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How the Internet Boom Harms Society
There's a man I know who is one of the finest Unix and Linux software engineers you'd ever want to meet. He works for one of the big computer manufacturers, from his house, on his own schedule. He is no obsessed computer loner, but a hearty family fellow who lives in a sprawling suburban home with his loving wife and teenage children. Let's call him "Ron."
Ron is a tinkerer, the kind of "true hacker" who longs to improve every machine he meets. If Ron wasn't earning an excellent living in the computer industry, he'd turn his talents elsewhere and probably meet with similar success. When I look at him, sometimes I wonder what he would have been like if he'd been born 100 years earlier. In my mind's eye I picture him running a farm equipment repair service in a small Wisconsin town, circa 1899, happily modifying his neighbors' threshers and steam tractors so that they'd perform better than when they left the factory.
If the Internet and the computer infrastructure behind it weren't growing so rapidly, and feeding Ron and his family so well, he might have drifted into some other field. Perhaps he'd be designing more efficient Diesel fuel injection systems that would help cut air pollution or inexpensive Artesian well pumps that could help bring marginal land under cultivation.
Now think of all those "If cars were built by Microsoft" and "If General Motors built computers" jokes. Imagine where the automobile business would be today if the entrepreneurs who run Silicon Valley had decided to build cars instead of computers. By now we'd probably all be driving vehicles powered by fuel cells or 100 MPG hybrid gas/electric motors, and the U.S. would dominate the world's automotive industry instead of playing constant catch-up.
If the same spirit that drove the growth of Apple and Oracle and 3Com had been put into space transportation, we might have permanent colonies on the moon by now. We might even be ready to launch human expeditions to some of the more interesting asteroids.
Imagine how much better life in third-world countries would be if just a fraction of the intelligence and energy that have gone into building the Internet had been applied to subsistance-level agriculture. Or if some of the high-ability, high-concept managers who have been drawn to Internet and computer businesses had gone into politics. I don't think there would be nearly as much hunger and misery in the world if so much talent hadn't been sucked into computers and the Internet.
This is all just speculation, no more valid than an "alternate history" science fiction novel.
But I wonder, I really do, what the world would be like today if the Internet was not such an overriding factor in it. And then I remember that the Internet is really not a big deal; it's just a toy for the few of us who are so rich that we don't worry about finding food to eat. In a global context, nothing on the Internet -- not even Slashdot -- is important enough to be worth a glance.
I suppose what bothers me is something I've never heard put quite this way: the "Internet Brain Drain." If all the best and brightest minds are attracted to Internet-based industries, that means the rest of the world is being run by second-raters. And that's scary.
Yesterday I had a phone conversation with a highly-placed campaign official for one of the major U.S. Presidential candidates. (Which one doesn't matter; they're all about the same.) This guy could easily end up as a top-tier White House staffer if his man wins. And compared to most of the people I come in contact with online, he simply wasn't very bright.
I don't think I'm exactly brilliant myself, but I don't presume to think I'm capable of making decisions that affect millions of people. Then I meet some of the people at the top end of the (U.S.) political game, and I realize that I wouldn't trust most of them to drive my limo because I'd be afraid that they'd get lost. And that's really scary.
I have come to believe that the average computer industry person is much brighter and more capable than the average modern American political person -- which is not only scary, but rather depressing.
Consider Sun CEO Scott McNealy. Like him or not, you've got to admit that the man is full of vitality and imagination. Put him on a debate platform with the current bunch of Presidential candidates and he'd eat them alive.
I'll stop with the analogies now. You get the idea.
I believe the Internet, and computers in general, are both worthwhile and necessary. It's when we think of them as ends in themselves that we go wrong. The Internet doesn't create ideas; it's merely a tool that helps distribute them and makes collaborative thinking easier. Computers do no original thinking; they merely help human thinkers work more efficiently.
The talents that make a good programmer could be applied just as well in many other fields, from politics to agricultural development to civil engineering.
Right now, the Internet is the equivalent of a world-wide boomtown. Booms always end. When they do, the people who participated in them settle down and do other things. The Internet boom will end, just like all the others. When it does, infrastructure development will continue, software will still get written, and Web sites will still be made, but not at today's frenetic pace. "Information Economy" skills will become common and will no longer command a premium price -- except for a very, very few people at the top end.
So what are you going to do when this change comes? Have you chosen a "next field" yet? Have you thought about it at all? Do you ever wonder what you'd be doing with yourself if we had no Internet and no personal computers?
After some of the sad contacts I've had with political people (which I'll save for another story on another day), I hope at least a few of you decide to leave computer work and go into politics.
As I said earlier, This is all just speculation, no more valid than an "alternate history" science fiction novel.
But I can dream, can't I?
heck, fill the whole whitehouse with the /. crew and the worlds problemd might be solved
I've seen a lot of my friends in college end up in Internet-related fields. Psychology majors, chemical engineers, lawyers - everyone seems to be ending up in the Internet sphere because that's where all the money is. Even me, and I was a lowly English major resigned to a life of poverty while writing the Great 21st Century Novel, except now I'm a web programmer. One day all the hype will dissipate and sanity will resume. But at least it's fun for now ...
It seems that internet is really making people richer.. Well, I mean USA people. Most other countries will suffer with the "sucking" effect that globalized commerce will impose on them. How will small and poor countries counterpart the commercial appeal that USA will show up through the internet?
The internet boom is the tail end of the computer boom, which is the tail end of semiconductor development, which is the tail end of quantum physics research.
As long as there are bright people who AREN'T interested in computers, there will be somebody working on the Next Great Thing. We just need to make sure that there's a place for him/her to work in peace. In other words, keep funding university research. Maybe 99% of the bright people today are eschewing that path, but the 1% who really love their research will be responsible for putting food on the table in the next century and beyond.
But it'll take some time. How long after Newton before Maxwell's equations were discovered? You can't engineer breakthroughs. You can only provide a fertile environment and hope for the best.
Uh oh. You mentioned _Atlas_.
You know what this means, don't you?
You're going to be flamed to no end by people who take issue with Ayn's philosophy, ignoring the fact that the general theme of the book (let people *do*!) is fundimentally sound.
But that's what you get when you wander into a political/philosophical debate.
I think. I can. I will.
i am very grateful to Linux and the Internet... i'm going to make around $250K this year working out of the house... when my financial goals are achieved, and i can get the wife to stop working, we will return this freedom to society...
The "brightest minds" seem to have the least amount of self pride in the quality of their work. If engineers in the automotive and aerospace industries were this careless about product quality many people would lose their lives everyday. In real industry, there is no room for "Bugs"..whether it be buses,boilers,or bombs. an engineer cannot allow his product to fail, because the stakes are too high. How often do computers fail? How often do aircraft fail? Thats my point. Robin, you need to rethink your idea about the "brightest minds"..we "second rate" humans object to your elitist ideals
Ok look at the Shell/Chevron activity and compare it to the atrocities of government in this century, from the Nazi concentration cams, to the killing fields of Cambodia. The harm caused by governments so greatly exceeds that done by Capitalist corporations that they belong in different moral levels. One should not use the same word to describe the spilling of oil with the spilling of blood.
vs.
Capitalism is the only moral system in existance
Chill out, boys. Capitalism is a tool. It's a very powerful and useful tool for a lot of jobs, and when properly used it can be very helpful and efficient.
But it isn't the answer to everything, and it isn't the only tool in existance. And "proper use" includes effective antitrust, environmental, and consumer-protection regulation to keep it stable and nondestructive.
Prove it.
You've touched on my feelings of uselessness.. Now, there's IT & there's development. As a sysadmin, there wasn't much appreciation & it didn't -really- give you the chance to create, just push pieces around. The saying goes, if they don't know you exist you're doing your job well, or something like that. Glorified janitors.. If you'd told me 3 years earlier I'd be making the money I was, and that I'd be miserable/bored & quit, I'd say you were wacky on the junk... But I was, and I did..to finish up that engineering degree..at least I'll be creating something.. Sure, I'll still be sponging off Internet-mania, but at least I won't be relying on it... Ride it while it lasts, store your nuts, but most of all -enjoy- the ride.
Excuse me, i live in a third world country, you are talking about nothing that you knows. Only the 15% of companys here are controlled by national, the rest, by US, Germans, Spanish, British capitalists groups, etc, the money produced here with cheap workers go out, and go to feed your military arsenal (to opress our country, see the circle?), to inflate your ridiculous stock prices of IPOs, and etc. When you ask "Why this country is in the third world and this other no?", the answer is a colony dominance, (explicity or not), with centuries of "we gave you the materials, and you gave me the manufactured products.", The central countrys dont want to the peripherical ones go industrialized. The politicals are toys (the spanish word is "titeres") of the big economic groups, here in the third world and in your first world. Im not a nationalist, dont misunderstand me, i think that the opression exist also in US, by the high classes to the workers, and in every place of the world. Maybe if you gona read the socioeconomics theorys of marx, lenin, trotsky, bakunin, you will understand what is the real problem, i can give you a six months of sociology and economics class. Internet is (yeah, i enjoy it, and linux cant being to the life without internet, i see many Fidonet projects go to the trash :)) here too much expensive for the majorty of the population, i see inet as a education tool _but_ you must have a education before, and here, the education of the majorty of the people are poor. If i can write this, is becouse im a middle class boy, from a little middle class that is being smaller and smaller. btw: wall street is about to explode, bigger than 1929 (only marxist economic theorys applied if you ask). forgive my bad english.
It strikes me that the real question is one of how do you define progress (as in progress toward some arbitrary utopia). The writer laments that a lot of the energy and ideas are going into the wrong direction. However, what direction are they actually going? To get a better view of that, I would like to see two graphs. The first one is the number of person-person phone calls vs. machine-machine calls over time. As you all know, the phone lines are too thin a medium for capabilities of most machines today. So, the second graph that I would find interesting shows the $$ put into person-person communications vs. $$ put into machine-machine communications over time. If the graphs turn out the way I suspect, the logical conclusion would be that we are inadvertently constructing our own irrelevance. We are putting the importance of things over the importance of people. And why not? Except for the immediate family and some good friends, who are all these other 6 billion humans? So why would one get upset if one of the latter brushes you off as dumb, irrelevant, etc, when you can sit back have a beer and watch some TV and make the rest of the world go away. -Dr. Firmware
Sounds like a variation on the "Atlas Shrugged" plotline.
Remember, network app development and politics are not the only games in town. But do keep thinking.
I agree with everything he says after half past three.
on the flip side, the boom is great for folks with no direction...opportunity for the inept/unfocused. Any of my friends that seem wayward, I toss 'em an NT book & tell 'em to move to the Valley.. Some have found their calling, others are just crankin out the bucks while it lasts. It's an enabler..when it goes poof the folks that are worthy will do fine & the parasites will move on..
When I got into the field, I had no idea it'd be the goldmine it is today, I really didn't care..I thought if I could make 40k (this was a while back), I'd be happy, because Id be doing what I wanted & would be comfortable - what's happened now is just a bonus... The fools that are attracted to it now because of .com mania are the ones that will suffer - oh well....
Bring on the bust! I'm tired of working with idiots that aren't true geeks.
You have set the bar low on progress, I see. I consider progress things that benefit mankind, you know, like curing diseases, ending wars, etc., not something that provides a momentary escape from our day to day drudgery. But then again, I have a life outside of this joint. You probaby don't.
Wall St will crash, although not like it did in 1929. There are too many differences between the economic structures in place now that would allow a worldwide depression of that magnitude. It will probably be a correction similar to the one that took place in 1987. The IPO bubble will burst, much in the same way the junk-bond markey, which created similar number of paper tycoons, did a slow leak in the mid to late 1980's.
"Sure, I've thought about giving up on it all and become a farmer. While I would probably be very happy doing that, I'd not be doing what I do best and I wouldn't feel good about that." Or, you could do what I do - both! In the mornings I'm a computer consultant, and I have developed a clientele that lets me pay the mortgage with plenty left over. In the afternoon, I work on my small farm - a small herd of sheep, fruit trees, a woodlot, and vegetable garden. Hey, it works for me! - Steve
I don't think that IT workers are in IT simply because of the lack of hard labor. How much physical work does an automotive/aerospace engineer do? How often do architects put together the buildings they design? As for the laziness part, I think that this is more of an issue of the effects of software glitches in comparison to the effects of giltches in, say automotive design. A badly placed gas tank can explode and kill the people in the car, inciting massive amounts of lawsuits aginst the company, while a badly written program crashes your computer, forcing you to wait a few minutes for it to restart.
Could you please explain why you feel that the post is irrelevant? If you actually make a full argument your post may not be moderated down. You are only stating your conclusions. I am interested in your evidence and the logic you used to reach that conclusion. That is the point of a discussion.
Heh.
Don't take it so seriously, dude. That was hardly even a flame.
And while we're on the subject, can you -- you personally -- write a better OS than windows? No? Me neither. Well then, is either one of us gonna shut up about windows' shortcomings? Nope. Should we? Nope.
I mean, hey. People got a right to shoot their mouths off.
The guy had a valid point, anyway.
Or opium, or whatever. Oh, goody. Just what we all need: More drug lords! That'll really help the farmers!
The problem here is that your lovable old laws of economics work together with some very grim laws of politics, which dictate that when the lion lies down with the lamb, only one of them will get up [1]. The people running Monsanto and the US government are not airy-fairy free-market angels drifting around bringing candy with their invisible hands for all the good little boys and girls. They're motherfuckers. If they weren't motherfuckers, they wouldn't be running the show, because some other motherfucker would have edged them out.
Blind faith in the free market is just as goofy as blind faith in socialism or anything else. All of these groovy ideologies begin and end with the same mistake: "First, let's assume that people are honest and moral".
Oops.
----------------------------------
[1] Woody Allen said that, IIRC.
Uh, what?
They supplement their crops . . . with food!
Whoa! What a cool idea. Don't have enough crops to feed yerselves? Hey, just supplement 'em with some food , and you'll be good to go!
Eventually many jobs will be automated out and the humans left working will only be produing new information.
. . . while the vast majority just get hungrier and hungrier until they start clobbering software engineers and eating them.
Oh, golly, I just can't wait.
By the way, when we've got 50+% unemployment, who exactly is going to buy all this wonderful information, eh? Ever wonder about that? Who will be buying the products produced by the few remaining productive workers? The Libertarian response is, "It ain't MY responsibility! The useless people should starve!", and my response to that is, "Yo Ace, tell that to the 'useless' people who shoot you and take your food. I'm sure that once they understand that they're useless, they'll do the moral thing and starve peacefully".
I think the Information Revolution (which has barely even started) is one of the most important events in human history. I hope we respond to it correctly.
My Three-Point Political Program (plagiarized shamelessly from Wayne Kramer):
2. damn, I forgot the second, and I'm not kidding, but I think it was really insightful. oh well.
I doubt it. I don't believe the internet can fade into obscurity. It's too efficient a method of distributing information. The only limitation is our ability to find what we need, and new concepts such as the Google popularity index are helping us do just that. The only thing that could possibly derail the Information Superrailway is a massive Y2K-like societal collapse. At that point, however, who's going to worry about a debate like this?
Hey, at least this comment is related to the parent comment! Wow, you're getting better. I'm sorry, but I still hate your guts. I read about 40 comments towards the bottom of this thread that were more "interesting" or "informative" than the piece of crap you peddled. You see, the only difference was they were only concerned with voicing their opinion. You, on the other hand, believe life is one big video game where you rake in as many karma points as you can. Of course I am merely using you as an example.
but you don't realize that it's the growth of information in our society that is making this boom. i can find out nearly ANYTHING using the internet. your friend couldn't just be some tractor guy, he would be a non-innovator because he would still be ignorant. the internet and computers and networking and information are what makes him, you, and me totally different human beings.
I don't know about Denmark or Japan, but the US statistic is total BS. It is illegal to pay someone less because of their gender. If that was really true, men would only be hired in fields where women were scarce. Why should a company hire men when they can lower payroll expenses by 24%? Also when you include facts like women are more likely to take off a long period of time from work (being a mother), account for different fields (secretaries and managers aren't paid the same), and seniority, the ratio of men's pay to women's pay reaches parity. This is what happens when you do real research.
Next, I will not be countered with facts (because the facts are on my side), but with "You must hate women" or some other meaningless drivel.
The poster has a very good point. The world has a very large supply of genius and it certainly isn't restricted to the world of computer science. I would add the following: The Internet is an excellent tool for the rapid dissemination and collection of information. However, only a small subset of the world's problems can be solved by more rapid and efficient distribution of knowledge. To quote Buckaroo Banzai (in Earl MacRauch's book, not the movie), "Consciousness is the impotent shadow of action". For most of mankind's problems, we already know what must be done; it's a matter of mustering the political and economic will. BTW, did you know that 1/2 the world's population (that's 3 billion people) live more than a day's travel from a telephone?
It is quite ridiculous for someone in the technology sector to assess the historical importance of the technology sector.
No machine is going to replace me until it learns how to get drunk and be miserable! Oh yeah that and I don't work with computers at all I do "real" work I'm a frigging ditch digger. People I work with don't even know how to turn on computers. So you'd be suprised at how little impact computers really have on their lives.
IMHO, the "best and brightest" and the best of the internet came before the capitalist boom. Money ruins everything. We still need bright people in government and industry. For example, basic automobile technology hasn't changed in 100 years. 4 wheels, 4 pistons, and burns dinosaur. Why don't we have hypercars? Government example: Cars themselves are a technological mistake. What we need are better City Planners. After all, average actual commuting time (20 minutes), and the average maximum commuting time that people will stand for (45 minutes) haven't changed since the Middle Ages. I don't think that market forces are the best way of choosing our technology. We need a GNU method.
hey, where's the roblimo sux option?
Unfortunately, this whole article reeks of "I'm smart, my geeks friends are smart, so all smart people must do the same thing I do." Oh, and all politicians are dumb. Gimme a break.
The universe itself. We've invented all of the
"easy" things already. During the past 200 years,
we've gone through a storm of technologies,
inventions, scientific fields.
So much has been done, you can't expect the
rate of discovery and development to continue
at an explosive rate forever.
And as far as bringing advances that are in
use now, to countries who don't have them...
There is no simple answer for that. I might
cite some barbaric tendencies, like ethnic
cleansing, or bloody religious wars...millenia
spanning feuds, gratuitous overpopulation...Things like that are major obstacles. When they are prepared to enter the 21st century, the rest of the world will be waiting.
blah blah freaking blah
The Galactic Library
Not this internet. The only thing the current
'net will grow into is an even bigger hairball.
Not enough cooperation. The whole structure has
been bastardized towards generating "hits".
And page impressions. We've traded the functionality of the
'net for "get rich quick" schemes.
So...meanwhile, the database explodes with
more and more corporate distorted information. Are we concerned
about being able to find the remaining data? No! More
and more effort is spent on tracking the
users of the database, rather than maintaining
the database itself.
SO. The WWW is fubar as a library.
Commercial interests have taken care of that.
The next WWW, if it is to be a library(port 81?),
will have to be non-commercial right down to
the power cords on the servers. We want a library?
We build it ourselves.
Commercial involvement destroys information.
It doesn't matter how it's implemented,
so long as the goal is the information
itself which is the evolutionary drive.
The WWW is a neo-boob-tube. Fuck the WWW.
There are enough of us around with the
hardware and the knowledge to make this
happen. It wouldn't be hard, once some standards
were set down. Just let me lay down the first
and most important of those standards:
1.) Information is more important than money.
2.) Information is more important than money.
3.) When pressured to manipulate the presentation,
location, indexing, delivery or the content itself for
commercial or monetary interests, refer to rules 1 and 2.
The WWW has become a tool for use against us.
We don't have to take it.
You seem to think the presidential candidates are all mediocrities, but Alan Keyes is a brilliant thinker. You might disagree with his ideology, in fact you probably do, but in terms of candlepower there is no doubt that he is up there. And he's a great debater, too! Keyes vs. McNealy- that would be a great one! Unfortunately, he doesn't see the light about MS. He opposes the antitrust action on free market principle, which is understandable, but also repeats their "freedom to innovate" propaganda.
"all the smart people arnt working on farm equipment, what a shame"
The GPL exists to simulate a world that doesn't admit copyrights on software. It's based on copyright law because, ironically, that's the only way to assert the right to forbid others from asserting rights inappropriately.
Seriously, IMHO "X changes society" is an idiom for "the ready availability of f(X) lets people behave differently than they had been, and enough people did so that society changed". Railroads and telephones (and other inanimate objects) have also been described thus.
If future customers have higher standards, and bad software starts to carry serious penalties, do you think there will be many alternatives?
Exactly, I was told not to study electronics because soon "It will all automized and run entirely by computers". Yeah, right! Mikael Jacobson
That is so true. Actually, in my experience, very few of the best minds go work for internet companies, or often even into CS at all, for the simple reason that they think it is not substantive, and don't want to work for a dot com company writing html. It is the bullshit artists, the phonies who gobble that shit up. Granted, at Caltech (my school) there is a notable bias for physics and hard science, as one would expect, but still...
You are assuming that these minds would work for good. They would work for the bucks regardless of whether or not the internet existed. If not we would have had Utopia before computers existed. Just because people are 'smart' does not make them more likely to do good for society. It probably swings the other way IMHO. All serial killers are on par with the IQ to folks such as Isaac Newton and other brains. Your reasoning, if there was any, is falacious at best. Another thing I work in the computer field, there are more dunces working on computers than intelligent people. I have worked for both the public and private sectors and have found this to be the case. Mediocrity rules this field also, so give it up already....... No knights in white satin here...........
Amen to that. Come to think of it, once I have my first $20 billion, I'll fund my first Mars mission:) Robert Zubrin says it is that cheap... Seriously: the first steps to an interplanetary internet are being taken right now, so who says that efforts in the internet technology arena cannot lead to better things...
Wrong. They don't make any assumptions about your intelligence, nor do they demand a degree in the field. They just want to know that you have at least the staying power required to get a degree. After all, who would want to employ somebody that couldn't even get through college?
Aren't you forgetting Stalin and Mao were anti-capitalist?
He may set the bar low, but your examples are unrelated to progress at all. Curing diseases and ending wars do not provide any benefit to mankind. They are, in fact, extremely harmful. /. might not be the greatest creations in the history of the world, they are far more progressive than calculated self destruction.
In case you are unaware there is no shortage of mankind. These "benefits" you talk about lead to increased human population destroying the environment which we need to survive.
So while things like
Wow. I've never seen someone use decontextualizing in a sentence without it sounding like a blatant attempt at pseudo-intellectual-speak. I don't know why "you misinterpreted my post" couldn't have been used, but bravo anway !
i was going to just email you personally, but you didn't leave your email address. thank you for posts like this. the neo-libertarian ideology scares me, and it's prominence on slashdot (usually with very little thought behind the rhetoric) makes me wonder what kind of company i'm keeping... but yeah, thanks. - a. coward (forgot my password *and* my username) http://www.local666.com
That's where I'm going. If I ever have 1% of the money Bill Gates has, I'm going to fund a manned mission to Mars, including a colony. My current involvement in computers is only because I happen to have had a bunch of opportunities in that area, and I really didn't see any realistic way I could get involved in space travel.
I remember the same kind of talk about 10 or 12 years ago on the eve of the end of the cold war. At that time, much of the nation's engineering and technology talent was engaged in things like SDI and other high-tech defense endevours, while the automobile industry was barely holding its own against the Japanese and the American consumer electronics business had already tanked, a victim of the Japanese.
...
Well, we know the rest of the story... The mighty Japanese electronics industry was undercut by Korea, Malaysia, and others, and Detroit, sobered by their experiences of oil shocks and the Japanese invasion, started to actually build cars that people wanted again. And all those laid off engineers and computer people who used to work for Westinghouse, General Dynamics, and the Pentagon, well many of them formed startups and that is the rest of the story
What does the internet do for business? .............email it
Well the view from the trenches is it just replaces a few older technologies.
Used to be.............,is now
Fax it.......
Fedx software.........download it
Send a catalog........website url please?
Staff meeting...........group email
Call them................Email them
Fly in......................video conference So all the web has really done:
Is replace the fax machine, catalog, To some extent fedx,
and cut down on staff meetings,
and reduce hold time, and Time spent in cars and on airplanes
If you eliminate government, you eliminate law and order. If I steal something from you, who are you going to call? Don't threaten me with hacking, because I can hire hackers just as good as yours, and pay them more money. Don't assume that you are tough enough to survive in this "totally free" world that you're imagining.
Remember, if there are no rules for you, then there are no rules for anyone else, either. And maybe some people will not play fair. Some people actually *like* playing dirty.
Americans should stop whining about having to pay for government. We've got a darned good government here, and it's worth every penny. I for one have no problem with paying for the services that I enjoy.
And besides, about 90% of the complaints that I hear about government are pure fantasy. People just invent things in their minds about what the government might do, and then they talk as if they government was already doing it. Some people have a hard time distinguishing fantasy from reality. I have no idea what you mean about "taxing all websites". I am sure that no one has ever proposed any such thing. You're just fantasizing.
And as far as "rules" go, yes, websites are already governed by "rules," some of which are Copyright laws. Are you actually opposed to this? Hopefully I'm just confused, and I just missed your point.
I'm amazed at the number of Americans who are ready to take the entire system of representative democracy that we have developed for so long, and just throw it all away. I just don't get it. You actually prefer anarchy?? If that's what you want, then I hope you get it. :)
Remember, the GNU public license itself is based on law. Without Copyrights, and without a court system to back it up, the GNU public license is just a piece of paper... empty words. Nothing more.
The Internet revolution is not over yet. Perhaps the main benefits of these changes will be in the future.
Besides, your argument is assuming that successful Internet businesspeople and techies had their choice of working in new Internet-related businesses, or working in some other industry. What makes you think that the world at large would be so open to their contributions? Often the world does not care for exciting new ideas, no matter how sound they are.
Somebody please moderate this guy up.
How rich did Richard Feynman get? Albert Einstein? Oppenheimer, Bohr, James Joyce, Dennis Ritchie, blah blah blah -- the list goes on. Smart and rich correlate to some extent, but not consistently enough to get excited about it.
And let's face it, even beyond "intelligence": Would you rather hang out and suck down some beers with one of those guys, or with Donald Trump? I mean, assuming Keith Richards isn't available, 'cause I'd kill to get drunk with that guy, rich or not
. . . which is why you hear all that talk about eternity.
The LORD has more stack space than you and I can possibly imagine. He doesn't even have to swap.
That's lame Panglossianism; I can't keep myself from laughing. Does that mean that Linux is worth less than Windows simply because it has a lower price value?
The US achieved its current prosperity during a period of real free-market capitalism in the last century.
Pure rewrite of history. The US had internal capitalism, yes, but protectionism to protect its developing industries. And even the internal capitalism was far from pure, such as subsidizing the building of the Western railroads and other such things. And Japan has used much the same strategy after the end of WWII. Protectionism works, if done appropriately.
And it really must be said that the "free market" is *not* a universal panacea. The Internet, for example, is plagued by spammers and worse. For more, there are some excellent articles at Government Success Stories
Without secure property rights and the freedom from taxes and regulations, they are condemned to stagnation and poverty.
"Secure property rights", in practice, are a kind of government regulation, and enforcing those is something that governments have generally not been able to do for free. Anarchy has been tried, and it has *not* in general produced capitalist utopias.
This article is full of more misbegotten notions and patently absurd logical fallacies than I've have recently encountered in one place. The brains are going to the internet because that is where both money and interesting challenges are to be found sufficient to draw them. But not all big brains belong to computer geeks by any means. The fallacy is that big brains are interchangeable among professions. They aren't. They belong to people with particular interests and characteristics.
A meaningless notion is the idea that the WEB is just a toy of the rich. Rich relative to what? The technology is not yet universal. So what? No technology is in its early period. This sort of class warfare nonsense should have fallen by the wayside at the end of the cold war at least. The poor of this world cannot possibly be helped without hitech and a lot of it. Not that any of us need to justify our existence on the basis of what the poor do or do not need.
I haven't the patience to wade through the rest of this tripe right now.
The author here (and many commentators) seem to feel that human problems are just like tech problems, that if we only try hard or think more or spend a ton of money we will solve this. History shows little evidence that this is true. What history does show is that whenever people latch onto some simple supposed solution to humanity's problems, the results aren't pretty. Whether the supposed problem is "the Jews control everything" (Nazi Germany) or "private property sucks" (Russia etc) or "the intellectuals have a bad attitude" (China and Cambodia), the results aren't pretty.
Everyone has their own theory on why the world has problems. Maybe I think the problem is too many people, while you think the problem is there's not enough respect for religion, and Joe over there thinks the problem is that the rich aren't taxed enough. Even if we could agree on what the problem is (not damn likely), then how do we solve it? It's one thing to say the problem is too many people. How do we now deal with this? Again, my solution might be simply to line everyone I dislike against a wall and shoot them, while yours might be simply to try to control population. But (even assuming you can get the right to life zealots and catholic nuts off your back), what do you then do when people ignore your exhortations? Do you force them to be sterilized? Do you kill all babies after the first one? Do you start allowing special exemptions for people who are supposedly special (eg extra-smart), or preventing undesirables (eg disabled) from having kids?
Sure you can try to view certain human problems as technical (eg how can we make a more efficient engine to cut down on oil usage), but dealing with these technical problems do nothing to resolve the real issues, all they do is shuffle things around. IMHO, (and again we're back where people don't even agree on the problem, let alone the solution), the attempt to deal with various US problems (like school education, or violence) via technical solutions rather than getting at the root of the problem, is why these problems remain.
(Score:-1,Funny)
Computing, as with harder sciences, centers on debate and searching for the Right Answer. Poly Sci is the art of compromising with fundamentally wrong-headed people who are too powerful to ignore yet usually can't be swayed to your point of view because their goals are hostile to your own. Where they intersect are standard committees, the results of which are often uninspiring (witness the rise of RFC-described protocols over ISO-specified ones).
Except what I know about those particular people, I don't like....
Next to self-defense, freedom of speech and of association are IMHO the most fundamental human rights. Through Usenet and the Web, we can share an audience of thousands (or more!), with identity rightly discarded in favor of content, and speak even unpopular ideas without fear of harassment from family or coworkers.
Right on, very well said; I think what you are describing is a kind of guilt complex that IT folks, who are at the top, often feel when they realize how meaningless it all is (in a global context), and yet have reaped such huge financial rewards. The obvious next step to relieve this guilt is philanthropy; lots of dollars going to good causes in the Seattle area, Mr. G. himself is quite a donor (let's leave aside for the moment the conspiracy theories about "why" Mr. G is so generous); look at the Woz and what he did in the 80's. Basically I think there are enough good people in our industry who, after they get rich on this Internet boom, will do some good things with their time, talents, and money.
So what we're talking about is the large number of businesses that make a living off of something that's not at all or only marginally useful to the world at large. For example, streaming video may very well be useful; an eighteenth competing streaming video format is probably not useful, except to the people who hope to make money off of it. And therein lies the problem-- most of the "useless" Internet companies can make a decent bit of cash creating a niche product and selling to a rich company. The argument, then, would be that people going to work for these companies might otherwise have done something useful, like creating those 100 MPG engines. Another argument might be that a niche company might have more "geek appeal", allowing a good amount of hacking, whereas the "useful" internet companies might require some more mundane work at times.
Really, though, what we see as the problem here is not that people wanted to do something really revolutionary, like make the 100 MPG engine, and then didn't because of the Internet Boom. I'm going to suggest that people who follow the big money in the Internet Boom, over the "contributing to the world" career path, would also do so were the Internet not around. Not only that, but with the amount of "geek jobs" so much lower, many of these positions wouldn't pay as well, leaving people following the money to do things like work on concealing oil spills at Exxon, or chemical weapons for the U.S. government.
People who have been drawn to the Internet and still want to contribute to the world at large will have no difficulty doing so. The Internet is obviously revolutionary itself, and has in fact increased everyone's opportunity to do something big to change the world. The Internet Brain Drain is nothing that wouldn't have happened through the draw of money elsewhere. This is capitalism, remember? If people had followed the money, sans Internet, there's no great chance it would've been to make 100 MPG engines.
Being a consultant I get to see a lot of different companies.
Two things are readily apparent to me:
1) There are a LOT of stupid people doing computer programming, systems engineering, and ESPECIALLY, end-user support.
2) Politics are no better in IT than any other part of business and often worse.
Compared to when this country was formed, the world is a much more diversified place now and there are far more people involved in politcs than ever before.
By simple statistics, this means that it is far more likely, with a larger more diluted pool of candidates, that more people of less-than-stellar intellect will be in positions of power in politics, because more of the really bright people are now involved in business.
If there is anywhere that the Internet Brain Drain has hurt us, it is in the loss of all these bright minds being involved in corporate computing. With the internet being such a lure for big money and fame, it is hard to find good people who will actually do the boring hard work necessary to make systems that run the day-in and day-out functions of a company.
In more than one case, I've seen one good person dragging around the weight of several people of questionable intellect and moral character because the company couldn't fine better candidates for what it could afford to pay.
On the other hand... Having a lot of idiots in corporate IT is great for the consulting business.... And I have to LOVE the current focus on short-term profit by upper management. I get more work fixing mistakes made by idiots in under funded and under staffed projects than pretty much any other source.
In any other field this degree of short cutting and incompetence would be criminal.
It's like having two guys from the lumberyard try to build your corporate HQ in 3 months for $100,000, instead of hiring an architect and a team of experts to do it right.
If you want free-time, become a hunter-gatherer. Every advance since then has decreased the amount of free-time available to devote your own pursuits. They spent about 10 hrs/week in survival activities, most people are working more tahn 60 hrs, and often (for poorer people) several jobs.
It's *not* about free-time, that's a line they try and sell you. It's about the amount of time they can convince you to give up voluntarily.
-- Ender, Duke of URL.
Keep in mind that rapidly developing technology lowers the barriers to entry. Ask yourself why there are so many high school graduates/college dropouts/non-credentialed individuals doing important things and getting paid important bucks in internet and computer-related businesses today. One answer is that rapid technological change puts a premium on people who can demonstrate the ability to do the job, instead of those who have the right degree/certification/license. I find a parallel to engineering 175 years ago, when many of the people responsible for major developments had all sorts of non-scientific backgrounds.
However, such a situation is unstable: Just as we have a lot of buggy software today, 175 years ago there were a lot of bridges that fell down and boilers that blew up. And as the technology stablilzed (and as more was learned about engineering), it became easier to recognize good (and bad) design and teach design principles, and (because bridges that fall down and boilers that blow up kill people) it was seen to be a Good Thing to develop methods to certify that people who were calling themselves engineers were really competent at engineering.
Now, look at the computer/internet business today. Rapidly proliferating technologies and a shortage of competent people (combined with low cost of entry and no regulatory barriers) mean that anyone with the interest, ambition, and skill set can get into the business and find customers/get a job/set up a website. Many of these people are competent, but many are not. And as computers and the net become more important to more (non-technical) people, there will be more pressure to develop credentialing processes to help the non-technical tell the competent from the frauds. We already have Microsoft and Novell "certifying" people, and there have been calls on this forum for some sort of "programmers guild/union". Such efforts work for "stable" technologies (i.e., Netware), but aren't useful for the new (there aren't that many CompSci graduates with specialties in Java around today because the Java hasn't been around long enough).
But as soon as technological advancement slows, the credentialing process will catch up. And then the barriers start going up. And eventually, it won't matter how smart/knowledgable/competent you are, you'll still have to get the right paper/jump through the right hoops/serve the right apprenticeship to work in your field of interest.
And then the smart geeks who don't have the patience to play the game will just have to go somewhere else.
Thanks for illustrating the ugliest artifact of the "internet revolution" -- growing egomania and coldheartedness, and an obsession with "brightness" as a determiner of a persons worth or ability. This is seen in the moral bankrupting of the intellectual elite as the corrupting forces of money, power, and egotism lead to acceptance of the comfortable belief that IQ represents a persons principal worth to a society. Now, formerly nice kids have become insufferable snobs who invalidate 99% of the population as worthless subhuman automatons who are contemptuously tolerated because they need a wage slave to bring them their pizza. If they are aware at all of the truism that "an unhealthy society is an unhappy society for all", they address this by planning to live in gated communities and by personal purchase of weapons rather than committing any of their resources to the sick society. This is just as ugly and damaging as the attitudes of yuppies in the middle 80's. It's actually uglier, because while the yuppies were unapologetically crass, the new technophile is righteous and egotistical and is morally bankrupt -- doesn't see any moral obligation to give back to society. The result is a growing class divide, exemplified by our school systems -- bright teachers going to private prep schools to teach children of the intellectual elite, while the impoverished kids who need extra help get a crummy education. And the intellectual elite who in the pre-internet era tended to be left leaning socialists, now rationalize that this is somehow a fair and just example of darwinism in action.In reality, it is a brutal example of a society that is failing the majority of it's members due to abdication of responsibility of the intellectual elite.
As the saying goes, it takes all kinds. Creativity, athletic ability, hard work, interpersonal skills, and humanist values are often more important than IQ. Technology will change the landscape significantly but it won't change the humanitarian need for people of all levels to participate and come together to make society better. If the elite ignore this, they will eventually be overthrown in a populist revolution.
More likely he is just upset because of the time he wasted on his degree.
I see many advertisements for IT personnel requiring a degree.
That means they don't care whether you are intelligent, they only care about the piece of paper. Do you want to be working around people like that?
While a post to Slashdot about the supposed elite nature of software developers is a little like politicians debating whether or not to give themselves pay raises, I'd like to suggest two errors in this argument:
1) Progress in developing the Internet is easier than progress in any other field. The Internet is 'contrived' and entirely invented; as such it is not constrained by physical or natural boundaries. Progress in the field comes in the form of inventions. To say that software developers could bring about a renaissance in, say, aircraft design, if they only devoted their attention to this field neglects the fact that there may be hard boundaries in aircraft design that have already been reached, like strength of metals for airframes or efficiencies of engines.
2) Tremendous progress is being made in other fields by the 'second-raters'. Democracy and open markets are expanding, population growth is slowing, fewer conflicts are being ignored by the international community. The humanities and social sciences are receiving their fair share of bright people, only we software developers sometimes do a poor job of recognizing different forms of intelligence, and are ill-informed about progress outside our field. Try the world outside Slashdot: I hear the graphics are great!
"Well the thing that local companies still have over internet delivery is service."
That's the point, the local companies don't have the service. The local computer companies are Windows only, and if I ask for Linux stuff the employees spit at me. Without internet ordering, it's winmodems, winprinters, winnetwork cards, winonly, andifyoudon'tlikeityou'reanidiot.
I had two technology vendors go punky on me. One sold ink for a high speed duplicator and without notice, withdrew from the market. It took 10 minutes to listen to their tale of woe, and 5 minutes to find a replacement vendor over the internet. The other CASS certified mailing lists, the technology ran away from them, and they can't deliver any more. I'll replace them, too.
The internet has changed the way I do business. It's allowed me to up my standards for vendors. A message to local vendors: Up yours.
A Nigerian snail farmer (who made all of $450 last year) keeps hearing about this internet thing on the radio (his neighbour's radio to be precise) and how useful it is and all. He writes to BBC African service, his letter reads something like this "You keep talking about how useful the Internet is . But I want to know about how to improve my snail farm. Can this internet help me?". Reporter goes off, opens her browser, navigates to a few search engines and types "snail farming", clicks enter and voila, lots of hits. She begins printing, well, she has to refill the office printer a couple of times (lots of documents from US Agriculture Dept, FDA etc and even, it turns out, research done by some crop scientists in the University of Ife, Nigeria that might be very relevant to the farmer).
Net result: reporter has a half-hour feature for her weekly comment program, the farmer after the 2 weeks for his care package to arrive by air mail, might have a few leads to improve his farm. Oh and yet another "Internet is a good thing" anecdote for you.
If the decades of research on farming techniques can be harnessed this easily, the Internet can't be ignored.
p:\krunt
Let me say this again:
The starvation problem in the world is NOT caused by lack of knowledge of farming techniques. It IS caused by uneven distribution. This uneven distribution is caused by political reasons.
The article is laughable.
How do we know that the people in agriculture for instance AREN'T just as smart as computer people? Does it just seem that way because the whole geek culture has created a very self-congratulatory tiny world of people going "oh man, noone is smarter than ______! That was a brilliant thing he did"? There are tons of extremely brilliant people out there in many fields doing all sorts of productive things, and I think to discount them all (actually in this case to FORGET about them all) because they don't get talked about in the very tight-knit insular media outlets that most Slashdot readers read is being pretty short-sighted. The politics thing is the absolute WORST comparison you could make too. Noone thinks people in politics are smart! I understand that Robin hangs out with them apparently so they're a good point of reference for him, but they are just a bad bad bad thing to bring into this at all! Try using doctors, or even agriculturists, or anything other than politicians. They're not smart, everyone knows it, everyone accepts it, bad bad example.
I disagree. Society will adapt to the `net, and in doing so it will change in fundamental ways, both politically and on a personal level. I expect there will be both good effects and bad ones.
The printing press enabled the Protestant Reformation, the rise of the nation-state, widespread literacy, and the rise of the middle class. These were massive political and personal shifts in Western civilization. IMHO the `net is a bigger advance than the printing press, and we should prepare for the changes they will cause.
>I believe that in ten years, everything that
>programmers do now will be done by programs.
I recall hearing this prediction about 10 years
ago, just before I went to college. Some said it would be AI (a hot research topic at in those days), others (aptly) predicted rapid application development languages. In either case, "by the time you hit the workforce" (over 6 years ago) the job market for programmers wasn't going to be so hot.
I majored in EE, because I was a bit bored with programming. Somewhere in the Spring of 1990, a large number of people were predicting the end of virtually all analog circuit design. Everything in the world was going to be digital signal processing, and the A/D and D/A conversion process was supposed to be a commodity (even though much active research in sigma-delta conversion was just begining at the time). The "analog is dead" story had a lot of appeal to my peers, who had an easier time with gates than opamps, but I went ahead and focused on analog circuits anyways... yet again a prediction of the future tech job market that turned out to be false.
While I'm at it, somewhere along the line a number of people believed that GaAs semiconductors would "take over" the world of mircoprocessors and virtually all digital circuitry.
The great management outplacement/firings occured in the 80s and 90s because one hotshot with a spreadsheet could collect, collate, and report on data that normally took dozens of middle managers and their secretaries to do.
Local, that is township, village, and small city gov't, is the equivalent of corporate middle management. At least in MI, it no longer even collects property taxes. The state govt hands the local level a list of qualified candidates from which to hire its police, fire, and ambulance staff. It even pre-qualifies who is allowed to run for school board or sheriff. Road maintenance is about to be taken by the state. I can't figure out what local govt does anymore.
The local businesses are being wiped out. OfficeMax moved in with its internet ordering system. Post your order to the web, the truck drops it off the next day. Place an order for network stuff with CDW in the early AM, have it sitting in your porch that evening. No local business can do that.
Three layers of govt - at the federal, state, and local levels - are just no longer needed. The local level is being obsoleted. Local govt is a legislative construct of state legislatures, and it isn't needed anymore.
Just watch, in ten years, most of these little fiefdoms will disappear. All the mosquito control districts, fire protection districts, water and sewage, all of this can be better managed at the state capital with internet technology. Everything will be submitted via web form.
It's only a turf battle, not some moralistic crusade of evil vs good.
Likewise, the ability for the average citizen to buy a computer, connect to the `net, and read publish and discuss in ways that were previously impossible will require changes to society. Old institutions will become irrelevant; new ones will have to be invented. I think our society has only begun to adapt to the new computer and network technology we already have.
Certainly it is people who did and will do all this. Society itself is people; how can a society do anything without the involvement of people? I don't understand your ire.
And then I remember that the Internet is really not a big deal; it's just a toy for the few of us who are so rich that we don't worry about finding food to eat.
Agreed. IMHO all this computer stuff is mostly B.S., with one very important exception: technologies for the handicapped. What all of us have seen on TV, Steven Hawkings (sp.?) communicating and doing work despite it all, is duplicated every day on a very large scale by other people with handicaps. Oops, challenges.
The rest of this Internet stuff is largely SSDD. Unless of course you live in a repression land and you value any communications lifeline to the world outside.
So I guess my point is .. that the Internet has the potential to be a Great Equalizer, in more ways than one ?
I hope the medium is the message, because the content is 95% crap !
If the US can produce food cheap, because the government helps out producers, I'm fine with that. If just they didn't use their enormous power to coerce other countries into not doing the same...
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In 1979, I think it was, the average CEO of a US company made 30 times as much as the average worker. Nowadays, it is about 240 times. And workers' wages have stagnated in this 20 year period; they have not even kept up with inflation. Are we to conclude that CEOs are now 8 times as productive as they were in 1979, while workers are less productive?
The problem of poverty in the third world has little to do with Western greed. The primary problem in these countries is oppressive, corrupt, and bloated governments.
Aren't you talking about oppressive, corrupt, bloated governments diplomatically , economically and militarily supported by first-world governmental and private interests? You know, Colombian death squads' M16 rifles don't grow on plants. You know, those governments are not in power accidentally, they are in power because they receive decisive support from powerful first world interests. That's why you see the Indonesian militias with M16s, while the Timorese peasants are usually unarmed.
The US achieved its current prosperity during a period of real free-market capitalism in the last century.
False. The US (and England, and every industrial first world country) achieved its current prosperity by means of protectionist policies and economic colonialism. This is very well documented in US history; throughout the 19th century, the government would pass tariffs on goods that were produced outside the US cheaper, in order to protect the development of local production. Precisely this is one of the things the IMF denies third world countries which seek its assistance, BTW.
Economic growth is stifled in these nations because people do not have the freedom to take economic risks, and if they do succeed, that income is confiscated for the benefit of the rulers or the "people."
Actually, most of the wealth produced in third world countries is siphoned away by multinational corporations, not by the local governments.
Attempts by our government to help the poor in other countries have resulted in the money going to the government of those countries, and often propping up the corrupt regimes that caused the problem in the first place.
I can not keep a straight face at you calling enthusiastic US government and corporate support of third world death squads "helping the poor". The whole history of US intervention in the thirld world goes against the idea that the US tries to help people in other countries. For recent examples, take Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Nicaragua, where the US supported death squads in the 80s. All of this because the US seeks a "friendly foreign investment environment" (i.e. subsistence wages, no workers rights, no environmental protection laws, no tariffs on US imports, no restrictions on capital flight).
Immigrants tend to be very hard workers, and second or third generation immigrants are often members of the middle or upper class.
Hmmm. I live in Palo Alto, California. When I meet middle and high class people, they are almost invariably white.
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This sounds funny. Every single econometric study says the very same thing?
Anyway, I'm not about to accept unsubstantiated claims from your part here.
This 'theory' is just of of many Marxist economic postulates that in fact have been totally discredited by real quantitative study of what actually happened.
My goodness. You can see it happening around you, yet you deny it. Go check, for any multinational corporation with factories in the third world, what are their expenditures in each third world country, how much they make out of selling the resultant products, and where does that money end up.
And, for gods sake, there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened! This is true for any branch of human knowledge. You make assumptions about which data are relevant to what you wish to study, you gather that data using the methods you consider to be most reliable, and you interpret the data. If your assumptions are bad, your methods for collecting data are bad, and your interpretation is bad, you're going to get a bad result.
The simple fact of the matter is that there has NEVER been a single succesful implementation of Marxist economic theory. Nations that have tried it have ended up regressing economically, and in many cases have had large numbers of their citzens die of starvation.
Marxism is discredited and dead. Long may it rot.
And why do you drag Marxism into this, anyway?
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Here we go again. Should organization like the IMF, with the backing of big corporations and the governments of the industrial nations, pressure third world countries into not helping out their farmers economically (i.e. giving them equipment and training so they don't have to rely merely on wooden sticks and muscle power)?
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And astrologists have been studying the nature of astral body movements for a long time, and have developed quite comprehensive quantitative models. Argument from authority.
Modern mainstream economics is full of unstated assumptions and value judgements that influence the analyses negatively. I'm sad I can't explain what I mean right now, because I'm very busy and have to get right back to the books :-(. So I won't be able to answer your challenge to substantiate my arguments.
You neglect to consider the transfer of wages and capital that would have gone to first world workers that now go to third world workers. Usually this far outweighs the profits of the multinational companies. Not to mention the the educational infrastructure investments that often accompany such investments. This is why governments of third world countries strive to attract foriegn investment. Investments of this nature have done a lot to improve the economies of developing nations.
The unstated assumption here is that these countries would be worse off in the long run if other countries didn't invest in them. Can you substantiate that?
What if the presence of very strong foreign investment makes a greater potential for local development undoable?
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Our government has been screwing around with other nations all the time. I agree that they should not be. And certainly if the US stopped propping up dictators and sticking its nose into every global conflict other nations would be better off. But I find it hard to believe that we are single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world. There are certainly some countries where we propped up corrupt regimes, but there are other nations where we haven't done anything particularly viscious and those nations are still poor.
You pass over one of the things I said, which I will put in bold-- that corrupt, oppressive dictatorships in third world countries are usually supported by first world governmental and private interests. Corporations also give decisive support.
You also pass over the motivation behind international intervention, and limit yourself to lamenting the US government "sticking its nose" into places it shouldn't. This fits completely well with a picture of the US randomly going around, propping up dictatorships for the fun of it. The truth is that where the US gives support, it is almost invariably in the interests of the "national interest" (read: US corporations), to create a "favorable invesment environment" (read: to crush laboral movements, restrictions on foreign investment, and environmental protection laws). These, of course, are what corporations like: countries where they may dump toxic wastes where poor people live, where union leaders get shot, and they can get out as much of what they produce as they can, investing as little as possible in the country.
As for the countries where the US "has not done anything particularly viscious", you are thinking only of extreme measures like death squads (which I might have overemphasized in my post, though). In fact, the measures that result in world-wide poverty are many and subtle; threats of intervention, IMF programs, threat of capital flight, the WTO, etc.
It is true that the US had high tarriffs. But I don't see how this lead to prosperity. Simple economics will tell you that free trade is a benefit to both countries involved. And one of the things that allowed the US to be successful is that within its borders was one of the largest free trade zones in the world.
Suppose the US had had no tariffs. Could its industry have developed like it did if it were cheaper to import English goods?
This is the case for many US industries. I don't remember which right now, but I know where to look it up.
Me: I can not keep a straight face at you calling enthusiastic US government and corporate support of third world death squads "helping the poor".
You:Please reread my sentence. I said "attempts" at helping the poor. I didn't say they actually helped, nor am I endorsing such.
Minor point. I still can't keep my face straight.
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Of course this, combined with further IMF conditions on being open to foreign imported goods, puts local farmers at a huge disadvantage. They have to compete with US food companies which receive government subsidies, one of the factors that contributes to their being able to outsell them. This way, the only profitable crops turn out to be marijuana and coca.
The argument can be extended to encompass the almost the whole of autonomous economic development of a society. For example, take high tech industry. Governments of industrialized countries invest heavily on doing research on cutting-edge science, which later turns up in consumer products. The net is a prime example. So governmental subsidies are an important factor in autonomous economic development; thus it is no surprise that "aid" programs for poor countries, like those of the IMF, try to curtail that, while rich countries get to do it.
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there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened
I provided direct evidence of such studies. Done by people who have a lot better empirical track record than do either astrologers or Marxist economicists.
But in fact there is no such thing as the real quantitative study of what actually happened!!!! Gee, if you are taking this as controversial, you need to do some studies in the philosophy of science.
As for "empirical track records", there is no such thing as independent empirical data, and specially not in economics. Data is not floating around people, just waiting for someone to catch it all; it is the result of hard work by people who have limited time, and must decide what kind of data is really important for some preconceived theory that they have.
So in science you really have to go after every single unstated assumption in your theories as agressively as you can, and see if they are reasonable assumptions, if they can be falsified, what are the objects that the theory attempts to explain, what properties of those objects are important for the theory (and which it overlooks, and whether this is acceptable), etc. And, when we're dealing with a science that deals with the relationships between people, you can't avoid the ethical implications of the theory.
I believe mainstream economics does not do a very good job looked in this light.
You have declined to provide any substantiation of your position. When I provide substantiation you change the question.
For which I apologize. I was trying to get across that I don't swallow your story, but for reasons of my workload, I really can't substantiate my skepticism and my claims in this forum today. Right now I'm too engrossed on nontransformational lexicalist approaches to the syntax of Spanish pronominal object clitics (ooh how exciting) to make anything more than very general remarks on what I percieve to be far-reaching inadequacies of mainstream economics.
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Of course, this just assumes that life in third-world countries is bad supposedly because they haven't had enough help from the first world countries.
First of all, the wealth of the "first-world" nations is based on centuries of economic exploitation of the third world.
Second, you might be amazed at how much talent and dedication has gone from first world institutions into keeping the third world poor. (Think of the International Monetary Fund, if you want a contemporary example.)
And, for all the talent that was "sucked into the Internet". The Internet was developed as a military defensive system; the goal in its design was further strenghten the US industrio-military complex, so that the US can conduct its exploitative economic practices around the world.
I think you need to read more about the relation between the first world and the third world, Roblimo. This idea of "these poor starving people in third world countries, they need our help so they don't starve" is absolutely fscking misleading. It's more like, "these hard-working poor foreigners in third world countries, we need to stop from screwing them over at every chance."
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Inept and corrupt governments which more frequently than not receive diplomatic, economic and military backing from first world countries with economic interests in the country.
As for the "lack of farming": it is well known that International Monetary Fund Structural Adjustment Programs (which are a way for such countries to get economic help) tend to have a terrible effect on local agriculture. Governments accepting an IMF SAP are not allowed to subsidize farming, and cannot put significant tariffs on food imports. The result is that local farmers cannot compete with subsidized agricultural goods from other countries, like the US.
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Computer science is only 60 years old, making it the youngest of the engineering disciplines. Like a young child, its rate of learning and growth is absolutely unbelievable. However, as the basic infrastructure is layed down, the rate of growth slows. That's because the early advancements are simpler (though no less important) than the later, more complicated advancements. Expecting that other, more mature, industries can experience the same kind of growth as computer science is not realistic.
Another thing to consider is the flexibility of the medium. Maybe it's just my bias, but the aspect of computers that attract me (and many of my computer geek friends) most is the lack of limitations with computers. Especially given the increase in computer hardware (caused by the growth of modern electronics, a field who history has gone hand-in-hand with computer science), more and more the limits on software are human imagination. I just can't see mechanical engineering or agriculture experiencing the same kind of boom because doing unique and amazing things is so much harder to do in the real, physical world. However, digital castles can be suspended quite easily in virtual air.
I think the "Information Revolution" (as much as I am sick of that term, it is the most accurate) happened because of the special nature of information, not because a bunch of smart people happened to magically appear on Earth in the latter half of the decade. The smart people have always been around.
(a) We are nowhere near the end of the Internet explosion; a reasonable argument can be made that we are just starting out.
(b) There is always another interesting technology / trend to jump onto [nanotech, VR, space, AI, genetics etc.]
(c) The collaborative facilities / ease of information dissemination of the Internet is likely to lead to an even greater explosion in knowledge / research
I'd agree that we (the "First World") entering a post-industrial age (Toffler's "The Third Wave" still makes decent reading) but I believe we are heading for even greater technological progress.
Nanotech has the potential to make current socio/economic problems dissapear (ref. food replicators, "factory" nano vats for consumer goods etc.) that will probably make current resource/energy limited consumption society obsolete - but it will bring its own problems: what do you do with a planet full of immortals?
--------- Webmaster, http://www.cpureview.com and
Technology is a good that has not reached full potential, plain and simple.
:)
For instance, an automobile in america is hardly "technology", but perhaps the engine & transmission inside of it is.
Personally I don't think the technology surrounding a computer is the computer itself, but the application of the computer's capability, that is, until quantum computing becomes more of a reality.
Just like the different applications of an automobile, or better yet, an internal combusion engine, have been more or less "finalized" in our society as to what they are efficient/not efficient to use in practice, I think what we are doing now with silicon is very similar to the automobile boom of the 50's & 60's.
In about 30 years, when we're old farts, and the new thing has come along and we're struggling to get our retirement benefits from our employers, I think the parallel will be more obvious.
-Erik-
I think there's a sense in which devising systems to allow and facilitate collaborative human thought is the most worthwhile activity possible.
... what shall we do to entertain ourselves? Sure, there's plenty of places to explore, but geography (or space exploration) has value in the same way that metallurgy or computer science has value: it's all room for discovery, and food for the mind. Comms technology doesn't just provide such mind food: it multiplies it six billionfold. More if you take into account the cross-pollination effects it allows.
I mean, I think I would rather see a project to end global poverty than satellite comms for all, but insofar as the priorities of those with power are screwed up (strangely, in favour of those with power), our ability to do something about those priorities rests on our ability to work together and think together, and in that way I think that the work that gets done by free software authors to bring computing and connectivity to the masses does more towards such lofty ends than any ten dollar donation to UNICEF.
And once we have abolished hunger, and war, and homelessness
So, I agree that all these inflated IPOs are ridiculous, but I couldn't be further from the opinion that fiddling with the Net necessarily means ignoring any sort of "real issues" that need tackling: facilitating our ability to tackle them is what's needed most of all.
--
Xenu loves you!
If every person in the world concetrated only on serving the needs of himself, what would "society" have left to do? We wouldn't need welfare, or any kind of social programs of that sort becuase everyone would be responsible for themselves.
That will work as long as nothing really bad ever happens to anyone. I am generally in favor of everyone looking after their own needs, but sometimes, that is REALLY not possable. Especially in these days where medical bills can run over a million dollars (rare, but not unknown), and insurance companies do everything they can to never pay anything to anybody (not at all rare).
I can't think of anybody who wouldn't benefit from knowing that, no matter what, they will have food, clothing, and shelter. For that matter, everyone benefits from everyone ELSE knowing the same thing.
Consider for a moment, that when XYZ corp dumps toxic waste into a lake rather than disposing of it, they were just fulfilling a 'need' for low cost disposal.
I realise that you are not advocating THAT sort of serving one's own needs, but [OPINION...] the one tends to lead to the other for too many people.
Ummm ... people have been saying that for years (just ask this geezer who read Byte for 20 years). It hasn't happened, and I suspect it's not likely to happen.
What did happen? People found new fields to conquer - for example, few people write database programs any more, but there is a real demand for people who know how to massage a database to get useful information from it.
People will always be finding new things for computers to do, and those new things will require people who can translate those new concepts and actions into a format the computer can understand
. And even if certain types of programming (assembler, for example) lose their marketability, there will always be other ways for computer-savvy people to make a good living (network setup and firewall admin, anyone?)
after all, on your Pentium-XXV 6000Mhz your business apps are going to FLY so there's no need for real optimization work to be done
That's the sort of thing Carl Helmers said about the Sage computer (68000 based) 15 years ago - it was so fast that it didn't matter that big chunks of its OS were written in Pascal.
Today's processors (like the dual 433 Celerons in my latest work computer) are over 1000 times as fast (in MIPS) as the lowly 1.77 MHz Z-80 which ran my first TRS-80 - but my work computer takes longer to boot up than the Trash-80 did (fortunately, boot episodes are few and far between when one runs Linux).
And Word (on my other work computer) is certainly slower at screen refreshes than Electric Pencil was. Hmmm ... perhaps Microsoft, too, believes that "there's no need for real optimization work to be done"?
Sure, IT people face long hours and underpaid salaries, but most of this time is spent in front of a computer typing in code and compiling and testing. Beyond this effort and the chance of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that ain't a lot of work. Add a radio or CD player nearby, a fridge full of food, and the like, and you'll have someone that could work nearly indefinitely if the salary was right, and they wouldn't have to move from the desk.
This can and has invoked laziness in the IT industry. Something goes wrong? You don't have to rebuilt it, or take it apart to find the troubled part; you can just modify the code and find the error. Since it's so easy to do so, coders generally can let bugs go until release time, and because it's easier to release a patch than do a recall (and much cheaper too), it's easier to let users find bugs and report them , and .. and... Well, it's basically a viscious cycle between the ease of the computer user and human nature to do as little work as possible.
I'm not belittling IT. There's a lot of mental energy that is supplied to get the computer world working as it is. And I respect a lot of programmers and other sysadmins; I know that my excursions into IT can be mind wracking.
Now, let's go back to Rob's idea. Would IT professionals be doing something else if there were no computers or internet? I would shout a resounding "NO" to this. I think that even though the people would have high quality ideas and intelligence, the fact that there would be more physical work involved would deter many from following those ideas. Additionally, because it's physical, people would be less tendful to let errors exist in the final designs or models, and there would be less buggy output. "If Microsoft Made Cars" I think would not really hold up in such a situation.
Is this beneficial? It's a double-edged sword; I would think people like ESR and Linus and others would not necessariy be a big name if there were no computers, and those that have the mental capacity but the lack of physical proweless to get the job done would be unable to succeed as well as they have. On the other hand, we've gotten an attitude from the IT industry that is spreading to other industries on laziness and lack of checking for bugs and problems, and it has allowed people that don't necessarily have great ideas to succeed with sufficient monetary infusions. IMO, it's an overall beneficially effort: Linux and the Open Source movement of thousands of people collaborating across the world would never happen without the internet, and this is also spreading to other businesses.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The biggest drawback to the internet boom is that we have no innovation. Companies aren't taking chances anymore. They're perfectly content to keep doing things the way they've been doing them for the last 5 years.
Just like all living processes, technology runs on punctuated evolution. Only during times of stress and recession do we engineer new technology. The intervening periods like the present are when tinkerers come in and improve the technology, but we won't see any revolutions until the next recession.
The Alpha, Pentium, and PowerPC architectures we use today were all products of the 1993 recession when EEs were working their asses off to come up with something big. All improvements since then have been incremental tweeks on the same architecture.
Remember the 1980 recession? That was coincidentally the second most recent semiconductor boom. Almost all the technology we used in the 80's was developed during that recession. The Yamaha DX-7 was such a monument of hard working EEs that it remained king for 10 years, surpassing all expectations for an electronic product. The Commodore 64 and all those 8 bit computers came from the 1980 recession.
Until businesses start feeling pressure to experiment again, it's going to be a bad time for engineers and a good one for tinkerers.
We might possibly find out just who is and is not affected by software on the morning of Jan. 1, 2000.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This has been the argument against industrialization and automation since man first invented the coal-fired steam engine.
"If they design a robot that can do my job, I'll be out of a job"
. . . but they'll always need guys who can install/repair/design new robots.
So even if programs are writing programs, we'll always need tech support. Or do you think that Joe Sixpack will stop trying to find new and creative uses for his CD-ROM tray?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
...you're forgetting one important ingredient... and it is very important...
I am a tinker and a hacker on the 'net because it's very inexpensive and I can do it with cheap equipment...
To work on the space program or really do groovy things with mechanical things and the like, you need groovy equipment... expensive equipment... Not just a Linux box (or in my day, a DOS box) and oodles of time.
Same with the old days of electronics... I could do amazing things with a box full of parts and a breadboard or seven... Now, unless you're doing microcontrollers (which I really don't consider electronics, that's programming with the ability to make smoke), you can't do as amazing things... Someone always says "I can do that with my Mindstorm." or "I can do that with a $2 PIC and 15 minutes time." or how about "I can do that with one CPLD and 1/10 the space."
Ah vell. My kids will still tinker, but it'll likely be software-related until I can get them to realize that old stuff still is useful for knowledge.
Roblimo is exactly right.
I work at an aerospace company that in the past has developed some of the most exciting new technologies in rocketry, lasers, etc. Neat cutting edge kinds of things any geek would find fascinating. And the people that work there are uniformly extremely well educated and knowledgeable.
Yet over the past two years (in particular the early part of 1999) the brain drain set in. It seems that nearly everyone under 30 quit the company and changed careers, usually going to some random dotcom or another, in the hopes of using their brainpower to make quick cash through stock options and 80 hour weeks.
At the same time, the high value of the economy, lead to massive waves of retirements. People who had participated in Apollo, with a weath of know-how disappeared in incredible numbers.
Today the people who remain are those who cannot easily pick up and move (due to children, mortgages, etc.) or who fall into the "old dog" category - unwilling or unable to learn the skills like Perl, C++, UML needed to succeed in the internet market. Needless to say, these are not the aggressive, single-focus dedicated people that would be needed to make the space industry leap to new challenges.
And that is the other problem: No challenges. The attention that used to be fostered on the space industry by the government for Mars missions vs. Lunar bases vs. Spacestation vs. etc. now appears to be reserved for domain name control legislation, promoting internet morality, and helping or fighting companies exploiting the new internet industry.
Money that could be spent on developing tech for solar power satellites, or on global telecommunications systems, or on interstellar propulsion, is instead being focused into building Y2K bureacracies, setting up elaborate citizen tracking systems for the FBI (to make it easier to save us from those evil people), or exposing fellow politician's ineptitudes.
Of course, to do anything _really_ cool in space - going back to the Moon or Mars, or sending probes to other solar systems, for instance - would require a lot more money than we can handle right now. So I try to look at the current Internet boom as a massive project in increasing our communication and work efficiency, and in raising the standard of living high enough that our children can choose careers based on their interests, and not on the market's needs. And *then* maybe they can dust off the old space exploration books and have another go at it.
Anyway, sorry for the long rant. I totally agree with Roblimo's concerns, he's brought up an issue that's troubled me quite a bit.
As someone whose life long dream was to be a Mechanical Eng. I feel I can comment on the above article with some authority. I was in my 3rd year at UIC in Chicago when it hit me. I am not going to change the world when I get out of school. I am going to do stress analysis on little metal parts for the first few years till I past the Exam, work on my masters, and generally be a flunky. I'll impliment standard procedures, get products out on time, and general be an efficient engineer. I would be revolutionizing any 100 year old industries overnight. Not that it can't happen, but would "I" be able to do it. I'm no company man in it for the pension. I also read an article in Pop Sci above genetic algos being using to design more eficient propelers for planes. The engineers were estatic at this 1% increase in effiencincy then had gained. Pop Sci went on to explain "that 1% is an amzing windfall in a mature field like areodynamics." I quit that semester.
I didn't make the jump to computers for a few years after I quit school. But when I started a job in tech support 3 years ago (for which I was extremely underqualified) it was love at first sight. Here was a field where there are no "standard way" to do anything. If you think you can do it better, no one is going to get into your way. Either it works or it doesn't. If they don't like it you take your idea somewhere else and start your own company. Hell my boss is one year older then I am and sitting on ARIN's board. He is doing soemthing tangible and the effects will be felt for years to come.
I only hope that my work can be as useful.
Kashani
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
This is why I stay out of e-commerce, at least for now. I'll buy stuff, but I tend to avoid the lure of such ventures. They're really hot now, but when the boom ends I'll be stuck with something which isn't that much more profitable than a regular store, and not quite as fun either.
But hey, I'm a geek. Specifically, I'm a coder. And as long as there are computers, people will need someone to make programs to run on them. When the Net boom ends, I'll code other things. It's not like the Net will disappear after the boom anyway; it just won't be a wowie-zowie-look-how-neato-keen-this-is thing like it is. It'll become like television is now (scary thought, I know); something that's such an integral part of our lives that we take it for granted. If I asked who on Slashdot could go without any television for a year or has already done so, I'd imagine I could count the responses on one hand. The same will be true of the Net; it'll still be there, it just won't be "special" like it is now.
And any TV exec will tell you there's lots of money to be made in that sort of thing.
What really scares me is the huge amount of money, attention and brains that go onto military research.
And don't tell me that "if it weren't for the X millions invested in military research, we wouldn't have mobile phones, or the Internet, or whatever as a spin-off". Just imagine what kind of phones, Internet or whatever we would have if the money had gone straight into civil research (or be kept in our pockets).
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's good to think about the impact your industry has on society as a whole, but I think the big concern here seems to be rather ego-centric. I mean, c'mon, all the 'best' minds attacted to the computer industry? Yeah, right.
You know, those same minds that came up with the iMac, Windows, xf86config, & hardware designs that you need a set of tools to work on. Those people. Yep, they're sure the smartest people around!
Some of the smartest people I've ever met don't care about computers except for how they make other things easier for them - like any other tool.
The Internet is a communications & (now) transaction medium, nothing more. It's really a big pile of crap when you look at it a certain way - impressive only because of the sheer scope of how MUCH crap is there, and how varied & easy it is to ACCESS that crap. How many more pet web sites does the world need? (answer: as many pets as there are, and then we start on the fictional ones!)
The Internet, and computers in general, are tools. Rather like the telephone, it's causing a great deal of attention right now because it's just recently become mainstream. But, like the telephone, it's hardly the harbinger of doom, and is actually a great help to just about everyone in every field.
Those doctors & engineers Roblimo mentions can all do better at collaborating now because of the Internet. Who do you think the Internet was originally developed for, people with pets? I think not. (therefor I am not?)
The Internet has a long ways to go to get where it needs to be. It needs, as so many have said before me, to be more like a kitchen appliance. Unfortunately, before we can get to that point, computers themselves need to be that easy and reliable to use. Microsoft obviously won't get us there, though they sure seem to want to actually BE in our real kitchen appliances! Linux and other Open Source operating systems have the reliability down, but not the interface (don't get me wrong - MS & Apple don't have the right interfaces, either). But Linux has the mindshare and momentum now to take on all comers. Hopefully Linux will drag the other OSS operating systems into the daylight (kicking and screaming, no doubt, about being behind Linux in the spotlight), and we'll have freedom of choice, too.
Either way, it's good to have a selection of reliable tools.
So, to sum up, the hammer didn't end society - it made building easier. But then again, the hammer is a lot easier to use than the Internet.
Except for the ubiquitous holodeck malfunction, of course...
Or those times the computer took over the ship and zipped off to parts unknown...
Or when it turned homicidal and tried to fry the crew...
"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)
Is Roblimo trying to convince us that we should stop riding the Internet boom because it's going to run out eventually, and we're lagging behind in other areas? This seems silly. All advancement is eventually replaced with a new one. Plus, even though we may not be excelling at making cars, we do excel at progressing the development of computers and the Internet. We lead there. We now have technology in our computers that were unheard of three years ago, and are working on ones we didn't even consider a month ago. Moreover, the development of computers and the Internet is particularly nice, because it assist development in other areas, since computers have practically no end to their uses. A car might help a journalist get to a story faster, but it won't help an author create a cleaner, flexible copy of his work. A computer can help them both.
As for politicians... that's always a problem. :)
-- Stargazer
> Just take a look at Star Trek, or any other SF series: the computers just work. No ifs, buts or device drivers. They work. That's what most people will want anyways.
I would just like to take the time to point out that Star Trek is ***FICTION***. It is the mere speculation of a bunch of scientifically and technically ignorant Hollywood scriptwriters. I bet most of them wouldn't know a device driver if they saw one. To suggest that the writers have any more insight into how technology will work in several hundred years than I do, or any other person in the world does, is utterly ridiculous.
It is just as likely, if you ask me, that these more complex systems will have more complex problems, and those problems are likely to occur at least as often as they do already.
Eric Geyer
corduroy@sfo.com
Borrowing a vision from Asimov, he pictured a world wide network of computers with access to vast libraries of information. As tools.
I would be thrilled to see more knowledge-centric projects set up on the internet, for example:
Project Gutenburg, it's a great thing, and a start in the right direction.
I think it's in these ventures that the internet will actually become welcomed and accepted as commonplace. Where my grandma or aunt Sue would have an opportunity to learn about places and things they otherwise wouldn't have, and without having to worry about managing the mechanics. In a perfect world I suppose...
Earn cash in your spare time! Blackmail your friends!
This is the basis for a free market. The products that get produced are the products that people are willing to buy.
Certainly the market isn't 100% efficient, so some capital gets wasted producing things that are not wanted, but that's only a tiny percentage of the total production.
It was neither necessary nor even a particularly good idea to "decide where we were going". Planned economies do not work, because the feedback that happens in a market economy is replaced by arbitrary control by bureaucrats. This leads to a much higher percentage of production wasted on things no one wants.
And surely you aren't going to argue that people should be forced to buy what the government (or some other collection of smart people) think they should buy, rather than making their own decisions?
I'd strongly recommend that you read Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and The Road to Serfdom by Milton Friedman. These are both available for under $10, and are two of the most approachable books on practical principles of economics.
gargle continued:
Again, I don't think that's at all what he said. He's complaining about producers making worthless crap: When you say "should reassess what they want", what makes you think that they assessed their wants or needs incorrectly the first time? What additional information will they have that causes their reassessment to be different? It sounds like you're claiming that people are making the wrong purchase decisions, but you're not explaining why or how to correct it.As I stated in my previous posting, in a free market it is not generally the case that a lot of stuff gets produced that isn't what consumers want. Sure, it happens a little bit, but companies that try to do that on a large scale go out of business.
Ignoring whether SatanLilHlpr meant what you or I think he meant, how can we address this supposed "culture of excess"? Economics may not have any moral value, but by what mechanism should consumers be induced to change their purchasing habits? What should people buy (or not buy) instead of what they're buying now? Who should make the decision, and what gives them the authority to do so?
I maintain that the fact that economics is "morally vacuous" is a good thing, and that the only person qualified to impose any moral values onto someone's purchasing decisions is himself (or herself). The very idea that a person shouldn't be able to exchange the fruits of his or her labor for anything else that he or she can negotiate with another willing party seems repugnant.
If people are buying "excessive" things that you don't approve of, there must be some reason for it. Obviously their values must be different from yours, but neither you nor SatanLilHlpr have actually suggested any "better" values that the people should have. As a phrase, "culture of excess" is emotionally loaded but devoid of any meaningful content.
Dude.. don't kid yourself. The 'talented' people who drive the net are just as stupid and worthless as the dorks who run the auto industry (that is to say, that people are people). Your friend is an exception to this well understood rule. The big difference about the net is that it's an exceptionally efficient tool- it lets us collaborate in ways that were never before possible, the net result being rapid growth in net-related projects, but no improvement to your public health-care system or roads. Believe me, if open-source development applied to government or space exploration, we would have been to europa and back several times over, and maybe, just maybe Linus would be president. But, people being people, we'd probably end up electing Bill. (gasp!)
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
Sorry, don't have the URL handy, you might find this on scientific american's site ... anyway, it's been proven that IQ has been and is rising continuously since the beginning of the century. This has been attributed to the higher exposure to brain-stimulating activities; think about it, being exposed to computers makes your brain bigger!
... I have to disagree with it in at least 2 ways. Firstly, not all tinkerers and smart people are necessarily the same, or driven by the same things! People are inspired by the strangest things, and perhaps 'Ron' was inspired by the power of computers and the rewarding nature of programming (symbol manipulation, algorithm development). If these facets hadn't been available, perhaps he'd be one of those 'underachievers', sullen and depressed because of ability with no outlet for release. To paraphrase a famous quote: "Stupid people are stupid in the same way, while Smart people are smart in different ways"..
:( )
Also, to think that people are going 'to waste' because the internet's a fad is kinda putting the cart before the horse here. Would you have said that James Watt was wasting his time because he was tinkering with a well-known mechanism? What about Alexander Graham Bell? Who would possibly put up with the bother and expense of running all that metal wire when you could perfectly well just write a letter or use a telegraph?
I think that history has taught us that any major advance in communication capability has changed western culture in massive and incalcuable ways. The printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet. If there's any proven historical trend, it's that anything which improves human ability to communicate or travel brings wealth and prominence to people involved in the field. Not necessarily the inventors, but to someone.
The internet joins many different streams of human progress: communications, (virtual) travel, and symbolic manipulation, among others. The telephone's touch-tone system has spun off a huge and entirely unpredictable range of services and interaction available by the side effects of having tone-recognition capability and a 12 button interface. Hell, think of all the features a simple switchhook 'flash' can get you these days! Thirteen buttons are all you need to buy clothes, order food, make travel plans, check movie times.
The internet and the power that simple, standard data communications offer can make life smarter and less tedious than ever before, though along with that (as history shows) it probably won't help decide the difficult questions, and it probably won't make life any easier (since all the tedious bits are done for you, all that's left is the really hard stuff.
We're only 30 years into the Internet revolution, and really only 5 years into the popularization of the Internet. It's a little bit early to bemoan our waste of human capital just yet.
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
My feeling is eventually the Sysadmin field will end up being similar to other, more traditional skilled fields like carpentry, plumbing, auto mechanics, etc. The job of sysadmin requires both a skillset and a mindset of a highly technical nature, which is rare in both boom and bust times. Sysadmins trade on their knowledge of and facility with their systems, much as a plumber trades on on his knowledge and facility with pipes, water flow, local codes and ordinances, etc. Sysadmins (when the bust comes) will probably have to suffer an attitude adjustment: a lot of primadonna behavior (mine included ;) will have to go, but in the end, real sysadmins with skill, knowledge, and a 'calling' for the field will continue to do well. The 'casual' sysadmins who are in it for the money will have to look elsewhere, thus reducing the overall admin pool and equalizing the salaries higher among those that enjoy the job.
Actually, depending on the size of the company, I see sysadmin morphing into a 'superintendent' role for small companies and a combination 'plumber/janitor' role for larger companies. The job actually reflects elements of those jobs now, but with the demand there's an added element of 'fuck you, I can go across the street and get 30% more salary in 24 minutes' which I find ultimately regrettable in terms of personal happiness (in the short run it's fine, but in the long run you have to be pretty social and good at maintaining contacts made in brief amounts of time to make something ultimately worthwhile of the job-hopping act)
And the difference between a burnt-out admin and a working admin is the ability to manage expectations well, as well as the ability to say NO and stand firm. If you bitch and moan about people heaping stuff on you, which isn't really your job but since you can do it in 5 minutes and they would take a half hour you do it, so you do it, they will CONTINUE TO HEAP THINGS ONTO YOU because (and this is the really sad part) YOU'VE TRAINED THEM TO! This is a sure road to quick burnout. Don't sacrifice your personality or psyche to the job: it's JUST A JOB.
Your Working Boy,
>I am interested in your evidence and the logic you
>used to reach that conclusion. That is the point
>of a discussion.
..and yet you forget to even mention what was missing in his argument. I saw two well written examples, myself. As one example, he gave reference to how certain 3rd world governments use the 'net to cut beauracracy.
His post may not have been perfect, but yours was most certainly worthless. You know what they say about those in glass houses...
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
>>Immigrants tend to be very hard workers, and
>>second or third generation immigrants are often
>>members of the middle or upper class.
>Hmmm. I live in Palo Alto, California. When I meet
>middle and high class people, they are almost
>invariably white.
What are you talking about?
If you are white, odds are your grandparents, great grandparents, etc. were not native to this country. You may have to go back a few decades, but the only people who really originated in this land are most certainly not traditional 'white' (and even then, Native Americans most likely came from somewhere else too). Why must one be not white to be an immigrant?
Anyhow, this classical liberalism track is kind of annoying. I believe everyone is responsible for their own destiny - America was at one time almost a blip on the world radar. It's unfortunate that not all countries are doing so well, but who do you blame? I don't see what the problem is with us just having done the same thing much much better. Given how the average American lives versus those in 3rd world countries, I'd say we were doing something right.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Quit complaining. Our industries wouldn't be there unless your country - which you do not divulge - asked for it. Most likely the idea of having jobs created automagically was a big draw. Unless this was a case of the US govt. taking over your country by force (which I don't support), you have only your own government to blame. All the while, the people seem more than happy to use US commerce for what it's worth.
If you don't like that, hold an election or overthrow the reigning government. It's been done before.
>btw: wall street is about to explode, bigger than
>1929 (only marxist economic theorys applied if you
>ask).
Heh.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
People are good at different things, and that tends to guide what they do in life. There are those that end up in the sci/tech industry: we tend to call them intelligent, but we do so, I think, to the exclusion of other "intelligences" that people can exhibit.
Not a perfect analogy, but I think it fits. The Internet is more than just a playground for rich people, just as books - especially CHEAP books made possible by the printing press - were not the sole property of the rich.
You wrote: believe the Internet, and computers in general, are both worthwhile and necessary. It's when we think of them as ends in themselves that we go wrong. The Internet doesn't create ideas; it's merely a tool that helps distribute them and makes collaborative thinking easier. Computers do no original thinking; they merely help human thinkers work more efficiently.
This is the key. Using the analogy of books again, Gutenberg didn't print the Bible just because it was a "neat thing to do." He did it because it gave information, and by extension, power to the masses. No longer could the religious elete hold sway over the common people, claiming that they were the sole holders of The Truth. Now every man or woman (or at least those who could read) could go and read the Bible for themselves.
The Internet opens up a vast network of information. In itself, it's not worth any more than a piece of paper with ink spots on it. What makes it important is the people and information and opportunities it brings together.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Sounds like my computer network at home. How many times have you spent 10 hours fiddling with some upgrade or enhancement on your computer at home, only to realize that the only reason you're fiddling with it is... well... because you like to fiddle with computers? I just put a 300MHz processor in my Linux box. Do I really need that 500MHz processor/MB upgrade I've been drooling over? Will my son's life really be better when he has THREE systems on line at home to play QuakeII Deathmatch???
Now, there's a lot to be said for education and keeping up with the industry and hacking and contributing to the community, but when does it shift from hobby to obsession? When does it get in the way of spending time with our families?
Funny... My wife is a teacher and principal in a small elementary school. I work on Information Technology - the ability to stuff huge amounts of data into small places, and then be able to find it later. My wife teaches kids the basic tools of life - reading, writing, critical thinking, writing. I push bits. Yet, my salary is close to 4 times what hers is. Where's the justice in that???
I just volunteered a week this Summer at a not-for-profit organization working on getting LDAP and Netscape up and running on their new Linux network so they can use more of the power of email to communicate. Is that an appropriate use of technology?
(Of course, I'm still having all kinds of fun, so I can't be TOO far off base... ;-)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
It's just that the act of revolution rarely changes anything.
Revolution: something that spins, ie it changes for a time but ends up the same again later.
So there's a revolution, so what?
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
-- The Who, "Won't get fooled again"
... and today's pet project has
I have to say you're severely marginalizing the effects of what Katz refers to as "the Hellmouth". That article was a wake up call of every definition to the geek community. It turned the heads of alot of people.. and during that day I watched in complete awe as thousands of geeks came forward to solemnly confirm that this was far more widespread than the columbine massacre. It was the first time I was able to personally witness and take part in the rapid-action decentralized communication of the 'net. That was an eye-opening experience, and it rewrote atleast a dozen rules of journalism in a matter of hours.
So you'll excuse me if I'm alittle upset at your proclimation that we need to lighten up. If we don't take things like this seriously, we're opening pandora's box..
--
All the internet has done so far is accelerate communication and amplify the current state of affairs in the societies it has come in contact with. Witness commerce moving onto the internet - the advertisements, "get a free pc" offers, and banner ads are all rooted in their real-world equivalents - TV ads, giveaway offers, and billboards. It's just that online those ideas are amplified and reinforced at an accelerated rate.
Same with communication. Before communication occurred totally within the context of a one-to-many relationship. Now you have a many-to-many relationship, although the dynamics of communication and it's content have not changed. Rather than telephoning people we e-mail them. Rather than watching the news we read www.cnn.com or slashdot. Same concepts, except now they're more specialized and refined - they've been amplified.
The internet will adapt to serve society, NOT the other way around. If the opposite had occurred, we would be having wars, anarchy and mass hysteria. As it is we only have some hysteria and alot of paranoia over the changes that are washing up on the fringe shores of society - the geeks and outcasts.
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I agree with Mocaone on this (see next post) - the internet is just the medium. It's a collection of fiber optic wires, servers, routers, switches, hubs, and computers. It doesn't have a life independent of those that use it. To say that it's "revolutionizing" things is akin to saying an inanimate object has human-like characteristics.
When I look at webpages, desktops, multimedia presentations and word documents... I don't see technology - I see people. What do you see?
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I agree. I'm reminded of an interesting idea that Donald Knuth put forth in one of his Gods and Computer Science lectures that I attended. It's his belief that computer scientists existed long before computers did, and I agree. I think that people who have a lot of talent with computers think in a certain special way, and that sort of thinking doesn't apply nearly as well to other fields. Perhaps computer science grew so quickly and continues to grow because all these "computer scientists" who were stuck doing something that didn't fit their talents correctly suddenly found the perfect tool to showcase their talents, the computer. I know I'd make a pretty crappy politician or mechanic, that's for sure :). Just my two cents...
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I used to be a sign-maker, and I worked in a furniture shop for a while (can ya tell by the examples in my other post?). I was also a ditch digger for two miserable hellish days (digging holes for sprinkler systems). And yeah, most of the people I worked with neither knew nor cared whatsoever what all this computer stuff was about. Interestingly, the owner of the furniture company was an ex-programmer, though.
In any case, computers will, and are already, having an effect on people's lives. They might never notice it though, and it's that sort of ubiquity that the article is really talking about, I think. There were people who said the the newfangled "horseless carriage" was a tinker toy for hobbyists, and would never have any effect on *their* lives, but of course it did. Same thing for electricity. And there's always The Graduate: "One words, boy: Plastics!"
The point of all this being, of course, that pretty soon, my (and many other's here) "glorious" profession is going to be seen as no more than plumbing. Fixing the internet pipes when they get clogged up. And whenever someone casts a profession in that light, someone else is bound to say that "we could just use machines to do that." And then this thread gets going.
So why are you, a human, still digging ditches? Can it be that in all our decades of industrial progress, somehow the work of digging ditches has been overlooked as a job that could be done by machines? Nope, there are lots of ditching machines. But (and I've been there) there are some ditches that are tricky to dig, and require the flexibility and learning skills of human ditch-diggers to do it. Sure, some clever engineer could make a machine to dig that bit right next to the house, where the outdoor pipes are. But that machine wouldn't be able to do the intersection in the middle of the lawn where two pipes cross. Basically, it'd be way way more expensive to make a machine to do your job than it would be to pay you to do it.
So, you're pretty much right. No machine is going to replace [you] until it learns how to get drunk and be miserable! For most jobs that are considered skilled crafts (and even many that aren't considered such, but actually are), people are still by far the most cost-effective machines to perform them. Until we can build a machine with the physical and mental flexibility to get drunk and be miserable (i.e. duplicate human behaviour, basically), all these jobs will keep on bein done by all the "plain old ordinary stupid people" that programmers think they're so much better than.
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Note: This is not a "machines cannot do what Humanity can do!" argument. I've no doubt that machines could be built that can (for example) duplicate the craftsmanship of an experienced woodcarver. However, doing so would be prohibitively expensive. It's simply more cost-effective to hire an experienced woodcarver than to try to duplicate that skill in a machine. The same is true for many other fields, where an approximation can be made with cheap and fast machinery, but for the Real Thing, it's just way less hassle to hire a skilled human to do the work.
The same thing, IMHO, is true for programming. Yes, you can automate the process, and eventually, I won't be at all surprised to see some sort of evolutionary "device-driver-writing" AI (for example). It'll crank out simple, common code by reusing chunks of "boilerplate" and evolving the whole program till it works. BUT. I don't believe it will ever be cost-effective to build an AI that can so closely approximate the workings of a skilled coder that it's output would be indistinguishable from that of a Real Programmer.
Just to emphasize-- this is not an argument that it cannot be done. I'm not advocating some sort of "human's have souls that make them unique in the universe" idea. I'm simply saying that the decision to build machines that approximate or duplicate human activity is an economically motivated decision, and for many things, duplicating human labor mechanically is simply not cost-effective past a certain point.
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Fred Brooks, author of "The Mythical Man-Month" had quite a lot to say about "magic bullets" like AI in the mid-eighties - basically, they might help a little, but it's not going to improve programmers productivity by orders of magnitude. On this, he's still correct today. Programming is still (almost) as hard today as it was then.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Asimov's crumbing "Galactic Empire" was written in the 1950's and set thousands of years in the future. It's pretty easy to see the stagnation in these fields now. Earth's space programs peaked with Apollo, and the nuclear industry has been retreating for decades (and most people are happy about it).
The internet boom started was sparked by a single catalyst - a program written by Marc Andreeson and company that captured our imaginations. Somebody really needs to write the "Mosaic" of spaceflight.
I disagree with your assumption that the rest of industry is populated by the second-raters(I'll give you the fact that government is). The perception you have is based on the fact that the automotive, agriculture, whatever industry don't provide innovation at the same pace or magnitude of the computing industry. Now, with regards to the Internet, it's infinitely easier to build five revisions of a website than to build one good automotive engine design, or advanced aircraft frame, etc. BUT, the inherent difficulties of innovation in those industries are substantially increased by something that the Internet, as yet, does not have to contend with....regulation. ;)
In the current climate of "safety" and "consumer protection," can you honestly believe that a group of hackers could come together and in a year's time create a product weighing two tons, carrying flammable fuel, capable of travelling in excess of 140 miles per hour, and will be operated within feet of defenseless pedestrians on city sidewalks...or worse, next to playgrounds where CHILDREN play?
Smart and creative people want the freedom to innovate and succeed on the basis of their ideas and results. Unfortunately, our current climate of NerfWorld(tm)-style legislation inhibits those who innovate, and reward those who cow-tow to interest groups, government bureaucrats, and the basest of emotional public appeal.
In every new industry, unfettered by regulation or meddling, the best and brightest appear and innovate at a phenomenal speed. Remember that the personal computer revolution is now some 24 years old...it took us less time to go from propeller-driven aircraft to moon landings. The automobile went from amusing distraction to ubiquitous tool of society in a similar amount of time. Now look at the pace of innovation in the aircraft, automobile, or space industries after they were regulated "for the benefit of society." The only ones who have benefitted from this stifling are uncompetitive industries, and the second-raters that make their living erecting barriers to the innovators.
Don't bemoan the Internet's attraction of innovators, celebrate the fact that at this point in time, we still have a venue to express our innovation. Don't worry, the regulators and meddlers are already drawing down on the Internet industry, so we'll just have to invent another unique market to succeed in.
Your proctologist called...they found your head. Remove "no-spam" from email address to contact me
The best and the brightest are going into business, because Western "Civilization" values a person based on the size of their paycheck.
The size of your paycheck is a reflection of your productivity as a worker, which is, after all, the purpose of going to work: to produce new values. Capitalism is geared toward maximization of profits, which means the maximization of production.
You may scoff at this as "materialistic," but materialism is exactly what those in the third world need. They need food, shelter, clean water, etc. These things do not appear by magic. They must be produced. And that production is best accomplished by setting up society to reward producers.
The problem of poverty in the third world has little to do with Western greed. The primary problem in these countries is oppressive, corrupt, and bloated governments. The US achieved its current prosperity during a period of real free-market capitalism in the last century. Most third world countries have corrupt dictatorships, socialist economies, or massive welfare states. Economic growth is stifled in these nations because people do not have the freedom to take economic risks, and if they do succeed, that income is confiscated for the benefit of the rulers or the "people."
Most people are poor through no fault of their own. They are poor because of the destructive policies of thier governments. Without secure property rights and the freedom from taxes and regulations, they are condemned to stagnation and poverty. So I for one do not believe that the poor are poor "because they deserve it." But neither do I think we should feel guilty about their poverty. Attempts by our government to help the poor in other countries have resulted in the money going to the government of those countries, and often propping up the corrupt regimes that caused the problem in the first place.
The US serves as a model for what the people of other countries can achieve if given a chance. We have blazed a path that will be easier for others to follow. Concerns about "Linux versus Windows" may seem trivial in the grand scheme of things, but the wealth we now enjoy is the result of decades of Americans dealing with seemingly small problems, and gradually acquiring new knowledge and producing new wealth.
The other thing we can do to help the poor is to let them come here. Immigrants tend to be very hard workers, and second or third generation immigrants are often members of the middle or upper class. We can't change the economic conditions in other nations, but we can certainly allow as many people as possible to benefit from the economic opportunities available here. If we are seriously worried about the plight of the poor, our first step should be to open our borders to allow those who wish to work to take jobs here in the US.
In 1979, I think it was, the average CEO of a US company made 30 times as much as the average worker. Nowadays, it is about 240 times. And workers' wages have stagnated in this 20 year period; they have not even kept up with inflation. Are we to conclude that CEOs are now 8 times as productive as they were in 1979, while workers are less productive?
The short answer is in some cases absolutely. As companies get bigger and markets become more competitive, good leadership becomes increasingly important. If the janitor screws up, the company has dirty floors. If the CEO screws up, the company could very well go out of business. Thus shareholders are willing to pay a lot of money to attract the very best people available.
A good example would be Steve Jobs. Since taking over at Apple, their stock price has more than quadrupled, creating hundreds of millions in new wealth. Now obviously Steve isn't responsible for all of that, but if I were an Apple shareholder you can bet I'd be in favor of giving Steve a healthy raise if he were offered a position elsewhere. Like him or not, he has been good for Apple's share price. Apple's always had smart engineers, but without good leadership and marketing, they couldn't make money.
I also question the idea that the poor are not keeping pace with inflation. Check out this page for example. Also, the laws of statistics dictate that there will always be a lowest 20% of the workforce, but what is often ignored is who makes up that workforce. Many of those people are college students, immigrants, and recent high school graduates, who start out in low-paying jobs and move up the economic ladder. Unlike some countries, the US doesn't have a class system. People can and do change economic classes.
Aren't you talking about oppressive, corrupt, bloated governments diplomatically , economically and militarily supported by first-world governmental and private interests?
Absolutely. Our government has been screwing around with other nations all the time. I agree that they should not be. And certainly if the US stopped propping up dictators and sticking its nose into every global conflict other nations would be better off. But I find it hard to believe that we are single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world. There are certainly some countries where we propped up corrupt regimes, but there are other nations where we haven't done anything particularly viscious and those nations are still poor.
The US (and England, and every industrial first world country) achieved its current prosperity by means of protectionist policies and economic colonialism. This is very well documented in US history; throughout the 19th century, the government would pass tariffs on goods that were produced outside the US cheaper, in order to protect the development of local production. Precisely this is one of the things the IMF denies third world countries which seek its assistance, BTW.
Nonsense. It is true that the US had high tarriffs. But I don't see how this lead to prosperity. Simple economics will tell you that free trade is a benefit to both countries involved. And one of the things that allowed the US to be successful is that within its borders was one of the largest free trade zones in the world.
I don't know what "economic colonialism" is. Certainly Britain engaged in military colonialism, and the US did a little bit. But in the US the industrial revolution was well underway before we even started meddling in other nations. Aside from minor meddling in Cuba and Central America, the US was essentially isolationist until WWI, and even after WWI it was not particularly imperialistic until WWII.
Actually, most of the wealth produced in third world countries is siphoned away by multinational corporations, not by the local governments.
How do they do that?
I can not keep a straight face at you calling enthusiastic US government and corporate support of third world death squads "helping the poor".
Please reread my sentence. I said "attempts" at helping the poor. I didn't say they actually helped, nor am I endorsing such.
For recent examples, take Guatemala, or El Salvador, or Nicaragua, where the US supported death squads in the 80s.
My impression was that the excuse for this sort of thing was "fighting communism," but it doesn't really matter. I agree with you that the US support of these regimes is attrocious. But this was not the point of the original article. The article was suggesting that the internet was siphoning off talent from other purposes, and that capitalism and "greed" were major contributers to the plight of the third world. My point is that corrupt and bloated government (possibly supported by our government or our corporations) are responsible.
I think we're pretty lucky to live in the age we do: few diseases, pollution is down, crime is down, communism's dead, life expectancy is the highest it's ever been, and the Flight Sim 2000 is out next month.
Some people make a living out of doom-and-gloom. I just ignore them; to each his own. And hey, everybody needs a hobby, right!
I went to a yoga retreat, and realized that if I'd visited India 2000 or 3000 years ago, the hot technology of the day would have been yoga and meditation. It would have consumed as much of the currency and intellectual resources as the internet consumes today.
There must have been a time, around the heyday of the Library of Alexandria, when much mental effort went into the advancement of library science. Perhaps people were developing precursors of the Dewey decimal system. Certainly there must have been many translators living and working in Alexandria. Some days, some of the librarians must have asked themselves if all this work on books was really a good idea. An infrastructure for books doesn't directly contribute to any field, but indirectly contributes to all.
I can remember a day when businesses didn't have any computers. Records were kept on papers in file drawers. Computations were done on desktop adding machines with levers on the side. Searching for information meant checking a card catalog, and then manually examining all the relevant-looking pieces of paper in the file drawers. The entire economy, and every level of government, worked this way.
The economy will probably competently reallocate resources when some other area starts to offer greater promise. Given how tech and net stocks have flattened over the last year, we might already be in the midst of that reallocation.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
IMO the Internet is among the most important things ever to be invented and it's continued development is vital to survival as a society. We have reached a critical mass on development of technology and now need to develop as a society to reduce war and discrimination and similar evils that are at their strongest when people are ill informed and don't communicate with each other. Also the power of the Internet to allow people to learn will cause the general intelligence of future generations to raise allowing even more which will create even more people to drive science & technology forward. I hate to think what I'd have become w/out the Internet. I'd probably be working at Burger King with all my talents wasted. I remember growing up.. knowing I was intelligent and creative but having no idea what to do with it.. I thought of becoming an inventor or engineer but for a kid in a poor neighborhood the idea of buying such a costly education for the off chance of inventing something I got some $ from instead of some rip-off business wasn't much of a hope. And I agree a lot of the average people are rather stupid, even high-level people often are. I once had a manager that had to ask people to add and subtract for him because he couldn't do it. I've heard that we shouldn't count people as stupid because they are specialized in other areas but I have to say many people really are just stupid. My rule is that all smart people need to get laid often to pass their genes around.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
However, the author tends to mention only the 'dark side' of things, I can mention some bright one's too:
Open source software might also help the 3rd world countries, because it can lower the cost of having a 'modern' company.
Not to mention how great it is when studying history.
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Sure, there is a bit of brain drain, but I think that the internet provides a unique opportunity for people. It has a low cost of entry and who you know means nothing. Anyone can step in and go as far as they want regardless of their past history and, many times, experience.
Contrast that to the real world. In order to become a 'High level politcal staffer' you need to at least attend the 'almost right' college, take the right classes and meet the right people. Many times such people are raised around this sort of activity and thus know the 'ins and outs'. Its not something you can just pick up and say 'I am going to do this'. In addition, its not a sport that can attract individualistic intelligent people, I think for the most part that breed strains under the bonds of political life. Look at the few who have tried, the Jerry Browns and the Ross Perot's. They fail. There is a reason for that even though I do not know what it is.
What would internet folk be doing 100 years earlier? Probably operating telegraphs or using printing presses or tinkering with cars and the like. We are people who like the cutting edge whatever it is. If there is a problem to solve, we will solve it. This is a mindset that transcends time. Individualistic and Intelligent people will always find a way to prosper and will always take advantage of the future before the general populace gets wind of it.
I would also agree that not all the best and brightest gravitate to internet-related work. Rhetorical question: if the best/brightest are working in internet technology, why are we still grappling with crap browser technology, rudimentary development tools and methodologies, etc. etc. etc.? Frankly, there have been and will continue to be far more interesting and complex challenges in computing than building collaborative web sites which manipulate databases. If you want a real computing challenge, try designing mutithreaded transaction queuing systems, secure crypto, etc., not building web sites.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Sure the net has attracted the best and the brightest.
But consider the other side of the coin. It's also attracted (in some way or other) the Scum of the Earth. Just think what Havoc they'd wreak elsewhere, if we (ahem, the best and brightest) weren't keeping them busy here.
Dontcha think even as we speak, predators are cruisin these very pages, hoping to get rich of the back of some nerds?
I think that in an alternate timeline, McNealy would've played in the NHL.
"A Little Song, A Little Dance, A Little Seltzer Down your Pants" -Chuckles The Clown
There's a fault in your premise here. In a world where every one did concentrate on their own needs.. and bothered to think for themselves once in a while, M$ would have never happened. The only way someone can make money on inferior products is when the people who buy refuse to question what it is they're purchasing.
Though you are right in your point about murder. I failed to mention one key point. The only moral system is one in which individuals serve their own needs through voluntary exchange with others. Which is exactly what capitalism is designed to do.
Capitalism is, at best, amoral;
This is what kills will take down this country. Capitalism is the only moral system in existance. It works on the principle of everyone producing, and getting what they deserve for what they produce. Some one mentioned the guilt complex for IT managers.. Why is this? What is so wrong about making lots money for work that people have a great demand for. The electronic digital computer and by extension, the Internet, is the most import achievement in the last 500 years. Someone else said that the Internet will eventually be something very plain, and equated it to a mailbox.. I think they're right.. but it should be equated to a wheel, or to fire. We are the best and brightest of this country, and we are doing very important work. We shouldn't be ashamed of getting what we deserve for it.
And why is it so important to "serve society?" Think of this: If every person in the world concetrated only on serving the needs of himself, what would "society" have left to do? We wouldn't need welfare, or any kind of social programs of that sort becuase everyone would be responsible for themselves.
The Egghead
"There are no contradictions. Check your premises"
The Internet develops so quickly in part because it amplifies intelligence: it lets people cooperate and work more effectively than ever before. When it's stabilized, when the boom ends, we'll still have that benefit and will be able to apply it to other problems. Consider how much better space exploration will be with ubiquitous networking. "Can't get there without going through here."
(Well, I'm feeling optimistic today.)
- What you see happening depends on where you're looking. People reading Slashdot are probably interested in computer-related fields, and they keep track of developments in these areas. Few have any serious knowledge of something like modern agriculture. In my work at Bell Labs, I see plenty of very intelligent people working in non-computer areas such as astronomy or materials science, but even this perspective is skewed towards science and technology.
- What constitutes brilliant is not the same in all areas. As a technical type, I tend to admire logical thinking and the ability to reason about complex systems. But for a politician, it is probably more important to have the ability to relate to people, understand alternative viewpoints on a wide range of subjects, fashion compromises, and convince people to pull together.
- Since computers are so pliable and the technology moves so fast, it is relatively easy to make sweeping changes quickly. This lends the impression that the people driving the changes are brilliant visionaries. But a great politician can't throw out the government and start from scratch. Want to develop a new automobile powered by fuel cells? You've got to contend with the huge infrastructure designed to support the internal combustion engine, from gas stations to repair shops. As programmers, we also curse the legacy systems that we must contend with. Even the smartest people find it difficult to overcome inertia.
- The internet is a very young thing. When anything fundamentally new appears, there is usually a burst of rapid development. You hear about all these smart people doing exciting things. Eventually, most of the "easy" things have been done, progress slows, and you get the impression that all those people have moved on. They're still there, but it's not simple to do something really new anymore. But in a year or two, someone who's been toiling away making only incremental progress will get a great idea, and suddenly all those brilliant people will reappear from thin air.
I'll close with a little anecdotal evidence. The technically smartest people I've known personally are now: a theoretical physicist, a doctor, a musician, a film-maker, a semiconductor device physicist, a CAD researcher, and a manager at an engine manufacturer. I know one person who has founded a wildly successful internet-related company, but I never considered him very astute.David
Success is an essentially meaningless term. Many of us know this, experiencing the meaningless thrust towards an artificial deadline, to release a product of dubious value to the user.
R -V12.9pluspak that we did when we used Xy-write.
How much of the technology that we toot our own horns about really provides significant benefit to mankind? I think most slashdoters have the sense that it really takes a technologically savvy person to really exploit and profit from technology, at least on a personal level. How much progress has the user seen, in say a word processor, in the last 5 or 10 years? That's right. None. We're all writing the exact same letters and resumes with SUPER-ULTRA-BETTER-THAN-BRAND-X-Y2K-TURBO-WHATEVE
So what of the average person? What is this bubble of so-called prosperity made of? Endless forced upgrades, where the customer is snowed into believing that he absolutely has to have the latest and greatest in order to keep typing out his invoices? Sure, our stock options are fat, but is this something to be proud of?
Without doubt, automation and networking have provided massive economies of scale, allowing industry to be much more productive. I don't really think that there is any argument there. Items that used to be optional luxuries are now seen as requirements: $500 Weber grill, useless sport utility monstrosities that spend 95% of their existence on a freeway or a parking lot...
So, *yay*, our society is the most productive and opulent in all history. Am I the only one feeling a bit hollow? We've created a giant army of highly productive and innovative professionals, but WE FORGOT TO DECIDE WHERE WE WERE GOING BEFORE WE SET OUT ON THIS JOURNEY TO NOWHERE!!!
Look up from your cubicle and tell me we haven't built ourselves a guilded cage.
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Explore:
http://www.adbusters.org/
http://www.unamerican.com/
If you have similar links, please send them my way.
Celebrate International Buy Nothing Day on November 26, 1999.
What you're talking about is abstraction and it's been going on since the first macro-assembler in the early fiftys. Programs that write programs have been around for decades. I use Perl to write C code, does that count? The developmant of FORTRAN did not decrease the need for good programmers, it simply enabled them to write better programs in less time. Who will write the "programming programs"? More important, who will debug them? Who will port them to quantum processors when they become available?
As for optimization, no matter how fast computers become, someone will be able to conceive of a problem that will take a thousand years to solve on the best hardware available. The future of optimization is secure.
Since programming is a branch of mathematics, there will always be an opportunity to build on the work of your predecessors.
If the US can produce good food cheap, let them.
But the U.S. doesn't produce good food cheap. They produce food (whether it's good is a value judgement) expensive. Not because the soil is poor, or the technology is lacking, or even because the government is corrupt (it is, but that's beside the point). U.S.-produced food is expensive because people in the U.S. can make more money by not producing food. And I don't mean farmers idling their land in conservation-reserve programs. I mean the children and grandchildren of farmers leaving the farm because there's more money to be made in other lines of work.
Food is cheap in the U.S. not because they grow it so cheap there, but because they import it from third-world countries where farm labor is cheap. Americans aren't stupid - if they can make ten times the money working in an air-conditioned office with vacation and sick pay and health insurance, they will. It's far better than performing hot heavy farm labor with no benefits, and pay that is entirely at the mercy of commodity markets. They'll let third-world people feed them because that costs less. Because third-worlders don't have the option of working in the air-conditioned office.
Yet.
Outside the nerd community the impact of internet is fairly limited, I think.
Not at all. The impact is enormous. The understanding is limited.
I know several people who are clueless about
internet and only have the minimum skill required for reading email.
Right. The internet impacts them, but their understanding of it is limited.
The same thing could be said of other things with immense impacts. The phone system, f'rinstance. It has had an impact on people and businesses all over the world. A great many people have phones, and use them. But only a few devoted phone phreaks and phone-company people really understand how it works. Would you say that "outside the phone phreak community, the impact of the telephone is fairly limited"?
Sometimes I find myself longing for the "old days", when the impact of the internet really was minimal outside of the nerd comunity. When nerds used it to share information, and few people had considered it as yet another medium for selling things. That's a large part of why I'm here ranting instead of shopping over at ebay or amazon. But I digress. If non-nerds hadn't intruded, and started selling things via the internet, a lot of nerds would be working as parking-lot attendants and cashiers to support their computer habits, er, hobbies.
We(humans) can not second guess ourselves at every turn.
What if Sir Newton had kept himself busy farming? What if Einstein had gone into the manufacturing business with his father?
On the other hand what if the next Hiter waste all his time playing quake and surfing the net?
If a person is wasting his talents all his life so be it... it's his life. It's alway been that a person must find his own path and it will continue to be this way, that's life.
The only way to prevent great minds from going to waste is to educate them, encourage them, inspire them. Enlighten kids on the significance of science, better yet use a computer to aid your lessons.
Even after the Internet boom, we will still have computers around, so I'd still be doing what I am doing today; making sure that people can use a computer without losing their freedom with proprietary software.
Sure, I've thought about giving up on it all and become a farmer. While I would probably be very happy doing that, I'd not be doing what I do best and I wouldn't feel good about that.
IMHO, the attraction of the "best and brightest" to the internet/technology sector is nothing but capitalism at work, and that's a good thing.
A case could be made that because of advancements in technology, the need for top-level people in some industries and government has waned.
For example, the automobile business has been around for a long time. The state of automobile technology is such that the cars being produced by companies such as honda and toyota are pretty clean and fuel efficient, so much so that the need for a revolutionary improvement in those areas is not nearly as great as the need for revolutionary improvement in certain technology products.
The internet "boom" will not leave desolate virtual ghost-towns. You're comparing it to the wrong things. Compare it to electricity. Compare it to automobiles. Compare it to air travel. It will continue to "boom" for quite some time, and then maybe its rate of expansion will slow, but it will still be expansion. it will never go backwards and eventually fade away, as do conventional booms and fads. Not, at least, until there is something better. But i don't see that happening anytime soon, much as i don't see us driving around in hover cars or using magic phone booths that instantly transport us to our destinations, or using a new-fangled replacement for electricity.
Silicon vally will not experience a great exodus prompted by the public deciding "oh, that internet thing? yeah, we're done with that. check out my pokemon tho!"
Unless you're a moron, your job field is not in danger, and you don't need to decide if you want to be a farmer or a carver of wooden ducks in a shack in maine after this internet malarky is over.
Maybe the cs department that I attend is different from some others, but "it depends" is a correct answer for many questions. However, each prof in my cs department is doing research and is teaching, so that might make a difference too. I don't know.
The problem that I see is we seem to have many people drawn to the computers for the money, not for the desire. They don't have any passion for the field, and because of that, they probably won't succeed.
At the same time, many people and organizations seem to be substituting technology for intellegence. How many accounts of the salesperson who, when the cash register stops working, can't add $2.50 and $2.50 to give a total in a state with no sales tax. I have heard and have seen dozens of accounts like this.
The real danger is when we turn our brains off.
Most of us are guilty of this. I probably have spelling and gramatical errors in this message because I normally rely on spell checkers too much.
Just remember, If we keep exercising our grey matter, it will serve us well, otherwise, we are zombies. Find a passion, follow that passion, and you will be happy and prosperous.
"The same thing could be said of other things with immense impacts. The phone system, f'rinstance. It has had an impact on people and businesses all over the world. A great many people have phones, and use them."
I'm not denying the phone or the internet has an impact on society. That would be rediculous. I' just saying the internet is not a revolution. The telephone wasn't a revolution either, it took several decades for people to use them as they are used now. My grandmother still uses the telephone very sparingly and when she does its only for a few minutes. She'll probably never understand or use internet nor does she have to. My parents both learned how to use computers in the past ten years (internet too during the last year) but I can't say it had a major impact on their lives.
So people send an email instead of a fax, big deal. Sure it is an improvement but no revolution. I suppose in a decade or so computers and networks will be as common as the telephone is right now. But it won't be a revolution.
Jilles
Interesting post. Outside the nerd community the impact of internet is fairly limited, I think. I know several people who are clueless about internet and only have the minimum skill required for reading email. But I don't think those people are less intelligent than I am (as the article suggests). They just don't have the same interest as I have. Sometimes after hours of reloading slashdot and surfing the web I wonder if I couldn't have just read my email, switched of my computer and done something useful instead.
The world is just spinning around its 24 hour spins like it has done for millions of years. I don't believe in revolutions and I refuse to see internet as one. Rather I see progressing integration of networks and computers into daily life. Nothing to worry about.
Of course you can think about the impact of internet on society, the environment, politics and such. There are people who have a very negative perspective on these matters and there are people who think internet is the final solution to all problems related to these matters. These groups of people are called pessimists and idealists and have been around for a very long time but most people are not part of either of those groups: optimism is a requirement for survival on the long term and pragmatism usually defeats idealism in the end. My believe is that human beings are particularly good at solving problems. I.e. if environment is becoming a large enough problem people will start to come up with solutions for these problems. Partly this is already happening.
The author is wondering what his friend would have done 100 years ago. Well lets think on and move back time 1000 years or even 10000 years. You'll find that each time he's doing something similar (doing what he is best at). Of course the subject of his activities will vary (computers, machines, bow and arrow, the wheel?). Of course you can also move the time forward and I don't think the pattern will change much. From my point of view a piece of software is very much like a machine, you can tweak it, play with it, improve it and some will claim it has a mind of its own. So there's plenty of room to do useful stuff with his talents.
Jilles
This site has the rate at 18%.
This one has it at 33%.
Another says 35% of women are sexually abused as children.
This one (currently down, check Google cache) gives the magic 25%, listing Mary Koss, et al., A Criminalogical Study, 1990 as the reference.
HealthCentral says 50+% of women have been physically assaulted and 1 in 5 raped, citing the HHS/DoJ survey from the first link.
So... not just a concoction of my imagination, not just more bullshit to prop up my thesis... sadly, it's true.
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
Stop reading Wired: the global economy doesn't help people. It helps corporations, who hold no real allegiance to actual human beings.
Does the fact that PepsiCo's stock is high make your life any better?
Has quality of life improved?
Are your wages increasing at the same rate as your cost of living?
The "Big Boom" has resulted in mass inequality of condition.
This is okay? This is good? Neglect and exploitation of the Third World to keep us where we are is justified?
Don't get me wrong, the technology by itself is not evil. It's neat, it's entertaining.
But does ICQ help starving people? Does HTML 4.0 solve civil war? Do microkernels help the hole in the ozone layer?
When we wax poetic about how decentralized network theory can be applied to society at large, let's not forget that there are problems out there. The world sucks right now. 25% of American women will be raped at least once in their life. Corporate profit margins are going up as loyalty to employees goes down. We still drive cars. There's 6 billion of us now. Money hasn't helped anything.
It's easy to put this aside and ignore it. It's not fun to think about, but we need to nonetheless.
I'm not blaming the Internet Boom for this, either. If we weren't checking out the latest build of Mozilla (lookin' good, guys!), we'd be doing something else of equal or lesser import.
*sigh*
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
While I don't think he quite knows what a fad means. I think his implications of it being the next new thing will fad. As I one time the telephone was the next new thing and everyone was raving about it. And in a weird sort of way, the initial hype was a fad, and eventually everything calmed down, and it was simply "the telephone" and the next new generation will most likly having been born with the internet, simply think of it as "the internet". To them it will likly be nothing more, and nothing less. They may even have less interest in it than most of the previous generation, as it was something radically new and exciting for us it will just be something that has always been to them.
I think Roblimo is making an invalid comparison here. It takes a different skillset, and different type of intelligence, to do different things. No matter how bright a person may be in one thing, that doesn't mean that they're good with other things.
Personally, and applicable to your analogy with "Ron," I am good with computers and software. I am useless with mechanical contrivances. With my car, I can change my own oil, and I even did my own air filter a few weeks back. But no matter how hard my Mechanical Engineering friends try, I still have troble really understanding how a car's transmission works.
You said that there was a politico you met who you wouldn't trust to drive your limo, because he'd get lost. I have friends in the IT business who I would never ask for financial or personal advice, because they aren't good at and don't understand that sort of thing.
People gravitate towards the things that they feel rewarded by, either external (monetary, social prestige) rewards or internal (sense of satisfaction, personal growth) rewards. IT people do it because they are good at it and get paid well for it. Many (like McNealy) could get paid much better as executives, but most don't. Either they wouldn't view the hassle of management as worth their salary (unlikely) or they don't have a hig-end management mindset. Or the current management wouldn't promote them that high, which shows that the hypothetical IT people in question aren't good at office/social politics.
What if, instead of the internet being the 'brain drain' described, it simply turned out to be a fad?
By fad I mean exactly what the word means.. a passing phenomonon. I have a feeling that someday, the internet is going to be as common place as a telephone or a mailbox, and used in much the same manner. Anymore, I seriously doubt you could blame the lack of creativity on a mailbox.
Sure, right now it's sucking talent into it, but I just can't bring myself to think that it will continue to do so. It will become a name, and it will stabilize, and then, it really will be the tool for technological advancements that everyone keeps promising us it is.
At least, that's my take on things.
I want a rock.
First you are wondering what the world would be like if the resources that went into the internet were used for some other project, like world hunger. It's an interesting thought, but not a very useful one. The internet attracted so many minds because it was a better opportunity. It is a quicker way to make more money than, say, agricultural research. That's just the way it is.
;)
..."
"And then I remember that the Internet is really not a big deal; it's just a toy for the few of us who are so rich that we don't worry about finding food to eat..."
Try telling that to Wall Street
Then: "the rest of the world is being run by second-raters."
This is a silly conclusion to draw - just because there are many bright people working in computer-related industries does NOT mean that there are no bright people left for other things; in fact, i am not in the computer business, and your conclusion seems to imply that i'm second rate.
Then: "The Internet doesn't create ideas; it's merely a tool that helps distribute them and makes collaborative thinking easier. Computers do no original thinking; they merely help human thinkers work more efficiently"
Who's claiming they do?
Then: "The talents that make a good programmer could be applied just as well in many other fields, from politics to agricultural development
I have to disagree with you there. In very broad terms this might be true: honesty, hard work, etc. etc. But how many geek programmers do you know who would be good politicians? How many can schmooze for hours at fund-raising dinner parties and debate (_not_ using a keyboard) the merits of a particular policy issue. Maybe they can out-think most politicians on technical issues, but that in the end isn't what politics is ultimately about, and it isn't what politicians are paid to do.
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
If the bigtime hackers had any interest in working in the space program, or trying to design the 200MPG carburetor, that's what they'd be doing, Internet or no Internet.
I don't think the Internet is keeping people from doing other things they enjoy.
--
Pretend there is some witty statement here.
I don't think the boom is going anywhere. The internet is just like an automobile. Too many people with too much money invested exist to let this die out. And besides, the development will probably never freeze, because there will always be new companies coming out with new crap to advertise and stuff. Computer science jobs are pretty safe, I think, until somebody fires off a crapload of EMP rockets at the US and fries every circuit. But then there'd be worse things to worry about.
-S
So you'll excuse me if I'm alittle upset at your proclimation that we need to lighten up. If we don't take things like this seriously, we're opening pandora's box.
I have asked you not to, and you did it anyway. You completely misinterpreted me.
I said that the guys who killed all those people need to have lightened up before the fact so they didn't do anything stupid. Unfortunately they did not.
As for the rest of us, I firmly believe that no matter how badly youar picked on, there is no reason to make a big deal out of it. I have had my share of unpleasant experiences, but if you bite your lip and bear it, eventually you grow out of puberty and everything is fine. This whole hellmouth thing makes me sick. Just a bunch of 9th graders venting their hormones 'cause girls won't go out with 'em.
Now that that's over with, I seriously doubt that there was any breakthrough journalism as you call it, at least no different than any other slashdot article, it was just about some issue that a lot of people felt strongly about. I think that everything needs to be taken with some skepticism and if that is not upheld, then all you get is hype and chaos, both of which need to be fought as hard as possible.
-S
Trust me, there are plenty of very very smart people working on things other than the internet. Let's think of most of the really breakthrough internet-related development. The net allows people to buy stuff from vendors -- anybody from a major company (amazon, dell to some guy sitting in his basement. Also there is very available information, as well as slashdot. If somebody is in some country that's getting bombed to hell by the US, they can set up a web server and give accurate(hopefully) accounts of what's really going on that doesn't get filtered through TV. There are various projects for the distribution of software, as well as thigns like distributed.net/seti@home.
I may have missed some things, but most other sites seem to be clones of the above -- ie ppl selling stuff, distributing news, distributing programs. It doesn't take much wit to clone a website.
The development of software (ie the linux distos, BSD's, m$) also takes effort. However it seems to me that for every software engineer there is prolly a hardware engineer working on something else (intel Leadmine, the G4, whatever).
I think that there is also a very large number of people working in science. Every major university has some large portion of it devoted purely to medical research, I think, and those areas are full with very very smart individuals doing their best to cure cancer (I work in such a lab myself) or other diseases.
You can't rechannel energy from one industry to another. I can tell you that because people have different interests, they would be much less productive in a field they are not interested in. So for example if I get my thrills by making programs, I'd be quite less interested in working on a farm trying to grow a giant tomato (no offense to Lisa Simpson) or develop better diesel engines.
The point is that I believe it is a miracle that we have gotten this far already, and besides, would colonies on the moon be really worth it if you couldn't listen to mp3's (or watch DVD in linux) once you got there?
-S
The only profound effect that the net has had on society in general is that Joe User can now look up scores on espn.com instead of watching the little ticker at the bottom of CNN on tv, and buy stuff with one click from amazon as opposed to actually having to go to a store. Everything else is a minor change, I believe. As for that whole Hellmouth thing, people just need to calm down and not take stuff so seriously. (please don't misinterpret that last statement. No offense was meant to any victims of any tragedy. I mean that the possible perpetrators of inhuman acts need to relax.)
-S
Ordering products with the click of a mouse, from ANY store ANYwhere
;)) but if linux isn't important enough to get drivers written for it by hardware manufacturers, (which is already in the computing industry), how can it have a really significant impact? Sure, the internet is helping Bill push IIs servers, but that's still in the computing industry.
You are telling me that Joe User has interests in anything he can't get at WalMart?
Obviously linux could not have existed as such without the net, but how has that affected Joe User? Even if he has a computer, he is connected through AOL, and he doesn't care if some server he's getting porn from is running linux/apache or whatever.
mp3 is only changing the music industry for the little guy, artists that benefit from mp3.com. However, the "old" way of getting yourself recognized as musician is still the same -- play in some clubs, get a demo out, sign a contract with some existing label.
I'm not saying that some small number of people can benefit greatly and have their minds expanded with limitless amounts of wisdom (as you are doing by reading my comment
I'm saying that as soon as it becomes very difficult for a grownup in any walk of life to live without an email account, THEN the net will have a significant impact for everybody.
Ah, whatever.
-S
If what I remember is correct, Gutenberg originally invented the pre-pre-pre-pre-printing press so that he could automatically copy (i.e. forge) books that until then had to be copied by hand, a monotonous task usually performed by monks, and sell them for profit.
Just an amusing detail. I honestly don't know if this is the truth (it may well not be), but it made me laugh, once.
If you are reading Slasdot, you probably aren't considering running for public office, but you can do your part to make the world a better place.
The following ditty is a document that can be found in the back of almost any textbook on Engineering Ethics. You can tell from it's language that it was written a while ago, but its' message still is relevant.
"Faith of the Engineer"
by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)
I AM AN ENGINEER. In my profession I take deep pride, but without vain-glory; to it I owe solemn obligations that I am eager to fulfill.
As an Engineer, I will participate in none but honest enterprise. To him that has engaged my services, as employer or client, I will give the utmost of performance and fidelity.
When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given without reservation for the public good. From special capacity springs the obligation to use it well in the service of humanity; and I accept the challenge that this implies.
Jealous of the high repute of my calling, I will strive to protect the interests and the good name of any engineer that I know to be deserving; but I will not shrink, should duty dictate, from disclosing the truth regarding anyone that, by unscrupulous acts, has shown himself unworthy of the profession.
Since the Age of Stone, human progress has been conditioned by the genius of my professional forbears. By them have been rendered usable to mankind Nature's vast resources of material and energy. By them have been vitalized and turned to practical account the principles of science and the revelations of technology. Except for this heritage of accumulated experience, my efforts would be feeble. I dedicate myself to the dissemination of engineering knowledge, and, especially to the instruction of younger members of my profession, in all its arts and traditions.
To my fellows I pledge, in the same full measure I ask them, integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and devotion to the standards and the
dignity of our profession; with the consciousness, always, that our special expertness carries with it the obligation to serve humanity with complete sincerity.
One problem with your analysis is that most other industries are very capital intensive. You're not going to colonize the moon or create a world changing automobile in your garage. What's worse, is that without the Internet, anyone interested in doing something like that would have a much harder time figuring out how to do it. The Internet gives them the capability to form groups who would never have even know they existed without it. If, one day, a group gets together to build an open source rocket, it will be the Internet that made it possible.
The Internet is strange. I have been using it for a few years and I still don't get it entirely. For some reason, it is expected that you are connected to the world-wide network. Most people don't know why they need to be connnected, just that they do.
I still don't get the internet. I wonder if it is like when telephones were invented. How come virtually everyone has a television and telephone in their homes?
Why is that thousands of people flock to this site in particular everyday? It would be easy to say Slashdot is for news and communication. We would carefully avoid mentioning anything about addiction and obsession.
There are probably many other sites on the internet like this one, catering to thousands. But for some reason, people are not heading to information sources and news sites, we are gathering to web forums, chat rooms, and email.
The question of whether Man is a social animal has no doubt been solved. There has never been a more powerful force in our world than world-wide communication. And world-wide economic exploitation.
Anyone see the comercials? For e-business? Yes, we now have people from Russia, Japan, Switzerland, etc. telling us how the Internet is power. The Internet is power but now, of course, money has become wrapped up in it. Now, thanks to the internet, all of us see constant advertisements on all our sites. But that is okay, commercial television has prepared us for this. Making money is okay.
After all, we all need to exist in this economy. It is how we get jobs and how we sell our goods. It lets us specialize to what we do well instead on focusing on survival; creating the things we need that are better made by people who know to do those things well.
You have probably noticed that this post is full of contradictions. I just don't yet get this 'Internet' thing. I use it daily. I understand many of the technologies that makes it work. But to understand it is not specialty of programmers, technicians, or system administrators. To understand this are the specialties of philosophers and writers. A big job it is for them. Because to understand this internet thing requires knowlege not much less than knowing how the world goes around.
I am posting here to say I don't know. Does the Internet boom harm society? Did television? Did telephone? Yes and no is probably both of the answers. But them are easy answers. So, for now, I am content with "I don't know".
But one thing I do know. I was going to go into astronomy if I wasn't distracted by computers. But would I have been a good astronomer? Probably not. If you people don't know this yet I will say this to you: computers are among the easiest of professions. Computers have their challenges, sure. But Computers have solutions and you are allowed to be wrong What we call debugging is simply not feasable in most professions. How many bridges must an engineer build before he gets it right? How many people does a surgeon get to practice with?
I don't know. Any other answer would be dishonest.
***Beginning*of*Signiture***
Linux? That's GNU/Linux to you mister!
Listen, society is not some distinct entity lives off on its own. It is enabled by technology. Rhetoric alone can't change society. Rather, it is the new perspective and new powers offered by technology that give people the ability to instill change.
Remember, without a medium, there is no society, there is no rhetoric, there is no people, only animals shuffling around looking for food.
It tries to divide people into 16 "variant temperaments" by evaluating answers to the questions on the test.
Its interesting. I would imagine that most people using Slashdot will end up in the "Rational" group, whereas many people running government would end up in the "Guardian" group. It doesn't presume to rate the intelligence of people, just their temperaments.
It may be that the folks that choose IT as a career fall more into a specific temperament than those who go into, say, automotive engineering.
....and a time for every purpose under heaven, etc.etc.
I guess it's time for internet development!
Imagine how Colonial architecture could have progressed if the brightest minds of the industrial revolution had not been so wrapped up in factories and machinery!
As for McNealy in a political debate, Clinton would eat him alive!
Seriously, I think it's more than a bit presumptious to believe that the brightest minds are completely absorbed by the internet. The brightest minds are able to grok more than one industry/project simultaneously. Anyone who's young and got a modicum of intelligence these days will likely have a firm understanding of the internet and how it will potentially impact their bottom line. I would argue that internet is just a means to an end for most of the "bright minds" out there, and not necessarily and end in itself as this article seems to suggest.
Trust me, the rest of the world will be okay!
Just my 2 cents
Ok, it is a problem that people create problems and solve them, instead of not creating them in the first place. But that is not related to the internet, but rather to the mentality of programmers in general. It's some things that are common between a lots of computer people:
- Problems are cool, so why reduce the population?
- Why use other people's solutions? self-solved is well-solved.
- Difficulty is a value in itself.
If these people designed cars, they would be made of Lego Techno and matches. But the net didn't make them that way. Most of the programmers today would still be programmers if the net wasn't there. They just wouldn't be so exposed to better ways of doing stuff, so they would stay at home writing paper simulators in x86 assembly, instead of writing paper simulators called HTML editors in java. Both are stupid, but the former is even more stupid and less useful than the latter.When it comes to intelligence and the net, I for one think that you become bright from using it, especially usenet and irc. It's extremely good training. You talk to people just waiting for you to say something stupid so they can flame you to hell. Sooner or later you learn to recognize stupid stuff, and not say it. That make you more intelligent.
If it's one industry we could do without, I would rather pick commercials. Think about how many man-months gone into creating and watching commercials. Millions. For what use? Is it entertaining? Normally not. Is it useful to know that the blue bottle of shampoo is better than the green one since the makers of the blue one could afford to pay more creative people who could invent cooler names of the content? no. It's just a way of paying for entertainment with a giant loss percentage.
BTW: I'm very sleepy while writing this. That's the reason for the lack of continium and the bad language. That and my crappy English teachers.
-segfault
you came to a town where a man with a club was stealing everyone else's food. "Promising young fella," you say to yourself, and approach him.
"I'll give you this gun if you give me a potato a week, forever."
So you do, and so now the villagers spend less time taking care of their bruised compatriots and more time potato farming, so he steals more food, and not only gives you a potato a week but hires a henchman to ceremonially carry around his old club.
Sure, the village is "better off" now because you invested in it. But that doesn't make your investment strategy moral. You're still complicit in a corrupt regime.
This analogy doesn't hold for the entire third world. But there are definitely numerous countries where it's spot-on. And that's not even mentioning the places where we started out with a marginally beneficial investment and then trashed the place out of pure spite when they threatened to go all commie and stop sending us interest.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
/quote/
Most of my friends work either directly on the Internet or in some sort of Internet-related computer field.
//quote/
And then he wonders if this is a good thing?!?
Why do you think most people who are in the computer field get into the computer field? Because either 1) it's a labor of love and/or 2) it allows the freedom to work at the office, home, on a plane, and if the government gets to oppressive you can pick your marbles and move it all through customs effortlessly to a new playground. Try doing that if you're "happily modifying his neighbors' threshers and steam tractors."
That is why the New Internet Economy(tm) is growing so rapidly and the industrials didn't. Freedom is the path of least resistance. Is that really so hard to understand. What you're proposing has already been tried in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc.
Per Investor's Business Daily, "The US several years back boosted the maximum speed limit on its open highways to 65 miles per hour from 55. A surge in computer investment and the Internet have done the same thing for the economy."
And Roblimo, you need to read 'Atlas Shrugged.'
Geeeesh, I hate these time changes...
Pork is not a verb
The only profound effect that the net has had on society in general is that Joe User can now look up scores on espn.com instead of watching the little ticker at the bottom of CNN on tv, and buy stuff with one click from amazon as opposed to actually having to go to a store.
;^)
That's for people who see the 'Net like a newspaper, not a "Brain Extender(tm)" . Even these things you say are trivial are amazing. Ordering products with the click of a mouse, from ANY store ANYwhere. That's tremendous, especially considering the amount of informational organization that needs to occur to get you your new Antonio Banderas Blow-up Doll overnight.
Or Linux, which wouldn't have existed without the Net. Or the way MP3 are changing the music industry. Entire industries are being obsoleted and created on a monthly basis, and you say the effect isn't profound? I can type up a paper, put it on the server in my apartment and you can read it from ANYwhere in the World, that's profound, even more so because of the content
I could go on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, about this, but I won't. The Internet is cool.
+&x
Granted, the results are worth it, but how many times have you had a hack go the wrong way, and have nothing to show for it but a pile of chips?
Exactly. How many times has everyone here fscked up a system so bad the only choice is to reinstall? How many times by doing horrendously stupid stuff? Trial and error is a good way to learn, but a bad way to learn to teach. Either way it's more a sign of resourcefulness and stubbornness than intelligence
+&x
until somebody fires off a crapload of EMP rockets at the US and fries every circuit.
Didn't l0pht say there are a few "magic" packets that could be used to shut down the 'Net? Anybody know the process? There have to be weakpoints. If a few conscruction workers can cut the thing in half, what can a few well placed bombs do?
+&x
This thing is just getting rolling. The Internet was the big first step, the spark if you will. I think Linux might be a big log on the fire (free widely distributed quality software). I think it might end at nanotech and quantum mechanics.
We really are moving on to a new and exciting age. Information is power and the Net basically gives every single person (connected to it, an important technicality) a Whole Lotta Power.
Media, as an example, is seeing a huge shift as it becomes easier and easier to become a media gatekeeper or content creator. Truly interactive media (where you create the content) is already here, you're reading it.
One the whole, How People Communicate, is changing and that has wide reaching unforseen consequences (hopefully benificial) on society.
+&x
I don't think internet has cause a brain drain, but I believe it has created a money drain. My father has this great patent with which you can build infinitely large motors. But finding investors has been very hard, mainly because (my guess here) it isn't related to internet. Everyone and his grandmother believes that the fast bucks are best made in internet-related companies, so why bother spending money on hydraulics?
http://www.henricson.se/hercules
>"In a global context, nothing on the Internet --
>not even Slashdot -- is important enough to be
>worth a glance."
I would disagree, but then again, I'm one of those crazy types who thought the printing press was important too. Information, schmormation.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
I think Roblimo is well intentioned and even made his speculations out to be lighthearted which is admirable. It's not that I don't agree with him, I just think it is a pretty myopic view of the world. I have found this to be pretty prevalent on /..
/.ers or net geeks, etc. are the only perpetrators of this folly of elitism. Any time you get a group of people together that share something in common (and it could be really mundane and basic like nice clothes in high school.) and then you add someone or some people that don't "go along" w/what is viewed as the way to be and the latter are ostracized. Of course there are exceptions to the rules but from what I have experienced it's pretty common. It's funny how so many people have treating each other like shit in common because they are different! Weird huh?
I don't think only
I have seen it in religion, scholarly pursuits, occupation, financial standing, race, gender... I think you all get the point.
So it's not a matter of who's smart and who's dumb. Nothing excels in every environment. I may be a genius in the here and now but in some other time or place I may get my throat slit for being a complete dumbass!
I know my post is late but it was a media blackout weekend. For those of you that don't do it you should maybe think about trying it sometime.
Oh and for those of you that don't get my dry humor, the subject is *sarcasm* at it's worst. My apologies.
nothing excels in every environment
Since 1998, I've gradually watched TV ads for websites rise. Now I'm seeing commercials that have many different people say stuff like, "We power the interet." Then they spam a site. I don't understand what the hell that has to do with powering the internet. Stuff like that just downright pisses me off. Its a waste of 30 seconds that could be advertising some caffeine product.
- PovRayMan
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Check out my blackbox styles
Well yes, in the future there will be lots of jobs just in the maintenance of web/net/server-space (just like any automated job you can think of now) When enough people of a nation has gotten enough free time/money to discuss what is on their mind, we will not only see a revolution in information, but also in democracy...(although this could include only those who can afford to spend time discussing problems of their nation)
I don't think the internet is a "Brain Drain". In fact, I think the internet is a Brain Enhancer. If we didn't have the internet, all of those brilliant people working in our universities would still be forced to disseminate their research via paper. The old publishing techniques were holding back the growth of technology in the same manner as hand written books before Gutenberg invented the printing press. The internet is just a tool, and programmers are tool-makers. Most software and hardware pertaining to the internet are not consumer goods. You are not producing cars or boats or blankets or food. This is not to say that tool making is not important, but don't believe for a second that all the good brains are working in the computer industry. I have a friend studying neuro-biology at the University of Illinois, and he is perhaps the smartest person I have ever met. He uses the internet, as a tool. It helps him communicate with the hundreds of others that are doing similar research around the world.
I'll even gather that that politician you talked to is much smarter that you believe. I've learned that people do not get to lofty career positions by being stupid. Because this guy does not think like a programmer does not mean he's dim. Of course, that's not to say that I respect his choice of career. Certainly he's not as smart as McNealy, but your really smart types are positioning themselves to run/own companies, not become President. It's too much hassle, and it doesn't pay squat. I'll probably be raking in more in a year than the President does before I'm eligible to be Pres-o-dent (age).
Josh
And I quote:
This is exactly the attitude that is displayed in this article. How DARE any of us think that we are the only smart people out there? The fact is, geekdom is a very insular world, and we are not in much of a position to speculate on the woes of other industries, or the potential impact we would have upon said industries if we weren't so busy getting a woody from Quake3.
Huh? Where are you? That wasn't even implied. He was talking about his friend, not the geek populace. Yeah I'll admit geeks have a certain level of arrogance (me included), but we mustn't let that get the better of us. If we do, we'll seem like complete self-centered assholes to the world around us, the exact people we're against.
Anyway, there is no shread of a, "Geeks are wonderful, blah blah blah, etc." tone, meaning, theme, ANYTHING along those lines in this article.
And anyway, who cares?! That's not even the point Roblimo was trying to make. When, and if, the internet crashes, the ones who do know a hell of a lot about it will be left stranded, looking like idiots. He means that all that energy we concentrate into one thing could be used to better the world and stuff, and to make the future that authors of the '50s and such a reality. That would be cool.
THAT'S the point. We're all geeks here. We can think what we want of ourselves around ourselves. That's why we're all here : ) Just like jocks do at football games, and shallow teenage girls do in the makeup aisle of CVS. For you to concentrate on something that wasn't even implied in this article saddens me. Maybe you should go back to the football field and cheer on the sidelines.
miyax
this internet boom is exactly what it is... a boom... and like all booms they become diluted and more spread out. Everybody pays a whole lot of attention to a boom, but not its' after effects. The internet will eventually become as widespread as telephone service, and people will stop obsessing over it.
Where would the world be now without the Internet? I'm sure the stock market would be doing so well without those day traders. We would still be under the opression of shopping from local retail stores when we know that "Widgets Inc. of Some town far away" has your widgets for half price. Also where would Linux be without the internet? Widespread open source development would be nearly impossible, and we would all be paying $79.99 for Redhat 6.1 (of course we cold still burn copies).
I just think the internet isn't harming society at all. At the time people in Europe said Gutenburg Printing Press is making people read too much when they could be out farming. What they didn't know is that advanced farming techniques were coming from Africa by way of printed books. The internet will better civilization and we won't even know it in our lifetime.
Your statement comes from what I consider to be a fallacious assumption: that the Internet is an end, not a means.
In and of itself, it is not an amazing thing, except to geeks. The value comes, rather, from what it promotes: facile communication between people.
You might as well ask,"Would the world be better if we kept advancing ways of making fire instead of creating language?"
We're just experiencing the pain of socio-economic upheaval, the price we're paying for a fundamental improvement in how humans interoperate. The world changed when apes figured out they could whack each other with bones and sticks, and the world changed when people could get to a town twenty miles away in less than a day.
The world is changing again, and it will continue to change.
I must disagree with the idea of an "Internet Brain Drain," for several reasons. It is simply not true that "all the best and brightest minds are attracted to Internet-based industries." Many of the world's best and brightest minds are attracted to writing, to music, to art, to mathematics, to the sciences, to politics, or to agriculture. The fields that have drawn bright minds for generations continue to do so. In science, one can point to advances in genetics, biotechnology, or particle physics; in mathematics, work in areas such as "chaos theory" and wavelets (fields that are greatly aided by computer programming, not hindered) shows that new ideas are still forthcoming. In literature, there are many wonderful recent books: to give just one example, I highly recommend Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. The older fields of intellectual endeavor are not dead. The Internet has not changed them.
Even if many bright minds are attracted to Internet-based industries, is this necessarily bad for society? Not everyone working on the Internet is doing useless work. Some are simply doing things people have always done, but in a new way: e-commerce is one example, sites that present news are another. These people are merely engaging in traditional activities, but using technology to do them more efficiently.
Use of the Internet is not limited to surfing the web and chatting on ICQ. Certainly these activities are not beneficial to society, but the people who spend their time chatting on ICQ would probably be chatting on the telephone if the Internet did not exist. They are not stealing time away from useful work. Much useful work is also accomplished on the Internet.
I disagree with the idea that people who spend their time working with technology could be running the country. Being intelligent does not give one the capability to lead a people. There is more to leadership than intelligence; furthermore, skill in and knowledge of politics is a very different thing from skill in, say, writing Perl scripts.
I will agree that many of those involved in politics are inept; however, I believe this situation has persisted for centuries. The advent of the Internet did not suddenly draw intelligent people away from the political arena and into cyberspace. The skills needed to write efficient computer programs are very different from the skills used in winning votes, or in persuading others to vote for a particular measure. Rhetorical skills and programming skills, while often sharing a basis in logic, have only a narrow area of overlap. While some people may be gifted in both, it is rare that techonologically skilled people would do well in politics.
What would today's programmers be doing, if not programming? This is an intriguing question. Perhaps they would be mathematicians or scientists. Are these activities necessarily more beneficial to humanity than programming? I do not think so. A computer scientist who works on seemingly abstract problems may discover a method that has tremendous applications to another field. In fact, I believe that the computer "revolution," if it should be so called, has its most powerful applications in mathematics and science. As others have pointed out, engineers can make use of computers for simulations. In all fields of science, computing power has the capacity to dramatically decrease computational time and can allow rapid testing of theories. This does not only aid "rich people" who sit in front of computer screens every day; it aids anyone who, for instance, drives a car or takes a flight in an airplane. The Internet aids researchers in modelling problems, rapidly disseminating information, and communicating solutions.
Could the average user of the Internet be devoting his time to solving agricultural problems for Third-World countries? I doubt it. That is a task for experts in agriculture. The skills needed are entirely different.
Speaking in generalities about the Internet is much a mistake as speaking generally about, for instance, books. Books in themselves are neither good nor bad. Individual books may contain misinformation; they may be poorly written; they may be popular, but contain little of real value. Still, there are many great books: works of literary value, like The Sound and the Fury; works of historical importance, like Uncle Tom's Cabin; works of philosophical value, like Camus's The Stranger; or informative works like Numerical Recipes in C. To say that "books are good," or "people who write books could be running our country instead," is absurd. To say the same things about "computer geeks" is similarly absurd. The diversity in web sites and computer programs should be viewed in the same manner as the diversity in books. There are many web sites which are quite useless; others are brilliant, artistically or intellectually. Many computer programmers may do little useful work, but I would define good programmers as those who accomplish useful tasks, by writing code that benefits business users, or helps home users become more accustomed to techonology, or aids artists or musicians in their work, or helps a mathematician visualize a problem, or does some other form of useful work. In other words, good programmers do things that help people, just as good politicians do. It is incorrect to say that a good programmer could help people more by becoming a politician, just as it would be clearly wrong to say that a good mathematician should become an anthropologist. People can benefit society in many ways, and it is no one should designate the way someone else uses his or her time. Any argument which attempts to state that people who use their time tinkering with computers or writing code are wasting a brilliant mind could be applied in an analogous manner to any intellectual pursuit, and would be just as wrong. Computer science is not unique among academic fields. Attempt to apply the argument that the Internet is a waste of time to, say, painting. Could not brilliant artists like Picasso have better served the world by working on Artesian wells? Anyone can see the absurdity of this question. Now ask yourself: is it really any different than the question of whether a computer programmer should be working on Artesian wells? I believe the answer is "No." The Internet is not a "Brain Drain." It is a techonological tool that, in the future, will be viewed just like other tools (the television, the pocket calculator, the wheel). It will be used without second-guessing its usefulness.
Matt Reece
Wow... this is one of the most blatant examples of Internet/geek community arrogance I've seen. I've worked as a sysadmin and as an engineer and I know quite a number of people in quite a number of fields and I have not noticed that any one particular group is generally more intelligent than any other. I certainly haven't noticed that people on the Internet are particularly intelligent.
Right now, I'm working at an engineering company with a number of engineers who range in age, experience, and familiarity with the Internet. While many of the intelligent ones have figured out how to use computers to help them engineer, many of them aren't particularly interested in computers or the Internet.
The engineering work we do requires a lot of problem solving, spatial visualisation, and understanding of physical stresses and fluid flows. It's not easy and requires a certain kind of thinking that many people can't do.
The auto industry is currently spending a lot of money and has many talented people working on ways to make cars more efficient. If they could charge $100,000 for a car, they could already build them. They are limited by government regulations, the market, and physics. Automotive engineers aren't a bunch of morons stumbling around in the dark waiting for some Internet guru to point out the solution to their problems. While many people think that there is some big conspiracy between auto companies and oil companies to keep gas prices up and sell big cars, any auto company would love to develop technology which reduced their dependency on gas and gave them an edge over the others.
I love computers and the Internet and think that a lot of the research being done is really cool. I just want to point out that there are plenty of smart people who are doing other things, some using computers, some not.
This is not intended to be inflammatory but is a response to an attitude I've seen more and more frequently.
> Progress in developing the Internet is easier than progress in any other field. The Internet is 'contrived' and entirely invented; as such it is not constrained by physical or natural boundaries.
Try designing a chip. You have no idea.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Although I agree that if there was not such a computer industry boom the people there (here) would be doing something else, I don't consider it as a bad thing in the long run.
The advancements achieved in both hardware and software technologies make it faster and easier to develop the "more efficient Diesel fuel injection systems", "vehicles powered by fuel cells" and other things Roblimo mentioned. I'm pretty sure that modern fuel injection systems are totally dependent on embedded computers, to mention just one example.
And what comes to the growth of the Internet and improving the life in third world, they are certainly not mutually exclusive. When the underdeveloped countries get more Internet connections it becomes easier to people there to get information on how to improve their lives: produce more food per acre, organize a revolution against the tyrannic government etc. Of course this is naively optimistic statement considering the amount of people who can't even read, but maybe those who can are able to distribute the knowledge to those who can't.
When the computer industry growth slows down and stabilizes on the level of older industries those people who would today be internet entreprenours, software developers or hackers will choose something more interesting, build colonies in the moon or whatever, with the help of the technology developed by the computer/internet generation.
Not everyone is being sucked into the Internet. One of the most brilliant people I know programs because he wants to solve theoretical problems, not because he just wants to program. Sure, a lot of people are doing more with computers now--but a lot of them are because it's the best means to the end, and not the end itself. I don't think the Internet is sucking away all the best minds...just the ones who *want* to be there. And they'd probably be less happy elsewhere.
I also have doubts that people whose expertise lies in computing would have efficiently and quickly have developed, say, better land transport... if only because it's difficult to get this sort of idea to the public, since the oil industry REALLY wants to squash it every time it's mentioned.
And even if it's a toy, this internet thing does good things for lots of people. My entire family is online now, and I'm so much more in touch with them than I ever was when we had to use snail mail or long distance phone charges. It's brought us closer together, which is a Good Thing no matter how you look at it...
Well, the reason that I present it as a new idea is because: 1. I never heard it before and I thought of it myself, I guess no one's been talking much about it lately (due to the fact that since it's an old idea that never happened, no one thinks it will). 2. You've been reading Byte longer than I've been alive... I do think you're correct, but you happen to prove my point. Humans will find new fields to conquer. That's why I said that there will be a shortage of programmers BEFORE the "programming programs". One of the consistent themes of the tech industry is abstraction... that one should be able to think and work at a higher level if they can, rather than think of electrical pulses and high/low clock edges. Programmers will need to know the input strings to make the programs... but the programs will do most of the work. Sadly, today's boom is in doing a lot of that work, and a lot of people won't be prepared for the switchover. Lemme give you a real example that exists TODAY with "programming programs": HTML. You write tags and text and send it along to a browser, which makes a screen display based on the given text and tags. That's a fairly advanced concept: making a navigable system of menus, displays, images, and information from formatted text files. The HTML document would be your "couple of strings" and the browser would be your "programming program". The only thing is that HTML is a rather primitive and limited version of this right now. I believe that many of the concepts used in HTML will be used to make complex programs REAL SOON.
...but in a slightly different manner. I believe that in ten years, everything that programmers do now will be done by programs. That is, programs will write programs. A lot of people will be out of jobs... not because of the programs that write programs, but because of some unforseen breakdown of the current high-demand for programmers. Those "programming programs" will be an eventual replacement for the millions that are out of work, as it would be much cheaper to have than hiring a 40-year old who needs to support a family. This will be possible because of Open Source, believe it or not - functional code will become a commodity, no longer being something that has to be researched, planned, and written in bits and pieces, line by line. Instead, massive code-generating AI-based assemblers will take a couple of strings from the user and use codebases on the net plus its own AI code-generation routines to make a whole program, bug free, with an appropriate and user-friendly GUI, database driven, QA testing as part of the program generation, and acceptably optimized. (after all, on your Pentium-XXV 6000Mhz your business apps are going to FLY so there's no need for real optimization work to be done)
Sounds farfetched, doesn't it? I estimate ten years, maybe up to twenty. Whoever invents it will be the toast of the academic world but will be lynched by all the out-of-work techies. Once it's done, you can get the damn thing to write a bigger badass version of itself every now and then. (not really necessary if every program written is Open Sourced and placed on one of the aformentioned net codebases)
If you've ever felt that your current programming job is monkey work, there's some infinite monkeys on the way...
Money is money. Everyone needs money. The President is the most prestigious job in the world. Not only is it the most powerful, but America couldn't function properly. True he doesn't get paid as much, but he controls the most powerful arsenal in history. Not only the power and prestige, the President, even the worst of them all, has made decisions that helped (and hurt) millions of people.
I was drawn to computers for love of them, not because of some "geek magnet" factor. Sure, I'm a geek, but for years I debated going into politics, medicine and just about every other job in the world.
A computer engineer may make more money, but how does he affect the lives of millions in a real sense? I have yet to find _ANY_ software that helps my parents get on with their daily life. For that matter, I haven't seen anything created in the past 6-10 years that was so much better for the average person, increasing productivity more than prior software available. My parents could use win31 better than win98, and their old excel works the exact same as the top of the line newest (which incidentally is a bitch to relearn after using an ancient version). I challenge you to find a dozen things in daily life that the normal person _Can't_ live without, which has been created in the past dozen years? Sure things have gotten better (cameras et al) but does that help feed the homeless? Does it divert wars?
Politics allows you to actually have a bearing on real life. To influence Everyone.
However, you're right, noone wants to go into politics now.
-ex
Coincidentally, my parents are both in the medical industry.
What you say is probably true, however, the only thing I hear from them about their computers at work is "those damn idiot bean counters changed our software again, I have to go through another goddamned meeting to learn how to use another program. The old one worked fine". Sure, they're not doctors. However, my father does home-patient care, and as such, he's used the same program at home to keep track of patients. Sure they can learn "new and improved" programs every three months, but why? Personally, I think it's best to leave 'new and improved' to techies and geeks, give them something that works, and that is similar to what they've used before...
As for my mother, she does physical therapy. What program does she use? The same one she's used since they got the "brand new" 486... 7 years ago. Why hasn't she upgraded? because it works.
I understand your points, and agree that there have been advances that have helped people. I know behind the scene stuff is mostly computer driven, but there are still airline crashes.
Now I've forgotten what the original topic was. Suffice it to say, computer engineers help the world work more smoothly. They dont' help the world work.
-ex
Living in a country which had been under US colonial rule for the first half of this century, I'd say the US is to blame for a large part of what our gov't is today. What our culture is today, also.
We like US products. In fact, our poor people will prefer US brands over local, cheaper brands whenever they can afford it. Are we to blame? or is it the overwhelming pressure of advertising?
Of course, I'm not saying this was done on purpose, but the "colonial mentality" problem is a huge part of third world poverty. The best and the brightest of our youth want a green card.
Yes, we're happy with US products because we've been conditioned that way.
We've held elections. We've staged revolutions. Yes, it's been done before. No change. After we win, the US State Department moves in.
The internet is very simple. I don't know why there is so much confusion about its worth or the discussion of it as a "fad". This simply does not make sense to me.
.com-mie bastards"
Imagine if everyone got together and decided to take existing businesses and people, string them together with a single, (relatively) high-speed connection and then normalized the data between them (or at least published their access methods). Now you are imagining what people are calling the "internet."
FOLKS, THE INTERNET ECONOMY IS THE REGULAR ECONOMY BUT HIGHLY AUTOMATED. (BY ITSELF THE INTERNET IS NOTHING- WHAT WE ARE CALLING THE INTERNET IS NOTHING LESS THAN THE SUM TOTAL OF ALL OF THE PEOPLE/BUSINESSES CONNECTED TOGETHER AT HIGHER SPEEDS AND MORE-ACCESIBLE STANDARDS THAN EVER BEFORE)
its not a fad. it's not going away, and its not going to slow down. if you are going to look for the next "fad," you misunderstood the internet, the power of literal and figurative networks, and the value of distributed "processing".
yours truly,
puppetluva
- "I'm sick of all of these
Most people that work on Internet related projects do it because they like it. Sure, their are other issues, but if you look at very smart people, they tend to work exactly where they want to because they can. This leads one to think that rather then stealing a mind away from another industry, the internet has allowed a mind to work where it is happiest and thus most productive.
You could have everyone in the world work on a cure for cancer. If you did I am sure a cure would be found much faster but at the same time the world would starve without food, freeze without power and in general fall apart. Lots of people would be working on a good thing but doing it very badly because they are don't like being a researcher. FED chief Allen Greenspan has been sited as saying that increased productivity of the american worker, especially in the technology industry, is one of the biggest reasons for our boom. People are most productive when they are happy. Smart people that are making a lot of money with internet companies are working where they are most productive. 100 years ago they might not be there. I am programmer. It is what I eat, sleep, and drink (to borrow from my company's ads). 100 years ago, I would have been doing something else but I know that I wouldn't have as productive because I wouldn't have been as happy doing anything else as I am programming today.
There is no shortage of workers in other fields because too many "smart people" are going into the internet. To be honest, the opposite is true. Not enough very smart people are geting involved with the internet and the tech. industry in general. Companies are begging the government to raise immigration limits so that more IT people from other countries can help meet the demand. The demand is so high their are too many people in the IT industry that are not smart enough. Their are tons of people who never studied comp. sci. or EE in college working on important things in the industry. This opens the door for lots of buggy software and hardware and less productivity for people that use this technology. In the old days only a few elite people wrote a program or maintained a server. Now anyone that can run the Visual C++ tutorial writes applications. Anyone that can access the Windows NT Help runs a server. My mother's firm used the head of their accounting department because, "he seems pretty good with computers."
Further proof of this opposite effect is the male to female ratio in most tech. jobs and in EE and comp sci. university classes. It is horrible. Millions of very smart women are not going into this industry and I feel it is for the wrong reasons. I do not believe it is because all of them just don't like it. Many are not exposed to it or are pushed away from it. This theme extends to math and science in general. It is still a widely believed but unproven thought that women are not as good in math and science as men. Garbage! It is a fact that statistics show men are called on far more often then women in math and science classrooms. This is a very real problem!
-- soldack
Well I personally think technology that has been around awhile and doesn't continually change every few months will be "stable". Take the TV for instance, it's pretty much the same thing it was 40yrs ago. Although now you have bigger screens, color, and better quality of picture. Now this is where things get interesting take a look at the computer industry say 40 years ago. I don't think we really even had what we would call a computer to today standards. :> Even if we look at how computers have changed within the past 10 years it's pretty impressive. Just think of all the things we could be doing and are going to do in the future.
:> However computers are imperfect beings created by imperfect beings(Not an exact quote but close).
:->
I think me using my house as an example was a poor example on the "stable" side of the discussion although it does make sense in the "ever changing" side of it. If you take my house for instance I just recently put in some wiring to be able to turn a light in front of my house from the front of the house, the back of the house or the Garage in back. I wanted this ability for convenience more than anything else. Now I used one four way switch and two three way switches and ran the wire. This is a pretty simple thing to do. Plus the only things involved that could be defective or broken is the switches or the copper wire itself. Now when I wired this I could have made a mistake. I could have put the red wire where the black wire is supposed to go and thus it wont work. Now lets take a look at this at a more complex thing such as a microprocessor. A microprocessor is a pretty complex thing(unless you actually make them:>). Now just think of all the millions of little transistors in them and during design think of the possible errors that could have been made. It's not that engineers making them don't know what they're doing it's just the fact that them being human can make an error. Now since we have such a complex thing, and being prone to errors(nothing is perfect) we now have something that could possibly fail or just not work. So this where we come into the problem of sometimes things just don't always work perfect and you'll always need someone to correct it. As the future progresses I believe things will just become more and more complex.
Now lets take this one step farther into the OS area of things. Take an operating system such Windows NT. Microsoft has millions of lines of code which we all know has lots of errors in it. Now I'm sure they can't possibly find ALL of the errors to make it work 100% of the time. Now say we throw in an Operating System such as Linux which has fewer lines of code(I think still in the millions) however it's free. You also get the code with Linux so anyone that knows anything about programming can look at this code and if they find errors correct them then tell the person who wrote it about the bugs. Then you get a bug fixed and no one will have to worry about it. Both of the Operating Systems are prone to errors but each one is given to the end user in a different way and if the end user knows any bit of programming can correct any errors s/he finds in Linux, however you can't in Windows NT.
Now if we look at this from a Star Trek point of view with their Operating Systems just working. In Star Trek it seems everyone helps everyone out. This is because in the future as Gene Roddenberry saw it, every one helped everyone out, there is no one homeless, hungry, etc. Now it would be safe to assume everyone does what they want to do. So perhaps looking at this aspect of things the OS(LCARS) that runs all of the computer in systems in the Federation(Well at lest in Starfleet systems ASFAIK) is maybe an "Open Source" type of thing allowing anyone in the Federation to view the code for LCARS and submit changes/bug fixes allowing things to just work.
Using Star Trek as a future reference is maybe a poor thing to do, but at lest we have some type of reference point on how things could be in the future. Like I said earlier I think in the future things will work better but we'll still have bugs and problems in them however things will probably work better than they do now or have ever worked before. You will still have people's needs changing and wanting more convenience(like me wanting the ability to flip a switch in 3 different locations). With these added conveniences we will still make errors and need to correct them. Large cooperation's such as Microsoft need to fix their bugs quickly and promptly without us having to wait ages to have the problems fixed. Companies also need to have better quality testing and management needs to allow programmers to spend more time fixing and checking for bugs. I think doing those things will improve the quality of our software and then maybe we will have everything just work.
Are you sure technology will ever stabilize?
:)
:)
Even on Star Trek they're always making some modification or repairing something or another.
Anyhow the thing I noticed the most about the technology industry is someone always wants something better or someone always wants some type of feature added into something. Even at work I would(almost) be out of a job if someone didn't want a change in something or another. I think it's perhaps the end users themselves that drive the speed at which technology moves. Perhaps one day no one would say, "Boy I wish this could do this" Perhaps one day no one will want anything new and be just content with they have. You're always going to have to change something, add something or remove something.
Take my house for example it's had little things added and removed in it's life span(25yrs) and it STILL isn't "completed"-- the way we like it. There's always something you wish you had on the house or something different. For instance you may think, "Gee, I wish I had a wall outlet there" or "You know I want to have Green walls in the dinning room instead of White walls" It's the same concept with computers, everyone wants something a tad more convenient or a tad different or something that does whatever entirely different.
So maybe our computers will work like they do on Star Trek. Although who's to say that when you're interfacing Data to the ships main computer something goes wrong? Just think of all the times they're modifying that stupid Doctor in Voyager? Or I could give you 100's or so of other eposides where life just ain't perfect.
So really you can't create a perfect system from people who are imperfect.
Yup.. it is strange that this debate happened now.. with me just about to graduate and going into the industry.
:) /.ers about his views..
Makes me think twice..
Having chosen an IT field of job am I doing it just becos it is cool or as Rob put it, I feel that many/most brilliant ( Note I didn't say all.. will come to that later) pple are in that filed.
Now to come to the topic in had..
* Well pple are guided by their interest. U end up where u mind wnats to be working (atleast if u listen to it) It is true that any moderately clever guy will succeed in any job he takes. It is not just the case of IT guys. Maybe Rob had this impression becos, as he said most of his friends are IT guys !
* I have to really disagree when Rob says that all clever guys are in IT/computer fields. Ifd that was so I am sorry we would be dead by now. To name just a few concrete examples Stephen Hawkins, late Richard Feynman, Salman Rushdie and the list goes on..
* Rob brought the point of CEO of Sun well, how is it that he forgets the other CEO of other companies other than in IT field.
To sum the above points, IT guys are very intellignet guys, but pardon me they ar enot the only intelligent ones. It is another matter that most politicians are stupid !
BTW is Rob facing a mid life crisis ??
An oft asked questions in interviews is "What would you have done if u weren't in this xxx field u are in right now" ( substitute xxx with IT in this case). Looks like Rob wanted to inform the whole
I am all ears Rob.. way to go
Manifest
... "follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind
...allow researchers from around the world to communicate with each other more easily. Thus the internet allows creative/intelligent people of all fields, not just computer science to interact and share their ideas amongst themselves.
Thus the internet increases combined intellegence, rather than draining it away.
Disclaimer: I am writing from Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America, so I may be a little biased, but who cares...
:)
Yesterday I was at Expomanagement, which was running on Buenos Aires. There was a videoconference with Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte and all the gurues and sort like.
They point that Internet Economy is helping South America and Asia... Whow!. It is quite sad than, despite the boom, in the last four years the number of people who died from starvation GROW in US.
In South America, there is a great breach between poor and rich, and in Argentina only 400.000 people has Internet access (total pop is 35 million).
I believe that this boom will only make US richer, because they benefit from having the initial advantage... South America can't repeat Taiwanese or Japanese boom... We will only geet poorer.
The global economy will grow if and only you ppl realize than is in YOUR benefit helping Third World.
Paul - Running a beautiful net of k6-2 & Imacs
He is the Path, the Truth and the Life
Twenty-five years ago, the experts predicted that the number of programming and software design jobs would steadily decrease. The rationale was that as the tools improved and computer skills became more prevalent, experts in other fields would be writing the applications and that IT folks would only be needed to improve the tools.
Now, the experts are predicting the same thing regarding tools for Internet applications.
Meanwhile, the end users are still waiting for the productivity increases that would come from applications that allow them to do things the way they do them, rather then forcing them to change to adapt to the rigid structures enforced by the application software.
The users have been thwarted by a succession of monopolies who have a financial interest in resisting significant change.
I see hope in the current situation - not frustration or despair. We all know that the best software developers prefer to work on projects that interest them. Is it a coincidence that Open Source software is seeing a resurgence at the same time when so many good software folks are attaining relative financial independence? I think not.
Look what some of the large software companies are doing to coax these folks into working for them - paid sabaticals to work on "personal" projects, relaxing the rules about work done in "free time", making company computer resources available for Open Source projects, etc. This is real progress.
Look at the benefits being reaped, world-wide by such software efforts as Grass, as an example of how this software improves the life of many. Data presented through Grass has help with flooding predictions, drought predictions, pollution control, and many other areas. Now that Grass has been released through the GPL, I expect that it will improve significantly, especially in the UI area.
The next step, of course is to free the data. This is increasingly important at a time where some are trying to lock it up and make it only available to a select few and at a high price. But awareness can thwart this move and make the data available to the public.
I am optomistic. Even the discussion here and articles such as the one today in Silicon Valley Life play an important part in shaping the concept of social responsibility (and opportunity) for IT professionals.
--doc
I was reading Rob's comments about the internet being a brain-drain. The implication being that the intelligence and effort going into the internet might be more efficiently put to use in other industries. It made me think of the time in US history when most of the railroads were built. All the effort and the resources put to that, if put into something else at that time, could have produced something really amazing, but instead, we got railroads.
:-(
The way I see it, we're building infrastructure now. That's what we're in the middle of. The true benefits of this infrastructure won't really be reaped for many years to come.
Someone else made the comment about each generation having it's industry magnet that draws the learners, the college degrees. I will weigh now as saying that the next generation's magnet will be bio-tech. Of this I have no doubt.
Think about it. 77 Million baby boomers will be retiring in 10-30 years. They have a lot of money. They have a vested interest in staying alive as long as possible. Bio-tech is making huge strides and showing they can deliver on a lot of promises. So, that's where the boom will be, 20-30 years from now. Maybe sooner.
Also, regulations of drug testing and FDA approval will be relaxed. Drugs will get to market quicker, thus making bio-tech more profitable. Why? Cause the larger elderly population will a)have all the political power and b)be impatient for medical improvements.
By this reasoning, we won't be ramping up space exploration, though
Follow the money, and the future is clear....
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
When I hear this argument, it seems like I'm mostly hearing fear talking. Loss of manufacturing jobs means those who used to do manufacturing are left trying to work in fields they weren't trained for. This local "bad" is then generalized and feared as a global "bad". But I don't think the extrapolation is accurate. What's bad for some is not necessarily bad for all. It's cruel sometimes, but I think that's the way it is.
Individuals have to be adaptable to the times. The fact that our economy demands a better and different education than the industrial era demanded is not a bad thing. Industrial type education (where children are basically prepared to be good workers in factories - where attendance and discipline are the most important aspects of a worker) won't do a service economy much good. But if we get over our fear of change, I think things wouldn't seem bad, just different. Maybe even better.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I think it is a good thing... not necessarily because it makes people a lot of money, but that it networks a lot of people together. Information has and will always be a valuable comodity and it
has become 'cheaper' to obtain for people on the Internet. This lower barrier to information can
only help people gain the background information needed to dream up further improvements for mankind.
Sidenote on jobs and the boom ending:
I don't think wages will go down that much... what I think will happen is all the people who learned to program using those Learn Foo in 21 Days will finally be exposed and thrown out. Not to sound elitist but programming is not for everyone and requires certain kinds of thinking that many people just can not do.
Denise Caruso has been pointing this out in her NY Times column "DIGITAL COMMERCE" for several months now. Her latest "Internet Economy Grows on Plans, Not Products" of October 25, 1999 covers how the investor money is hung on plans and not real live companies gaining revenue.
To use your analogy of the printing press, the invention itself can be compared to the internet in that it changed the way information was forever created and shared. But, do you think that the printing press spurred people to suddenly start thinking new thoughts all of a sudden? No. Change would have occured, albeit at a much slower pace.
i think that the point that is being made, and that in your reply you seem to have missed, is that the internet allows new modes of thought that wouldn't otherwise happen. The tools we use affect how we think of things, and what we think is possible.
it's although worth noting your comment about the printing press: without the printing press, even if the thoughts were there, change wouldn't happen at a slower pace, but most likely not at all because there would be no way to effectively communicate these thoughts (many of the changes brought about were dependent on a large number of people being informed at the same time).
The internet functions in the same way of expanding the realm of the possible. (at no point does the ac mention anything about the internet being the end all be all of anything--i think that was a notion that you've simply been projecting).
Throughout history humanity has being going upward, like a bellcurve extending upwards and at the same time the base extending ever outwards. The Net is important, and /. is as well, at the top end, and here is why. The Net allows people to communicate without skin colour, without nationality, without religious bias (it had to be said), we are equals for once. As for /. one of my freinds who is doing a masters degree in sociology has gained much from The Hellmouth series and various other articles on here, and so do we all, I think you might be surprised in 5 or 10 years at the effect that this forum has had on many aspects of life in general, this is a place for ideas, and discussions about our collective future. Now I agree with you about politicians, most are not like the readers and contributors on /. and I dont think that the present type of politics is designed for the people with the best approach to get elected. I see no point in going into politics, my ideas might work, but I dont come with any ideology, I dont support ideas that are there to make people feel comfortable, I ask questions rather than dispense quick, simplistic answers. Politics is slow and clumsy, those creating the technology for the future are speedy, pinpoint accurate, and can easily overwhelm politicians when they get in the way as in the defeat of the Clipper chip and all the Net censorship bills. For a taste of where we are going check out the following article about Ashoka which supports social entrepreneurs, and they have a web site too :-
h tm
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jan/ashoka.
http://www.ashoka.org/
Just remember, we are part of a process, we stand for the future and though most of our names will never be recalled in a century, they will remember what we built together.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Don't you remember the lesson from Econ 101?
Some places have an advantage at producing certain goods. Don't fight that. If the US
can produce good food cheap, let them. Then all those local farmers in 3rd world countries can get down to doing something they can make money at.
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
Why do you say it's not good food? Wheat is wheat, right?
I'd also disagree with you that the gov't is helping farmers. More like helping ADM.
At the end of the day, should hundreds of folks live at (or below) subsistence level because their farming implements consist of a wooden stick and some muscle power? Or should that one dude in Kansas just ride his combine listening to Alabama and grow their food for them so they can get down to the serious business of making wiring harnesses for cars, or airplanes, or whatever?
What's going to grow the world's economy more?
Do anal-retentive people hyphenate 'anal retentive'?
they may both be true, that's statistics for you.. all depends on how you calculate.
if you divide the total income of wages by women by the number of women and do the same for men, women probably do make less. you can check it by monthly wages, and still end up lower for women, because (e.g.) less hours worked. compare hourly wages, etcera. it can probably even be rigged to look like men make less cash. Statistics are worse than lies, because they misrepresent truth.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
You are right. Some bright people actually use the internet as a tool to get their real work done. Can you imagine that?
I think Roblimo's use of the term Internet is a bit broad for the point he's trying to make anyway, especially when he points to companies (Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, 3Com) who are not soley internet companies. Rather, they were innovating long before they embraced the internet. I think Roblimo should have went with omputer related techonology as opposed to internet, but then that wouldn't be quite as sexy, would it?
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Listen, the internet is not some distinct entity that lives off on its own. It is part of society. The internet alone can't change society. Rather, it is the people behind the internet who feel empowered by the ability to create virtual soap boxes who will instill change.
Remember, the internet is a medium . Granted, it is a powerful medium, but give credit to people.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
You don't understand my ire because I didn't express any ire.
To use your analogy of the printing press, the invention itself can be compared to the internet in that it changed the way information was forever created and shared. But, do you think that the printing press spurred people to suddenly start thinking new thoughts all of a sudden? No. Change would have occured, albeit at a much slower pace.
Yes, the internet has brought about change, and will continue to do so. Let us not become deluded into thinking that the internet is "it". The internet has not obviated the use or need for printing presses. Books will continue to be printed. Once the next thing that surpasses the internet comes along it more than likely will not bring about the end of the internet. It will just be the next great thing.
If you had asked Guttenberg whether he could have conceived of anything that would surpass the printing press he more than likely would have said no. We are at the same place in the internet revloution. We can't fathom anything better. But there will be. Mankind will conceive it and create it. Not the internet.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
This has got to be the biggest bunch of malarkey I've heard in quite some time. I can't believe that someone who appears to be quite normal would foist this nonsensical garbage upon us.
Let me list some of Roblimo's pearls:
1) Internet is spurring latest economic golden era.
This is true. It can be compared to the junk-bond era of the '80s where a lot of paper wealth was created but not a whole lot of good came out of all those companies getting bought out and leveraged. I mean slashdot is cool and all, but exactly how has created anything economically? Glad to see Roblimo at least ackowledge that much.
2) Internet boom-era has siphoned talent away from other fields, stagnating those fields.
This is a comical assertion. First, Roblimo assumes that the development in the computer fields is somehow remarkable. What evidence does Roblimo present? There are a bunch of people smarter than Roblimo who have actually presented proofs to suggest that the explosive growth in technology is not extraordinary. To then suggest that the automotive and space fields have been slowed by this brain drain is meer suppostion. It'll take more than the two case studies Roblimo has presented here.
I'm always amused by the articles that Roblimo and Hemos toss out there. They seem intent on mimicing John Katz by putting out articles that are gauranteed to generate debate, but the underlying issues are usually shallow and not thought out clearly.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I have to disagree. Many third world countries suffer, not because of the lack of farming (they are lacking, but many countries suppliment their crops with food) but from inept and corrupt governments.
You also claim that most of the people you meet are much smarter. I really dont find this to be the case. Example: My schools compuer network. We support dial-in that has been broken for 3 weeks now b/c, well, no one is real sure what novell is doing right now. Example 2: the majority of computer software.
I also feel that the internet and computer age is more than a boom. It is as big as the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past. Eventually many jobs will be automated out and the humans left working will only be produing new information. We will not even be moving information at that point just making new stuff. Through computers we are on the brink of providing humanity with enough production capabilities and free time to either destroy us all, or finally achieve human unity and begin to expand our frontiers both physically and mentally.
In essence I think the Information Revolution (which has barely even started) is one of the most important events in human history. I hope we respond to it correctly. Ben
"A computer engineer may make more money, but how does he affect the lives of millions in a real sense? I have yet to find _ANY_ software that helps my parents get on with their daily life."
I believe that your argument is significantly in error here. Your assertion may be true when talking about applications intended for a PC or Mac, owned by a typical consumer, but is very very wrong when applications used behind-the-scenes are considered.
I used to work for a company that produced medical records software. Shortly after we released a new version with improved searching capabilities, a diet pill was recalled. Doctors with the software were able to quickly find all their patients who used the pill and notify them to stop doing so immediately. Doctors with other software, or no computer, could tack a notice on the front door of their office and hope that the right people read it. Other than having the right medical records software, there was no other feasible way that those patients could be identified. That 'increased productivity' was just one example of computer software saving lives.
Your parents are only unaffected by computer software if they have never: flown in an airplane, been hooked up to a machine in a hospital, benefitted from improved agricultural techniques, etc.--since all of these things are closely related to the quality of the software used in their design/production/use/improvement.
It is easy to forget that the vast majority of computer programmers have nothing to do with the next version of Word or Quake. They and their software are VERY MUCH affecting the world, every day.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
i think that computer related fields bring a disproportionate number of ppl in general, and out of those the best/brightest get to the top....
since there are more ppl to begin with, it makes sense that there would be more better/brighter people
i personaly can't deal w/ all those ppl, so i'm going into math, and i'll just use puters like the tool they are
Need a Catering Connection
The next target of the geek community may be bio-technology, or it may be agriculture, or it may be something noone around today ever even thought of. But the way I see it, there is always a single place where the intelligencia go, and the second-raters will always be everywhere else.
The geek world is like an antibody. It attacks a problem as it comes up, and doesn't let go until its solved. Soon we will see a new problem, and all pounce on it, leaving the internet in a precarious balance with only the second-raters taking it over.
This is partly true, but it seems the second raters tend to come in, take what the innovators developed, and slowly stabilize and refine it. As an example, look at Manufacturing or Farming, they are Old Tech, but in their day they attracted the best and brightest. Once we had the big picture and the process down we moved on to let the second string pick it up and refine it. Now Manufactoring is ungodly efficient and 3% of the population feeds the other 97% with plenty to spare. As we leave the giant conglomoration of New Tech behind for the latest shiny toy the less flighty, less easily bored members of our society pick up our innovations and finish up the projects we started. All we do is take care of the hard/interesting part. We never REALLY finish anything. Our entire Geek Society has ADD.>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
for(bool offtopic=true;offtopic=false;slashdot.comment()) { Hmm... Roblimo could drive himself in the motorcade - he already has the presidential limosine(sp?) :)
:)
// hmm...that sounds really disjointed.
If we had Robin for president, do you think he'd overturn all the encryption laws?
Though I like the fact that, as a friend of mine puts it, the Canadian Prime Minister can be mugged as easily as I can. (Unlike the US.)
}
OFTC: By the community, for the community
Every generation has its intellectual magnet. It used to be industry, then it was the war machine, and now its the internet. Each one has been a direct result of the previous, and the next boom will take all the bright folks left from the internet world and move them on to the next step.
And like industry, and the war machine, the internet will be left incomplete, and inefficient, but nevertheless there to stay.
The next target of the geek community may be bio-technology, or it may be agriculture, or it may be something noone around today ever even thought of. But the way I see it, there is always a single place where the intelligencia go, and the second-raters will always be everywhere else.
The geek world is like an antibody. It attacks a problem as it comes up, and doesn't let go until its solved. Soon we will see a new problem, and all pounce on it, leaving the internet in a precarious balance with only the second-raters taking it over.
We've been there, we've done that, we'll do it again.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
thank god we live in a world where women make a fraction of what men make:
Denmark women make 86% of men's pay
USA women make 76% of men's pay
Japan women make 50% of men's pay
etc...
Oh and thank god 50 of the top 100 financial entities are corporations, and that the richest 350 billionaires have more wealth than the poorest 40% of the world...
but dont take my word for it, do some research of your own, the results are scary.
Take a look at any of the other huge industries right now, automobile, oil, sugar, and beef. Take any of these industries and their resource, technology, marketing, research, and distribution departments, and you could make a great difference to many people. But that will never happen because of the cut-throat nature of our ideology. There are enough resources in the world to provide every person with the basic necessities, however there is not enough money for every person to pay for it at the prices asked by corporations and business. This point is further shown by the fact that governments around the world pay farmers to NOT grow food. And my favorite one is the way the US government has always reacted to foreign democratically elected governments, e.g. Chile, Nicaragua, Guatamala, Iran, Congo... the list goes on. Do any research on the history of any of these countries and you will know what i mean. Ultimately economics drive us and what we do, and until our ideologies change nothing will ever happen to solve world problems.
The bottom line is that the internet industry is not the only industry which could be taken apart and used to benefit human-kind.
I reccomend this book: GLOBAL PROBLEMS AND THE CULTURE OF CAPITALISM, by Richard Robbins
I enjoyed the article and agree with many of the author's points and concerns. The frantic pace of the internet, business combinations and knowledge greatly increasing are all repeating history and fulfilling prophecy at the same time.
In the book of Genesis, after the flood, men were making great progress building the Tower of Babel until God noticed how rapidly they were progressing. United in purpose, with one language there was no practical limit to their accomplishments. The trouble was, their purpose did not take into account God's wishes. Thus, He threw a monkey wrench into the engine of progress. He confused their language; stopping progress.
We are returning via the internet, etc. to the days of the Tower of Babel. This is forecast in the book of Daniel: "knowledge will greatly increase" in the time of the end. Because of the unifying power of the internet confederacies for "evil" purposes will (are) greatly accelerate; likewise, seekers of the truth are able also to use this mechanism to rapidly advance present, saving truths. Sadly, the last group are in the minority.
Let us keep our feet and eyes focused on the upward path and we have nothing to fear. The duration of the ultimate worldwide confederacy is ONE symbolic hour! Those confederating for selfish purposes should note what God says about it in Psalms 37 and 59: "He laughs."
At it's most extreme, what do you do when we have complete automation and total freetime with unlimited technical resources? You turn to the arts, which we technocrats often shun. When a true Holodeck is completed, then we can enguage in all the sex, life activity, and AD&D modules that we would have been doing if we weren't spending our time trying to simulate these things.
as douglas adams wrote in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy: the people who seek to lead are the least capable of leading(paraphrased). the world isn't lacking intelligent minds in fields other than computing/internet. it's just that these people are simply not interested in leading. they are interested in changing things, just not from the leadership aspect. perhaps one day that will change, but then again, if one of these people chooses to lead, will s/he be a less than capable leader?
This article has some very good points on where our productivity and creativity has been focused. However, there are many professions that make use of the efforts that have gone into computer science over the past several decades.
Bad example, but look at the tools that animation designers have available now vs. 5, 10, 20 and 50 years ago.
What about simulation? Engineers can design-test-refine aircraft, bridges, automobiles, almost anything without having to build a prototype...
gotta run, but this is an interesting article.
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Of course this situation would cause a huge chunk of people to be chronicly unemployed and could never survive in today's global economic system. Sure you'd get 100 mpg, but will you have money to pay for even one gallon this week? Imagine fierce population control and lots of crime by the idle poor.
The best, most efficent technology has always lost out to a the most profitable one. Yes, its stupid and wasteful but it does keep money circulating and keeps creating jobs.
Maybe if society never bought into the industrial revolution and we lived in small solar powered homes raising our own livestock and crops or non-mass production trade, then the wonderous marvels of ingenuity could be very beneficial and practical because you wouldn't be subject to today's economic realities.
But alas, we did buy into the industrial revolution and now we're stuck supporting an inefficent infrastructure, that includes our huge population, mainly through making sure technological advances are profitable and economicaly practical, not efficent and revolutionary.
Sorry I don't have more to say, but this article was brilliant. I agree with everything it says. Thanks for the great reading!
thanks
One of the main wonders of the internet age is increased access to information. while it is a shame that some brilliant people are not working of agriculture, that does not mean we should knock the internet. People who have never been exposed to the world as a whole now have the opportunity to learn from millions of other people with different points of view. It is freedom of speech at the highest level.
For example, there is a group of Afghani women who post images and news about human rights violations Taliban on their website (run from Pakistan). While there are people who are making huge amounts of money on some silly ecommerce stuff, I believe that these early days of the internet will be exaulted as a new age of information, one to be celebrated, not reviled.
I don't believe the internet harms society at all. It's everything that's behind the internet. There is a lot of hype about the internet and how you can make a lot of money off it. Not all, but quite a few people's lives are driven by the lure of money, and lots of it. I know a lot more people that I'd care to that are going into computers just for the money, not for the love and it's something that doesn't seem like it's going to change. Some of the brightest, smartest people know that's where the money is and that's where they are going to go. It's really not about the internet that's harming society, it's what it embodies to most people in the first and second world countries that's harming it. But the world revolves around money to make it revolve these days. We've already proven that communism doesn't work.
I personally plan to go into some field of Engineering. I've already determined that plopping my ass in front of a computer 8hr/5day to code all life long is not something I love to do. Problem solving and continued learning is just where it's at for me and lucky for me, this field is a good generator for income that will keep me with a lot of the latest toys scattered around my house. But sadly, not all jobs have such good pay and you already know that people like to have a high income (and low taxes). So quite a few people are going to go where the money is and not what their passion dictates (and often, it's the area where they are best in).
And about Politics? Politics doesn't yield a lot of money. Who wants to put themselves up in the public and media as a scapegoat to be blaimed when something goes wrong? One whose life will be on record no matter when and where. I don't think too many people are that willing to put themselves up for that. Perhaps all politicians are alike because they are the mindset that are willing to put themselves in that sort of position.
People go to whatever field where the media has hyped where all the money is... the internet happens to be one of the bigger areas.
~~~NO CARRIER~~~
Now you have a many-to-many relationship, although the dynamics of communication and it's content have not changed
um.. maybe the fax machine had a little something to do with the fall of a certain wall in Berlin, and a certain big bad bear that built it? Many-to-many relationships enabled by networked info machines distinctly changes the both dynamic of communication and the content carried by it.
If this evident fax effect serves as a precedent, society is likely adapt to the Internet, rather than the other way around. Moore's Law will let you buy today's laptop in 2010 for $15-$20, and it will also be a cel phone: Gilder's Law, (bandwidth triples yearly to 2025) suggests that broadband duplex communication will cost pennies or even be free. Metcalf's Law, (the power of a network is the square of its nodes) will empower billions of people to trade learning and tap human ingenuity like never before. The party hasn't even started..
Roblimo wonders if all the intelligence focused on 'net wouldn't be better focused on eliminating poverty. Well, there's probably no better tool than the 'net to do this: when it costs ten bucks for an access device and the connect fee is negligable, earning only $350 a year won't be such a barrier to entry. Informed populations won't be so easily kept under despotic thumbs. And we're likely to see globally-connected leap-froggin' knowledge workers undercut high wages paid in the developed world. It's already happening in places like Bangalore.
Sure, it's we the people that make the changes.. but how easily can we make them without decentralized electronic communications?
Bill Clinton has many character flaws, a lack of intelligence is not one of them. He is an extremely smart person; he's probably the smartest president since Woodrow Wilson. I agree that most politicians are not as smart as most high tech industry executives. But most corporate executives are not as smart as high tech executives. It should also be noted that the presidents of Ivy League universities are far smarter than most high tech executives. Smart people may work at Micro$oft and Sun, but they are not, in general, as smart as the people working at MIT and Harvard.
I've had my run in with various people in both the computer science department at my school here and with the political science department also... The last straw that broke me away from the computer science department was the lack of openmindedness. The simple fact that you can look at something from many angles and do it a "different" way than the norm caused most teachers to simply mark it wrong since it was not the same answer as the book. Originality is not lacking in computers, most definitely not... But its all along the same thread... Take an existing something and modify it, not say, take someone's idea, and someone else's, and another's, and make something totally new out of it.
For all the hackers/crackers/cyberpunks/curious people out there, I remain amazed by you desire to change the system, and I do agree with many points. But the only thing is, just imagine if all of you studied the system you're trying to fight and fight them on their own ground... If you put that same desire into political science rather than computer networks... Not only might it increase you chances, but you'll get out more and meet more people... The freedom provided by the Internet is not real... Just my food for thought...
While it may seem like everybody in computer/internet-related fields are exceptionally bright, it is not true that all exceptionally bright people are drawn into computer/internet-related fields.
Every field has it's exceptionally bright. Be it agriculture, the arts, biology, computer science, chemistry, physics, education, engineering. Proof of this is available at your nearest University. There will always be some who are exceptionally bright and an endless source of creative ideas. They are not all in computer/internet-related fields. I wouldn't even say that the majority of exceptionally bright people are in computer/internet-related fields
This brings me to your second point, that once this "internet-boom" is over, what will one do. If as you say, most comp/net-related workers are bright, I'm sure they will find something to do to put the bread on the table. They may not have as comfortable a lifestyle as they currently do, but they will survive.
But I do agree that many (might I say majority) of our political figures are unfit to run this country, be it your town's mayor or the country's president.
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
"Internet Brain Drain" is simply one small part of an even larger problem: "Profit Brain Drain."
The best and the brightest are going into business, because Western "Civilization" values a person based on the size of their paycheck. Currently, the Internet is the way to go, and it attracts many of the best minds.
Money isn't, in and of itself, the problem; where we stray is in the glorification of oppulence, in our fascination with useless celebrity, with the implied goal of becoming the next Bill Gates. The media feeds the frenzy, and the frenzy feeds the media, in a feedback loop that pushes us higher and higher into the stratosphere of greed, farther away from our fellow man and the evolution of a wise society.
Consider AIDS research. Various companies are all working on proprietary vaccines and cures; scientists at these companies do not exchange ideas, because doing so might dilute their employer's exclusive claims to a profitable product. If Company A has one part of the cure, and Company B has the second part, the twain are unlikely to meet, and the complete solution is delayed or never realized.
I've been in third world countries; subjects like "Linux vs Windows" and "Is Java a Useful Tool?" don't have much meaning there. Hell, "Ford vs Chevy" and "Is Gore boring?" don't have much meaning there either! What matters is clean water, good food, and a safe place to live. But for the most part, humanity's ills can't be solved with a quick rewrite of the code or a run through the debugger. I wonder sometimes if I enjoy programming because it gives me a sense of power and accomplishment; my journeys into the "real" world have often left me feeling helpless and incompetent.
We have this very odd sense of predestination in Western "civilization" -- if someone is poor, they must somehow deserve it. We expect people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", failing to realize that they don't have any boots.
I'll bet there's some Navajo kid, living in a trailer that lacks plumbing, who'd put me to shame as a programmer -- but he'll never get the chance, because he'll never have a computer to learn the skills. It isn't his capability that matters, it's his lack opportunity.
Certainly this isn't a modern problem, and you can't lay blame at the foot of the Internet -- but if we are ever to attain civilization, we must begin to solve these problems, finding a way to focus our best minds on what really matters.
I agree, the whole point is silly. The skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set needed for technical work. The alarming thing is that the skill set needed for politics is orthogonal to the skill set for government as well.
That's the problem - when democracy was invented there was no such profession as politics. Now that a political profession has arisen, government is run by politicians, not by statesmen. The skill set needed to be elected against professional competition is so specialized that there is no room left in the politician's life to learn anything sensible about government.
The statesman needs to communicate and to understand, while the politician needs to propagandize and oversimplify. True, the technical professional needs a little of each, but mostly we need to understand inanimate systems. Engineers and coders are not especially drawn from the same talent pool that either the existing political class or the hoped-for statesman class might be drawn from.
The way we can help is by providing tools to the world to sort through the one-sided garbage and get to the wierd multifaceted truth. Maybe the web can serve this purpose, and maybe our sort can help in that way.
It's hard to imagine the technical professional who'd make a good statesman, any more than the good politician makes a good statesman. I think it would be excellent if more of us devoted more of our efforts to the public good. That doesn't mean it makes sense to suggest that our failure to go into conventional politics is what's causing governance to slip ever further into futility.
What we can export from our culture is skepticism, inquiry, and a resistance to hype (despite our production of so much hype? or because of it?). We can help the public do a better job of not being bamboozled. On the other hand, our streaks of arrogance, self-righteousness, and eccentricity don't lend themselves to governance, so we shouldn't feel guilty about not running for the state assembly or such.
mt
Rob has made some good points but I don't think he brought them all the way to the obvious conclusion, which I don't necessarily blame him for since this forum is mainly about computers.
:)
Here are the two main points that I believe, and that Rob more or less basically stated:
Human greed comes before human need, mainly because high level decisions are made by only a few people (who usually aren't so bright), and thus can swing the direction of our society in their favor.
The internet and computers in general is exasperating the gap between rich and poor, first world and third world.
Rob showed the first point by stating that the best and brightest are in the computer industry. While that of course is not entirely true, there is a lot of truth to it because that's where the money is. Huge amounts of money are being invested here because it is making huge money for a lot of companies. There are a lot of more pressing problems that resources need to be diverted to (pollution control, hunger, economic strife) but they don't make money so they get shoved aside. Sometimes the solutions to these problems are called "politically unfeasable" by those in power. This means, simply, those in power don't care about these problems.
Point number two could probably be restated in that it's the information age in general exasperating the problem. As the current state of technology increases, so does the cost of entry to be a part of it. Thousands of years ago, all you really needed was the ability to gather food or do some basic hunting, there was no economy per say. Today, you need at a bare minimum the ability to read. Last I read this shuts out 23% of AMERICANS , because they are functionally illiterate. In third world countries this number is probably up to over 90%. To truly be sucessful, you usually need a college degree, access to, and a minimal knowledge of, computers. Well, even in America, the college graduation rate isn't that high...around 40% maybe? That's shuting out a lot of people in the country that has the most money and power in the world. The third world? Well, the numbers here might as well be 0%.
Some would say that third world countries cause their own problems through political corruption. This is partly true but is oversimplified; the US government and other powerful countries have a lot to do with it. Sometimes it's direct, sometimes it isn't. The US will generally support any government that allows large corporations to use their natural resources. Since this is obviously unpopular with citizens of these countries, these governments are often brutal dictatorships. If these countries get out of line in some way, we bomb them to hell, like Iraq. If you read almost any non-mainstream political texts you'll see that this is the case. There is too much evidence to simply dismiss what I'm saying here. But I'll let you all figure that out for yourselves, I can't write an entire book here
Basically the rich have their priorities wrong. Instead of trying to help the poor by increasing education budgets, or giving third world countries more than token support, they simply fatten their pockets. In fact, the US exasperates problems in these countries with military arms, leaving a lot of countries in perpetual misery. They're doing nothing to help with the increasing cost of entry into today's economy.
Technology can be used for good or evil. The internet can be used for wonderful things, but we see it being used more and more to simply sell things that people don't need, and do nothing for society. Society has evolved very slowly compared to technology. This gap needs to close very quickly if humanity is going to survive. When animals fight over territory, the only means they have at their disposal is their physical strength. They don't have nuclear weapons like we do.
This is a very good question. If your neighbor was working in a traditional industry, an economist would assume that you neighbor was doing the most he could do for society, by doing the most he could for himself. Of course, such an assumption is obviously false, but it works very well.
However, in the software industry, the government grants monopoly protection in the form of copyrights to the developers of software. This generally results in higher-priced software than one would normally expect.
It's still "fair" pricing -- at least with copyright law, as opposed to patent law, if you don't like what somebody is charging for something, you don't have to pay her.
But the fact remains, under copyright monopolies, prices are determined differently, so the incentives are different, and its reasonable to question whether people are choosing the profession where they can do the most good in the world. (assuming that the amount of good is related to how much you are paid -- obviously false, but better than any other definition I'm aware of).
Bryan
What is next? We had the metal revolutions, the agriculture, the industry, the computer age, and the internet... what is next? And how will humans cope (i use cope since the next step could be a spiral into our doom).
I have several theories on the next step...
1. We will have super computers that can emulate the brain's thought processes (no ai yet, it can just do what we do, but it can't do it by itself)
2. Someone will achieve ai in the computer (the programs programming programs)
3. Other people find ways of hooking our brains to the computers and have brain and comp interface.
4. Stemming off 3, consciousness transfers into other beings (animals/computers)
5. The end will be from either one, either comp ai takes us over, or man will be dependent on the brain interface and a problem happens killing us and again, computer takes over.
Would kinda be neat though. The end product would be a silicon based lifeform (till the computer figures out what else it can use to build itself).
Man, i love tangents, speculations, and philosophy.
yeoua
Well, why exactly would people with enough computer skills who work in the industry and make twice as much as a politician (not all do, but those salaries are quite big, and not all politicians make a lot... president doesn't even break 1000000 bucks, but he gets tons of benefits... ) want to go into the government? He is already affecting the lives of millions if he is working for the right company, and hopefully in a positive light as well. So the computer engineer, is making more, affecting everyone in a positive way, gets his name on a product, what more can you want? Besides, who wants to be branded as a politician in this time and age?
yeoua
A major downside to the rapid growth and economic role of the internet is that it causes all of our governments to want to impose rules, taxes, and such on all websites. IMHO the internet is a place where people should be truly free. as in: no copyright, trademark suits, no patened technology, etc.
Try the massive debt crisis engineered by the incompetence of 1st world bankers and greed of now-dead 3rd world despots, that has been enforced with I.M.F. controls of loans backed by the US's guns and butter. Think of what the US would of been like if Europe had loans billlions to the Confederacy and Union in the Civil War then demanded the victor repay with 17-30% interest. That is basically what we have done to some countries.
These countries spend over 3 times as much servicing there debts as they can afford to spend on education. Forgive the debt that they didn't even get.
Perhaps the answer is to set up a department for computing within the government. That might encourage some of the people now working in the industry to move to politics, thus moving some of the intelligence to somewhere that it can be of more real use. Who really cares if someone keeps a system running, or creates a new wonder program, to most people on the street they are not even aware of the changes, and if they knew they wouldn't see what the fuss was about. Get IT professionals into government. Get the legislation relating to the Internet and IT worked on by professionals, who know what they are talking about, and the real issues at stake. So what if you didn't earn as much, money isn't everything, but having a job which really means something is a lot more satisfying. Most of the legislative problems around now are caused by people with no knowledge making decisions of things they have no understanding of, and having no one to ask that can be trusted. This is the area that needs change in government.
I think that unlike Rob's opinion, the Internet is doing the exact opposite from holding back human innovation and progress in "real issues" - it "drains" the brightest becuase its the current most fastest advancing field in science/commerence/etc, and it provides complex problems for complex minds.
At its current state, Politics is just a like Advertising - you need to convince people they should (vote/buy) some(one/thing), and you need to convince as much of them as you possibly can, this leads to an approach to the MCD and to the escape to the truly gifted to other fields, where they can express themselves in a fulfilling way.
The Internet (and computers in general) are filling the void created, and are rerouting human effort to newer regions not-yet-explored, this will eventually effect ALL mankind, not just the "too-rich-to-think-of-food" and will yield more efficent and new ways of providing jobs, food, houses and other basic needs to everyone...
To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish. ---Euripides
As long as you don't ever change your accounting software.
I have a big bag full of two cents and I'm coming your way.
My first comment is that There Is No Problem. The author seems to think that all the bright people, everywhere, are wrapped up into computer and internet technologies as outlets for their creative outlets, technical and otherwise. This is, of course, simply not so. The internet is my hobby, but what I do for a living is high frequency analog electronics. Basically, specialized radios. And believe me, I know a very large number of people, all of whom are very intelligent, working in that field.
Keeping up with the scientific literature (and my old college contacts) I know perfectly well that there are tremendous numbers of very bright people working in physics, chemistry, biogenetics and mechanical engieering; composing music, writing books, and so forth.
I don't see an internet brain drain.
My second comment is that even if this were happening, There Would Still Be No Problem. There is money to be made in internet technologies, and many people are concentrating on internet technologies, because people want internet technologies. It's as simple as that. A hundred million people have made their hundred million individual choices and the net result has been the influx of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into that particular technology sector.
It seems somehow churlish to engage in what I consider to be a handwringing stream of thought about how much better other things might be if the internet weren't so nifty. This necessarily implies, despite the protestations that "this is all speculation," that the author has a better feel for how the money and talents of hundreds of millions of people (here in the US, in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, etc) should be deployed, than those hundreds fo millions of people.
Postrel would probably class this as a stasist, technocratic viewpoint. I think it's tinged with a bit of arrogance.
Are these decisions sometimes purely hedonistic? Yes, sometimes. And this leads to my third comment-- that the author apparently lacks a certain historical perspective. Why is the internet singled out for this "brain drain" commentary? Well, in fact, it isn't. Going beyond the original author, similar claims have been levied against other efforts-- including our fixation on automobiles, our attempts at space exploration, the movie and entertainment industry... all of it.
I see no difference between those claims, and this, all of them tinged with the ieda that the few or the one know better than the masses how to direct their interests.
My fourth comment, of course, is that this focus on the internet is most certainly not entirely hedonistic. In my profession, we are able to coordinate much larger projects than before, with comparatively smaller efforts, through internet technologies. The ability to lob design specifications-- and designs-- back and forth in seconds rather than in days makes our lives much simpler. The ability to through designs to foundries electronically also makes life easier.
Similar things happen, I'm sure, in all professions. The easy manipulation of data over large distances is, to use a military science metaphor, a force multiplier. What that means is that, used properly, long distance data manipulation makes other large scale endeavors easier. This includes the design of better cars, the exploration and exploitation of space, feeding the poor, and anything else we might think of.
Finally, the author seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too. First, the internet is causing a great sucking brain drain from other more noble fields of endeavor, to the detriment of those other fields. But then, he says, the internet is truly insignificant on a global scale.
Well, that doesn't follow at all. How can there be so much money, and so many of the strongest minds of the present day involved in this whole internet thing.... and yet it still remain globally insignificant at the same time?
One or the other, please.
Not both.
Recently (in an ethics course at University) we were asked if "The continued growth of the Online Society and the power it gives participants to create an augmented reality is a positive step for humankind. " I think the answer I gave in the debate is the same here, we must focus on the part that says IS a positive step, unfortunately most people seem to see one example of the usefulness and success of the internet and assume that the entire conglomeration is like this, where, in truth, there are both positives and negatives associated with it, and not just within the field. Take for example the stories found in J. Katz's Voices from the Hellmouth (somewhere on Slashdot), the internet can have a profound effect on society, unfortunately, people are slow to recognise that this isn't necessarily a good thing. The success of Silicon Valley is not the same as the success of society, or even America.
While I can definitely see the point behind the article, I think there are two types of people currently going into tech fields - those who are extremely gifted with technical things - be they computer programs, electronics sets, or something else entirely, and then those who are in it for the money.
I have to say, I think the majority is covered by the latter half of that statement. That's true for most industries - most lawyers aren't driven by passion for the law, at least not by the time they get out of law school. Managers and directors in companies aren't driven by an urge to lead. They do it because it provides a good income to support their families. And I'm not saying that the people who are doing it for the money aren't bright, excellent people in the industry - I'm saying if the money was somewhere else, they'd be there instead.
Then there are those who no matter what the money was, they'd be doing what they're doing today. Much like teachers, who are one of the most disturbingly underpaid sectors of our society, they love what they do, they feel it has importance, and they do it regarless of lifestyle issues. Could these people be in other engineering fields? Sure, and lots of them are.
Are there people who are utterly brilliant in all ways, and are in an industry where some would consider them to be wasting their talents, when they could be bettering mankind? Probably. But who is to say that one industry is more important for society than another?
I don't think that the lack of pure research into areas such as space exploration can be attributed entirely to brain drain by the computer industry - I'd be more likely to point to where companies think they're going to be making money in 3 years. For whatever reason, companies are looking short-term, not long-term right now, and space is definitely a long-term endeavour.
Eventually, if the work we are doing in computers and the internet is not of benefit to society, I believe that eventually it will come to pass that something else *will* take over the hearts and minds of our bright people. And those who are in it for love will remain, and those who are in it for money will follow to the next great thing.
I would like to commend this article for pointing out the importance of the 'net in the greater context of the world, something I find myself having to point out to people all the time. It's easy to lose perspective.
You make many good points.
I know that I am computer capable, but don't have any degrees yet. Your comment made me realise I will need CS degrees if I want to make money with my skills. I see many advertisements for IT personnel requiring a degree.
The next major frontier, will not allow easy entry with a DIY Gene Splicing Kit available from BioShack(tm)... (nice name though, except for the BiCaps)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Of course I realise it is fiction written by people of whom many are technically ignorant (my remark about downloading/copying was also ironic).
Star Trek depicts a future in which the computers work. I.e.: the computer users don't have to be expert hackers to get their systems working properly and reliably, as is now the case.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
>Are you sure technology will ever stabilize?
No, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure whether I want to be sure about that. It does interest me enough for me to try to find out. IMHO, this forum is about as good as it gets to discuss this.
I think some technology will eventually stabilize.
Take the weel for example. It's always been more or less round, of course. The first weels were probably made of wood (or rocks in cartoons), and did not have fancy things like spokes. Later wheels did have spokes or holes in them. Even air-filled rubber tires.
I don't think we'll have a major wheel-technology revolution coming up any time soon... though transport as a whole might be indeed revolutionized yet.
About the Star Trek episodes: ever noticed that they have problems with copying data? The can move the Doctor's program, but when some alien ship tries to download him, the crew is afraid they will lose him. Does this have to do with copyright legislation?
$ cp foo bar
cp: access denied due to copyright restrictions.
$ su -c "cp foo bar"
Password:
$
The Star Trek crew does occasionaly fine tune some devices, but I don't see them reinstall all software anytime... or switching to a radically different OS... Hmm... whenever the ship is hit, you can see a Blue Screen enveloping it... Not good...
About your house: the house itself (walls, doors, ceilings, roof, floor) is made with established, stabilized technologies. Bricks have been in use for millennia. Walls and roofs have been in use for millennia, for that matter.
The doorbell, cable tv connection, radio antenna, POTS socket: these things are standardized, stabilized technologies, and they just WORK, don't they?
Things like computers, ISDN, ADSL or cable modem Internet connections aren't part of the established technology yet, though ISDN is becoming one. Computers seem to have standardized on Intel x86 architectures, due to Evil Marketing (tm).
I think it would not be bad if there would be a time when a cheap CPU could perform adequately in even the most demanding of games, and that there would be something like a "Standard Computer" consisting of parts that are adequate enough for >95% of the users. It would run software adequate enough for >95% of the users.
My only problem with this is, that Windows seems to be becoming this standard. Too many companies are already treating it like that.
Btw, why is the first half of your text readable, and WHY does the M$ moron kick in in the latter half? All those question marks... ?!I just don?t get it?!
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I think it is a good thing when the technology stabilizes. Things will become more easy to setup, and will have to work reliably to be successful.
Just take a look at Star Trek, or any other SF series: the computers just work. No ifs, buts or device drivers. They work. That's what most people will want anyways.
When the Internet has stabilized, and anyone anywhere can get a connection for a few bucks, I think this 'investment of genius' we are now doing, will pay off: everyone will be able to share ideas and opinions, and stay informed. That is not the case in the Third World at all at this moment. I think this increased equality will increase the rate of development in the 3rd World.
(There weren't any other comment when I wrote this (First Post! Woohoo! Ahem), so I am interested in your opinions. Maybe I'll refine mine when I read yours.)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Come on:
"Imagine how much better life in third-world countries would be if just a fraction of the intelligence and energy that have gone into building the Internet had been applied to subsistance-level agriculture. Or if some of the high-ability, high-concept managers who have been drawn to Internet and computer businesses had gone into politics. I don't think there would be nearly as much hunger and misery in the world if so much talent hadn't been sucked into computers and the Internet. "
Really? The two major places where people are seroiusly dying from hunger right now are a) North Korea -- a close Communist totalitarian dicatorship; b) Sudan -- a country that has had a civil war for 40 years and tolerates slavery.
Please explain how your Unix engineer friend would have been able to solve these problems.
This seems to me an example of the hubris of computer geeks in general. Solving something like world hunger is not like solving a technical problem -- in fact treating social problems as technical problems is one of the worst methods in the world to truly solving them.
What is weird is the implication that providing good data services is not real work. I'm not a big fan of McNealy, but why would you want him to waste his obvious talents by going into something as ridiculous as politics?
This is a good example of setting up a fallacious premise and then knocking it down. In logic, it is called a "straw man argument."
As another poster noted, skill sets are not universally transferable. People are oriented toward different areas. Perhaps many of the people involved in IT and the internet would be mediocre and unhappy performers in another endeavor if the 'net did not exist.
You also miss another important point, motivation. There is one big reason why so much time, attention and manpower is devoted to the 'net. It is money. Whether you like it or don't, whether that is your personal motivation or not, that's the root. The smell is strong and the feeding frenzy is on. If you don't believe it, try putting together a startup to manufacture irrigation pumps for third-world farmers who cannot pay for them. The result is obvious.
The market determines winners and losers far more efficiently and ruthlessly than morality, ideals, governmental intervention or any other suasion. You may not like it. You may want people to more guided by concern for others. There has always been a percentage of such people, like Mother Theresa, God bless her. The vast majority will, as observed by Von Heyich, act in their own interest.
The internet is a boom phenomenon and will diminish in intensity, gradually settling into a business area like many others. For now, the main effort is to determine what works. When there is a consensus about the models that are most efficient and lucrative, then the industry will have matured and be a lot less fun.
For a fairly close analogy, take a look at the development of television. When tv started to become popular, very bright and gifted people were involved in the development. Early tv was highly experimental and some of the best work ever seen was done in those years. But, as soon as the money men found out that soap flake manufacturers were willing to pay to air commercials, money started to shape the medium. Turn on your tv today and take a look at what passes for entertainment. It certainly does not look like the "best and brightest" are involved now. Although the technical end is still managed by very sharp folks, the ones running the show don't display much more than avarice.
Intellectually gifted people tend to be motivated by achievement for its own sake, but the real power comes from those who finance it.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
The advent of the information age will lead to advances in other areas of technology. Software could lead to new ideas and ways of thinking and design that could uncover a way of making/doing something that we as a civilization would not have seen otherwise.
icq:=22921393;
You can afford to eat? I can't... I used to be able to... before the internet. Now I spend all my grocery money on my ISP... Just kidding.
Spectacular speculation, at least in my opinion. It's not often that people think about what things would be like _without_ something, more often the other way. (ie: what would life be like if ice cream could talk.) It's good to see that it still happens.
In all seriousness tho, I know a lot of people, who are BRILLIANT in the computer field, but without the very first lick of common sense. I've seen people do things that you know they're too smart to do, and not realize how dumb it was.
The real truth, is that forethought is just as, if not more important than thought. Tearing apart a circuit board is a bad idea, UNLESS it works. (or unless you learned something in the process, which is another tangent) Granted, the results are worth it, but how many times have you had a hack go the wrong way, and have nothing to show for it but a pile of chips?
I'm not implying that hackers/techies don't have forethought, but that I've seen a mighty many that don't.
Back in the 1950's, 60's, and 70's when our economy was booming to due cold-war, military-industrial-complex spending, ANYONE with a high school education could get a really good, high-paying job with plenty of benefits to support a typical family.
Many people in my family are good examples. I have many uncles who worked at local GE plants during those years and lived the "american dream" (or whatever you want to call it). You know, nice wife, nice house, nice car (maybe even TWO cars), other nice things (including health insurance), and a future with decent retirement options.
Now locally, all of those GE plants are closed and jobs are getting scarce. There's only one aerospace type plant locally (Lucas Aerospace) when we used to have 5. Within the past decade I have seen the average age of the burger-joint employee rising steadily.
Clearly these people who used to have good jobs and who now work at BURGER DEATH (TM) are not equipped to take advantage of the opportunities that the net provides either, since most have little or no computer skills.
Remember when the US of A used to make ALL of the good, cool stuff for the world? :-)
So yes, for the most part I agree with the premise of the original article.
Ignore Alien Orders
Perhaps a shift to a telecommuter economy (a positive side effect of the Internet) will ultimately produce the same result: that is, reduction in fossil fuel emissions, and pollution.
If the same spirit that drove the growth of Apple and Oracle and 3Com had been put into space transportation, we might have permanent colonies on the moon by now. We might even be ready to launch human expeditions to some of the more interesting asteroids.
One of the technological requisites for a true space age will be artificial intelligence. The continued existence of companies innovating computer software and hardware technologies, including Internet tech, is necessary to achieve this end.
The other two inventions that we need (in the absence of faster than light speed travel) are cryogenics and fusion power; fusion for a continual power source, cryogenics to suspend human crews in stasis for the hundreds of years interstellar travel require, artificial intelligence to pilot/maintain/navigate the spacecraft.
So IMHO, the Internet is stepping-stone to a higher technological index. Some of the spin offs have been greater communication (e.g. access to uncensored information) and the huge entrepreneur factors that are fueling our continued economic prosperity.
But I see the Internet as only a means, not an end. It is not a cure all. The same problems remain. The same threat of humankind's extinction looms... and will continue to loom until mankind can get free of this gravity well, this prison, this earth.
Offensive though the comment may be, the guy does have a point. wm's comment didn't really have anything to do with the parent comment. But I understand, I sometimes do it too :)
Slashdot needs to do something to make it easier for later comments to get read. Maybe randomize the display order. Then people don't have to 'cherry pick', as the AC nicely puts it.
I did not go into CS when I graduated from high school in 1982 because I was told this same line. As a kid, I grew up in the middle of nowhere, and had to go off to summer computer camp to get time writing programs. I even did odd jobs at my dad's office so that I could also work on computers there, doing little tasks like loading programs and entering data. Still, everyone said "don't go into CS, all the programs are almost written, nothing will be left to do, you will be unemployed." Thanks a lot! So after years in my non-CS career, where I've usually been the one people turn to do computer-related projects because it was my personal interest, I finally decided to work on my masters in CS so that I can get into a true CS career that I will enjoy. And what did people tell me? "Oh no, don't do that, pretty soon this bust will end, there will be nothing left to do, you will have wasted your time and money." Shut up!
To begin with, i think your prospect is a bit too optimistic. i'd say at least 50 years before this happens (IMHO).
however, humankind in general tends not to have a far-fetched view.
it is inevitable that sooner or later, humankind in general will have nothing to do. self-programming programs would seemingly be the peak of that, occupying the 'thinking' part we like to attribute to living things alone.
that'd also be the point where capitalism will probably fail. if there are no workers, who will buy the products?
i believe the internet is one of the great inventions ever because it's one of the few oppertunities for us to try and switch to a more cooperative (instead of competitive) way of life.
if we won't do that in time, there will be no one to compete with anyway.
so that's my summary. work is overrated. that's why the whole 'ron' doesn't matter at all.
maybe i'm too demanding, but even 20 years isn't enough planning ahead. by the time the change comes, we *have* to be ready for it. and it will come, whether we like it or not.
The counterpoint to the argument of "would non-internet activites be better without the internet draining resources" is "are those non-internet activites better because of the internet?" For the sake of argument, I will assume internet related activities are draining resources from other fields, which is something I don't actually believe. However, even if we assume that is true, there might be some surprising results.
An example used is could the internet brains make a more efficient engine, reducing polution. Perhaps. However, could it be that moving documents electronically, rather than on paper, has reduced the need for engines to move those items, resulting in a greater reduction in emissions than if they were just made more efficient?
Could the internet be offering jobs to those who might otherwise be unable to find work? Absolutely. I know of several companies that send audio data to countries that often have a lower standard of living, where they have people who transcribe them into electronic text. What makes these jobs possible is the ability to quickly move the data, it could never happen with traditional transportation. Is it taking advantage of poor workers, perhaps. Is it giving them opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have, absolutely.
On CNN the other day they said 60% of the world population has never talked on a telephone. Calling grandma on christmas is not going to provice the economic justication to correct the technology imbalance. Opening up new markets, new sources of labor, and creating previously inconceivable possibilities will draw the capital to provide many more people access to a telephone.
It is my believe that the positive impact of the net will (if not already) outweigh the negative impact of it drawing people and attention away from other problems. Even if there is not a net positive impact now, it may be that we have to take a small step backwards in order to take a great leap forward.
Somebody else would run Sillicon Valley, and the car industry would be the same.. Because a 'very fast and clean car' is useless, and phones, fax machines, and internet are useful for business. So people pay for what is useful. I don't think that "The Internet boom will end", because it's a usefull thing. Just like telefhones. Every body has thelephones, and more new lines are being installed. And the only way that the "telephone boom" will stop is if somebody came up with some altearnative cheaper easier and more effective way to comunicate (like maybe Internet)
Things are not made by 'one special guy'.. Bill Gates doesn't own the world because he _is_ Bill, but because he has an idea (the idea of making computers easy for stupid users). If he hand't had that idea, somebody else would come up with it (and he would be rich).
(so my grammar and spellig are very bad.. english is not my 'first language'.. sorry)
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Oh I don't know, every little helps.
Seriously, it's very rarely that we irretrievably lose options through progress.
The internet in particular pre-empts no resources and creates little pollution.
So I just thought I'd cite one small instance of a new choice as an example. But it seems I should have added a :-) as a sign for the ironically challenged.
5 years ago there wasn't.
=> Progress.
I don't think that we would be any better off. Do you have any idea how much it costs to do space exploration?! No way in hell most upstarts could afford it. The internet will probably help the 3rd world countries the most by giving them a level playing field once they can start feeding themselves on a regular basis
A few cents from marketing textbook: At the first stage of product life cycle, it is mainly a matter of technology. Those with strong R&D could win out, and charge a high premium with a monopoly position. Then some followers come up with competition, price will drop. At that stage, there will be a lot of brands and products. It will be a tough and free market. Along the maturing of the market, the product will be standardized in most functions, and only a few brand can survive to this stage. The primary factor of success now is scale. At last, the product become obsolete and some new tech show up. Sometime the production site will shift from developed to developing. I believe, the internet is in the process of stabalization, you may see a lot of bigger and bigger package solutions come up, and very few brand survive in spite of some many start-ups. the history will be some what like business software with a little variation.
Li Jingyi Shanghai, China
This argument has been around in one form or another for years. And its going to take slightly more than one AI "invention" to satisfy your requirement. BTW, why not add *free beer* to the list?
and only matches your ignorance.
First of all what makes you think that the best engineering minds are NOT working on hybrid diesel-electric cars? What ever gave you the impression that software engineers with their SLOPPY, LAZY, bug-ridden systems (let's think of the average implementation of the TCP/IP stack as a typical example) can do a better job on world level problems than other people, let alone hardware engineers?
As far as Silicon Valley businessmen go: I don't think the poor benighted folks in Washington D.C. can hold a candle to the likes of Larry Ellison in terms of dishonest and sleazy practices. Remember Oracle booking sales they hadn't really made? Obviously not or you wouldn't have held them up as an example of how we should get to the moon. Permanent lunar colonies with the Apple business model? Get a grip.
BTW, the best minds have worked on substinence agriculture. Ever hear of the Green Revolution? If India wants to solve its poverty problem its going to have to do it itself. As you might notice there is no dearth of intelligence on the sub-continent if the number of Indian Nobel prize winners is any indication. The problems they have run deeper than that. In fact, the internet seems to be a vehicle FOR increasing wealth in the Third World *NOT* something they should be running away from.
Scott McNealy for president? Give me a break... The half-baked libertarianism of Silicon Valley types is nothing new. Especially when they trim their free-market sails and call for import restrictions against foriegn competition, or selective application of anti-trust and restraint of trade laws against their competitors. They show their true greedy colors when the insist on unrestricted immigration so they can drive-down U.S. labor rates. I would have thought you'd be against this fundamental Silicon Valley belief in order to keep all those Asian engineers at home to work on substinence farming projects.
Your "dream" is really more of a nightmare. Happy Halloween.
First of all what makes you think that the best engineering minds are NOT working on hybrid diesel-electric cars? What ever gave you the impression that software engineers with their SLOPPY, LAZY, bug-ridden systems (let's think of the average implementation of the TCP/IP stack as a typical example) can do a better job on world level problems than other people, let alone hardware engineers?
As far as Silicon Valley businessmen go: I don't think the poor benighted folks in Washington D.C. can hold a candle to the likes of Larry Ellison in terms of dishonest and sleazy practices. Remember Oracle booking sales they hadn't really made? Obviously not or you wouldn't have held them up as an example of how we should get to the moon. Permanent lunar colonies with the Apple business model? Get a grip.
BTW, the best minds have worked on substinence agriculture. Ever hear of the Green Revolution? If India wants to solve its poverty problem its going to have to do it itself. As you might notice there is no dearth of intelligence on the sub-continent if the number of Indian Nobel prize winners is any indication. The problems they have run deeper than that. In fact, the internet seems to be a vehicle FOR increasing wealth in the Third World *NOT* something they should be running away from.
Scott McNealy for president? Give me a break... The half-baked libertarianism of Silicon Valley types is nothing new. Especially when they trim their free-market sails and call for import restrictions against foriegn competition, or selective application of anti-trust and restraint of trade laws against their competitors. They show their true greedy colors when the insist on unrestricted immigration so they can drive-down U.S. labor rates. I would have thought you'd be against this fundamental Silicon Valley belief in order to keep all those Asian engineers at home to work on substinence farming projects.
Your "dream" is really more of a nightmare. Happy Halloween.
Right on!!! You are right, we need to get over ourselves. But when I think of my own life I have gotten use to being treated as the smart guy in class. When people have a question they come to me, it just happens. But all of this does not mean that I can solve the world's problems. I can't even solve some of my problems. This school year I have gotten in contanct with a lot of bright minds, many of them are CS oriented. I'm incharge of a freshman floor in the residence Halls. They are really smart, but I would be scared if the country was run by them. The thing is that they simply don't care about the problems of the world. They give a flip about hunger, or violence in third world countries. They only care of being the first to get 1 Ghz processors. They care about getting email, having friends online and playing StarCraft. Why would I vote for someone that only has friends online, who's idea of a good time is finding free software on the net. I'm not saying that all cs people are social regects or evil. For example, me, I consider my self a good man. I'm religious, I try to do good in this world but it takes more than that lead a country. It takes charater to be a leader and many cs people lack charater. Being smart doesn't always mean being wise. I love my career, but we are not any better that anyone else. I hope I made sense in that I totally agree with the comment posted. Changos
When I saw this, all the bells went ding ding ding.
Of course, when the AI software with the genetic programming first comes out, it will be expensive as hell. Or at least someone will try to make it that way.
What will Microsoft do with a self programming, self debugging OS? It certainly could put MS out of the OS business. As it no longer could sell continious upgrades every other year.
So we are left speculating on what the new technologies are going to be that will demand the knowledge workers of tomorrow.
Many companies will continue on with what they have because it is convenient. Just take a look at all of the companies rushing about furiously because of the Y2k issues. So there will continue to be a market for the older technologies. Just as there is today a market for Cobol programmers.
The demand to keep up will continue to be there, and ultimately the truly valued commodities will be those thing not easily reproducable.
Keep on marking me down as flamebait. I'll never go away!
/. post). Your rebellious nature would have been channeled in more fruitful directions. In a sense, you are making a subtle point in an indirect manner, heavy with metaphor - by wasting your time here, you are underscoring how harmful the net can be.
This is one of the scariest threats I've ever read....appropriate for Halloween, I guess.
After reading your persistent dissenting arguments, I've been swayed by their eloquence and changed my mind entirely. Now I agree with roblimo's article - if there were no internet, you would be spending your time more wisely (it's difficult to think of a more wasteful activity than civil disobedience in protest of a
I get it now. Ironic, I suppose, but effective. : /
w/m --->> humbler and wiser
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
There are 2 massive flaws in this article -
1) The author takes the thousands of people working on the internet, asks us to remove the internet out of the equation, and then places those people in jobs designing Artesian desert pumps and space engines. In reality, the people working today on the internet would be doing what they were doing 10 years ago, when almost NOBODY was working on the net. They were writing mainframe programs, client/server stuff, graphics design brochures, etc.
This is the same mistake that Cliff Stoll made when he said "If people weren't wasting their time chatting online or reading crappy web sites, they would be planting tomatoes, helping sick children in hospitals, or studying books". In reality, they would be lying on the couch drinking beer and watching the Simpsons.
2) The bigger flaw in the article is that it assumes the net helps only the elite, and then the author gives an example of 2 people in fairly elite positions in an elite society to make his point. However, if he were to look at a lot of the developing world, the net is HUGELY helpful. Governments in Asia are using email to cut down on bureaucracy, human rights dissidents are more effective than ever, to the point where even Singapore has decided not to censor the net as it used to, and because of the net, businesses are booming way, way more rapidly than the glacial pace common in those countries. Just read newspapers from around the world (on the net, of course) for a good insight into this phenomenon.
Saying the internet only helps idiots in elite positions to waste time is a little like a nineteenth century author pondering that electricity is useless for the masses - after all, the people he spoke to in the palace used it to glaze their succulent cakes.
The net is becoming an infrastructure pipeline that will be present everywhere at all times, like electricity. To claim that it won't be useful for the masses at large is losing sight of the fact that it provides what people have aspired to for ages - instant communication.
w/m.
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
IMHO the Internet doesn't make any money. Exhibit 1: Amazon.com
-Every time I see you flourishing with a metaphor I experience the same anxiety I feel watching a child with a razor-
Well I think the growth of the Internet will never end. We as a species are learning how to work together and share ideas on a global scale at a rate unprecedented.We now have the ability as a GLOBAL society to set our sights towards greater challenges, space travel, time travel, etc and the Internet has been the breeding ground of the sharing of ideas of technological advantages, as well as a place to discuss, debate and in some cases rectify social issues eg the use of real audio for news reporting (uncensored) in the balkans a few years ago. ;)
My 2 bits
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
I am not particularly concerned about IT draining the talents of the very brightest away from other, more important pursuits simply because almost no-one can be the very brightest in multiple fields. For instance, I know mathematicians who can run rings around every programmer I know when it comes to making deductions from large sets of highly abstract definitions. That's what mathematicians do, and some of them are very good at it and like it. I know biologists who are far better at recalling tons of minute detail about apparently unrelated processes than any programmer I know. And so on. And, of course, most of the biologists and mathematicians couldn't write a device driver to save their life.
Actually, amusingly enough, most of the scientific fields are actually too crowded, biology especially. It's not clear that without IT there would be more demand for people in those fields. So I'm not sure that we're losing too much talent.
If there is a loss, it seems to me to be mostly a second-tier loss. The very few very best are still doing what they're best at, but a lot of the next best are going into IT for the money. It's now a viable alternative to medicine or law or finance, if you can handle it. The implications are that a lot of bright people are going to be off making money instead of doing something useful. Gee, when has that ever not been true? Think of all the wonderful developments we'd have if lawyers all had been working on vaccines and antibiotics!
Besides, IT is genuinely useful. When it stops being genuinely useful, there will be less money in it, and people will go back to being lawyers or stockbrokers or maybe even virologists.
(The real danger, it seems to me, is that the internet can be a great productivity-sapper as well as a productivity-enhancer. Why, right now, some biologist is probably posting to slashdot instead of doing their research!)
This is exactly the attitude that is displayed in this article. How DARE any of us think that we are the only smart people out there? The fact is, geekdom is a very insular world, and we are not in much of a position to speculate on the woes of other industries, or the potential impact we would have upon said industries if we weren't so busy getting a woody from Quake3.
The fact is that IT/CS has grown at the rate it has grown because that is the rate at which it had the potential to grow. It is a field that a number of people who are smart (and vast multitudes of those who fantasize that they are smart) have cared about enough to dedicate their time to coming up with weird and ground-breaking ideas. I don't know enough about running for president or the efforts to curb the world's hunger problems to say, but I would bet that those involved are not simply a bunch of morons who didn't have the brains to work in computers. Our President, for instance, who most people (at least the vocal ones) seem to think is an idiot, was a Rhodes scholar from Georgetown. I know more than one arrogant IT geek who couldn't have gotten into Georgetown. Ever.
The point I am belaboring so badly here is that TCP/IP and Java are not the only things in the world about which one can be smart, and encyclopedic knowlege of such does not indicate that one is smart about ANYTHING else. What the IT/CS community needs most, IMNSHO, is a concerted effort to get over itself.
-phatman
Nice things are nicer than nasty ones.
... than with just about any other field in the world, technological or social. The amount of effort currently being applied to improvements in computers (hardware and software) when applied to more mature fields of human endeavor -- automotive engineering, agriculture, medicine, economics, literature, you name it -- will produce results at a slower rate for the very simple reason that most of the easy innovations have already been made.
... well, you get the idea. It's absurd to expect the same any field to maintain dizzying pace of innovation it experiences when it's first coming into its own.
As many other posters have pointed out, a great many smart people _are_ working hard in these other fields, and important changes are happening, but more slowly. Computer technology right now is where automotive technology was in 1910, or English literature was from about 1500-1800, or
And yes, damn it, the Internet _does_ matter. Online communities such as Usenet, e-mail, and Web shopping, to name a few obvious examples, have made my life and the lives of many others richer, easier, and all around _better_ than they were before. Real, deep-rooted, long-lasting social and political changes are starting to take root around the world because for the first time in history people have fast, cheap, reliable communication that _cannot_ be controlled by any one government or social institution. The astounding growth of the economy in the US and many other countries over the last few years can be _directly_ traced to the explosion in the computer sector, which in turn is largely due to the Net. Etc., etc., etc.
The strange phenomenon of technophobic rants propagating via TCP/IP is, ironically, one of the best indicators of the Net's growing importance to modern intellectual life. Even Luddites know, deep down, that their opinions _only_ matter if they share them with other people -- and the best vehicle to do that is the Net they affect to despise.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
What if the entrepreneurs who built Silicon Valley had decided to build cars instead of computers ...
Actually, they did. Except it was Detroit and it was almost 100 years ago. Then it was airplanes in Wichita 75 years ago. And radios. And computers. And software. Now the Internet. Every one has given a boost to our economy and standard of living.
Each industry still has its stubborn, successful entrepreneurs. He (she) may be making special parts for race cars or designing airplane kits, but there is still a place for him.
As for subsistance farming, we used to be a country of subsistance farmers, but we got better. Not because a big chemical company invented Roundup, but because farmers tinkered with their equipment to make it better and faster and more efficient. In the US, we have all the information needed to move farmers from subsistance to productive agriculture. The internet may finally be the means for distributing that information. Of course, then you need to figure out what to do with all the displaced farmers.
As for the brainpower of politicians. Charlie Rose had a series of programs from Silicon Valley where he interviewed Scott McNealy and the like. Each one interviewed impressed me as being very bright. I can't remember ever being impressed by a politician that way.