Our love of technology risks becoming a quiet conspiracy against ourselves

https://theconversation.com/our-love-of-technology-risks-becoming-a-quiet-conspiracy-against-ourselves-43428

by abdias • 11 years ago

78 64 11 years ago

dang• 11 years ago

Url changed from http://phys.org/news/2015-06-technology-quiet-conspiracy.htm..., which points to this.

"But technology is not neutral – and neither is code nor numbers. There are human, subjective judgements lurking behind the apparent objectivity offered by algorithms and the “user-friendly” operating systems. These technologies perform almost magically, while at the same time enabling all sorts of organizations to easily collect information about us, something that makes it that bit easier to usher in new forms of surveillance and control."

This paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately:

What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.

quonn2• 11 years ago

At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Well, that didn't happen. What happened is that desktop software become less important and things just started over for the web and mobile platforms. And, besides, those Adobe and Microsoft products are still commonly used and there are even some new proprietary players like Pages/Keynote that are probably even more widely used than their open source counterparts. I doubt this will be different in 20 years - the wheel will turn once again...

roghummal2• 11 years ago

At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written.

Who believed that?

paulojreis2• 11 years ago

What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software.

I would dare say that there's no end game, as long as we are making money out of it, without that much effort. We are terribly good at ensuring our job, at the expense of the end user.

We will keep doing software, even after the point where there's nothing to add. I mean, we already do so, right? How many features are added because engineers think it would be cool? Or, even worst IMHO, how many features are added because engineers think they are what users want/need? How many releases look like they were made just to keep programmers busy (and happy)?

We should be aware of this: most of the time, we are working for ourselves. We are even entertaining ourselves. How much % of the effort spent on a given software is founded on solid and systematic analysis of end user needs?

biturd• 11 years ago

you just described photoshop perfectly.

walterbell5• 11 years ago

There were some stellar DOS/Windows productivity software like Lotus Agenda and Ecco Pro, which have never been replicated, despite multiple attempts to clone them on modern platforms.

Unikernels could extend the shelf-life of applications, reducing the need to comply with OS pressure for upgrades. Mature and battle-tested applications need security upgrades and the occasional minor bug fix.

Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change.

Windows XP has proven that customers will pay for not changing what works perfectly well. With virtualization to provide drivers for new hardware, mature OS/apps can live for decades.

minthd• 11 years ago

> equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.

Software is relatively easy. Networks effects are hard. And there's no indication for free/open projects to be good at achieving network effect and stealing network effects from incumbents.

lovemenot• 11 years ago

What about the World Wide Web? Doesn't it meet your criteria of free/open and also has achieved network effects to a t? Not sure which incumbent WWW stole from, but why should that be necessary anyway?

crdb7• 11 years ago

Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by previous generations. Imagine telling someone from the era of ocean liners that in less than a century, his descendants would be routinely flying across continents in hours for the price of a few meals, with safety levels so high it is massively more dangerous for them to take a taxi to work. Imagine the surprise of the world upon discovering nuclear weapons in 1945, the hope that came from knowing it was a clean and seemingly endless source of power. Or look at Asimov: he was a prescient writer in many respects, probably one of the if not the greatest SF writer there was, but his works completely ignore the connectivity that is pervasive today (when the NSA taps every phone and reads every email automatically, when they can recognize your face even turned, from a million CCTV cameras whose feed is parsed in real time, you can't have plots with people running away in cities undetected).

The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it...

Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so.

The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.

rodgerd• 11 years ago

The history of human civilization is one of constant progress

A medieval peasant most likely had more leisure time than you. Having a local technological maxima doesn't mean "constant progress".

pjc502• 11 years ago

"The history of human civilization is one of constant progress"

The Whig view of history: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Our love of technology risks becoming a quiet conspiracy against ourselves

Related Stories