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Information Exchange Programs
I've been playing with Infomarco, a cool site which lets you play around with infodollars to buy and sell information. Eventually, they will be using real money, but one of the cooler features is the ability to put answers under the GPL. Questions can be from computer-related to sports. However, my question is - Do you folks think this is the future? Is this the way we will do information exchange?
I think some information already is distributed this way although it may not specifically be done under the GPL. You post a question to a newsgroup and among the flames calling you a clueless newbie you sometimes get an answer. For as long as the thread is archived that question answer pair is accessable to the general public. I think this is pretty fair though I'd like to see some way for permanance to be added to this mechanism.
Its very unlikely that this will become a major movement in the future. Everybody has a unique set of skills which require varying degrees of effort to aquire and maintain. People in general are compensated in some (non linear) proportion to their skills, the value of those skills and their desire to be compensated. A brick layer who gets tired after laying bricks poorly for an hour is going to be less valuable than a skilled brick layer who can easily work 8 hours a day. Not many people would argue that the two brick layers should get payed an average rate based on their combined output.
Some peoples skills are such that they are good at producing new information. That's what they do for a living, they need to be compensated for it. The degree of compensation will be proportional to how valuable that information is to somebody. The people who use that information are consumers, the information is the good or service. The information might be a means to overcome certain technology constraints in a CMOS process which in turn enables a CPU to consume less power or it might be a means to greatly reduce the redundancy in a stream of data while not introducing significant artifacts which in turn allows more data to be transferred per dollar spent on servers.
It's up to the person who comes up with the information on how to disperse it. Maybe they do feel altruistic and donate it to the general public or maybe they develop the information under contract with a company. As soon as you force all 'information to be free' you devalue the worth of being an innovator as a profession. Innovators then become second class citizens compared to the people who make use of the innovation.
I can't think of any innovator who has made the entire body of their knowledge available for free in a timely fashion. I may be wrong but I don't see evidence of it. Linus made the Linux kernel freely available (though he made use of innovations prior to this to do it, he didn't invent protected memory etc) but used other information to earn a degree and now uses yet other very confidential information to earn money at TransMeta.
I'll agree that IP has gotten out of hand but making all intellectual property into intellectual communism isn't the way to go. I don't know what the solution is or will be (not in my job description or my skills) but without compensation there will be as many innovators as there would be doctors if they were forced to work for fifteen dollars an hour since the medical profession is for the community's well being.
If you don't agree that people have the right to do with information as they please then by all means out innovate them, GPL it and beat them to the punch.
I can't say whether an information system like this is going to be the wave of the future. Truth is, I can't even say what computing is going to be like just one year down the road, and I don't think anybody else can either.
Yadda yadda the industry moves so fast yadda yadda technology is wonderful but aside from the fact that technology does move fast, sometimes it goes in weird directions and just throws everybody for a loop. For example, it could be that instead of worry about these information systems online, somebody is going to build us a working quantum computer, and that will be "the future" or robotic roaches the size of dust particles, (all those nano-tech articles) or maybe brain implants so we can all plug 10baseT into our ears and forgo the computer altogether as far as connectivity is concerned.
Obviously some of those are a bit more plausible than others, but none of them are *impossible* (well, maybe the ethernet idea) Truth be known, it's likely that "the future" is none of those but rather something much more deliciously weird that will leave geeks the world over twitching in technological ecstasy. (If you don't know what technological ecstasy is, expose yourself to a 486 as your only computer for 4 years and then upgrade to a 400Mhz jobbie)
Just my $1E-2.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Information should be free. Because information is knowledge. Because knowledge is power. When all people have access to all information then all people will be equal. I'm rather tired of the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" mandate of capitalism. Do you think this is a viable long-term solution? Our world is dying from pollution, from overpopulation, and consumption. If we gave power back to the people to recognize this, to act together to stop it, the tidal forces of change would rip through this country the likes of which haven't been seen since the Civil War. That is the power of information.
By claiming intellectual "property" and putting the barriers around information, we seriously undermine the effectiveness of this country in the global economy. Countries that freely share information will evolve their technology at a rate which will far outpace our own efforts - witness our own movement. We freed the code... as a result within a matter of years we've gone from novel idea to the forefront of the information revolution.
No matter what you call it - censorship, intellectual property, copyright, infodollars... it all points to the same thing - disadvantaging one group to advantage another group. Haven't we evolved beyond the need to form hierarchys of power? Information should be free. It's the ultimate personal freedom, it's a country's most valuable commodity, and the wind in the sails of progress. Why should we deny ourselves access to this?
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In order from something like this to succeed, they would have to have a fresh supply of information which is needed (demanded) by the public at all times. Why, you ask?
Assigning a monetary unit to information is institutionalizing a fiat system to information-- just as how many cultures (like the American culture) have assigned fiat money to phsyical goods.
A fiat system is a currency the people commonly believe has value. They are not certificates for hard currency (such as the old gold-backed standard in american currency). In order for this monetary system to succeed, it has to be honored and there has to be something to buy.
In American culture and in physical terms this is food, clothing, water, shelter, etc. (and arguable a lot of other things, that wouldn't be considered needs by other cultures!). But what is a need on an information trading site? What specific information can be said to be needed all the time?
Certainly they may have some good ideas for sale on their site; but do they have anything that is essential, like, "the food of thoughts?" I can go up to the super-market and by bread to sustain myself, but what would they offer that has the same property of being a commodity?
-AP
When all people have access to all information then all people will be equal.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no. People are different. There are and will always be short people (who won't be good basketball players), dumb people (who won't be good programmers), ugly people (who will be discriminated against in the mating game), people with no ear for music (who won't be able to play the piano well), etc. etc.
I'm rather tired of the "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" mandate of capitalism.
I'm also rather tired of the "cut everybody down to the lowest common denominator" mandate of the socialism/communism.
Our world is dying from pollution, from overpopulation, and consumption.
I haven't noticed our world dying. The pollution got significantly better in the last 10-15 years, overpopulation is becoming less and less of a problem as the developing countries grow economically, and why consumption is killing the world I don't understand. These are all slogans from the mid-70s -- wake up, they've been proven wrong.
If we gave power back to the people to recognize this, to act together to stop it, the tidal forces of change would rip through this country the likes of which haven't been seen since the Civil War.
YACFS (Yet Another Content-Free Sentence)
Information should be free. It's the ultimate personal freedom, it's a country's most valuable commodity, and the wind in the sails of progress.
I doubt very much that information is the "ultimate personal freedom". If anything, I would say that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to make choices and act on them. Granted, information is very important to making choices, but just knowing something is not enough.
And please notice that information as you describe it cannot be a commodity, since it cannot be bought or sold...
You and some other people in this discussion miss one point: it's not enough to find that person which knows the answer to your question. You also have to convince this person to spend his time and effort to provide this answer to you, and this is far from trivial. Linus is the ultimate authority on the Linux kernel: do you think he'll answer all the kernel questions that people come up with?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Will we end up with people who make a living finding information, uploading it, and seeing if it sells?
Suppose people will demand I pay them if I batter them with a really good awful pun?
The infomarco home page claims they have technology which connects people who have questions with people who have answers, in radically new ways.
Maybe they do, but I sure didn't see it. Of course, the site is just getting started, but so far, the site seems to be geared toward queries that can be asked in a single question ("How do I cast (sic) a long to a string", "Let me know if you find any bugs on this site").
The same sort of questions that can be answered by a careful search on deja.com, or your favorite search engine, probably with no more work that it would take to turn up the answer on infomarco.
Something like this might work if infomarco would be willing to work as a "reference librarian" type service (or even a "research assistant" type service for those with more complex problems and deeper pockets). As it is, it seems like all they want is to be deja-ebay.com...
-y
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
These guys should check out http://www.expertsexchange.com
I thought that that was the site for people who wanted an "expert sex change"?
jsm