> And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon.
> Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)
> Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! (...)
> I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.
> I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution coming to an end.
---
The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political -- automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could we accomplish?
There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it, we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected.
I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead spent on the unnecessary and menial.
Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!)
And security. The biggest problem of course is that this a field ripe with potential for abuse... there's a fine line between a personalized book recommendation service, and a massive, streamlined propaganda machine.
We have the knowhow to build either (very near) futures: one in which we automate all the menial aspects of our day-to-day lives and are left to explore and create... and one in which our desire for convenience is exploited by governments and corporations.
The technical difficulty of achieving either is the same, the only difference between utopia and dystopia in this case is the foundation on top of which it's built:
One is built on openness: open data, neutral networks, open software and standards, all massively available so that anyone with the ingenuity to do so can pitch in and help build this future.
The other is built on a foundation of walled gardens and closed ecosystems: everyone building on top of platforms and technologies that are ultimately controlled by a handful of individuals whose interests we now have to trust align with our own.
It wouldn't be propaganda if it gave you want you wanted. But the same systems that can predict what you want will give you what some unnamed face wants the masses to know, and silently reports on people whom it detects aren't complying. It's the same system, what it does depends on who owns it and how transparent their operations are.
> Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)
He should have look at some of the stuff that demo scene programmers churn out of a C64 these days.
> It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated.
In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.
Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.
Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.
"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.
It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".
It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.
Thank you for this comment, it really put into words things that have been passing through my head constantly in the last couple of months, without me being able to put them down in writing as well as you did.
For example just the other day I (a programmer) was trying to explain to a friend of mine the concept of "Cargo cult programmers" and about how an initially good idea (agile programming) had been taken over and perverted by outside consultants and "professional managers". Said friend works in sales and I think she once mentioned to me the "sell me this pen" thingie.
And about people and institutions still living in the 19th century, I'm now reading a book on the 1830s Saint-Simon movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Simonianism) written by an academia darling, French philosopher Jacques Rancière. I don't know how to put it in words, but to me it seems like Rancière would have preferred for the world to have stopped right then and there, i.e. in the 19th century, when bourgeois people had just taken over from the aristocracy and they could look from above at the peasants and workers that stood below them. He (Rancière) is of course trying to be sympathetic to the workers he writes about in his book, but one feels that he's being sympathetic from outside their world, worse yet, from above their world. More than that, there's this feeling of him mocking their (the workers') belief in an better future and improved social relations, especially when talking about Fourierism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourierism). It reminded me of people who not so long ago were still mocking open source.
And last but not least, and it pains me to say it, but I'm afraid that open data (the idea, the concept) is dead. Somehow the forces that be managed to kill it (I'm thinking Google post-2007 or so, FB since its inception, Twitter in the last couple of years, just to name the biggest). It's strange about how no-one wants to bring this subject up for discussion anymore, it's like a foregone conclusion by now.
Agreed. This is the crux of the problem: if we're worrying about this leading to an "underclass"... does anyone think its illegality will prevent the ultra-wealthy from funding this technology?
And who will be overseeing the research? If it must be conducted in the dark and on a budget, does anyone doubt that human experimentation will take place?
No thanks.
Ethical or not, the cat is out of the bag and the only way is forward.
Only one point to nitpick: let's stop spreading the "RSS is dead" meme. It's not. RSS/Atom are alive and well.
Google reader != RSS.
These standards are open and simple enough for everyone to implement on their site/blog, and they'll only die if we all start acting like they're dead because one company decided to phase out a product that was not even living up to its full potential. I use https://www.newsblur.com/ on a daily basis and it's a far superior piece of software.
Problem is phone manufacturers have a vested interest in making the web experience sub-optimal (and even limit developers' means of building a proper mobile browser, like Apple).
From a discussion in /r/rust. Great overall discussion about the benefits of Haskell-like abstractions. This example almost looks like magic, it really helped me understand the power of these abstractions.
Often people (including myself), will ask "why bother", "why should I get a PhD in abstract math just to write a damn script. They're all turing complete languages after all."
Here is a perfect, down to earth example! So simple even I got it!
p.s: Not being a Haskell guy, I had to use these resources to figure out wtf was going on; they might help you too:
Be well versed in genetics / molecular biology! - If I had the time to finish school, I'd double in biology / math or CS. Man will that be a killer combo when that kid is 30.
It feels like biotech is where computing was in the 1930's... what's to come, and how it will change the world is both frightening and exciting.
On the "soft" side (whatever that means): ethics, the history of ethics, from every point of view.
Two lecture series I always recommend, and feel like everyone should watch with a gun to their head (as the instructor himself says):
Literary theory. Gaining a deeper understanding of how masters of symbolism, language, and creativity think and put together their work; the history of literature; etc. will open you up to new ways of thinking just like studying pure maths or programming would.
Now to invent a time machine and give myself this advice! Boy I could've used it.
Exactly. Which becomes downright comical when you read any of the HN threads on negotiating salary, and see the stream of people who take what they are offered or are pleased with negotiating 5% more.
I've never given an offer I wouldn't have been ok with upping 30% or more, and conversely I have never taken an offer I haven't negotiated up 30% or more. And I don't see myself as a cunning negotiator - if I had been, I probably would have been far better off.
But I do negotiate, which is something, by experience from the other side of the table, nearly nobody does.
It's not a dissenting opinion, it's plain false. What he's thinking of is dissociative drugs.
Even at very high doses of psychedelics, you remain perfectly aware that you are tripping, and if anything, tend to be extra-careful not to do anything that might be foolish in "the real world", which you understand you still physically inhabit.
On the other hand, dissociative drugs, as the name implies, are drugs that make you lose your grip on reality (and even your own personhood). These are the "jump out the window" drugs. They can be dangerous in that sense, and also in the sense that they can be used to cause harm to others - for example, as date rape drugs.
They are not always hallucinogenic, are not the same thing as psychedelics, and they tend to be extremely unpleasant so they're not even particularly popular.
If done responsibly, about the worst thing that a person on LSD will do (assuming no pre-existing mental instability) is lie down, cry, and have a very bad time waiting for the bad trip to be over. No murderous rampage or flight attempts.
This is not true. It's quite easy to trip hard enough to be disconnected enough from understanding some things will cause permanent damage that you won't want. For instance, thinking that blood is life energy and so is electric so why not connect the two? Additionally, the idea of death can become non-scary entirely (which can make it great in therapy), lowering inhibitions.
Perhaps it's not common to have such problems, but your key word is responsibly. It's misleading to suggest that an uncontrolled bad trip can't easily result in tragedy. (Not that that's good justification for making it illegal.)
Minor pet-peeve. But we should probably refrain from immediately jumping to "drug cartel" examples. It only further perpetuates the meme that privacy is only something criminals and perverts should be concerned with.
Why not "Erotic messages with my wife", "My medical records", "My business plan", "My home videos", or any other number of things most regular people probably don't want anyone snooping around.
Fair enough. But you did understand that this tool is a way to decrypt something, under duress, which provides a credible plaintext rather than the actual plaintext right? And if someone asked you decrypt your "home videos" under duress and you used the alternate key to decrypt the "cat videos", the people forcing you to do the decryption might be suspicious that you're encrypting cat videos at all.
> And culture builds on culture. (...) That cumulative process is what allows for the civilization that we now live in, but it raises a very interesting paradox and it’s interesting that it’s very rarely commented upon.
> Here’s the thought experiment: (...) imagine I showed you an Apple II running World of Warcraft. If you knew anything about computers you’d say, “Impossible. Impossible!” (...)
> Now, let’s think about human beings. Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! (...)
> I happen to be one who believes that the cultural becomes so complicated at a certain point that it won’t run on our brains. And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.
> I think that that ultimately might be what bounds us; that we’ll reach a point where our memory capacity and inferential power simply cannot accommodate the latest cultural artifact. At that point what happens? Does it become independent of us, or does it just stop? It’s like evolution coming to an end.
---
The whole thing is worth watching really, but that question really hit home for me. Though maybe I'm more optimistic: if we automated away all of the menial -- such as deciding what's for dinner, searching for the next book to read, etc. (unless it's done for pleasure of course) -- and the political -- automate a large portion of how our institutions are run -- all of these things that stifle and fragment our creative energies, so that we could focus all of our brainpower and energy on creative endeavours, how much more could we accomplish?
There's still a cognitive limit, but it seems to me that currently we are mired by so much unnecessary overhead that once we are able to remove it, we'll find that limit is a lot farther away than we expected.
I'd guess that for most of us, well over 50% of our creative energy is instead spent on the unnecessary and menial.
Especially since brains are not Turing machines, and the cost of overhead is not linear (50% overhead might mean more than 50% productivity loss): brains get tired over time, they burn out, they need rest, context switching is hard... that overhead burns you out and is making you less productive even when you're not actively thinking about it (what's for dinner, your personal finances, schedules, meetings, that dentist appointment, am I due for a haricut? did I already book the mechanic? my car is making that weird noise again, oh crap did I miss the new Game of Thrones last night, now I gotta catch up... etc etc etc etc) -- what a relief would it be to automate all of that and only focus on what's fun and what's important!)