After last night’s embarrassing Clinton vs. Trump matchup, I’m once again feeling glum and confused. It caused me to reflect on a dichotomy that I was exposed to in high school: that of “great man” vs. circumstance. I think I believe mostly in circumstance, and maybe even a stronger version of that theory than is commonly proposed.
In my theory, Trump is not an agent with free will, but more akin to a virus: ablob of RNA with a protein coat, evolved to do one thing, without any sense of what it is doing. He is a speck floating in the universe, a mechanically fulfilling its destiny. A simulation running in an orrery of sufficient complexity could predict his coming.
This is his story:
Somewhere, through a combination of natural selection and genetic mutation, a strange child is born into a perfectly suited environment, ample resources and protection for his growth into a successful, powerful monster. Had he been born in another place or time, he might have been abandoned on an ice floe when his nature was discovered, or perhaps killed in early combat with another sociopath. But he prospered. With a certain combination of brashness and utter disregard for anything like humility, substance, or character, it was natural that he would be put on magazine covers, and eventually, television, where, because of television’s intrinsic nature, itself the product of a long, peculiar evolution, he killed, growing yet more powerful.
Later, perhaps prompted by something he saw on a billboard or perhaps due to a random cosmic ray triggering a particular neuron to fire, our virus started talking about politics. By chance, his “ideas” plugged into certain receptors, present in the most ancient, reptilian parts of our brains. Furthermore, society’s immune system, weakened through repeated recent attacks from similar viruses, was wholly unprepared for this potent new disease vector. Our virus, true to form, exploited in-built weaknesses to direct the media and make it work for its own benefit, potentially instructing the media to destroy itself and maybe taking the entire host — our world — in the process.
In the end, what will be left? A dead corpse of a functioning society, teeming with millions of new viruses, ready to infect any remnants or new seedlings of a vital society.
I often think about how to preserve data. This is mostly driven by my photography habit. My pictures are not fantastic, but they mean a lot to me, and I suspect, but am by no means certain, that they will mean something to my children and grandchildren. I certainly would love to know what the lives of my own grandparents were like, to see them in stages of life parallel to my own. But I don’t know how to make sure my kids and their kids will be able to see these photos.
A box of old pictures
This is a super difficult problem. The physical media that the images are stored on (hard drives, flash cards, etc) degrade and will fail over time, and even if they don’t, the equipment to read that media will become scarce. Furthermore, the format of the data may become undecipherable over time as well. I have high confidence that it will be possible to read jpegs in the year 2056, but when you get into some more esoteric formats, I dunno.
A commonly proffered solution is to upload your data to a cloud service for backup. I have strong reservations about this as a method for long-term preservation. Those cloud backups are only good as long as the businesses that run them have some reason to continue to do so. Subscriptions, user accounts, and advertising driven revenue seem a poor match for permanent archival storage of anything. Who, long after I’m dead, is going to receive the email that says “your account will be closed if you do not update your credit card in 30 days”? Also, what good is a backup of data I can no longer view on my now-current quantum holographic AI companion?
All of this compares quite unfavorably with a common archival technique used for informal, family information: the shoe box. Photographs stored in a shoe box are susceptible to destruction by fire or flood, but they are fantastically resilient to general benign neglect over exceedingly long periods of time. Sure, the colors will fade if the box is left in a barn for 50 years, but, upon discovery, anyone can recognize the images using the mark-I human eyeball. (Furthermore, it’s really astounding how easy it is to use a computer to restore natural color to faded images.)
There is simply no analog to the shoe box full of negatives in today’s world. Sure, you can throw some flash memory cards into such a box, but you still have the readout problems mentioned above.
As people migrate from their first digital camera to their last digital camera to iPhoneN to iPhoneN+1, lots of images have already been lost. Because of the very short history of digital photography, you can’t even blame that loss on technological change. It’s more about plain old poor stewardship. But just to amplify my point above: the shoe box is quite tolerant of poor stewardship.
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Okay, so, this post was not even going to be about the archival problems of families. That is, in aggregate, a large potential loss, made up of hundreds of millions of comparatively smaller losses.
The reason I decided to write today was because I saw this blog post about this article, in which it was described how the on-line archives for a major metropolitan newspaper — going back more than 200 years, are in risk of disappearing from the digital universe.
Here we have a situation in which institutions that are committed to preserving history, with (shrinking) staffs of professional librarians and archivists are failing to preserve history for future generations. In this case, the microfiche archives of the print version of the paper are safe, but the digitally accessible versions are not. The reason: you can’t just put them in a shoe box (or digital library). Someone most host them, and that someone needs to get paid. Forever.
Going forward, more and more of our history is going to happen only in the digital world. Facebook, Twitter, Hillary Clinton’s (or anyone other politician’s) email. There’s not going to be a microfilm version at the local university library. Who is going to store it? Who will access it and how?
A few years ago, it looked like companies like Google were going to — pro bono — solve this problem for us. They were ready, willing, and seemingly able to host all the data and make is available. But now things are getting in the way. Copyright is one. The demand from investors to monetize is another. It used to be thought that you could not monetize yesterday’s paper — today’s paper is tomorrow’s fish-wrap, but more wily content owners realize that if they don’t know the value of an asset, they can’t give it away for free. Even Google, which, I think, hands somewhat tied, is still committed to this sort of project, probably cannot be trusted with the permanent storage of our collective history. Will they be around in 50, 100 years? Will they migrate all their data forever? Will they get bought and sold a dozen times to owners who are not as committed to their original mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful?” Will the actual owners of the information that Google is trying to index try to monetize it into perpetuity?
I think we know the answers. Right now, it all looks pretty grim to me.
I think one of the rites of your mid-40s is assessing what you have accomplished relative to what your young self thought you were going to accomplish — and feeling blue about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my interchangeability. That is, the notion that in the vast majority of my own endeavors in life, I have been basically an interchangeable part in a larger system. This is in spite of being a pretty clever engineer, pretty good policy analyst, or even Really Smart Guy. I can’t really point to any professional situation where someone else, similarly trained and skilled, would not have performed the job more or less as I did. Or perhaps it’s just the nature of employment in our world that even if my particular combination of traits is uncommon, most jobs only require only a couple of them.
I’m not saying that we are not each unique, special snowflakes, but that in the vast majority of situations, that uniqueness just isn’t operational. Which is kind of a rough realization. It’s probably best for young folks to avoid realizing this as long as they can.
Of course, there are aspects of life in which even the least accomplished of us is not interchangeable. Obviously, the personal aspects come to mind. My spouse and kids would probably be nonplussed to wake up one day to find me replaced with someone who was “a lot like me.” Though maybe in a week, year, or decade they’d mostly get over it.
Some people transcend interchangeability. Artists and musicians create unique things that nobody else could possible have created. Sometimes scientists discover things that would otherwise have gone undiscovered for a long time. These are things whose profound singularness are easily recognizable, whether or not you know the creator herself. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it. Can anyone do this or is it just for rare talents?
Maybe, part of the secret to a happy second half of life is the acceptance of interchangeability. So what if I’m not leaving a unique mark on the world? Maybe it’s lifts a huge burden to accept that it’s more than enough that your family and friends love you (I have received reliable assurances that mine do) and that has nothing to do with your worldly accomplishments. Or, is that prematurely throwing in the towel on the world?
Or, maybe interchangeability — an assessment of value of self as perceived by the outside world — is a wholly inappropriate way to consider one’s own life. An alternative approach might be to totally disregard what the world “thinks” and just “be” whatever works for me. The world probably isn’t even real, anyway? Because of my non-liberal arts background, I wasn’t exposed to much philosophy in my education, but in high school I had a teacher who was really big into the existentialists. Didn’t really resonate for me then, but it’s starting to much more these days.
Apparently, both Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson believe that we are probably living in a more advanced civilization’s computer simulation.
Now, I’m no philosopher, so I can’t weigh in on whether I really exist, but it does occur to me that if this is a computer simulation, it sucks. First, we have cruelty, famine, war, natural disasters, disease. On top of that, we do not have flying cars, or flying people, or teleportation for that matter.
Seriously, whoever is running this advanced civilization simulation must be into some really dark shit.
Short post here. I notice people are writing about self-driving cars a lot. There is a lot of excitement out there about our driverless future.
I have a few thoughts, to expand on at a later day:
I.
Apparently a lot of economic work on driving suggests that the a major externality of driving is from congestion. Simply, your being on the road slows down other people’s trips and causes them to burn more gas. It’s an externality because it is a cost of driving that you cause but don’t pay.
Now, people are projecting that a future society of driverless cars will make driving cheaper by 1) eliminating drivers (duh) and 2) getting more utilization out of cars. That is, mostly, our cars sit in parking spaces, but in a driverless world, people might not own cars so much anymore, but rent them by the trip. Such cars would be much better utilized and, in theory, cheaper on a per-trip basis.
So, if I understand my micro econ at all, people will use cars more because they’ll be cheaper. All else equal, that should increase congestion, since in our model, congestion is an externality. Et voila, a bad outcome.
II.
But, you say, driverless cars will operate more efficiently, and make more efficient use of the roadways, and so they generate less congestion than stupid, lazy, dangerous, unpredictable human drivers. This may be so, but I will caution with a couple of ideas. First, how much less congestion will a driverless trip cause than a user-operated one? 75% as much? Half? Is this enough to offset the effect mentioned above? Maybe.
But there is something else that concerns me: the difference between soft- and hard-limits.
Congestion as we experience it today, seems to come on gradually as traffic approaches certain limits. You’ve got cars on the freeway, you add cars, things get slower. Eventually, things somewhat suddenly get a lot slower, but even then it’s certain times of the day, in certain weather, etc.
Now enter a driverless cars that utilize capacity much more effectively. Huzzah! More cars on the road getting where they want, faster. What worries me is that was is really happening is not that the limits are raised, but that we are operating the system much close to existing, real limits. Furthermore, now that automation is sucking out all the marrow from the road bone — the limits become hard walls, not gradual at all.
So, imagine traffic is flowing smoothly until a malfunction causes an accident, or a tire blows out, or there is a foreign object in the road — and suddenly the driverless cars sense the problem, resulting in a full-scale insta-jam, perhaps of epic proportions, in theory, locking up an entire city nearly instantaneously. Everyone is safely stopped, but stuck.
And even scarier than that is the notion that the programmers did not anticipate such a problem, and the car software is not smart enough to untangle it. Human drivers, for example, might, in an unusual situation, use shoulders or make illegal u-turns in order to extricate themselves from a serious problem. That’d be unacceptable in a normal situation, but perhaps the right move in an abnormal one. Have you ever had a cop the scene of an accident wave at you to do something weird? I have.
Will self-driving cars be able to improvise? This is an AI problem well beyond that of “merely” driving.”
III.
Speaking of capacity and efficiency, I’ll be very interested to see how we make trade-offs of these versus safety. I do not think technology will make these trade-offs go away at all. Moving faster, closer will still be more dangerous than going slowly far apart. And these are the essential ingredients in better road capacity utilization.
What will be different will be how and when such decisions are made. In humans, the decision is made implicitly by the driver moment by moment. It depends on training, disposition, weather, light, fatigue, even mood. You might start out a trip cautiously and drive more recklessly later, like when you’re trying to eat fast food in your car. The track record for humans is rather poor, so I suspect that driverless cars will do much better overall.
But someone will still have to decide what is the right balance of safety and efficiency, and it might be taken out of the hands of passengers. This could go different ways. In a liability-driven culture me way end up with a system that is safer but maybe less efficient than what we have now. (call it “little old lady mode”) or we could end up with decisions by others forcing us to take on more risk than we’d prefer if we want to use the road system.
IV.
I recently read in the June IEEE Spectrum (no link, print version only) that some people are suggesting that driverless cars will be a good justification for the dismantlement of public transit. Wow, that is a bad idea of epic proportions. If, in the first half of the 21st century, the world not only continues to embrace car culture, but doubles down to the exclusion of other means of mobility, I’m going to be ill.
* * *
That was a bit more than I had intended to write. Anyway, one other thought is that driverless cars may be farther off than we thought. In a recent talk, Chris Urmson, the director of the Google car project explains that the driverless cars of our imaginations — the fully autonomous, all conditions, all mission cars — may be 30 years off or more. What will come sooner are a succession of technologies that will reduce driver workload.
So, I suspect we’ll have plenty of time to think about this. Moreover, the nearly 7% of our workforce that works in transportation will have some time to plan.
