Nope. Being first to market with just-good-enough is more imporant. Besides, if it's crap, most people will still buy it.
2) Value people.
Muhaha. Good one. Consumers (aka: people) know their place. They're used to being treated like shit because they value the 'everyday low prices' more than being treated well by a local biz with a human face and little economy of scale.
Went from 400 firms in the 20s to less than ten major conglomerates. And this is in an industry that can be "open sourced"...
Hardware, too, will be "open sourced" when molecular manufacturing "replicators" are as common as the computer-on-every-desktop (in less than 20 years). And this nano-revolution will be just sliiiiiightly more disruptive than the info-revolution.
e.g. Nobody'll need Gillette's expensive razors when you can make your own carbon-blades at home using recycled molecules + solar energy + nano-bootstrap-assembly-process + GNU-carbon-blades-v1.1-blueprint.tgz, just as nobody'll need ADM, Monsanto, or CocaCola when they can recycle their old garbage matter into fresh food (that was previously scanned with atomic precision or designed virtually from scratch).
Unless Microsoft and the rest of the megacorps succeed in cementing their monopoly power with the help of fascist government, we'll be waving goodbye to them soon enough; in their place will be thousands of self-sufficient open source hackers.
If those enforcement efforts fail, then the portion of the software industry that produces shrink-wrapped products will have to find another business plan
Artificial scarcity enforcement will always fail.
Even in the face of a draconian future where DRM is mandated to be wired into all hardware, and each person needs an identifying digital certificate to access the "SECURE internet", there will STILL be huge subchannels where information flows freely as well as a huge blackmarket for open hardware (from China no doubt).
The best business model for CREATORS to switch to in the face of this new reality is to GET PAID UPFRONT FOR THE SCARCE ACT OF (GOOD) ORIGINAL CREATION, instead of relying on many small forced payments for an artifically scarce copy (carried over from when the media itself was scarce and distribution expensive). The Street Performer Protocol is one such model; there are many more variations. These kinds of distributed patronage systems are the way to go, IMO; not lock and key.
Even though we are now on the steepening knee of the billions-of-years-old exponential curve to Singularity, almost nobody(*) is aware of just how damn fast the rate of change will be accelerating to get us there (in about 25 years). As the pace of progress continually speeds up over the next few decades, though, the Singularity meme will spread as quickly as our inability to understand it (and a rash of crappy Singularity movies will probably be made:)
(*) Except for a few "whacko" Singularitarians, transhumanists, etc. You could probably fit everyone who's are of the Singularity today -- and takes it dead seriously -- in one football stadium.
Most people consider it "less wrong" to steal a penny from a rich man, than a hundred dollars from a poor man.
Makes perfect sense too, unless you're a Scrooge.
Who needs the money more? The poor guy. Who loves the money more but doesn't need it as badly? The rich guy. It's less morally wrong to take from the source of greater abundance than the other way around, unless you happen to be that powerful minority who's hoarded disproportionate wealth.
I'm no Go zealot, and in fact I rarely play either game. I was just posting the obligitory Go post (but I see I got beat by 3mins). About the only thing I could be called zeolous about is the rate of technological change we'll be seeing in the next few decades, and how many people are ignorant of this nearing Singularity.
It'll be about 25 years before our computers can match the parallelism and capacity -- but not speed, since transistors've always been faster than a synapse -- of the human brain's hundred billion+ neurons. But in 25 years there will be far more important things happening than Go:)
Forget chess. To truly push the limits of computing and AI we should instead be trying to improve on the ancient game of "Go". No computer can even come close to besting a human here yet.
This technological progress will unfold much faster than you might intuitively assume from the rate of TODAY'S progress. Read Marshall Brain's RoboticNation for a good look into the still-pre-singularity period of this coming robotic future. From fast-food, to trucking, to war, robots will be replacing many millions of jobs over the next decade or so, but until society adapts to this reality, humans will still need to 'work for a living' to justify their existence.
I think in these circumstances, a communist or socialist system begins to look good
You can't use the C-word anymore (no, not Cunt - I mean Communism). Even I wouldn't advocate pure communism or socialism, though, but instead a kind of capitalist meritocracy where there's still some ownership, but not to the outrageous excess we see today. Yeah, I'm for limits on personal and corporate wealth. *gasp*.
In a future where the vast majority of work has been automated, the means of most production should be owned by the people, and all the newly technologically-unemployed "useless eaters" should get their fair share of this automated abundance (rather than starving and revolting), but if you're a little greedier and want a BIGGER PIECE OF THE RESOURCE PIE, then you've got to somehow earn the whuffie by being a 'better' human being than the other 6-billion well-fed humans. What will a leisure society value the most (that can't be automated and owned by a monopoly)?
A little farther down the road and 'molecular manufacturing' enters the picture, in which the means of production can actually be owned by each and every person because there's no longer a need for a robotic infrastructure to move around the fruits of our old bulk-technology. With nanotech, each person could once again become a self-sufficient island, recycling 'garbage' molecules into food... bla bla.
Personally, I'd much rather plug in something interactive instead of passively sitting in front of the tube.
And yet, among many of the older (40+) generation, they see watching TV as somehow "healthier" and more social than computing. wtf?
Recent example: Mother-in-law bitches about Father-in-law always being on the computer when he's actively reading or playing 'Yahoo! Games' or whatever, but NOT A PEEP when he spends that same time vegitating in front of the TV.
Socially acceptable wastes/uses of time come and go I guess.
Sooner or later we're going to be shooting home movies and watching streamed video from our cellular phones.
Without the right (read: big) camera lenses, they'll all be shitty movies too.
My new RedRider BB gun is going to have a compass in one side of the stock, a digital clockradio on the other, a camera on the site, and 802.11x and GPS. yeehaw.
IMO, nothing much can be done in the very near-term about the increasing level of eye and ear pollution out there, especially the paid-for commercial pollution - people will just get used to it.
A little farther down the road, though, we could be living in a Vingean world where there's raw reality, and then there's the filtered augmented consensus reality. Your visual preprocessor would be able to recognize and remove the goatse.cx pattern before sending it down your optic nerve...
When you hear "the economy is doing great!", especially these days, that doesn't necessarily mean that PEOPLE as a whole are better off, it means corporations are disproportionately concentrating wealth at the highest rate in recent history.
Our increasingly efficient, insanely productive economy doesn't NEED that many human jobs anymore, but our society is still structured in such a way that humans still need jobs to justify their share of scarce resources.
The 21st century Anne Frank would simply need to be a little smarter and more prepared: she'd need to EM- and THERMAL-shield her little cubby hole, and also hope that the Brave New StormTroopers don't have the home blueprints on file to question the inaccessible void.
human society just needs Star Trek replicators. All problems solved.
Well, it wouldn't solve all problems, but it would be the biggest and most disruptive equalizer we've ever seen.
Besides just making possible the cheap reconfiguration of a pile of molecules in your garbage into any desired object (including food & shelter & diamond), democratized molecular manufacturing "printers" would mean the end of conflict based on trade of once-scarce resources. "Resources" could now be recycled at the molecular level given (stored solar) energy.
Could this be the begining of a true 'open' certificate authority?
Stumbling blocks would be that Verisign would still be the expensive 'gold standard' for quite a while because its always been compatible from the earlydays in the most number of browsers, and another would be getting enough funding to pay for the identity check and other redtape that it takes to really be a 'trusted' cert authority.
I wonder what the cheaper CA's like thawte and geotrust think...
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe the US is in an overt economic and political struggle with the People's Republic.
We ain't seen nothing yet. Multinational corporations (with no allegiance to the U.S.) outsourcing to cheap-China to sell back to the once-rich U.S. is only the beginning.
The bigger threat is from the fruits of increasing robotic automation being hoarded by the same multinational few who own the means of human-less production and fuck over everyone else who is now an unemployed "useless eater". These productivity gains need to be more evenly distributed, but that's not the corporate definition of "globalism".
People don't wonder why companies would want to hold onto "intellectual property" like old games for as long as possible. They know why: GREED. And that's what people question. They had a long window of time to profit, and it makes sense that it should now be the public domains turn, so that other people (and companies) can then build upon it.
I think that robots winning against a human team will happen much much later than 2050.
It's more a gut feeling than a "sicentific based" prediction
Your "gut feeling" is more accurately described as the "common-sense intuitive linear" view of the rate of change, and it would be wrong.
It took evolution 1 billion years to create animals that run around and "act smart".
If you'd look a little closer, you'd notice that each evolutionary advancement took exponentially less time. Exponential progress is a feature of ANY evolutionary system, including technology.
If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.
With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation. In this way, human technology is distinguished from the tool making of other species. There is a record of each stage of technology, and each new stage of technology builds on the order of the previous stage.
The first technological steps-sharp edges, fire, the wheel--took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 A.D., progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn't exist at all a decade ago.
Robotics is just one advancing tech we'll see on the shortening road to the Singularity.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Being first to market with just-good-enough is more imporant. Besides, if it's crap, most people will still buy it.
Muhaha. Good one. Consumers (aka: people) know their place. They're used to being treated like shit because they value the 'everyday low prices' more than being treated well by a local biz with a human face and little economy of scale.
--
Hardware, too, will be "open sourced" when molecular manufacturing "replicators" are as common as the computer-on-every-desktop (in less than 20 years). And this nano-revolution will be just sliiiiiightly more disruptive than the info-revolution.
e.g. Nobody'll need Gillette's expensive razors when you can make your own carbon-blades at home using recycled molecules + solar energy + nano-bootstrap-assembly-process + GNU-carbon-blades-v1.1-blueprint.tgz, just as nobody'll need ADM, Monsanto, or CocaCola when they can recycle their old garbage matter into fresh food (that was previously scanned with atomic precision or designed virtually from scratch).
Unless Microsoft and the rest of the megacorps succeed in cementing their monopoly power with the help of fascist government, we'll be waving goodbye to them soon enough; in their place will be thousands of self-sufficient open source hackers.
--
Artificial scarcity enforcement will always fail.
Even in the face of a draconian future where DRM is mandated to be wired into all hardware, and each person needs an identifying digital certificate to access the "SECURE internet", there will STILL be huge subchannels where information flows freely as well as a huge blackmarket for open hardware (from China no doubt).
The best business model for CREATORS to switch to in the face of this new reality is to GET PAID UPFRONT FOR THE SCARCE ACT OF (GOOD) ORIGINAL CREATION, instead of relying on many small forced payments for an artifically scarce copy (carried over from when the media itself was scarce and distribution expensive). The Street Performer Protocol is one such model; there are many more variations. These kinds of distributed patronage systems are the way to go, IMO; not lock and key.
--
No, we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet.
Even though we are now on the steepening knee of the billions-of-years-old exponential curve to Singularity, almost nobody(*) is aware of just how damn fast the rate of change will be accelerating to get us there (in about 25 years). As the pace of progress continually speeds up over the next few decades, though, the Singularity meme will spread as quickly as our inability to understand it (and a rash of crappy Singularity movies will probably be made :)
When your average Joe is forced to abandon his cozy inuitively linear view of the rate of change, and begins shitting his pants, we'll be very close.
(*) Except for a few "whacko" Singularitarians, transhumanists, etc. You could probably fit everyone who's are of the Singularity today -- and takes it dead seriously -- in one football stadium.
--
Makes perfect sense too, unless you're a Scrooge.
Who needs the money more? The poor guy. Who loves the money more but doesn't need it as badly? The rich guy. It's less morally wrong to take from the source of greater abundance than the other way around, unless you happen to be that powerful minority who's hoarded disproportionate wealth.
--
Apparently Verbatim makes CDs, DVDs and other storage devices. I find their writing fascinating and I just subscribed to their newsletter.
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It'll be about 25 years before our computers can match the parallelism and capacity -- but not speed, since transistors've always been faster than a synapse -- of the human brain's hundred billion+ neurons. But in 25 years there will be far more important things happening than Go :)
--
--
I think in these circumstances, a communist or socialist system begins to look good
You can't use the C-word anymore (no, not Cunt - I mean Communism). Even I wouldn't advocate pure communism or socialism, though, but instead a kind of capitalist meritocracy where there's still some ownership, but not to the outrageous excess we see today. Yeah, I'm for limits on personal and corporate wealth. *gasp*.
In a future where the vast majority of work has been automated, the means of most production should be owned by the people, and all the newly technologically-unemployed "useless eaters" should get their fair share of this automated abundance (rather than starving and revolting), but if you're a little greedier and want a BIGGER PIECE OF THE RESOURCE PIE, then you've got to somehow earn the whuffie by being a 'better' human being than the other 6-billion well-fed humans. What will a leisure society value the most (that can't be automated and owned by a monopoly)?
A little farther down the road and 'molecular manufacturing' enters the picture, in which the means of production can actually be owned by each and every person because there's no longer a need for a robotic infrastructure to move around the fruits of our old bulk-technology. With nanotech, each person could once again become a self-sufficient island, recycling 'garbage' molecules into food... bla bla.
--
And yet, among many of the older (40+) generation, they see watching TV as somehow "healthier" and more social than computing. wtf?
Recent example: Mother-in-law bitches about Father-in-law always being on the computer when he's actively reading or playing 'Yahoo! Games' or whatever, but NOT A PEEP when he spends that same time vegitating in front of the TV.
Socially acceptable wastes/uses of time come and go I guess.
"You should be outside soaking up skin cancer!"
--
Without the right (read: big) camera lenses, they'll all be shitty movies too.
My new RedRider BB gun is going to have a compass in one side of the stock, a digital clockradio on the other, a camera on the site, and 802.11x and GPS. yeehaw.
--
A little farther down the road, though, we could be living in a Vingean world where there's raw reality, and then there's the filtered augmented consensus reality. Your visual preprocessor would be able to recognize and remove the goatse.cx pattern before sending it down your optic nerve...
--
That's what Microvision does with their retinal scanners for augmented vision. Uses little MEMS mirrors.
--
Hah. On the conspiracy scale, a special image that can shutdown the human brain is 1000 times more bullshit than, say, the Philadelphia Experiment.
--
--
When you hear "the economy is doing great!", especially these days, that doesn't necessarily mean that PEOPLE as a whole are better off, it means corporations are disproportionately concentrating wealth at the highest rate in recent history.
Our increasingly efficient, insanely productive economy doesn't NEED that many human jobs anymore, but our society is still structured in such a way that humans still need jobs to justify their share of scarce resources.
--
--
Well, it wouldn't solve all problems, but it would be the biggest and most disruptive equalizer we've ever seen.
Besides just making possible the cheap reconfiguration of a pile of molecules in your garbage into any desired object (including food & shelter & diamond), democratized molecular manufacturing "printers" would mean the end of conflict based on trade of once-scarce resources. "Resources" could now be recycled at the molecular level given (stored solar) energy.
--
Stumbling blocks would be that Verisign would still be the expensive 'gold standard' for quite a while because its always been compatible from the earlydays in the most number of browsers, and another would be getting enough funding to pay for the identity check and other redtape that it takes to really be a 'trusted' cert authority.
I wonder what the cheaper CA's like thawte and geotrust think...
--
We ain't seen nothing yet. Multinational corporations (with no allegiance to the U.S.) outsourcing to cheap-China to sell back to the once-rich U.S. is only the beginning.
The bigger threat is from the fruits of increasing robotic automation being hoarded by the same multinational few who own the means of human-less production and fuck over everyone else who is now an unemployed "useless eater". These productivity gains need to be more evenly distributed, but that's not the corporate definition of "globalism".
--
--
--
Your "gut feeling" is more accurately described as the "common-sense intuitive linear" view of the rate of change, and it would be wrong.
If you'd look a little closer, you'd notice that each evolutionary advancement took exponentially less time. Exponential progress is a feature of ANY evolutionary system, including technology.
From the Law of Accelerating Returns:
Robotics is just one advancing tech we'll see on the shortening road to the Singularity.
--