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Nicholas Carr Says Tech 'Utopia Is Creepy' (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: It probably won't come as a big surprise that Mr. 'IT Doesn't Matter' isn't a big fan of Silicon Valley's vision for the future, a future defined by autonomous cars and the inevitable rise of robots. In his new book, 'Utopia is Creepy: And Other Provocations,' Carr takes aim at the irrational exuberance of Silicon Valley, where tech is the answer to every problem. One of the exuberances that Carr takes particular exception to is the notion that social media is a better, freer form of media than 'old' media, which maybe makes sense coming from a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, but he does have a point. "The old gatekeepers, to the extent they were gatekeepers, have been replaced by companies like Facebook and Google and companies that really now have become the new media companies and are very much controlling the flow of information," Carr told CIO.com's Clint Boulton.
but only technology of the kind that I can compile myself, or at least I know I could because the source is available.
Utopia of any sort, Plato's or otherwise, is intrinsically wrong, and completely anathema to the concept of individual liberty. I don't want a bunch of supposedly enlightened, supposedly superior masterminds controlling what goes on in *my* life.
I mean most of the ideas would be fine, if there wasn't some sort of large organization behind it. It doesn't really matter if that organization is non-profit or not, they all have to act in ways to keep themselves existing, even if that goes against he will of their users.
let me ask you: could jesus microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn't eat it?
I could use some good news, now, jim. lay it on me, bro!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Utopia, American Style, is turning out to be a hell for most people. Eventually we will need either some form of guaranteed income or guaranteed employment. The only alternative is mass despair, and the chaos that will come with it.
There's too much money in social media, just like there's too much money in politics.
No, he does not have a point about old media vs new. "Trust us, we're good gatekeepers, while those other people are BAD!" is not a good argument...
Who is Nicholas Carr? Let me guess: he is a "thought leader".
I could be mistaken, but I'm already seeing the ruling class clamping down on the free flow of information. Police shot a black woman and had her Facebook feed disabled. I half got my hopes up that everyone having cameras would change that sorta thing but the cops learned to take the phones. But it took 'em a while to learn that. They seem to have learned the Facebook video lesson much quicker...
If I have a hope for technology it's that birth control (particularly for men) will force birth rates low enough that the rich will have to treat labor OK because there won't be enough to abuse. But then with automation they have no use for labor. So unless we're gonna drive the population to around 10,000 I think we still have a problem. After all, what good is being rich if nobody's poor to boss around?
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No, but God can. Understanding the reality of the contradiction is one of the keys to understanding the nature of God.
Yep, the whippersnappers probably don't realize how profitable local newspapers used to be. Indeed, they were one of Buffett's favorite investments in the early days. From a 1977 WSJ article: "Warren likens owning a monopoly or market-dominant newspaper to owning an unregulated toll bridge. You have relative freedom to increase rates when and as much as you want." [1] When the economics are like that, you can afford prestige journalism and professional reporters.
The WSJ article also notes how Buffett made a killing buying the Washington Post Co. at a significant discount to book value; the company's huge investment portfolio wasn't factored into the stock price at the time. Fast forward several decades, and now Bezos owns the actual newspaper and WaPo brand.
While there are legitimate *technology* companies in Silicon Valley, the ad-delivery/social media "it's 1999 all over again!" outfits for some reason get all the attention. Looking at some of the large employers in the area, you realize a huge number of people earn a paycheck from firms that sell ads, make CRM software, and run social media services (in the red quarter after quarter). It's sort of like the West Coast Wall Street: too many overpaid assholes doing stuff of no useful value to human civilization. (And both groups are enabled by the torrent of easy money from the central banks, which makes all sorts of bullshit possible.)
[1] http://www.rationalwalk.com/wp...
Making better tools has always totally been a bad idea! Lets not make new tools because the old tools are less effective, but we are used to them and change is bad. Fuck Change. Trump 2016!
I'd totally peg Jesus to be the burrito guy over God.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Meaningless correlation.
(Democrats-wise) Based on my discussions (highly scientific!) people over 40 who voted for Hillary honestly admired her from the 90's, and while they may have voted for Obama in 2008, they weren't voting against her. People who are younger often skew more socialist, and Sanders would appeal more to them.
(Republican-wise) I'd suspect that the cause is that people aged 45-65 are more likely to unemployed/underemployed, are looking at the world changing (and leaving them behind) and want to wind it back. They're easy to convince that if we can wind back immigration/free-trade, then their skills will be required, and they'll be able to continue their career/have a retirement like their parents.
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There is a problem with automation: The entire economic structure of society is built on the assumption that (almost) everyone has a job. If you don't have a job than you can't purchase the essentials like food, shelter and clothing. Automation has worked so far only because demand has always grown to match supply, but there is no guarantee that will continue to be the case.
In the worst case scenario, auto-farms and -factories produce near-limitless supplies of goods, but the cities are flooded with people unemployed and living in poverty: They don't have five cents to buy even the super-low-cost food, and the people who own the farms have no economic incentive to give away their product. So food just rots in the silos, and the people starve.
That only happens if you automate the entire stack and eliminate all human labor entirely. Failing that, luxuries move downward from the rich to the poor. For example: the rich used to be able to taxi carriages, while the poor walked; then people could afford horses; now everyone owns cars.
When the hot-blast furnace was invented, it made 86,400 tonnes of iron in the same amount of invested human labor as the prior process required to produce only 400 tonnes. This (and new steel rolling process) allowed us to create railroads, increasing trade, reducing the cost of goods to people (by producing them where the least labor was required), thus allowing people to buy more goods. That moved some luxuries down into the hands of the common man, as those luxuries cost less of a man's year's worth of labor--it took fewer labor-hours to make, thus the wages paid to a man in a year were divided smaller into that good--thus the common man can buy more. Cheap steel? Cheaper machines to mine oil and coal; cheaper rail car rides; cheaper transportation; eventually, cheaper automobiles.
The cost to manufacture a cell phone and to operate a cellular network has decreased. The level of service possible in the same cost has increased as a result. Back in the day, a fiber optic line could carry about 1Mbit/s of data, and running thousands of them together could get you 1Gbit/s; now we can carry 2Gbit/s, 8Gbit/s, or 10Gbit/s over multiplexed fiber, and can run dozens of them to get hundreds of gigabits of connectivity. We don't need massive data centers sucking tons of power to process all that, either; each unit of network hardware today handles hundreds of times the data as a similar machine produced in 1985 would. That $4,000 cell phone with $0.42/minute voice back in 1984? It should be $9,000 today, with about $500/month of service cost for 2 hours of voice per week; instead, it's a high-end smartphone that only costs $350, stores 64GB of data, has 8 CPU cores, and gives unlimited voice and text/media messaging as well as a couple small gigabytes of high-speed data for $60/month.
90% of American laborers were farm workers in 1870; it's under 2% today, and about 10% more support the farm with chemicals (fertilizer, pesticide), equipment (tractors), and energy (irrigation, fuel). The result is food costs a fraction of our budget--just in 1900 the median family spent 43% of their income on food, and today it's almost 11%--and we buy tons of other goods, including more healthcare, leading to a lot of retail jobs, IT jobs, and medical service jobs.
Your worst-case scenario happens if we drop all of the new tech rapidly. Raise minimum wages, raise payroll taxes, increase the cost of a worker, delay regulation enabling the use of autonomous drivers and drone delivery, and then finally cut it loose all at once and tell businesses to go ahead and replace that $15/hr pizza driver and the expensive shipping infrastructure with machines sans operators; watch a third of the jobs in the country vanish overnight. If we stabilize it by supplying a non-wage income (e.g. a universal social security), reducing payroll taxes (your employer pays less to employ you, and you receive the same wage), and countering general unemployment by reducing or eliminating VAT and sales tax, then the changes come spanned across large timescales, and consumer buying power moves around, and we avoid a severe unemployment crisis.
Not simple. Doable, and important to understand if you're going to keep an economy from collapsing during a period of sudden technical progress; but not a trivial task, in any case.
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There is a factor you are overlooking - is there a limit on consumption regardless of cost?
Compared to a hundred years ago, we live like kings. The only thing there's a shortage of where I am is affordable housing - other than that, life is pretty luxurious. Even those in menial jobs can afford clothes so cheap that no-one bothers to repair them any more, all the furniture we want, highly sophisticated appliances, and the 'essentials' like electricity, communications, water and a sewage system.
But how much, really, can people possibly want? If you make clothes cheaper, will people buy more? They are already disposable. If you make food cheaper, will people buy more? There's a limit to how many luxury goods a person has time to enjoy. Not everyone wants to have their own private helicopter. There's still a lot of scope for consumption to increase in some areas, like transport, but others are at saturation already: It doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture, say, books. People aren't going to read more of them because they are cheaper.