Re:Are these just characteristics of rapid change?
on
NetSlaves
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· Score: 2
I think you're right. There's nothing particularly magical about the web, from a business standpoint. It's just another place to make a quick buck. And so it attracts people of ambition. These people care primarily about their own goals, and leave it to the employee to look after his own interests. The employee may be tempted by stock options and perks, which may never materialize, or may be disappointing when they do.
I was recently discussing with a friend the fact that many times in my life, people have described me as "lazy". She said she didn't regard me as lazy. Then when I thought about it a little harder, I saw that each person who called me lazy was actually trying to get me to do something for them, to put aside my own agenda and help them with theirs. You need to be careful about that. Sometimes such people can be very convincing, and sometimes it can be difficult to sort out what will best serve your own interests.
Cooperation is possible, and it's good, and capitalism facilitates it, and capitalism is good. But capitalism expects each person to look out for his or her own interest; your employer is not motivated to do so.
How about remodelling DNA to use different bases from ACGT? Total immunity to all known viruses - nice!
Only all existing viruses. New viruses would appear for the new system eventually. You'd need to design new ribosomes to map the new base pairs to amino acids, and you'd need to code the instructions for the new ribosomes somewhere in the DNA, replacing the current ribosome instructions. Lotsa work, lotsa risk, inadequate payoff. But hey, it's fiction.
Some of the interesting stuff happening at Rice involves getting the buckytubes to behave as either metals or semiconductors, depending on the tiling pattern of hexagons. To build circuits with this, you'd need to be able to join tubes of different tiling patterns. This was an active area of research two or three years ago, I haven't heard more since. At the same conference, I heard that it was pretty easy (from a chemist's pov) to "functionalize" buckytubes, i.e. stick little molecules on there that did useful things. Probably that would be useful in joining tubes with different tiling patterns.
The "hot technology" changes over time. About 100 years ago, the hot technology of the day was steam and hydraulics. To a crude approximation, Freud's ideas were really a hydraulic theory of psychodynamics: emotional energy could transfer from place to place, and if it built up enough pressure, something would burst. Nowadays, psychodynamic theories are subtly informed by our knowledge of computers.
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.
I've always loved Larry Niven's stuff, particularly Protector and the Ringworld books. If you wanted to do it right, you'd need lots of effects that are probably affordable now, with modern effects technology. For instance you could do a good-looking protector or kzin with the same method done for Jar Jar Binks. A puppeteer might be more difficult, but should still be feasible.
For that matter, Heinlein's stuff could be done with far fewer effects. He was extraordinarily prolific, and could keep a TV series busy for many seasons.
The article didn't seem to mention that the writers on the original show were people we consider luminaries of science fiction. OK, now my ignorance of science fiction is going to bite me, but I remember Harlan Ellison for sure. I was always pretty impressed with the episodes he wrote.
What makes these writers good is that, when asked to blend scientific and technological speculation, they don't go into a tizzy about whether it's possible. They think back to writers like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who wrote stories that were independent of the technology base. Those stories, and many of the stories in the original series, turned on constant elements of human nature.
I think Star Trek, and most of TV and almost all movies these days, is cursed with unimaginative, unskilled writers. Very rarely, some good writing slips thru the cracks, and invariably the show is cancelled. There seems to be some bigger profit margin in bad writing. Or maybe the execs consider it too risky to expose the public to quality. I find the whole phenomenon a little mysterious; an apparent failure of the free market.
I think it would be much better if the people did not have the extra (that they currently do) to give. I think that the extra should not be available,
it should be directly provided to those who do not have a sufficiency.
Big economic fallacy here. You are talking as if all those people with that wealth were given that wealth by some central wealth distributor. But that's not how it happens at all. Those people created that wealth by entering into voluntary exchanges with one another. They didn't get the wealth from the government. The government does not create wealth, it merely redistributes some and destroys some more.
Moreover, the tone of your recommendation that the putatively distributed wealth should be withheld from those who worked for it, and given to those who didn't work, directly contradicts your assertion that you don't want the government to coerce people. Who then should redistribute the wealth? The Mafia? They have their own agenda.
...some nanobot AI coder is going to be hacking some code late one night and introduce a small bug that just causes the bot to keep reproducing itself out of whatever's around... She'll wake up in the afternoon to find a huge sea-like nano-mass where her lab used to be.
This possibility was one of the first things the nanotech community started to worry about. It has a name, the gray-goo scenario, because of the idea that whatever the goo touches is turned into more goo. This requires that the goo be able to consume anything around it. The consensus is that this is a very tough engineering problem, and certainly not one that you'd solve by accident. The analogy is that you would accidentally design a car that could forage in the woods for fuel when it ran out of gas, and run on whatever it found.
So this almost certainly won't happen by accident. Well, maybe with the passage of time as nanobots got more complex, it might accidentally emerge... but people would know to keep an eye out for it. Even very slow accidental emergence seems quite unlikely.
Will somebody make gray goo intentionally? Because it is a tough challenge, they'd need a lot of time and/or a lot of money. Possible in principle, but hard to do without being detected, assuming the intelligence community remains clueful.
Rapidly growing goo will almost certainly throw off infrared radiation. The example you give, of a building being consumed overnight, means that a huge amount of chemistry is happening. There would be about as much energy changing hands as you could expect if the building burned to the ground. In a world primed for the possibility of run-away replicators, there would be look-out bots watching for infrared oddities, possibly from orbit. It's quite possible that there might be some tell-tale characteristic of the IR spectrum that would give more hints. At least it could give you a rough idea what kind of chemistry was being done.
I think there are some precautions we'll be able to take in order to detect and contain run-away replicator accidents. The very first would be to design replicators that can only run on exotic fuel available only in a lab environment.
Optical lithology draws all the lines and circuits on wafer simultaneously. A line draw method such as this article is serial and may take forever to draw the billions of logical devices you can fit on a single silicon wafer these days.
That's true, lithography is a bulk process that acts on Avogadro's number of molecules at once, and this is a one-at-a-time operation. The nanotech literature addresses this problem by assuming that there will be Avogadro's number of robot arms operating simultaneously. That scenario is a long way off, but theoretically feasible.
The need for vast numbers of robot arms is why the literature spends so much time discussing self-replication, the only way to make the whole proposition economical. Until we have that, things like this will remain laboratory curiosities.
There are some ideas kicking around about exploiting the self-replicative abilities of cells, rather than waiting until humans are competent to design a real replicator. That's a hard engineering problem, and it might take a long time.
I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.
The first, biggest thing to do is to further your education. Physics and chemistry are good places to start. Rambling conjectures on nanotech tend to assume that nothing is impossible, but nanotech will be bound by physical law like every other technology.
An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:
Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.
And if you really want to go wild with this stuff, get a job at Zyvex.
If they can manufacture this stuff cheaply enough, it will be a big win. They can keep it cheap by avoiding testing (so some of the dust is broken), packaging (the things should be raw dice), and precision interconnects (avoidable with on-chip solar cell). If they can do all those things, they should be able to get lots of MIPS per dollar.
It's not clear how they plan to program the things. Maybe they broadcast programs to the entire swarm in infrared.
There is some interesting stuff in a similar vein being done by MIT's Amorphous Computing group. The MIT folks have thought a lot about conservative sets of assumptions that shape the kind of software you can write for these things.
These are both emotionally loaded issues. Presenting both simultaneously, and suggesting that they are connected in some fundamental way, serves only to muddy the waters yet further.
People are inclined toward censorship because they are emotionally aroused by ideas. This arousal, and the absence of cognitive faculties to manage it intelligently, are dangerous to our society and our freedom. People who get stupid in this way should not be pushed deeper into their area of stupidity.
This is an excellent and very worthwhile project, but I have concerns about the approach. Here is the project schedule, which suggests that the order to do things is: first write UNL-to-native translators (1997), then write Native-to-UNL translators (1998), then test and deploy. The current UNL organization has three parts, one assigned to translator development, and two assigned to the design of UNL (semantics, linguistics, how it connects to HTML).
If the project organizers try to write good translators first, they will be putting the cart before the horse, and the project is likely to go badly. They should put their effort into the design of UNL, coming up with a good extensible machine-readable language that conveys human semantics, and write only prototype translators. UNL must be an open standard, like TCP/IP or HTML, and once publicly released, it should not drift too much. The writing of the real translators should be left to enthusiastic open-source developers, who will have the time and the motivation to do a much better job on translators.
Inevitably there will be trade-offs. In most languages, translations from other languages will seem like a pidgin. Fine linguistic nuances will not survive the translation process, and regular users will learn not to depend on them. If it's mostly comprehensible, it will still facilitate communication where none would have been possible previously.
The first design for UNL should probably be considered provisional, and ultimately a throw-away to be replaced in the future. But we can't replace it until we've learned its lessons. This still seems to me to be a very worthwhile thing to attempt.
Prior to the internet, which is now penetrating the third world, only big corporations like Monsanto could hope for wide enough distribution channels to have a broad presence in the third world. But now anybody with a green thumb and a laboratory, who can make productive seeds without the terminator feature, should be able to go on Ebay and sell them to local distributors, and sometimes directly to farmers.
The terminator feature is a copy-protection dongle for seeds. In most areas of software, dongles have proven unprofitable, and hopefully the terminator feature will suffer the same economic fate. Monsanto is now folding to public opinion, but that isn't a long-term fix; unprofitability would be.
You're confused on several points. MS is able to have the unfair power they have BECAUSE of the government protections I'm talking about getting rid of. It's true that the GPL only has teeth because of current copyright law. But if you took away all the government protections on MS's IP, it would substantially weaken their position as a monopoly. Their very large collection of lawyers would suddenly become mostly worthless.
You're also looking for a discussion of the private enforcement of contracts. I am not offering that here.
If government protection of intellectual property were to disappear, the position of free software would be _strengthened_, not weakened. Yes, MS would surely clone Linux, and they are probably thinking very hard about doing that today. But today, because of IP law, if Linux were public domain rather than GPL'd, MS could _remove_ it from the public domain and claim it as their own. Ridiculous, I know, but this is a feature of today's intellectual property law. The fact that public domain doesn't have teeth is the reason that the GPL needs to have them.
Driving to work today, I started thinking about a free-market alternative to government enforcement of patents. This idea is still hazy, but far enough along that it might be of interest to Slashdot readers.
A HYPOTHETICAL SCENARIO
Suppose that one day, all government protection for intellectual property were to disappear. Trade secrets would still exist. License fees previously collected under patent and copyright law would end, and information disclosed under patents and copyrights would become public domain. It would no longer be possible to remove something from the public domain. Invention-based monopolies would be enforceable only by maintaining trade secrets.
In the absence of government protection, it would seem that inventors would keep inventions secret forever, hoping to maintain perpetual monopolies. Obviously, innovation would grind virtually to a halt. The government's solution has been to implement a body of law, patent law, which uses government force to enforce monopolies provided the inventor willingly discloses his invention.
The inventor's interest is served by concealing his invention because there is a differential advantage in maintaining a monopoly, compared to competing against many other vendors, all familiar with the invention. This differential advantage, summed over the entire future, is a finite amount of money, and the inventor will usually be willing to disclose the invention in exchange for that amount of money. Since money in the present is more valuable than money in the future, the inventor will likely disclose the invention for a smaller amount.
DISCLOSURE TRADING
Suppose an inventor wants to borrow against the future value of his monopoly. He prints shares, or contracts, saying that either he will disclose his invention on a particular date, or he will pay a predetermined penalty to the share's bearer. He sells these shares to anybody willing to buy them.
To his customers, the shares represent a promise that he will disclose the invention, reducing its cost. Disclosure benefits the customers, so they will start buying the shares. They are willing to pay some money now, so they can save some money in the future.
The cost of shares fluctuates as the market's estimate of the secret's value goes up and down. Many purchasers will buy shares just to try to make money on price fluctuations. The price will tend to track the market's estimate of the future value of the monopoly.
If the inventor ever succeeds in buying back all the shares, then he is relieved of the need to disclose the invention, since he would only be paying penalties to himself. If he sells only a few shares, he may decide that paying a few penalties is worthwhile in order to maintain the monopoly.
I've assumed here that government intervention isn't necessary to enforce contracts. There is some good evidence to support this assumption. Most business contracts these days (the sort under discussion here) are privately arbitrated and privately enforced.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TODAY?
In reality, there is an essentially-zero probability that government protection of intellectual property will cease. In a world with patent and copyright protection, can disclosure shares do anything useful?
Some ideas that originated as oddities of libertarian thought have gradually trickled into the mainstream. Among these are privatized mail delivery, education vouchers, and private arbitration and enforcement of contracts. One might hope that if enough functions of government are obsoleted by free-market replacements, the government might eventually dry up and blow away. Not likely, but we can always hope.
One place to experiment with disclosure shares is the world of proprietary software. Software companies are tinkering with the idea of open-sourcing their efforts (or at least some of their efforts), with varying degrees of success. Netscape's Mozilla project is probably the most famous example, the one everybody hoped would succeed, and which has run into grave difficulties.
If Netscape had chosen instead to sell disclosure shares, things might have gone easier for them. Share sales would represent income, at a time when they were having trouble finding income. By tracking the price of shares, they could have measured the market demand for an open-source browser. This might have provided better information for committing resources to the Mozilla project.
This is a fascinating project. Wonderful stuff these guys are doing! The haptic device being used by UNC is called the Phantom, which alas costs big bucks. Using cheaper game-oriented force-feedback controllers would be cool, if it would work. A couple of years ago, I did a little research into what might be involved.
A really cool thing would be a piece of client software that knows how to talk to the UNC microscope over the web, and connect it to my force-feedback joystick, showing the image on my browser.
If you believe corporate greed... is a major problem, what alternative system can you offer to achieve superior results to fufill individual and group expectations?
Hear, hear!
A lot of other responses to this article reflect a common belief that capitalism is a source of human suffering. Indeed, bad things happen in our predominantly capitalist system (speaking here as an American) but those bad things are mostly either unrelated to capitalism, or the direct results of violations of capitalist principles. Katz himself comes from a generation that, in its time, disdained capitalism for all the wrong reasons. Capitalism, while including competition, is fundamentally a system of cooperation.
Capitalism is a system of voluntary exchanges which works best in the absence of coercion or fraud. When allowed, capitalism gives us Moore's Law, improved medical care, steadily improving quality of life for rich and poor, and other delectable yummies. But coercion and fraud can gum up the works.
There is no magical reason why the American government should know what's right for the American people. But surpringly often, people know what's right for themselves. And if it isn't made a crime, they'll pursue it under their own steam.
The government purports to be a unified entity, operating from reasonable-sounding principles spelled out in the Constitution and elsewhere. One is tempted to think of a friendly Santa-like figure who looks out for the public's best interests. In fact it is a hodge-podge of loose cannons all acting independently. The only consistency in all the buzz is the influence of special interest lobbyists, who use government to enforce coercion to pursue goals that cannot be achieved non-coercively.
The only alternative to voluntary exchange is random coercion by a powerful government. Worst case, it's a local warlord. Best case, it's a far-off bureaucracy from which one can hide through anonymity. Either way, there is no reason to expect a government to serve the public good, much less to do so efficiently, its own rhetoric notwithstanding.
Not nanotech, still worth doing
on
Smart Dust
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· Score: 1
True enough, that this stuff is not utility fog, but it's an interesting step in the general direction. One thing that pops up pretty consistently in discussions of utility fog is the question "how do you program it?", and this stuff will prompt us to start working on that.
There is an interesting effort at MIT, and similar efforts elsewhere, to develop the flavor of software engineering that will be appropriate for these kinds of things. It stretches the imagination a bit: each dust mote will have a pretty small amount of memory available, but the whole cloud of them will have a large amount of memory taken together. So it's not inconceivable that a large cloud might run a large program, where each mote held only a small amount of the entire executable.
If you draw a space-time diagram, and imagine how information passes around as a program is running, you can quickly convince yourself that this would be an excellent architecture for large-scale simulations, like molecular modeling, weather prediction, economic modeling, finite element analysis, and so forth.
The great hope for making such computing clouds economical is fault tolerance. The programming model requires you to assume from the outset that you won't know the exact location or orientation of the neighboring motes with which you are communicating. It is a very small step to say that some percentage of the motes might not work (say, 10 or 15 percent). This means you can be very sloppy about some QA issues that, done well as is required with current systems, are very expensive. So 85% reliable dust motes may end up giving you many more MIPS for your computing dollar.
It ain't real nanotech, but it's worth doing. It will put computer science where it needs to be when real nanotech arrives.
David Brin talked alot about issues of privacy and surveillance in his book "The Transparent Society". The impression I took away from the book was this: Due to technological advances in cameras, satellites, and so forth, privacy is probably not going to be maintainable over the next few decades. But it has been the ability of the government to conduct its own business in secret which has allowed it to perpetrate all the abuses it has. Brin points out that if surveillance is uniform and bi-lateral, it can be used to enforce accountability upon the government.
The danger at the present time is that the anti-privacy technology is advancing rapidly, and the government is learning to use it much more quickly than civilians. The asymmetry in surveillance could continue to grow wider and more rapidly, ending in something like 1984. Perhaps the best thing would be for civilians to start learning about this technology, and using it to track the lives of the legislators who favor abuses of privacy.
So maybe there needs to be a web page that shows recent candid photos of all these legislators, and their home addresses, home phone numbers, travel itineraries, tax records, police records, where they eat dinner and who they meet, and all the other fun stuff they would like to know about the rest of us.
In the worst case, the government would use its monopoly on privacy to secure so much power for itself that it no longer requires the process of popular elections. This would remove the last means by which the people constrain the government. Consent of the governed would become an unnecessary hindrance.
I ran across a grant proposal written by Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python language. He proposes to use Python (which is very easy to learn) to make programming literacy much more common that it is now. His idea is to extend the open-source notion of parallel coding and debugging efforts to include millions of people rather than today's thousands. Not clear whether this is really a feasible idea, but it's an interesting one, and even if it fails, it will produce something good and useful.
This is a cool project, except for the crummy incentive for contributing hardware, which many other posters have already mentioned (4 minutes and all).
Here's a better approach. You donate a 100-bogomip machine, they knock off 15 bogomips for networking overhead, claim 40 bogomips for their own use in exchange for the trouble of building and maintaining the system, and you get to keep 45 bogomips. That is, you get the right to use 45 bogomips-worth of the system's cpu load, forever if you so choose. (Assuming Beowulf system administration allows this kind of control...)
You can buy, sell, rent or barter your bogomips. You can donate fixed time periods of your bogomips to worthy causes (seti@home, the mersenne guys, the rc5-cow guys, whoever).
Several shared beowulfs might come into existence and there could be a whole beowulf-share economy with cryptographic protocols for electronic bogomip transfers. It would be cute.
Slashdot Mirror
I was recently discussing with a friend the fact that many times in my life, people have described me as "lazy". She said she didn't regard me as lazy. Then when I thought about it a little harder, I saw that each person who called me lazy was actually trying to get me to do something for them, to put aside my own agenda and help them with theirs. You need to be careful about that. Sometimes such people can be very convincing, and sometimes it can be difficult to sort out what will best serve your own interests.
Cooperation is possible, and it's good, and capitalism facilitates it, and capitalism is good. But capitalism expects each person to look out for his or her own interest; your employer is not motivated to do so.
Some of the interesting stuff happening at Rice involves getting the buckytubes to behave as either metals or semiconductors, depending on the tiling pattern of hexagons. To build circuits with this, you'd need to be able to join tubes of different tiling patterns. This was an active area of research two or three years ago, I haven't heard more since. At the same conference, I heard that it was pretty easy (from a chemist's pov) to "functionalize" buckytubes, i.e. stick little molecules on there that did useful things. Probably that would be useful in joining tubes with different tiling patterns.
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.
For that matter, Heinlein's stuff could be done with far fewer effects. He was extraordinarily prolific, and could keep a TV series busy for many seasons.
What makes these writers good is that, when asked to blend scientific and technological speculation, they don't go into a tizzy about whether it's possible. They think back to writers like Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who wrote stories that were independent of the technology base. Those stories, and many of the stories in the original series, turned on constant elements of human nature.
I think Star Trek, and most of TV and almost all movies these days, is cursed with unimaginative, unskilled writers. Very rarely, some good writing slips thru the cracks, and invariably the show is cancelled. There seems to be some bigger profit margin in bad writing. Or maybe the execs consider it too risky to expose the public to quality. I find the whole phenomenon a little mysterious; an apparent failure of the free market.
Names like Hindenberg, Titanic, Andrea Doria, Valdez, Challenger should be reserved for Windows machines.
Moreover, the tone of your recommendation that the putatively distributed wealth should be withheld from those who worked for it, and given to those who didn't work, directly contradicts your assertion that you don't want the government to coerce people. Who then should redistribute the wealth? The Mafia? They have their own agenda.
So this almost certainly won't happen by accident. Well, maybe with the passage of time as nanobots got more complex, it might accidentally emerge... but people would know to keep an eye out for it. Even very slow accidental emergence seems quite unlikely.
Will somebody make gray goo intentionally? Because it is a tough challenge, they'd need a lot of time and/or a lot of money. Possible in principle, but hard to do without being detected, assuming the intelligence community remains clueful.
Rapidly growing goo will almost certainly throw off infrared radiation. The example you give, of a building being consumed overnight, means that a huge amount of chemistry is happening. There would be about as much energy changing hands as you could expect if the building burned to the ground. In a world primed for the possibility of run-away replicators, there would be look-out bots watching for infrared oddities, possibly from orbit. It's quite possible that there might be some tell-tale characteristic of the IR spectrum that would give more hints. At least it could give you a rough idea what kind of chemistry was being done.
I think there are some precautions we'll be able to take in order to detect and contain run-away replicator accidents. The very first would be to design replicators that can only run on exotic fuel available only in a lab environment.
The need for vast numbers of robot arms is why the literature spends so much time discussing self-replication, the only way to make the whole proposition economical. Until we have that, things like this will remain laboratory curiosities.
There are some ideas kicking around about exploiting the self-replicative abilities of cells, rather than waiting until humans are competent to design a real replicator. That's a hard engineering problem, and it might take a long time.
An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:
- Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
- Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.
And if you really want to go wild with this stuff, get a job at Zyvex.It's not clear how they plan to program the things. Maybe they broadcast programs to the entire swarm in infrared.
There is some interesting stuff in a similar vein being done by MIT's Amorphous Computing group. The MIT folks have thought a lot about conservative sets of assumptions that shape the kind of software you can write for these things.
- First Amendment freedoms
- Bioethics
These are both emotionally loaded issues. Presenting both simultaneously, and suggesting that they are connected in some fundamental way, serves only to muddy the waters yet further.People are inclined toward censorship because they are emotionally aroused by ideas. This arousal, and the absence of cognitive faculties to manage it intelligently, are dangerous to our society and our freedom. People who get stupid in this way should not be pushed deeper into their area of stupidity.
If the project organizers try to write good translators first, they will be putting the cart before the horse, and the project is likely to go badly. They should put their effort into the design of UNL, coming up with a good extensible machine-readable language that conveys human semantics, and write only prototype translators. UNL must be an open standard, like TCP/IP or HTML, and once publicly released, it should not drift too much. The writing of the real translators should be left to enthusiastic open-source developers, who will have the time and the motivation to do a much better job on translators.
Inevitably there will be trade-offs. In most languages, translations from other languages will seem like a pidgin. Fine linguistic nuances will not survive the translation process, and regular users will learn not to depend on them. If it's mostly comprehensible, it will still facilitate communication where none would have been possible previously.
The first design for UNL should probably be considered provisional, and ultimately a throw-away to be replaced in the future. But we can't replace it until we've learned its lessons. This still seems to me to be a very worthwhile thing to attempt.
The terminator feature is a copy-protection dongle for seeds. In most areas of software, dongles have proven unprofitable, and hopefully the terminator feature will suffer the same economic fate. Monsanto is now folding to public opinion, but that isn't a long-term fix; unprofitability would be.
Then the next step will be open-source seeds.
You're also looking for a discussion of the private enforcement of contracts. I am not offering that here.
If government protection of intellectual property were to disappear, the position of free software would be _strengthened_, not weakened. Yes, MS would surely clone Linux, and they are probably thinking very hard about doing that today. But today, because of IP law, if Linux were public domain rather than GPL'd, MS could _remove_ it from the public domain and claim it as their own. Ridiculous, I know, but this is a feature of today's intellectual property law. The fact that public domain doesn't have teeth is the reason that the GPL needs to have them.
A HYPOTHETICAL SCENARIO
Suppose that one day, all government protection for intellectual property were to disappear. Trade secrets would still exist. License fees previously collected under patent and copyright law would end, and information disclosed under patents and copyrights would become public domain. It would no longer be possible to remove something from the public domain. Invention-based monopolies would be enforceable only by maintaining trade secrets.
In the absence of government protection, it would seem that inventors would keep inventions secret forever, hoping to maintain perpetual monopolies. Obviously, innovation would grind virtually to a halt. The government's solution has been to implement a body of law, patent law, which uses government force to enforce monopolies provided the inventor willingly discloses his invention.
The inventor's interest is served by concealing his invention because there is a differential advantage in maintaining a monopoly, compared to competing against many other vendors, all familiar with the invention. This differential advantage, summed over the entire future, is a finite amount of money, and the inventor will usually be willing to disclose the invention in exchange for that amount of money. Since money in the present is more valuable than money in the future, the inventor will likely disclose the invention for a smaller amount.
DISCLOSURE TRADING
Suppose an inventor wants to borrow against the future value of his monopoly. He prints shares, or contracts, saying that either he will disclose his invention on a particular date, or he will pay a predetermined penalty to the share's bearer. He sells these shares to anybody willing to buy them.
To his customers, the shares represent a promise that he will disclose the invention, reducing its cost. Disclosure benefits the customers, so they will start buying the shares. They are willing to pay some money now, so they can save some money in the future.
The cost of shares fluctuates as the market's estimate of the secret's value goes up and down. Many purchasers will buy shares just to try to make money on price fluctuations. The price will tend to track the market's estimate of the future value of the monopoly.
If the inventor ever succeeds in buying back all the shares, then he is relieved of the need to disclose the invention, since he would only be paying penalties to himself. If he sells only a few shares, he may decide that paying a few penalties is worthwhile in order to maintain the monopoly.
I've assumed here that government intervention isn't necessary to enforce contracts. There is some good evidence to support this assumption. Most business contracts these days (the sort under discussion here) are privately arbitrated and privately enforced.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TODAY?
In reality, there is an essentially-zero probability that government protection of intellectual property will cease. In a world with patent and copyright protection, can disclosure shares do anything useful?
Some ideas that originated as oddities of libertarian thought have gradually trickled into the mainstream. Among these are privatized mail delivery, education vouchers, and private arbitration and enforcement of contracts. One might hope that if enough functions of government are obsoleted by free-market replacements, the government might eventually dry up and blow away. Not likely, but we can always hope.
One place to experiment with disclosure shares is the world of proprietary software. Software companies are tinkering with the idea of open-sourcing their efforts (or at least some of their efforts), with varying degrees of success. Netscape's Mozilla project is probably the most famous example, the one everybody hoped would succeed, and which has run into grave difficulties.
If Netscape had chosen instead to sell disclosure shares, things might have gone easier for them. Share sales would represent income, at a time when they were having trouble finding income. By tracking the price of shares, they could have measured the market demand for an open-source browser. This might have provided better information for committing resources to the Mozilla project.
A really cool thing would be a piece of client software that knows how to talk to the UNC microscope over the web, and connect it to my force-feedback joystick, showing the image on my browser.
A lot of other responses to this article reflect a common belief that capitalism is a source of human suffering. Indeed, bad things happen in our predominantly capitalist system (speaking here as an American) but those bad things are mostly either unrelated to capitalism, or the direct results of violations of capitalist principles. Katz himself comes from a generation that, in its time, disdained capitalism for all the wrong reasons. Capitalism, while including competition, is fundamentally a system of cooperation.
Capitalism is a system of voluntary exchanges which works best in the absence of coercion or fraud. When allowed, capitalism gives us Moore's Law, improved medical care, steadily improving quality of life for rich and poor, and other delectable yummies. But coercion and fraud can gum up the works.
There is no magical reason why the American government should know what's right for the American people. But surpringly often, people know what's right for themselves. And if it isn't made a crime, they'll pursue it under their own steam.
The government purports to be a unified entity, operating from reasonable-sounding principles spelled out in the Constitution and elsewhere. One is tempted to think of a friendly Santa-like figure who looks out for the public's best interests. In fact it is a hodge-podge of loose cannons all acting independently. The only consistency in all the buzz is the influence of special interest lobbyists, who use government to enforce coercion to pursue goals that cannot be achieved non-coercively.
The only alternative to voluntary exchange is random coercion by a powerful government. Worst case, it's a local warlord. Best case, it's a far-off bureaucracy from which one can hide through anonymity. Either way, there is no reason to expect a government to serve the public good, much less to do so efficiently, its own rhetoric notwithstanding.
There is an interesting effort at MIT, and similar efforts elsewhere, to develop the flavor of software engineering that will be appropriate for these kinds of things. It stretches the imagination a bit: each dust mote will have a pretty small amount of memory available, but the whole cloud of them will have a large amount of memory taken together. So it's not inconceivable that a large cloud might run a large program, where each mote held only a small amount of the entire executable.
If you draw a space-time diagram, and imagine how information passes around as a program is running, you can quickly convince yourself that this would be an excellent architecture for large-scale simulations, like molecular modeling, weather prediction, economic modeling, finite element analysis, and so forth.
The great hope for making such computing clouds economical is fault tolerance. The programming model requires you to assume from the outset that you won't know the exact location or orientation of the neighboring motes with which you are communicating. It is a very small step to say that some percentage of the motes might not work (say, 10 or 15 percent). This means you can be very sloppy about some QA issues that, done well as is required with current systems, are very expensive. So 85% reliable dust motes may end up giving you many more MIPS for your computing dollar.
It ain't real nanotech, but it's worth doing. It will put computer science where it needs to be when real nanotech arrives.
The danger at the present time is that the anti-privacy technology is advancing rapidly, and the government is learning to use it much more quickly than civilians. The asymmetry in surveillance could continue to grow wider and more rapidly, ending in something like 1984. Perhaps the best thing would be for civilians to start learning about this technology, and using it to track the lives of the legislators who favor abuses of privacy.
So maybe there needs to be a web page that shows recent candid photos of all these legislators, and their home addresses, home phone numbers, travel itineraries, tax records, police records, where they eat dinner and who they meet, and all the other fun stuff they would like to know about the rest of us.
In the worst case, the government would use its monopoly on privacy to secure so much power for itself that it no longer requires the process of popular elections. This would remove the last means by which the people constrain the government. Consent of the governed would become an unnecessary hindrance.
Oops! Forgot the pointer to the proposal! Here it is. Doh!
I ran across a grant proposal written by Guido van Rossum, the author of the Python language. He proposes to use Python (which is very easy to learn) to make programming literacy much more common that it is now. His idea is to extend the open-source notion of parallel coding and debugging efforts to include millions of people rather than today's thousands. Not clear whether this is really a feasible idea, but it's an interesting one, and even if it fails, it will produce something good and useful.
Here's a better approach. You donate a 100-bogomip machine, they knock off 15 bogomips for networking overhead, claim 40 bogomips for their own use in exchange for the trouble of building and maintaining the system, and you get to keep 45 bogomips. That is, you get the right to use 45 bogomips-worth of the system's cpu load, forever if you so choose. (Assuming Beowulf system administration allows this kind of control...)
You can buy, sell, rent or barter your bogomips. You can donate fixed time periods of your bogomips to worthy causes (seti@home, the mersenne guys, the rc5-cow guys, whoever).
Several shared beowulfs might come into existence and there could be a whole beowulf-share economy with cryptographic protocols for electronic bogomip transfers. It would be cute.