Author Archives: Jon Perry

The Declining Cost of Doing Good

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One of the things that makes me optimistic about the future is that as technology progresses, charity should become dramatically less expensive in terms of both time and money. I base this assumption on the fact that historically almost all goods have gotten both cheaper and more convenient, and I don’t see why charity should be any different.

Imagine you are watching TV late at night and one of those ads comes on imploring you to help feed some child in Africa for just five cents a day. If you are like me there is a strong chance you might just change the channel and pretend you never saw that ad. Sure, the deal being offered is good: just five cents a day and you could dramatically improve someone’s life. But on the other hand, it’s just one kid out of billions—hardly a dent in terms of global hunger—and if I do decide to follow through then I am going to have to momentarily stop what I am doing, dial some phone number, maybe go to a website, and then, worst of all, I’ll actually have to take my credit card out of my wallet and type in all the numbers listed there—oh, what a chore!

Does this make me a terrible person? Maybe. But it also makes me human, and fairly typical of humans in general. If it weren’t so easy for humans to ignore the plight of others far away, then we would probably live in a far more equitable world.

Now imagine instead of one kid, it’s 1000 kids. And instead of five cents a day it’s five cents a year. That deal is starting to get pretty hard to ignore. Imagine also that some startup company has solved the micropayment problem and established a widely adopted standard for sending money. Imagine I don’t need to reach for my wallet; I don’t have to log in anywhere; I can just look at the TV and blink my eyes, and this will signal my augmented reality glasses to go ahead and send payment, no extra hassle necessary. Perhaps my payment will also be followed by a satisfying video game sound effect and an icon showing me I have just earned 1000 “points”.

All of which is to say: even in the face of a potential bad future where work is increasingly hard to find, where government fails to provide for people, and where access to helpful technologies is needlessly restricted by intellectual property law and digital rights management—even in a future run by sociopathic elites who could care less about the rest of us—even then there is hope that the masses will be alright. Because as lazy and solipsistic and selfish as people are, I’m convinced that if technology makes it cheap and easy enough, growing numbers of average people around the globe will simply choose to help each other out. Because at that point, why not?

The Intensifying Battle Over Public Goods vs. Club Goods

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I believe there is a growing battle between those who would like to see many goods become public, and those who would like to keep them locked up. I think this battle will only intensify in the coming years as technology continues to accelerate. To explain what I mean, I’d like to go over a few quick terms from economics.

Economists often classify goods according to two major criteria: how rivalrous they are, and how excludable they are.

A good is rivalrous when consumption by one person excludes simultaneous consumption by another person. An example is a painting. If I have an original painting in my house, you cannot also have that same painting in your house.

In contrast, a non-rivalrous good is a good that multiple people can use simultaneously. An example is a recipe. If I cook using a particular recipe, that in no way prohibits you from using that same recipe in your own kitchen.

A good is excludable if it is possible to prevent people from accessing the good unless certain conditions have been met (such as payment). Again, an original painting is a convenient example. If I want to exclude you from accessing my painting, I can just keep it locked up in my private studio until someone pays me what I consider an appropriate amount.

In contrast, a non-excludable good cannot easily be withheld from other people. A classic example of a non-excludable good is a lighthouse. Any ship within sight of a lighthouse can benefit from the lighthouse’s presence. It is not easy to include some ships and exclude others.

Why does all this matter? Because I think one of the recent effects of technology has been that it is taking many types of goods and doing this with them:

The first example we are all familiar with is music. Music used to come in the form of rivalrous, excludable goods like CDs. But once music made the transition to digital form, it became both non-rivalrous, and non-excludable. Digital music is non-rivalrous because if I copy a song from my friend, neither of us has to give up anything. We now both have equal access to the same song. Likewise, digital music is non-excludable, because its distribution is very hard to control.

Non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods are called public goods. One might argue that these are the best kinds of goods since we can all enjoy them with equal opportunity and without competing with each other. Examples of other public goods include nice things like fresh air, knowledge, and national defense.

And yet, somewhat understandably, the response from the music industry (and other similarly affected industries) has been to try to do this:

In other words, affected industries have made an effort to take public goods and make them excludable. They typically strive to accomplish this using a combination of intellectual property law and digital rights management.

Goods which are excludable and yet non-rivalrous are sometimes called club goods. Club goods include golf courses, movie theaters, and cable television.

The act of turning a public good into a club good is not always easy, as the music industry has found out. There has been a great deal of natural resistance to the idea of taking something which could be publicly available, and instead locking it up so that it can only be accessed by members of a private club. And this is where the battle breaks out.

Now, as long as this only applies to a few goods like music, one might ask “Who cares?” The answer is that as technology progresses we are going to see a lot more goods get moved into the lower right corner of this chart. And consequently a lot more businesses are going to fight to move those goods back into the lower left.

For example, if household 3D printers become widely adopted, we are going to see a lot of physical objects like tools move into the lower right corner. Or imagine: if the new Watson software ends up being runnable on smart phones some day, we could see even a normally expensive good like medical diagnosis move into the lower right.

Now step back and ask yourself: do you want a critical good like medical diagnosis, something we all need, to be treated more like fresh air, or like a golf course? Which is the world you’d rather live in? One where useful goods are ubiquitous and free for all, or locked up and under elite control?

Already today we have the potential to make all of the world’s books free for everyone on the planet. Google already has the infrastructure lined up to accomplish this. And yet they are prohibited from doing so. Why? Because of the demands of a few people in the publishing industry. If enlightened aliens came to visit us, do you think they would believe we are making the correct choice in this matter?

Traditional economic theory argues that the market will under provide public goods; therefore these goods need government intervention (i.e. intellectual property) to encourage their production. As with technological unemployment, I believe this is another area where conventional economic theory has simply failed to keep up with technological change. Computers are dramatically lowering the cost of creating many goods, and as such, the additional help provided by government is less necessary. The wealth of free, useful content on the internet, most of it produced by complete amateurs, is testament to this reality.

True, there are some public goods like street lights which still require government funding or else they would not exist. But we are seeing a vast explosion of new public goods—digital music, digital video, blogs, free apps—that I do not believe are susceptible to this traditional argument. People are naturally inclined to create, and once they have powerful computers, they seem to do so, with or without a government-backed monopoly.

My biggest fear is we will continue losing key battles in the war between public goods and club goods, and that the stakes will only increase as time goes on. As I pointed out earlier, music is one thing, but as physical objects and important services begin to move into the category of digital non-rivalrous goods, this battle will only become more heated and more critical. I sincerely hope that various industries will fail in their mission to turn public goods back into club goods. While this might help profits in the short term, in the end we will all be worse off.

The Road Forward Paved is With Decentralized Technological Solutions

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In a previous post I articulated how most problems have three types of solutions: cultural, legal, and technological. Suppose a hundred people are stranded on an island, and they keep fighting over limited food resources. To fix this problem, one could implement:

  1. A Cultural Solution - Try to convince everyone to be nice.
  2. A Legal Solution - Design laws that dictate the distribution of food. Create a government to enforce these laws.
  3. A Technological Solution - Invent new food technologies that ensure there is more food than anyone could ever eat.

Now the idealist in me likes (1) a lot, and it might even work in the context of a small island where everyone knows each other, but let’s face it, such solutions are generally not effective, especially as societies get bigger. Humans don’t necessarily respond well to just being told to “play nice.” Especially when it only takes a few bad people to ruin everything.

As for (2), it’s a necessary evil most of the time, but it has tons of undesirable side effects. Creating any government is going to lead to a concentration of wealth and power as per the iron law of oligarchy. Certainly some governments are more desirable than others, and we can quibble over those details, but at the end of the day I don’t think it matters whether or not you opt for a libertarian private property scheme, a socialist wealth distribution scheme, or anything else in between, once you start giving certain islanders spears and the authority to stab people who disobey, I think  inequality and abuse of power are likely to be unfortunate byproducts.

But as I articulated in the original article, (3) has tons of advantages. By finding a way to create more food you have potentially done an end run around the difficult challenge of getting people to be nice to each other.

However (3) has a big caveat: Who controls the technology? Is it centralized, or is it decentralized?

Some technologies are decentralized or centralized by their very nature. For example, fire, one of the first technologies, is naturally decentralized. The raw materials to create fire are cheap and readily available. All you need is some basic knowledge. Nuclear power, on the other hand, is an example of an extremely centralized technology. Clearly you cannot just create a nuclear power plant in your backyard.

The problem with centralized technological solutions, is you potentially run into the same sorts of problems as legal solutions. Let’s say the islanders develop an effective new farming technology, but there is only a very small patch of land on the island with useable soil. Then a situation arises in which the people who control that piece of land are effectively in charge of the food supply. This simply gives rise to another form of governance, albeit one based on leveraging technology rather than just force. Such a scenario is again highly likely to lead to inequality and abuses of power.

However, it’s not hard to imagine a more decentralized technological solution. For example, if the islanders discover a robust food-producing plant that can grow anywhere on the island, then this solution will be much more resistant to elite control. Thus, I would argue, it is decentralized technology solutions that have the most potential to create real progress. These are the types of solutions we should actively promote if we want to achieve a better, more equal society.

Of course, governments will often resist such developments as they tend to undermine government power. It is all too common for governments to take a decentralized technology and try to recentralize it into the hands of a few people. For example, we could easily imagine the government of the island making it illegal to grow certain plants unless you are part of a special farmer’s guild. (If that sounds silly, keep in mind that the effect of seed patents today isn’t all that different in principle.)

Because I believe in the power of decentralized technological solutions to create real progress, my political beliefs are shaped accordingly. I favor any government that enables decentralized engineering solutions to flourish, whether by actively funding research in a socialist fashion or simply getting out of the way in a libertarian fashion. Specifically, I want a government that:

  • Does not actively wage war on decentralized technologies (see the war on drugs and the war on piracy)
  • Does not enforce complex legal schemes whose main aim appears to be locking down knowledge that would otherwise be decentralized (see intellectual property law)
  • Encourages the development of new decentralized solutions (see solar panels, open source software, household 3D printers, mesh networks, etc)

The Strugglers vs. The Slackers

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Let’s assume for a moment that technological unemployment is real, and that there will be fewer and fewer jobs for people in the near future. Let’s also assume that some combination of new technologies and welfare policies props up the growing underclass of poor, unemployed people and keeps them from just starving to death.

On the surface it seems there are two ways one could respond to the scenario above:

  1. Become a struggler. Take advantage of all available intelligence augmentation technologies. Order the latest augmented reality glasses, sign up for the best online classes, and wash down a healthy assortment of smart pills with your morning coffee. Compete aggressively for a spot in the ever-shrinking labor market.
  2. Become a slacker. Let go of the idea of having a job. Scrape by on government welfare. Keep your costs low by using free open source technologies whenever possible. Retreat into virtual reality worlds that get more and more compelling every day. Make fun of the strugglers for trying so hard.

The Declining Relevance of Generation Gaps

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Something I think is already happening and will accelerate in the future, is that traditional generation gaps are going to stop being relevant.

  1. In terms of cultural artifacts, we are shifting to an on-demand system, in which all the media from all of the ages just exists in a giant pile on the internet for anyone to peruse at any time. Interested kids already have the ability to educate themselves about any classic works or past subgenres with great ease, and likewise adults armed with search engines can easily educate themselves about any new fads younger generations have concocted. The increasing fragmentation of entertainment outlets suggests that what will matter most is not so much what generation you’re from, but what micro niche you belong to.
  2. Computers interfaces are getting easier to use and increasingly dumbed down. So the younger generation is not likely to have any native technological advantage over the older generation, in the way that millennials have had a significant advantage over baby boomers.
  3. Relatively fast adoption of new technologies is already pretty much a necessity for adults today. So the idea that young people adopt things more readily or more quickly while older people end up frozen at a certain technological moment will probably fade.
  4. Better health and medical technology will make the physical differences between the young and the old increasingly less salient. Eventually cognitive advances may improve the brain plasticity of the old as well, which has probably always been one of the primary driving factors behind generation gaps.
  5. The increasing difficulty of finding a job, the growing impermanence of jobs that exist, the inevitable transformation of higher education, and the continued decoupling of education from work—all of these trends are going to undermine the idea that older generations are necessarily more stable and settled in their careers. Everyone, young and old, is going to be scrambling to stay afloat.

“He’s Not on Mushrooms, He Just Has the Google Eyes”

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You’re at a party, and you don’t know anyone, so you end up exploring the house. You come across an exotic looking potted plant and you wonder “What is that?” Your google glasses reveal that the plant in question is etilingera elatior, also known as ‘Torch Ginger.” A link appears to a gardening website where you can order seeds. You dismiss the link, but in the process you are reminded of your mother, who likes to garden, and think, “Oh shit, when is mother’s day?” You look up the date and are relieved to discover that you still have plenty of time to get a gift, so you can relax. But idly you are thinking, what is the origin of mother’s day anyway? Which leads you to a corresponding wikipedia entry…

Flash forward and suddenly you’re that guy who’s been staring at a potted plant for fifteen minutes.

The Supposed “Plight” of Artists is Not a Good Justification For Bad Policy

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Every once and a while, Cory Doctorow writes a piece that perfectly expresses what I’ve been thinking. Today, he has a great essay up at the Guardian that starts by contextualizing the plight of artists with regards to piracy:

“Virtually everyone with a solution to the copyright wars is worried about the income of artists, while I’m worried about the health of the internet… Oh, sure, I worry about the income of artists, too, but that’s a secondary concern. After all, practically everyone who ever set out to earn a living from the arts has failed – indeed, a substantial portion of those who try end up losing money in the bargain. That’s nothing to do with the internet: the arts are a terrible business, one where the majority of the income accrues to a statistically insignificant fraction of practitioners – a lopsided long tail with a very fat head. I happen to be one of the extremely lucky lotto winners in this strange and improbable field – I support my family with creative work – but I’m not parochial enough to think that my destiny and the destiny of my fellow 0.0000000000000000001 percenters are the real issue here….What is the real issue here? Put simply, it’s the health of the internet.” (link to full essay)

Doctorow later concludes his essay with a classic quote from Heinlein:

“‘There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.’”

I simply could not agree more. And in fact, I want to take this argument a bit further.

In my mind, artists are special for two reasons. First, for how utterly common they are. People love to be creative. Art is one of the primary human activities. And the reason people practice art and creativity in such large numbers is because doing so is fun and fulfilling. In short, art is its own reward. This truth implies that the primary justification for copyright—namely, that it incentivizes creativity—is completely bankrupt. With today’s access to tools, if you can’t be inspired to create—lf you can’t find the time and energy to make something unless you have a guarantee of a government-backed monopoly protecting you—then I’m sorry, but you’re just not a real artist.

Second, artistic success is, and has always been, very rare. Cory is absolutely right about the .0000000000000000000001 percent. The notion that we should bend over backwards to protect such a small minority from unfavorable technological change (change which isn’t really even unfavorable, since truly talented artists are still doing just fine) is absolutely insane. What about all of the other far more common professions that are being automated away by technology? What about the cashiers and truck drivers that are just about to be made obsolete? Last I checked, their numbers dwarf the number of working artists. Should we ban automatic checkout machines? Or self-driving cars? Of course we shouldn’t. Reflexively banning technologies that harm employment would be silly. But such silly measures would  arguably make more sense than some of the internet-harming proposals designed to “protect artists.”

Three Ways to Tackle Societal Problems, Or The Importance of Technological End Runs

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Most solutions to societal problems fall into one of three categories—cultural, legal, or technological. Consider a disabled man, who lacks the use of his legs. We want to ensure that this man has equal access and isn’t unfairly discriminated against. We can institute:

  • A Cultural Solution — Encourage everyone to be considerate of this man’s needs.
  • A Legal Solution — Enforce laws that make it illegal to not provide equal access to this man.
  • A Technological Solution — Just give the man robot legs and call it a day.

Cultural solutions generally don’t hurt, but they tend to be slow-moving and in the worst cases can be completely ineffectual. Legal solutions require the use of centralized state power, and are thus subject to all the associated problems. Even in the above example, the potential for governmental abuse is clearly present: it’s not hard to imagine a bureaucracy imposing excessive fees and requirements on businesses and individuals, all under the pretense of making things more “handicap-friendly.”

Technological solutions, on the other hand, have the potential to bypass both cultural lethargy and bad policy. If you actually want to change the world for the better, with a reasonable amount of effort and on a reasonable timescale, technological solutions have a lot of advantages.

Good philanthropic institutions tend to understand this truth. For example, if you want to help solve the problem of STDs and unwanted pregnancies by encouraging condom use, you can institute:

  • A Cultural Solution — Just tell people to use condoms. (While sex education is certainly a good idea, it is far from a complete solution given how intractable horny people are.)
  • A Legal Solution — Mandate the use of condoms. (If this sounds absurd, note that my county just voted to force porn actors to wear condoms in all sex scenes.)
  • A Technological Solution — Design a better condom that people will be more likely to use.

This might seem like an obvious point I’m making, but I find that all too often people tend to inadvertently leave technological solutions out of debates. Many arguments get bogged down in fights between two competing legal solutions. Meanwhile some lateral technological solution is just sitting there, waiting to be exploited. Often times, the energy that is spent fighting over competing policy visions, could be better spent fostering some engineering project. For example, what would save more lives per unit of effort? Fighting a difficult political battle to enact tougher gun control laws aimed at criminals who are already set on breaking the law? Or researching biometric locks that might at least do away with the significant number of accidental gun deaths?

The importance of technological solutions is particularly important to remember today. As technological progress accelerates, many old cultural and political debates become susceptible to technological end runs.

Is Programming Really as Future Proof a Profession as People Think?

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While the job market as a whole is troubled, in certain high tech fields, such as programming, labor demand is still quite high. But while times are good for programmers, is programming actually a future proof profession over the long haul?

One line of reasoning would suggest that yes, programmers are going to be safe in the new economy. After all, the logic goes, even if robots take all our jobs, someone still has to tell the robots what to do, and those people are programmers.

But let me suggest a different way of looking at things: A programmer is really just a translator. A programmer essentially translates a natural language idea, like “I need an app that does X” into machine-friendly code. And translation is a data processing task that computers are getting increasingly good at performing.

Imagine an extremely high-level programming language, one almost identical to natural language. You simply describe the program you want to build and the compiler handles the rest. Generally high level languages carry a performance cost, but in a future ecosystem rife with cheap computing power, such a cost might be negligible.

If that scenario seems too far-fetched, let’s try a different angle: how big is the possibility space of useful everyday programs? It certainly can’t be limitless. Remember that the goal of a good programmer is not necessarily just to write code that works, but also to write code that is modular and reusable for a wide variety of tasks. So as the library of useful code grows, is it possible that eventually most of the important everyday programming tasks will have been handled? That there will be an ever shrinking frontier of new code to write, and an ever shrinking group of programmers exploring that frontier? I’m not saying there will be no programmers. Just that after a while there might be far fewer than current demand would suggest. In other words, programming could be one of those ironic professions where doing it truly well means making yourself obsolete.

Along these lines, here’s a revealing quote from programmer Jason Lewis on his blog Practical Elegance:

“Marc Andreessen famously explained ‘Why Software Is Eating The World’ in the WSJ a couple of years ago. What he failed to mention is that the snake of software is also quietly eating its own tail.

“I’m not just an old-fashioned Job Destroyer, replacing secretaries and mid-level bureaucracy with CRM and accounting suites. By using the most efficient possible languages (Ruby and Clojure, in my case, rather than Java or C#) and relying on free and open source software (Postgres rather than Oracle, for instance), I’m potentially destroying jobs in my own sector!”

Why Texting Defeated Videophony, Or The Ability to Multitask is Paramount

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One prediction a lot of science fiction authors got wrong is the idea that all calls would some day become video calls. Today, the ability to make video calls is readily available, and yet a very small percentage of day to day conversations actually utilize video. Instead consumers have gone the other way entirely: rather than increase the resolution of our casual phone calls by adding images, we have opted for an even lower resolution form of communication—namely, texting.

As it turns out, there is an issue much more important than resolution when it comes to interface design. And that issue is the ability to multitask. Video calls demand your whole attention; not only do you have to appear as if you are listening, but you also have to worry about whether or not your physical appearance is up to par. One science fiction author, David Foster Wallace, got this pretty much exactly right in his classic novel Infinite Jest:

“[Video] callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those callers who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking rude, absentminded, or childishly self- absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril-explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress…

“And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no such answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair- checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.” (full excerpt)

Applying these same principles, it’s not hard to see why texting has become so popular. In contrast with phone calls, texting alleviates two additional causes of social stress—you no longer have to control your tone of voice, and you no longer have to answer in realtime. This frees up valuable attention for other tasks. Put simply, when it comes to multitasking:

texting > voice calls > video calls

Thus looking forward, we should expect the continued dominance of interfaces that minimize your need to pay attention while maximizing your ability to multitask. For this reason I am somewhat skeptical about whether or not voice activation, another science fiction favorite, will ever catch on as a dominant way of controlling our devices. In many scenarios, particularly when other people are present, voice activation is a liability that impairs rather than impedes multitasking. For example, using a standard cellphone swiping interface, it is extremely easy to look up the definition of a word, skim an email, or check your calendar while simultaneously and seamlessly carrying on a conversation with the person across the table. No such multitasking is possible with voice activation.

There are of course situations where voice activation is a net benefit, such as while driving. But if cars start driving themselves, then this special case vanishes rather quickly.

I have even more doubts about virtual assistants. Many futurists have envisioned anthropomorphic digital secretaries, often with custom personalities, whom we are supposed to converse with as if they are real people. It seems that in order to maximize efficiency and minimize social stress, the last thing I would want to do is put an artificially intelligent middle man between me and my computer.