Linky Friday: Gods and Robots
Robotica:
Image by Belgapixel’s 
[Ro2] If we thought we were afraid of AI before, imagine how much we’ll fear them when China rules them.
[Ro3] Sand mounts look like boobs, apparently.
[Ro4] Well, this is a murder mystery waiting to happen.
[Ro5] In the future, you really won’t be able to believe your lyin’ eyes or ears. The fun is just getting started.
[Ro6] Guys, maybe it’s time to pack our things. We’re doomed.
Religion:
Image by ChodHound
[Re2] Kevin Williamson looks at the Church of Satan.
[Re3] Will the Catholic Church need to resort to ordaining married men?
[Re4] Ahhh, the predictable unpredictable plot twist.
[Re5] Remi Brague writes on the Christian roots of secularism.
[Re6] Matthew Walther explains why he believes in the Devil.
Energy:
Image by langalex
[En2] Amy Harder is skeptical of attempts to sue Big Oil like the cigarette companies. Exxon looks primed to go on the offensive against California.
[En3] Even forgetting the new terrifs, solar panels cost a lot more here than elsewhere. Is regulation to blame?
[En4] The New York Times looks at how climate change skeptics overperform in search engines.
[En5] I don’t always drink socialism, but when I do I drink mineral resource socialism. They can’t easily outsource where the oil is, and also it helps create support for more drilling. {More}
[En6] Never mind the SUV, eco-conscious wealthy people need to start applying social pressure to one another against taking private jets. It’s the holy grail of hypocrisy charges, not the least of which because it sticks.
Science:
Image by Lord Jim
[Sc2] They need to work on their disaffected stare.
[Sc3] Even chickens like attractive people.
[Sc4] Andrew Gelman says cientists need to grow a thicker skin.
[Sc5] Chad Orzel argues that we need to make scientists public intellectuals.
Space:
Image by phooleo
[Sp2] Bad. Things. That’s what.
[Sp3] Beautiful.
[Sp4] Harrumph.
[Sp5] We must go to Mars.
[Sp6] I would say killjoys but I never want to make contact with aliens so I guess “whew.”
[Sp0]
History of exploration/colonization suggests it'll be criminals and religious/ethnic minorities who go to Mars first, not tech bros.
— Conor Sen (@conorsen) September 27, 2016
Ro1-Ro3: Most of the perceived threat to AI is seen in economic terms, a world with unemployment and no wealth redistribution. I’m wondering if the real threat would be to give better tools to authoritarian regimes and illiberal politicians in Western democracy. You can really use AI to enforce stuff.
Ro4: Isn’t this the plot of the new West World kind of but with self-awareness on the part of the sex robots rather than outside interference?
Ro6: The double standards that revolve around sex bots are going to be interesting. “When I was a sex bot, its because I’m a kinky cool edgy individual, when you use a sex bot its because your a loser who loses.” I wonder what the fault lines are going to be.
Sp2: The best case scenario might be like when Columbus discovered the New World with the most technologically advanced side as the Europeans. This is assuming the first extra-terrestrial life we discover has at least human level intelligence. The first aliens we come across could be more like animals than us.Report
[Ro6] This seems obvious. If you’re cool and attractive, people will see it as an interesting kink. If you’re not, they won’t.Report
Re3: I have been wondering for a long time how this is going to play out. The Catholic Church has had a priest shortage as long as I can remember, and it has been getting worse. Clerical celibacy is the obvious culprit. The old solution was to look the other way. The American Catholic Church was stocked with Irish priests, who brought their “housekeepers” with them. As a former Catholic priest once told my father, a Lutheran pastor, those guys generally didn’t cause any problems. But this sort of thing is out of vogue nowadays, and not really a selling point for young seminarians anyway. I have known several extremely devout Catholics who considered and rejected the priesthood because of the celibacy requirement.
The stopgap in the US has been a very low clergy-to-laity ratio. The typical American Catholic parish is huge by Protestant standards. The senior priest has near dictatorial powers within the parish (e.g. no congregational meeting voting on the budget) but a bunch of stuff that the pastor would do in a Protestant church is done by deacons or lay employees. You need a priest for the eucharist and a few other sacramental functions, but most everything else can be done by someone else. So you end up with one priest in a large church.
This only takes you so far. What then? One possible solution is a circuit riding priest. The parish is now run by a “pastoral associate” of some variety or other. But Catholics are very big on regular and frequent mass, and this still requires a priest, right? The leap is that while it does, he need not actually be present. He can consecrate the elements in large batches for later administration by others. Usually this is only done under extraordinary circumstances. So this solution is to normalize the procedure. The parish celebrates the mass as usual, but only sees the priest when it is their turn in his rounds. It would be quite a thrill, I am sure.
The solution proposed in the linked piece is another approach. There has never been an actual doctrinal objection to married clergy, and there have long been extraordinary exceptions, such as married Anglican priests who crossed the Tiber. On the other hand there are strong cultural and economic obstacles. If you ordain a young man who is married and has or is likely to have kids, the economic calculus changes. Limiting the discussion to “older married men of proven virtue” is a way of minimizing both the cultural and economic obstacles. What makes it interesting is that it could be the camel’s nose in the tent. Once the precedent is set, the limitation may seem less and less defensible.Report
I had learned years ago that mandating celibacy was a 10th or 11th century thing so Church lands would remain Church lands, i.e. not go to the clergy’s heirs. But I’m not sure how entirely true that is.Report
It’s partially true. The Catholic Church, especially in its Medieval version, is not anything like so unified or coherent as many imagine. The idea of clerical celibacy had been around for centuries, at least since Late Antiquity and with antecedents in Paul’s epistles. The essential idea was that sex is icky. The economic argument came later. And even after that, it took a while for the new policy to be consistently enforced.Report
Protestants seem to be able to believe that sex is icky and deal with married clergy.Report
I think the main thrust for celibacy in the Catholic Church was that too much church property was being passed down from father to son unofficially. There were also concerns of spotchy clergy work from priests who inherited and learned the post from their father. One of the things that led to the Great Schism was that the Eastern Orthodox Churches believe that the parish clergy who dealt with the lay followers should be married, long-haired, and bearded while the Catholic Church thought the ideal parish or monastic cleric has short tensured hair, a clean shaving face, and was celibate.Report
Correct, but 400 years later, it nonetheless didn’t stop Jeremy Irons from passing down the papacy to his son.
(But that’s also how we got Lutherans a few years later)Report
Guys, the solution is staring us in the face.
Reprogram the male sexbots from RO6.
[Penis_func] = OFFReport
En3: That explains a lot. I wonder how much that analysis varies from place to place in the US? AFAIK such codes are not federal (although tariffs are, thanks Trump).Report
Re5 – “Yet, Islam did not develop any secularist or egalitarian tendencies.”
I don’t know much about this subject at all, but I know this isn’t true with regards to egalitarianism. Half the reason Islam was able to take root so quickly is that it offered a more equal vision of society for many than that provided by the near east Hellenized world, and especially seemed a better deal among the lower castes of the Hindu world around the Indus river valley.Report
Andalusia was not a fluke. It’s a shame how Islam has regressed in some parts of the world.Report
And (as in many other things) the “regression” has been directly driven by political actors who see it to their benefit.Report
One could argue that Islam is egalitarian as between male Muslims, but its not uniquely egalitarian unless compared with something like Hindu caste systems. An Islamic polity never had any problem adopting hierarchical forms of government when it reached a certain scale.
What sometimes is being described is a romantic notion of pre-modern tribal societies, in which one belongs to a family or kin group that owes complete solidarity to fellow members, including the duty to correct each other’s errors. One cannot row a boat if one of the passengers insists on putting a hole in it.Report
Sp0 – I think I said this on Twitter at the time; Columbus *was* a tech bro, complete with overpromising and underdelivering to his VC backers.Report
It was a good Tweet.Report
They probably forgave him once the gold and silver started flowing back.Report
As I’ve said many times, Columbus was wrong and every educated European of his time (all 10,627 of them) knew he was wrong.
The size of the Earth was known since the III century BC; the distance from Western Europe to the East Coast of China was roughly known (at least in camel-days) since Marco Polo at the very latest; and the sailing autonomy of contemporary ships was clearly known too. It was impossible with the technology of his time to sail to China across the Atlantic, not because China wasn’t really at the other side of the sea (everyone knew it was indeed) but because you would die of hunger and thirst months before you arrived.
Columbus spent three months to cross only about 1/4 of the distance from Western Europe to East Asia by the time he run into the Bahamas. The whole trip would have taken about a year.
In tech bro parlance, Columbus success was a bug, not a feature 🙂Report
I’ve often thought there could be an interesting alternative history novel based on the premise that the New World didn’t exist and Columbus and his crew starved to death somewhere near where Omaha would be today. How would the world have been different if you just couldn’t get there from here?Report
Europe is only very lightly inhabited because the westerlies aren’t nearly so warm?Report
It would have taken quite a long time (perhaps until the invention of steam in early XIX century) for Europeans to attempt to cross the 20,000 miles (30,000 km) of sea they “knew” separated western Europe from China.
However it is most likely the Portuguese would have drifted sooner rather than later to Eastern Brasil on their way around Africa (which might or might not have been what happened when Pedro Álvares Cabral first arrived to Brazil in 1500)Report
No North and South America? Phew, setting aside the whole climate being massively different the historic changes would be massive. Maybe a much earlier colonization focus on Africa? The Cape route would have become even more important until tech reached the point where the Paxlantic mega-ocean could be spanned.Report
Shhh… you’ll anger the Itals!Report
IIRC, there were two classical estimates of the earth’s size. Columbus believed the smaller, incorrect one, which coincidentally placed the east coast of Asia at the same distance from Europe as the actual location of the Caribbean.Report
In Columbus defense, he had sailed to Iceland, and had probably heard of Vinland, which he thought was Northerst Asia being reasonably west of Iceland. Hence him accepting the Ptolomeus estimate of the size of the Earth, rather than the correct, Eratosthenes’, one.
Ptolomeus estimate, abou5 70% of Era5hostenes, would give you roughly 18,000 km from Spain to China. Columbus was still months away from his destinationReport
Let’s see: Ptolemaeus thought the circumference was 18,000 miles, the coast of Spain is about 10 degrees W, Shanghai is about 120 degrees east, and both are about at 30 degree N. That would be a trip of 18,000 * (sqrt(3)/2) * 230/360 or almost 10,000 miles. Yup, much further than the 3,000 he actually traveled.Report
To a certain person, tech bros are criminals so they might have a chance.
I think that the first trip to Mars will be through a big massive government program than any tech pro private-capitalist one and the first people on Mars like the first people on space will have at least some military background. They will also be deliberately photogenic for any potential movie adaptation.Report
Nothing to see here…
http://observer.com/2018/01/corporate-diversity-mckinsey-study/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=emailReport
Have more faith in the power of Capitalism to reward meritocracy rather than cronyism.Report
But it’s all just PC nonsense, no?Report
Obviously not! Look at those profit margins!Report
Well then… we’re in agreement!Report
Hey, according to the report, the US is already in second place globally! Only 3 percent to go!Report
I admit to being kinda surprised that we’re 2nd place globally.
I’d have thought that we were in the bottom third or something with every single country in Europe above us.Report
Why? It isn’t like liberals haven’t been pointing out the the US has been outperforming its developed world peers (with some small exceptions) for most of the last decade while the US followed a generally center leftist policy course whereas the Europeans went along a much tighter monetary and fiscal route?Report
Really? I thought that the general consensus was that the US was retrograde and we needed to be more like the EU.
If the message was that the EU needed to be a lot more like us, I have *SERIOUSLY* been misreading the signals.Report
Depends which way you’re referring to. A lot of liberals envy their various healthcare systems and social safety nets and would like to be more like them there so in that way sure. When the fiscal crisis hit, however, the EU central bank was a lot tighter fisted about monetary policy and the governments were more serious about austerity than the US was (not a ton granted but they also lacked the automatic financial stabilizers that the US had) so in that area Liberals generally thought the EU should have been more like the US. Funny though, all that hyperinflation the libertarians and conservatives predicted never showed up. It must have gotten lost.Report
I admire Iceland. Put the criminals in jail.Report
They only looked at 12 countries, and the only European ones were the UK, France, and Germany.
That said, the left-wing assumption that Europeans are more enlightened than Americans is based primarily on the fact that in (most) European countries the governments exert more control over the economy. In France, government spending is 56% of GDP, so they must be Buddha-level enlightened. But that same level of government control makes the economies sclerotic, allowing big businesses to skate by doing things they way they always have.Report
I think it’s mostly because of who tends to visit us here.
When Brits visit the US, we’re all “holy cow! They’re so urbane! They have such a great accent! They went to Oxford!” and we never go over there.
If we did, we’d say “Holy cow! They’re lower class! They have cockney accents! They’re soccer hooligans!”Report
What would a discussion about AI and robots be, without something about Amazon Go.
So of course I keyed in on this-
At the risk of being repetitious:
So, aside from the initial development of software, what value is the Amazon management and shareholders adding here?
They aren’t anticipating consumer preferences;
They aren’t managing employees;
They aren’t managing inventory, supply chains, or finances; these are done by outside vendors.
So what “work” is being done here, that these detached people are deserving of any of the slice of the wealth created?
And again, why couldn’t this be placed in the public domain, its bounty of wealth given to all?Report
Setting other morality considerations aside; from a utilitarian perspective at least perhaps we should let them invest their time, capital and talent into developing an truly extensive, ubiquitous and capable system of AI and automation before we arbitrarily appropriate it for the masses. Doing such a thing with Amazon Go strikes me as akin to privatizing the pharmaceutical industry after the first commercial antibiotic was developed.
And that’s me thinking strictly on a utilitarian basis.Report
So, aside from the initial development of software
You can’t yada yada yada the added value and then complain that there’s no added value.
And again, why couldn’t this be placed in the public domain, its bounty of wealth given to all?
This is a great idea that almost certainly would not have any effect on the incentives to invest in the development of other new technologies. If you want to live in a country whose government operates that way, I suggest Venezuela. I hear it’s working out pretty well for them.Report
Yes, those are very good points.
So lets consider the development of Amazon software the way we consider lets say, the rights to a song.
How long should the software be given protection, until it falls into the public domain?
How much incentive is needed do we think, to both spur creativity, and also deliver its benefits to society?
The answer is inevitably arbitrary, a negotiated decision made by society as a whole.
Which is really what I’m driving at. Private property, especially” non-real” property only exists as a utilitarian device to further the happiness, freedom, and flourishing of all society.
Amazon doesn’t have some naturally occurring and incontestable right to have exclusive and eternal possession of its software.Report
Amazon would love its patents to be treated like art copyright. Pretty much everything will be completely obsolete by 95 years, so it’s as good as indefinite. Report
And with a stroke of the pen, we the citizens could make it one year if we felt like it.
What stands in our way is this modern day Divine Right of Kings, where we accept passively that property is incontestable and eternal, where Prince Humperdink is entitled to all the wealth in Florin, because, well, shut up that’s why.Report
That assumes too much. Most people have, traditionally, not cared about patent or copyright term lengths, since it was a legal concept beyond their immediate needs. It’s only recently, with the advent of desktop publishing and home invention that the immediacy of such things has become a point of concern for larger and larger demographics.
Your worm is turning, just slowly.Report
So lets consider the development of Amazon software the way we consider lets say, the rights to a song.
One difference worth considering is that the song’s creator usually declares it finished at some point and releases it (puts out a recording, sells sheet music, something). The code that Amazon uses to implement its services is never finished — they’re always putting things in and taking them out. At any given point in time, some of the code in that pile is still within the protected-IP window. How often does Amazon have to take a snapshot of their running code base and put it away, so that it can be released a year, or five years, or ten years later? Are small companies excluded? The biggest personal project I’m working on has been in-progress for 4.5 years; would I have been required to issue snapshots periodically, just in case it might be useful to someone?
Another question is scale and documentation. Way back in the day, when Bell Labs agreed to share early versions of Unix with research universities, a university got a tape with binaries and source code, a pile of technical memorandums that documented the use of all the programs (but not their internal structure), and a note from Dennis Ritchie that said, literally, “Here’s your Unix. Love and kisses, Dennis.” Berkeley had to put gods only know how many students to work taking it apart and figuring it out (and in some cases, reinventing because that was easier than figuring out the existing code). Having possession of 100M lines of source code is one thing — building a working system and understanding it enough to modify it is quite another.Report
What exactly do you think the status quo is? To be honest, I’m not sure myself to what extent the software running these stores is protected by patents, as opposed to just copyright. If it’s protected by patents, the patents will expire in 20 years. If it’s only protected by copyrights, then nobody can just copy the source code, but anybody can duplicate the functionality.
Even if it is partially protected by patents, historically, software and even hardware patents have not been broad enough to prevent meaningful competition. Amazon’s retail site has competitors. Amazon’s cloud services have competitors. Microsoft’s products all have competitors. Intel has competitors. There are competing video game consoles, competing smartphones, etc. I’m deeply skeptical that the general idea of a grab-and-go store is going to be so well protected that Amazon will have an effective monopoly. The article you mention even says that other companies will be copying it.
So what, specifically, do you find objectionable about the status quo?Report
That’s a wonderful question!
What do I find so objectionable about the status quo?
Or rather, what do about a hundred million of us find objectionable about the status quo?
Because one of the most striking things about the 2016 election, is that both the 63 million Clinton voters and the 60 million Trump voters were angry, very angry.
Dispirited, anxious, insecure, believing they are facing a dark and uncertain future.
Why should we feel this way, in a world marked by technology that is producing such staggering amounts of wealth so effortlessly?
Because even as consumer items grow ever cheaper, our lives are insecure- the big items in our lives like rent and health care are growing more expensive, farther out of reach than they were for our parents.
So the wealth that is being produced isn’t actually producing a society marked by greater happiness and security, quite the opposite. The wealth that is being produced is accruing to a tiny and shrinking number of people.
So I am looking for a way that the wealth that is extracted from the earth which belongs to everyone, and created by robots and machines and algorithms which belong to no one, can be delivered to its rightful owners.Report
Chip, I haven’t been reading this whole thread, so I may have missed some context, but I noticed this comment and had to reply to it. Consumer goods have gone up in quality and down in price, as you noted. But housing has gone up in quality considerably. Square footage has increased over the years, for example, and wiring has improved, air conditioning is more common, and asbestos and lead paint are things of the past. As I understand it, the percentage of income spent on housing has been fairly steady. And as for health care, yes, it’s more expensive, but people are able to have a quality of life they’d never dreamed of before. You can take a Crestor today where you may have needed open heart surgery ten years ago, and you would have been dead twenty years before that. I can only think of one product that’s gotten more expensive and worse – formal education. Then again, I can watch a lecture on physics or the history of origami with two clicks.Report
How does code/software differ from a food recipe? The latter, to the best of my knowledge, cannot be copyrighted or patented in any way. You can keep aspects of the process secret (I think all you are required to disclose are the ingredients themselves and even the requirement there may be conditional in some way).
As a layperson, it seems to me that code/software’s closest analogue within our existing structure would be a food recipe, in part because of the reasons Michael Cain above outlines.Report
A recipe almost certainly doesn’t rise to the level of originality needed for a patent, although a list of chemicals and the process for combining them to produce a particular output may, even though it’s superficially no more complicated than the recipe (the phrase ‘a person skilled in the art’ does a lot of heavy lifting). On copyright — and I welcome correction from the actual lawyers here — somewhere between the simple list of ingredients on a scrap of paper and a finished page in a cookbook enough was added to become eligible for copyright.
Today, all software source code is eligible for copyright. Years ago, advised by corporate lawyers, I acquired the habit of sticking a copyright notice into any piece of code of significant size that I wrote, on the off chance that it would be involved in legal proceedings at some point. (Never happened, but legal took images of my hard disk on a couple of occasions as part of discovery.) Chip is, as I read him, proposing two changes: (1) a much shorter duration for such copyright, perhaps shorter than the the useful life of the code; and (2) a mandatory obligation to distribute the code when the copyright expires.
“Useful life” can be longer than many people think. I use, daily, a piece of code that I originally wrote more than 30 years ago. I use, regularly but not daily, a piece of code more than 40 years old. In the first case I’m almost certainly the only person in the world using it. In the second, where the code was open-sourced, there may be other people and I just don’t know about them. As part of my cartogram software, I use a piece of code at least 25 years old which is routinely used by hundreds/thousands of people and has been incorporated directly into a variety of current commercial products.Report
I’m not referring so much to legal structure as real world application.
If I figure out how to make a BigMac, McD’s can’t stop me. They can’t even stop me from selling it (though I couldn’t use their verbiage).
Why shouldn’t code work similarly?Report
It does largely work like that. You can’t lift my copyrighted source code verbatim and claim it as your own, but you can decompile my compiled code, and if you are sufficiently clever, you can figure out the general structure and possible algorithms I used. If, however, I have an algorithm in my code that is sufficiently novel as to have patent protection, you may find yourself facing a law suit if you try to implement the algorithm in your code.Report
Any such effort needs to be done very carefully. There are well established legal guidelines for how reverse engineering and clean room development has to work. The people who do the decompiling and study the structure have to write functional requirements, which are sent to developers, said developers never seeing the code being reverse engineered. Writing pure functional requirements, without including any implementation hints, is seriously hard. Anyone involved in the decompiling/study effort is long-term tarnished; they can’t work on the new implementation code for years.Report
Copyrighted code works exactly that way today. You can observe my service in great detail. You’re free to write your own code that implements exactly the same functionality. (The less said about the god-awful mess that software patents created the better.) What you can’t do is implement that functionality using my code. Linux was exactly the result of such an effort — an independent recreation of Unix functionality. Complete with — caution, geek gibberish ahead — lawsuits on esoteric subjects like whether Linus’s use of the names for constants in publicly visible C-language header files from Unix was copyright infringement.Report
Thanks, Oscar and Michael.
It reminds me of all the food products that make it on to Shark Tank… never anything propietary so they only get an offer if they are sufficiently great, established, or marketable (or some combo therein).
But then some Bozo can angle for a huge deal by patenting adding a foil lid to single serve wine cups, something that’s existed in school cafeteria juice cups for decades. So go figure…Report
On top of patents, DRM and rampant use of EULA contracts have also thrown significant monkey wrenches into the legalities of reverse engineering. There are now legal methods of preventing the old right to reverse engineer under fair use of copyright that didn’t exist a generation ago.Report
I’ve written here before about the LA City Bikeshare program-
https://bikeshare.metro.net/
Where the City runs a bike rental fleet, with bays of bikes stationed around downtown, and its fully automated. Software keep track of the inventory, tracks the fee, and bills your credit card, all with almost no human involvement.
What is amazing to me is that if 20 years ago I suggested the City run a bike rental business, people would have (quite rightly) objected, on the grounds that running a business efficiently is not what cities are good at.
Private entrepreneurs are superior at managing people, better at sensing and anticipating consumer need and allocating the business hours of operation to most efficiently match resources to need.
Yet what I see now is that Google and Amazon and their collective suites of algorithms are performing much of this type of work.
So with Amazon Go, which clever entrepreneur is sensing market needs for avocados versus eggplant? No one, the algorithm does that. Which bright energetic entrepreneur is expertly managing all the store clerks? No one, because there are none.
What value is Jeff Bezos adding here? What work is being performed by Amazon managers?
So how would this be different if it was the Los Angeles Municipal Grocery, run as a nonprofit public utility?Report
The LA bikeshare system, like most, is operated by a private, for-profit company under contract with the multi-jurisdictional transit authority.Report
(note to the powers that be – all the cool little editing and format tools that used to be in the comment box seem to be gone; tried on android chrome, desktop windows chrome, and desktop windows firefox) (also the 5 minute re-edit timer)Report
dang js just don’t want to optimizeReport
testing something else while I’m hereReport
@ck-macleod (thank you so very very much, CK.)Report
You’re welcome. Hope it all works. If it doesn’t achieve the main objective, at least the site seems to be zipping along very fast now.Report
(though not comment submissions – I wonder if this is something new or if it’s always been kind of laggy, been a while since I commented here regularly)Report
(Plus comment subscriptions don’t work for me. Didn’t last time I was checking either.)Report
Quasi-private, in that it is given a monopoly to operate on city streets, under the control of the City.
You can’t open one to compete with it.Report
Is it prohibitted to compete with it, or a matter of getting the property rights for docks, capital costs for the bikes, operating costs for the maintenance, and sufficient network effects to get paying customers, all in a manner where its actually profitable at the prices the market will bear?
A thing that’s going on the east (and in China) is dockless bikeshare; I don’t think many of which are operating under government license or government money. (they are however, burning through VC money at a pretty good rate) (they are also though, serving PoC customers at a higher rate than the existing docked bikeshare).Report
What is stopping LA from doing just that? All they need to do is locate areas with sufficient public interest, acquire the real estate needed for a store, equip the real estate with the infrastructure and technology to operate the store, and assemble the necessary software into a usable system.
Or they could just sieze all of that from Amazon, and operate as a public utility, with all the attendant effects of such an act, as well as incurring all the work needed to maintain the stores and the software.Report
Would it be that simple? I imagine they’d need to pass legislation.Report
Right-
They can do what Amazon, Google, Microsoft have all done, which is simply let someone build an operating business, then buy it.
The idea here isn’t to replace private innovation or even the private markets;
The idea here is that automation and managerial software have made it so easy to operate complex systems that the share of wealth that needs to flow towards the owners and managers can be reduced.
When something resembles a magic genie, performing work for free, the system is ripe for disruption.Report
Which, unless everyone is willing to let the business stagnate, means the city is in the software development business. As a general rule based on history, governments are terrible at software development.Report
Forget stagnate, just the business of bug fixes and security patches for when people get creative with the gaps in the algorithms will keep a dev team busy forever.Report
You see a working algorithm and ask, “What value does the corporation add once the algorithm is up and running?” I see a working algorithm and ask, “How large an organization, developing how many wrong algorithms, over how much time, did it take to get to the one that worked?” How do you propose getting people to take the (sometimes very large) risks associated with research and development?Report
Not to mention that the core algorithms (the valuable IP is rarely a single algorithm) is typically useless without everything that goes around it, which, while probably not something that is high value IP, is still not trivial to build or maintain. And all of that ignores the regular work that will need to be done to the core IP as I mentioned above.Report
So the value of lets say, Amazon Go or Uber or GrubHub or even Robotic Logging isn’t “Selling groceries”, “Taxi”, “Delivering food” or “extracting lumber”, but instead the value being added is in software research and development.
Which is kind of where my imagination is taking me. Machines have replaced physical labor, and are now replacing managerial expertise, leaving imagination and open ended research.
There just isn’t a lot of value in saying, “I can manage a large team of workers” when there isn’t such a thing, or saying, “I can track inventory” when software can do that better.
In the People’s Republic of Chipatopia, the actual doing of things like converting natural resources into finished consumer goods can be essentially automated and socialized and software R&D outsourced.Report
For all of this, you have to think about the value added chain. Extracting raw materials from the earth, or from trash, adds value. Transporting those materials adds value. Shaping those materials into machinery parts adds value, as does assembling them into machines/robots. Designing machinery and writing software creates value out of thin air (as does writing books or screenplays). Maintaining machinery and software adds value, or at least extends the valuable lifetime of these things.
Every step of adding value that requires a human investment is something that needs compensation. Bringing all those dispersed pieces together into something useful also adds value, potentially quite a lot. Boeing designs aircraft, and then assembles the complex supply chain in order to build an airplane. Amazon does something similar. So does Uber, to an extent.
The question is not, are these companies creating value, the question is, are the people in the C-suite at these companies being overcompensated relative to the value they create? That is an argument you can make, but making that argument requires understanding what, exactly, those people are doing to add value, and can you quantify that added value sufficiently to be able to argue that it’s not comparable to the compensation offered?
It’s not about software.Report
Absolutely.
Governments come as close as any organization to treating software as if it’s a static thing. Which is how we get into the situation we’re in with air traffic control. Or one of my favorites, nuclear reactor control software. The certification process is so onerous that we have reactor operators scouring the country for replacement boards for 40-year-old mini computers, and looking for people who can code in assembler for those machines, because certifying a new computer and a new software suite would be so expensive.Report
Curious: which minicomputers are they? 40 years old is about right for PDP-11s, whose assembly language wouldn’t be hard to pick up for someone who knows something harder like Intel or IBM 370.Report
Some PDP-11s and last time I looked, a couple of old Honeywell machines. DoD also still has some systems that run on PDP-11s. There’s at least one company (or was, they may be defunct) that sold PDP-11 hardware emulators built around an FPGA.Report
Boeing still (as of 8 years ago) has 20+ year old machines that are kept alive because those machines are needed to run engineering software (that was written for that hardware) that is needed just in case an older airframe like the 767 needs a change, because that was the software the plane was certified under, and upgrading the software would require re-certifying the entire line.Report
Would running the programs on a software emulation of the old machines be okay? My understanding of the nuke plant problem is that the plant certification included specific hardware. In the DoD cases, at least a couple of the systems involve custom unibus boards for controlling peripherals.
There’s a scary thought: “This system depends on hand-wire-wrapped boards that are almost 40 years old.” Granted, here in the closet I have a hand-wrapped board that’s 30 years old, but I don’t put power on it and expect it to work.Report
IIRC, you would have to emulate the math coprocessor, or whatever the equivalent was on that hardware, since the analysis can shift a bit if the processor instructions set is different. We have this issue even today, where the same simulation would have two slightly different results on Intel versus AMD processors. Not a big deal when you are just doing engineering, but if it’s for regulatory certification, they usually want things to be the same.Report
Or if you’re rounding off fractions of a cent and depositing all those remainders in one bank account.Report
Such exist, at least for some processors. My understanding is that the best of the PDP-11 software emulators, as an example, has been tested against an enormous range of software and is considered bit-perfect, including floating point. I would think that at some point someone at Boeing would have run test cases on an emulator and compared the results.Report
Cost benefit, how much to verify an emulator against the cost of keeping old hardware in cold storage against the off chance of having to certify a change.Report
I’m old, and remember too many power supply capacitors failing catastrophically and taking the motherboard out with them. I’d at least pay to know if the emulator produced an obviously wrong result — that’s a pretty trivial expense.
Isn’t one of the corollaries to Murphy’s Law that the $500 chip will, at the worst possible time, burn out in order to protect the $0.50 fuse?Report
If Boeing’s IT hardware acquisition practices 20+ years ago resembled what they were when I worked there, Boeing had a pallet or two of the machines in question sitting unopened in a warehouse somewhere. Chances were pretty good they could cobble together a functioning machine or three if needs be.Report
Our software is one used in flight certification, which means we have to be able to load old problems (generated as far back as 20 years ago) and be able to document why the answer is different.
People get shirty, especially if they see a drop in lifespan. (Although admittedly, you generally get a longer lifespan under newer models. As with anyone doing serious engineering work, everything erred on the side of conservatism, if you weren’t 100% sure or having to do estimates, fudge factors, etc).Report
Sc5 [thin-skinned scientists]: That wasn’t the article I was expecting it to be,* but it was interesting nonetheless. I see something like that dynamic in other professions, like history. Once in a while, a journal will publish a “forum” on some author’s book. The format usually has four parts:
1. A lengthy review/critique of the novel.
2. A middle-length review/critique.
3. A very short review/critique.
4. A medium-length response from the book author in which the author acknowledges some good points, but in the (admittedly small number of) forum issues I’ve read, the author never really reconsiders anything substantive.
The Sc5 article also reminded me of how I respond to critical comments to a post I’ve written. I put a lot of time into most posts and write several drafts, revising repeatedly. I get testy when people bring up the “what about x’s,” etc., even though those critiques usually have merit and are not often even meant as a criticism.
Of course, the Sc5 traces scientists’ reactions to peer review, which I assume operates differently for the historian-author in the journal forums. And of course, at OT, there’s not really peer review. Or rather, the comments section is the peer review, at least that’s how I see the comments at least sometimes.
/two cents
*Not a wrong link, but just different from what I thought it would be.Report
@chip-daniels
Did you get a job on the National Security Council in the Trump administration without telling us? 😉Report
I’m flattered but you can tell it’s not me due to the lack of key phrases like “seizure of the factors of production” and “exhortation of the cadres”.Report
I apologize, that was just based on the writeup. the power point itself was way too terrible to even consider any regular commentator in this site wrote it.
(I mean, it’s Gorka dissertation bad)Report