Category Archives: technology and the future

1984 finally has arrived

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Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright say so.

Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence (AI), for example, allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional surveillance. Not only do these digital tools enable authoritarian regimes to cast a wider net than with human-dependent methods; they can do so using far fewer resources: no one has to pay a software program to monitor people’s text messages, read their social media posts, or track their movements. And once citizens learn to assume that all those things are happening, they alter their behavior without the regime having to resort to physical repression.

This in spite of, or in response to, their tally that

between 2000 and 2017, 60 percent of all dictatorships faced at least one antigovernment protest of 50 participants or more.

. . .protests unseated ten autocracies, or 23 percent of the 44 authoritarian regimes that fell during the period. Another 19 authoritarian regimes lost power via elections. . .many of the elections had followed mass protest campaigns.

Recommended.

Quasi-biological children

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In a podcast last April that I just listened to recently, James Metzl says,

I have absolute confidence that our species is moving in the direction of conceiving our children in laboratories and not through sex. I certainly believe that the scenarios that I describe are very real scenarios. Whether I’m off by a few years in one direction or another, even a decade, it’s important, but the real story is that after 3.8 billion years of evolving by one set of rules, which we call Darwinian evolution, random mutation, and natural selection, we are now beginning a future process of evolving by a very different set of rules.

About this process, he notes that it may soon be possible, using eggs created from stem cells, to conceive thousands of babies.

You grow these 10,000 now fertilized eggs for about five days, use a machine to extract a few cells from each one. You sequence them all, because the cost of genome sequencing has gone down from about a billion dollars in 2003 to about $800 now, to basic negligibility a decade from now. And now you have 10,000 choices.

His point is that this allows you to be highly selective about which egg or eggs to plant back into the womb.

My question is: what if you don’t need a womb? What if in vitro gestation becomes as viable as in vitro fertilization? And suppose a billionaire wants to bring thousands of his babies into the world?

Have a nice Valentine’s Day.

Trust problems

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In a conversation with Tyler, Reid Hoffman said,

I almost never meet with an entrepreneur that doesn’t come from an introduction from someone I trust. . .

the way that I do investing is entirely through my network

He also says,

most jobs are described as “must have a BA or a BS,” a bachelor’s degree, whereas a lot of jobs don’t actually need that. But it’s like, “Okay, what’s the simplest credential that everyone’s aware of that I could throw on the table that says you have some capability of learning, and you’ve been trained in some learning institution?”

And one of the things that I actually wrote is an essay that’s, I think, on both LinkedIn and reidhoffman.org, is thinking about creating a diploma that’s not this old sheepskin, but actually is a modern set of attributes and set of characteristics. And we could start looking at these certificates as something that has a much richer language that can apply to different things.

Can entrepreneurs, especially using artificial intelligence, create a more efficient solution to trust problems than Reid Hoffman’s reliance on his personal network, or hiring organizations’ reliance on college diplomas? There is a lot of money to be made if you can solve trust problems more efficiently. That is the way that financial technology firms make their money.

Or how about the trust problems involved in evaluating contentious books? Consider Nancy MacLean’s attack on James Buchanan, or Diana West’s books on Communist influence in the U.S. government.* Could an AI program walk through the webs of sources of such books and give a measure of the reliability of the narrative, which presumably would be less costly than having humans try to settle the issue?

*West argues, for example, that Lend-Lease was passed under Soviet influence. Even though she knows that it was passed in March of 1941, before Hitler surprised Stalin by invading Russia. In March, the Soviets were adhering to the Non-Aggression pact with Germany, and only Great Britain was eligible for Lend-Lease.

What is the future of journalism?

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One element of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is the collapse of trust in journalism as practiced by newspapers and mass media. There are various diagnoses of this.

1. Gurri himself would say that the Internet has made the knowledge distribution more egalitarian. People are not as dependent on the media for knowledge, so that professional journalists cannot just stand on their authority.

2. Someone on the left would say that the problem is that bad actors have appeared on the scene: Fox News, the Internet’s right-wingers, etc. We could get back to the golden age if we could just get rid of censor these evil, “post-truth” outlets.

3. Eric Weinstein would say that we are living through a time in which our “sense-making apparatus” (one of his favorite terms) is up for grabs. He would say that he always was suspicious that the New York Times was feeding us a narrative and covering up stuff. Of course, since he is on the left, what he complains about mainstream media covering up is not what someone on the right would complain that mainstream media is covering up.

4. Yuval Levin (his book will finally be out shortly) would say that the institution of journalism no longer functions well. The institution of journalism ought to form journalists by giving them a sense of obligation to report truthfully and objectively. Instead, journalists see their organizations as platforms from which to pursue their individual careers, primarily by enhancing their personal “brands.” This leads them to take sides and play the outrage-stoking game.

5. Many of us point to the incentives of advertising-obsessed media to amplify those who stoke outrage and stifle those who are moderate and/or reasonable.

My thoughts are these:

I don’t think we are going back to the Age of the Single Narrative, when the left-wing media were more centrist and the right-wing media did not exist. Nor is that necessarily the age we would want to go back to if we could.

I think that mainstream media outlets like the Times are behaving in a manner that is nearly suicidal. On the one hand, they are taking up the silliest causes of the campus left. On the other hand, they are insisting that they should be taken seriously. They seem to think that any day now, the country will come to its senses and accept their narrative as definitive. I think that they will be lucky to retain as much of a following as they currently have.

It could be that a new sense-making apparatus will emerge. This will produce a new set of observers and analysts to replace traditional media. This will be highly decentralized.

Some people will specialize on gathering observations. Think of the people who have written books on the Opioid Crisis. Some have looked at the characteristics of users. Some have looked at the actions of pharmaceutical companies. Some have looked into the illegal Opioid production and distribution system.

Some people will specialize in analysis. Think of someone like Scott Alexander.

Some people will specialize in calling attention to good ideas and debunking bad ones. Think of someone like Tyler Cowen.

The question is whether this decentralized process will lead to consensus or fracturing. I am guessing a bit of both. That is, I think that weird opinion niches will thrive. But in a best-case scenario we will reach a point where some narratives are widely accepted. Even more ideally, where narratives are contested, most people will be familiar with the best arguments on each side, and not be rigidly committed to their preferred narrative.

Ray Kurzweil and the nanobots

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Yes, that would be a good name for a 1980s punk rock band. But it is how I might title a conversation I listened to between Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. As you know, Kurzweil views as inevitable the growth of computer intelligence beyond that of current human intelligence. He sees computers catching up to humans in about a decade, and then the computers will continue to improve at a rapid pace that will leave ordinary human intelligence behind.

Taking that as given, he sees two important roles for nanobots.

1. Fixing degeneration in our bodies, so that we can live healthy lives indefinitely.

2. Going into our brains to connect our neocortex to the cloud, allowing us to tap into the abundant computer intelligence that will be available.

I gather that he expects this to be possible in about 25 years or so. If he is correct, then it kind of makes concerns about economics or politics seem petty. In fact, I wonder, what will we worry about or care about in a trans-humanist scenario?

Telepresence

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[Note: I originally scheduled this post to be published next week, but I moved it up after listening to the conversation between Mark Zuckerberg, Tyler Cowen, and Patrick Collison. In the transcript, Zuckerberg says

So rather than people moving–inventing a new hyperloop or cars, I tend to think the set of technologies around–whether it’s augmented reality or virtual reality or video presence that just lets people be where they wanna be physically and feel present with other people wherever they need to be to do their job, to connect with the people they care about–that feels to me the better long-term solution.

Those are the thoughts I express and elaborate on below.]

I remember hearing Robert Metcalfe (link goes to Wikipedia) speak about twenty years ago, and when he was asked what he thought was the killer application for the Internet, he said “telepresence.”

I thought of this when I saw the paper on mobility in the United States by Kyle Mangum and Patrick Coate, pointer from Tyler Cowen.

repeat mobility is common. That is, people living in their “home” locations are far less likely to migrate than those away from home.

My train of thought went as follows.

1. I view the paper as showing that many people come to like where they live. The repeat movers are either innately restless or experimenting.

2. When people my age talk about their children’s work lives, a sentence that comes up frequently is, “They let him (her) work remotely.” Of my three daughters, one works in Boston for an organization based in Maryland, one works from home three days a week, and the third probably could continue to work remotely if her husband moves.

3. In fact, a lot of married couples have job opportunities in different cities.

4. Recall that Patrick Collison said that his firm set up a department that he calls “Remote.”

5. As Patrick pointed out in that same conversation with Reid Hoffman, Zoom Meeting is quite a step forward in the videoconferencing arena. I can’t really articulate what makes it better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but it just feels more conference-y.

6. If I were in the venture capital business, I would make a bet that remote work will grow exponentially, and I would assemble a portfolio of companies based on that bet. Will more people wear body cameras? Do small companies need better support for interstate human resource functions? What are the needs of the home-office worker? What sorts of meeting-scheduling systems address the challenges posed by remote work forces?

7. I think that blue-collar work may be an overlooked opportunity for telepresence. Techies talk about telemedicine, but it seems to me that it is much harder to remotely work on someone’s body than it is to do other tasks remotely. So blue-collar telepresence may come first. Professor Daniel Markovitz, author of the Meritocracy Trap (in another conversation I plan to annotate) says that Amazon warehouse workers already are subject to remote monitoring.

–How about tele-sanitation? Bathrooms at places like airports and hospitals have to be cleaned and re-stocked very often, and robots could do that. But the robots might not be able to operate completely independently. A remote operator could help the robot be more adaptable to situations.

–How about tele-chauffer? Even if self-driving cars are not ready for the road, who says that the driver has to be in the car? In the case of truck driving, the number one source of job dissatisfaction is being away from home all the time Telepresence could solve that problem. Perhaps a co-pilot does not have to be on the plane (assuming you want the pilot to be there).

–The highway construction workers who operate machines. Do they need to be there?

–The workers building skyscrapers. Could they operate by managing robots remotely?

8. Think of what Zoom Meeting and other telepresence apps will be able to do when 5G is ubiquitous.

Twitter matters

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Nicholas Grossman argues that political Twitter matters a lot.

There’s always been a national conversation, just as influential people will always spend a significant amount of time participating in and absorbing it. But thanks to Twitter, it’s faster, more interactive, more present. It’s easier to put down a newspaper, walk away from the television, or put off in-person conversations than it is to fully disconnect from your smartphone. Traditional information gatekeepers used to have much more control; now, access to information has been democratized.

But these are bugs, not features. “Faster, more interactive, more present” means that people react with emotion, not reason. People behave better when they do disconnect. And the democratized access is mostly to slurs and distortions.

Twitter excites its users. But if you step back and watch, it enfeebles them. I generally find about 20 percent of the links on Tyler Cowen’s blog to be interesting. But that percentage drops to near zero when the link goes to a Twitter thread. I think he (and everyone else) would benefit from quitting Twitter.

Marc Andreessen is a fast talker

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and I really enjoyed listening to his half-hour podcast about the Internet’s past and the outlook for cryptocurrencies.

Essentially everything he says about the Internet explosion in 1993-1995 resonates with me, especially his discussion of how hard it was for an ordinary civilian to get Internet access in 1994.*

When he talks about what it was like trying to persuade legacy financial firms to use the Internet, it also resonates.**

I also agree that the advertising model is the cause of much bad juju on the Internet.

But I hear Marc as saying (and he talks very fast, so I may have this wrong) that cryptocurrencies will enable micropayments, and micropayments will enable content providers to ditch the advertising model. If that is indeed what he is saying, then I disagree. I think that the main barrier to micropayments is not technological. It is psychological–what Clay Shirky dubbed mental transaction costs. I have talked about this several times, for instance in this essay.

*I quit my job at Freddie Mac launched a commercial web site in April of 1994. I did so by going to an Internet publishing start-up called Electric Press, where at their site one of the partners taught me the rudiments of HTML–rudiments being pretty much all there were at that point. He coded up the first pages I wanted for my site, registered the domain name, set up the server, and loaded the pages onto the server.

Then I wanted to be able to access the Internet myself, so that I could edit pages, add new pages, and so on. Previously, I had only accessed it through online services like AOL which did not have web access. There was a service you could use through a library that offered a text-only browser called Lynx, but I had only seen a graphical web browser twice:
once when some of us at Freddie went to visit a General Electric research site and while the higher-ups were having a pow-wow a tech guy took me to the basement to show me Mosaic (developed by Marc) and the second time was when I got my training session at Electric Press.

Electric Press was not in the business of helping individuals get on the Net, so they referred me to an Internet Service Provider, called us.net. They sent me a floppy disk. I could not install that software properly. So I called us.net, and the President of that small start-up (he may have been the sole employee) drove to my office during a torrential downpour helped me load the software on to my PC.

Rather than take this as a clue that the Internet was not for ordinary civilians, I kept at it, waiting for the day when getting on the Internet would be easy. That day arrived in August of 1995, when Microsoft finally released Windows 95 (which they had been promising since 1994) and America Online added the Web to their Internet offerings. That is when the traffic on my web site went from a trickle to a tsunami.

**I convinced a large mortgage banker to put up some pages on my site. They sent me a draft contract which read, in part, “Arnold Kling, who owns a service known as the Internet. . .” If only.

Social media platforms as utilities

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James D. Miller writes,

imagine electric companies stood up for progressive values by cutting off power to homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Even staunch supporters of free markets would likely object to these restrictions on expression by privately owned enterprises. When we examine why power companies shouldn’t be able to make service contingent on not violating political sensibilities, we see that analogous arguments should stop social media giants from exiling political dissidents.

. . .if an electric utility decided to just exclude a few customers, it would be extremely costly for a competing power company to sell energy to those people and the former customers would likely go unpowered.

Similarly, he argues that if your speech is cut off by Facebook, no competitor is going to jump in and offer you equivalent service. The network effect gives Facebook monopoly power.

My thoughts:

1. What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.

2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better to allow each listener to decide who he or she wants to hear. If I had sufficient control over my Facebook account, I would not see anybody’s political posts. (As it is, the best I can do is unfollow somebody who goes overboard with political posts. I done that.)

3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I would aim toward a subscription model, not an advertising model. This in turn would facilitate another major difference, which is that instead of having what you see determined by a secret algorithm, I would give you tools to set your own priorities.

4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.