Monthly Archives: September 2013

Opening up the New Frontier: Government Work?

Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks so. He doesn’t believe that Elon Musk’s plan to send people to Mars is going to fly. I’ll just let him lay out his argument in his own words:

The Columbus analogy is fairly persuasive, but it ultimately it rests on the assumption that things in the future are more or less bound to work the way they have in the past. Long-time readers will know that I am not overly attached to that particular assumption.  For example, I think that it’s likely to get us in a lot of trouble where automation replacing jobs is concerned. In the past, whenever technology eliminated jobs, it created more jobs in the process. But that might not go on forever, and our assumption that it will is a very risky one, especially with the work force shrinking ever smaller. Likewise, the fact that governments have traditionally sponsored the earliest missions that open up new frontiers doesn’t mean that it always has to work that way.

In any case, there is an argument to be made that the government has already done its job in opening up the frontier of space. They have demonstrated that we can send human beings into space and to land on other worlds (Apollo.) They have demonstrated that people can live and work in space long-term (Mir and ISS). And they have done yeoman’s work in exploring, mapping, and generally getting to know the very planet that Elon Musk wants to go to: Mars.

Tyson talks about how the first mission is always carried out by the government. But here’s the thing: Mars is not virgin territory. We’ve been going there since the 1960′s, landing there since the 1970′s. We just haven’t been going in person. Ferdinand and Isabella didn’t have the option of sending unmanned probes out to prove that you can reach Asia by sailing west. Give them that option, and assuming that a hypothetical Renaissance-era unmanned probe would have cost less than three ships plus crew plus supplies, that’s exactly how they would have done it.

Also, Tyson makes no mention of Planetary Resources, the company that plans to start mining near-Earth asteroids for profit in the near future. What are the risks? Who are the investors? What’s the ROI? These aren’t just rhetorical questions. People are seriously working out the answers to them as we speak.

Via technology, capabilities that once belonged only to large nation states and mega-corporations are being passed into the hands of ever-smaller entities and individuals. Increasingly we may find that small private initiatives are not only a workable way to get humanity into space; they may well be the best way to do it.

Only So Many Noises

Ricky can laugh it up about the UFO magazine and the horse in the pub, but Karl is correct that there are only so many noises that can occur.

The piano keyboard analogy is actually kind of brilliant.

Where Karl gets it wrong is his estimate that all noises have been used five times. More likely there are many that have never been heard and never will be heard. But that doesn’t mean that sounds can’t recur — some things do sound very similar to other things.

Some birds imitate other birds. Humans imitate each other — and other sounds. And then there’s recording and digital reproduction of sounds. In point of fact, we do end up hearing a lot of the same stuff over and over and over. It’s probably not all that common that you hear a completely novel sound.

karlAdvantage: Karl.

A Painting from a Dying Flower

This is my favorite XKCD strip ever, and that is saying something:

Wow. Why do I feel so sad?

Somehow, the idea of the  bee image embedded in the orchid reminds me of this story, in which I raised the following question:

This makes me wonder…are there other past events that we might get a second shot at observing? If a well-placed dust cloud can bring back an event from nearly half a millennium ago, what other options might exist for retrieving visual information on events long since past?

In a similar vein, Stephen commented:

It makes me wonder if there isn’t a record of everything echoed somewhere if we just knew where to look.

Well, maybe not everything. But it’s encouraging that we can get a glimpse of a bee that, presumably, no human being ever got to see.  So much of the past is lost to us.

But not all of it.

Ad from the Future

Imagine when we’ll see advertisements for 3D printer supplies that look no different from ads for inkjet cartridges or printing paper that we’ve seen for years.

Things like this:

(hat-tip: Shawn Thuris)

My immediate thought — these spools look exactly like the ones I load into my lawn edger / trimmer. I wonder if they are produced by the same manufacturers?

The future is already here. And it’s getting more evenly distributed all the time.

PS: I gotta get me one of those.

False Dichotomies

They’re everywhere.

Superman or Batman? Star Trek or Star Wars? Football or baseball? It’s one thing to be asked to state a preference, but these choices are increasingly offered as absolutes. The idea that you might really like both of the items in question (in different ways, for different reasons) seems to get in the way of divvying up the human race into opposing camps.

But at least those dichotomies make sense logically. Some Star Wars fans really do despise Star Trek, and vice versa.

Then you see something like this:

Anne-Marie Slaughter envisions an America where caring is as important as competing

We are a nation that thrives on competition, from sports teams to small businesses. We define success by who wins, typically through talent, luck and working harder than anyone else. If everyone pursues their self-interest, all of society benefits.

But winning is not everything, much less the only thing. Competition must go hand in hand with care. As Bill Gates has put it, “There are two great forces of human nature: self-interest and caring for others.”

Care starts from the premise that humans cannot survive alone. Our progress flows from our identity as social animals, connected through love, kinship and clanship. Success should be defined not as individual victory but as group advancement, whether the group is a family, a community or a company. Satisfaction comes less from beating others than from bolstering them, enabling them to reach their full potential.

To her credit, at least Slaughter is making the case for competition and caring that I would make for Superman and Batman — they’re both good and they both have their place.

The problem comes from even attempting to make a dichotomy out of them. Saying that you prefer caring to competition isn’t like saying you prefer football to baseball. It’s like saying you prefer chocolate cake to baseball.

Perhaps the confusion arises from the embedded Bill gates quote. Self-interest and caring for others are not separate forces of human nature. They are both expressions of the one overarching human drive, what around here we describe as the Human Imperative. Humans are constantly trying to make things better, to make everything better. To quote myself:

Some people are focused only on improving the circumstances of others, while others are focused exclusively on improving their own circumstances. Most of us are somewhere in between, devoting some measure of our energies to improving the lives of others (whether those “others” be our own friends and families, our communities, or humanity as a whole) and devoting the rest of our energy to improving our own lives.

Slaughter’s world view misses out on two very important points:

  1. Unforeseen consequences pop up all the time. So actions that are intended benevolently sometimes have disastrous consequences, while actions that are malicious or even just indifferent to the suffering of others often lead to long-term benefits. (See the piece linked above for examples.)
  2. Improvements to the human condition tend to be transferable and they tend to persist. Because of these tendencies, even the most competitive and self-centered efforts bring about benefits that eventually everybody gets to enjoy.

I’m not arguing against caring. I like caring. I care. A lot.

Slaughter’s point is to argue for government programs that she believes represent a caring attitude towards others. Her ideas may or may not be right; I don’t care. Anybody who wants to debate that stuff, have at it. What I reject is her implicit suggestion that anyone who doesn’t favor such programs doesn’t care about other people.

My point is that people who care about what actually happens to other people — as distinct from people who care about being “caring” — recognize that competition is one of the most useful tools in the effort to make things better for other people. Competition is one of the ways we get better at everything, including getting better. So whether Slaughter’s ideas are right or wrong, they would benefit from healthy competition from other ideas. And even if we were to adopt her agenda wholesale, it would be better implemented by competitive teams than by one central authority.

But that’s me. I like baseball and cake.

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(Cake photo by Tracy Hunter.)

 

Automation, Subordination, and the Future of Employment

Blogger Michael O. Church (don’t click if you can’t stand f-bombs) says that it isn’t just automation that is putting our economic future into jeopardy. Rather, it is is a deadly cocktail of automation taking up all the subordinate jobs combined with an employment model  that has made most of us — naturally — subordinate.

Per Church, the workplace in both its industrial and post-industrial incarnations trains us to be underachievers, curbing (and eventually quashing) our creative capabilities in favor figuring out how to get positive evaluations and thus keep the paychecks rolling in. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment knows that most companies fall far short of the kind of pristine meritocracy they more or less universally claim to be.  A real meritocracy would be a competitive environment in which the most capable and productive rise to the top, with good performers spurring each other on to better and better performance through the natural competition that arises. Unfortunately, in the real world good performers don’t get to be the role models they should because there is an entirely different value system operating under the surface.

…[E]ven in the relatively broken world of white-collar work, one never really has to worry, when doing something genuinely worth doing, about others who are better at the work. One has to worry about nasty people and political adepts, not superior craftspeople. In fact, people who are genuinely superior are usually quite nice about it, at least in my experience. It’s those who are inferior but politically powerful that are most dangerous.

….It’s not the objective difficulty, but the erratic and corrupt evaluation, that gets to most people. When the reward is divorced from the quality of the work, people lose interest in the latter. Most people, after all, associate work not with physical or mental difficulty (which people enjoy) but with economic humiliation. In a work world driven by non-meritocratic political forces and therefore subject to constant shifts in priority, they also lose a sense of coherence, and the ability to focus atrophies, since responding quickly to political injections is more valued than deliberate performance. Eventually, full-on disengagement sets in, and people lose a sense of ownership or responsibility. Over time, this creates a class of people conditioned into permanent subordination.

You know, even if machines weren’t coming along and snatching up all the good, reliable subordinate work — which they are — conditioning people into a state of permanent subordination doesn’t sound like all that noble of an objective. Not to say that there is anything inherently wrong with being subordinate to someone else; one of the commenters to Church’s piece points out that the military, for example, wouldn’t work very well without the concept of subordination. (It also comes in handy when rearing children.) But we don’t train soldiers (or children) never to think for themselves; ideally they are given a context into which they balance doing what they are told with doing what they believe, in the moment,  to be the best course of action. Ideally, there is an objective to be achieved — take the hill; learn how to successfully get through the day without relying on a diaper — that both orders / instructions passed down and actions taken on one’s own initiative will work towards achieving.

But in the highly skewed corporate setting that Church describes, the true objectives of the business often get lost in the background noise when one is trying to decide, day to day, which course of action will yield the best paycheck-ensuring results. So you end up with a workforce that is good at following instructions, and good at conforming to a set of evaluation criteria, and not terribly good at all at coming up with independent ideas for how to generate value and acting on them. So businesses have been cheating themselves out of a good deal of the value the workforce might have brought to the table (not to mention the toll such a setup takes on the workers’ lives.)

Meanwhile, here come the machines. Awesome at following instructions. Not terribly good (for now) at thinking up and acting on value propositions independently. It is an evolutionary inevitability that as machines become more capable, they take more and more work away from humans who were conditioned to be as machine-like as possible, but will never be as accurate, tireless, and so forth. There was a time when automation merely pushed human workers higher and higher in the subordinate food chain, but it looks like soon that will no longer be the case. The only humans who will be employable will be those who can make an independent contribution; that is to say, who can create value that machines currently cannot.

So what do we do with all those unemployed and unemployable humans? Church suggests:

The result of this is that the market value of subordinate work, on the market, is falling inexorably to zero. People who are afflicted by the long-term conditioning of subordination will have no leverage in the modern economy, and (as much as I am cautious about such things, being more strongly libertarian than I am leftist) I suspect that central intervention (socialism! gasp!) will be necessary if a nation is to survive the transition. All that will be left for us is work requiring individual creativity and personal expression, and the people who have lost these capabilities to decades of horrible conditioning will need to be given the help to recover (or, at least, enough sustenance while they can bring themselves to recover). The real discussion we need to have– involving economists, business leaders, educators, and technologists– is how to prepare ourselves for a post-subordinate world.

Well, let’s think about this. Sharing some of Church’s libertarian leanings, I’m not at all fond of the idea of socialism. I don’t even like the word very much, because it is so laden with baggage that it’s hard to have a reasonable discussion about these ideas. When we had Martin Ford on FastForward Radio a few years back, I remember him talking about the need for the government to make payments to individuals as the only way to keep automation from destroying the economy. In his view, establishing what we would normally call “socialism” is the one and only sure way to save capitalism. The problem is that our economic concepts are human-centric, where technology has always been an amplifier of human productivity and participation in the economy. If technology becomes the primary player in the economy, and most humans become irrelevant to it, our existing models begin to break down. So I think these ideas have to be on the table. We have to work through them, even if people’s knees tend to jerk when they hear either the word “socialism” or “capitalism.”

But having said that, I have a hard time seeing how a socialist system can remedy the problem of people being conditioned for subordination. Socialism subordinates all economic activity to the common good, as defined by the (we hope) benevolent state. But if individual corporations haven’t been terribly good at creating an environment in which people maximize their creative contribution, how can we support the idea that a powerful central state will somehow do better?  If people currently associate work with economic humiliation, how will they feel about being handed a free check for doing nothing every month? If evaluation criteria are introduced by which some people can do better than others, those criteria are at least as unlikely to be wide of the mark (And what is “the mark?” And who decides?) as the ones currently used in corporations — which we have already established represents a huge problem.  And let’s not forget those inferior performers with advanced political skills. Seems to me that they will be more of a problem than ever.

On the other hand, it’s important to note that Church suggests the S-word as a transitional strategy. It’s not a permanent solution. That last bit about defining what a post-subordinate world will look like is the truly crucial part.

Personally, I think that’s the part we should be working on now. A number of models have been floated around how society and our economy might be reorganized in light of the robot takeover. Maybe we all get straight-up government payments. Maybe we get them on a sliding scale based on efforts to better ourselves, serve our communities, clean up the environment (see caveat above about evaluation criteria.) Maybe we all get stock in companies and manage our portfolios for a living. Maybe we all do each other’s laundry. Maybe the whole economy gets reorganized around consumption with us all competing in some highly complex frequent shopper program. Maybe we push for advanced 3D printers and tiny nuclear reactor generators in every home so that everyone can just produce whatever they need without the old money economy at all.

These ideas all need to be explored, modeled, tested. And we need a lot more of them. A lot more. Perhaps it’s time to organize an X Prize around new economic models. Okay, sure, that sounds like a good idea, but there’s one problem. What would the prize be?

Some related thoughts at Transparency Revolution.