Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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Xenu loves you!
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.
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,
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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
...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...
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
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.
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.
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
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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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.
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.
The technology isn't meaningless, it is the use to which we put the technology that is meaningless. Perhaps, I am not a good enough capitalist but I think we all need more than simple monetary gain to be able to live our lives "guilt-free". I am sure many of us have been in that situation when we haven't seen our family all week (or longer) and find ourselves called in to work on the weekend knowing full well that we have lost another chance to spend time with the ones we love. How much worse is it when you sit and realize that you are there in order to make sure that the sales reports get completed on time, or that the production planning team has the information they need to buld more product to make the corporation money. Somehow, when I equate the two, my career comes up short.
That is to say if my career purpose was simply to manage the systems of, or create software for, some corporation's bottom line. The truth is that I greatly enjoy using and creating tools that the technology boom has made availavble. It is a passion of mine (and probably a good many of you) to say the least, but in that passion I still realize that they are tools. It is how I use those tools that actually affects society.
Corporations wish to pay us a lot of money for our skill in using and building these tools, and I, for one, am willing to take their money. There are other uses for these tools, however. Creating and interconnecting society, helping those who felt alone find people with similiar thoughts and dreams, providing a open arena for the safe and free transfer of knowledge; these are the airy (and perhaps naive) purposes to which I hope to be a part of in some small way.
I believe that this is what many of us in this field are doing; collecting the money while keeping our eyes on our own dreams and goals. We want the ability to provide for ourselves and our family but we also wish to do more. Some will build systems for medical advancement, other for offering help for the the lost. While it may sound trite, we are only limited by our imagination. Given the skill of the people here and elsewhere within the field, I think we are going to do fine.
>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.
Why shouldn't the same rules apply on the Internet as everywhere else?
I think that most of what is going on on the Internet already is covered by various laws. The only problem that actually remains is which country rules where. I think the current system where the physical location of a server is impractical, because most people are unable to find out which country the server they are visiting is located in.
One possibility I think it could be worthwhile to consider is "we accept that all disputes with visitors located in are subject to the laws of " certificates that webmasters could put on their servers (if they want to do business with people in ).
Just like the American wild west? Anybody can cheat anybody? Shut down their web site? Run of with other peoples money?
I don't like that idea at all!
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation.
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. --
There are huge advances that could be made to car technology; the trouble is they take huge investments of capital to work on and bring to market.
Internet technology is currently providing the most efficient return on investment. Capitalism is, at best, amoral; money doesn't go where it would have the greatest benefit to society. It merely goes where it would be of the biggest benefit to the investor. It tends to self-serve; there may be some side-benefits to wider society, but they are incidental.
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.