The Gap Between IT and ET

For professional reasons¹, I've refrained from commenting on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, to say nothing of the political or policy consequences. I did, however, want to highlight this post by Gail the Actuary over at The Oil Drum in relation to the spill:

Many individuals and groups, from Scientific American magazine, to school systems, to Energy Secretary Chu would seem to be telling us that technology can solve all of our problems.

And we have seen an endless array of new fancy gadgets over the years, starting with calculators, then computers, electric copying machines, the Internet, portable phones, and all kinds of devices to play music and send messages. These all seem to suggest that technology can do marvelous things.

Now, we are confronted with what should be not too difficult a problem--cutting off the oil flow from a well--and we find it is difficult to do. Perhaps the Deepwater Horizon blowout is an event that should get us to rethink our assumptions a bit.

The important thing to note here is that all of the technological advances that Gail mentions come in the field of information technology, which has indeed seen a flurry of innovation in the last few decades, the likes of which humanity has seldom, if ever, witnessed. Now, many of the same people involved in the IT revolution are moving into the energy business in the hope of accomplishing the same thing there. Hence, for example, the astonishing level of enthusiasm a few months ago over the introduction of the Bloom Box, which is, essentially, a very fancy battery. Innovation in energy, however, is a rather different animal from innovation in manipulating data. IT may be ruled by Moore's Law, but ET (energy technology) is ruled by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is a much tougher nut to crack. IT also benefits from the fact that, as a relatively young field, there wasn't very much in the way of regulatory hurdles or path dependence to get in the way of its development -- and to the extent that there were regulatory issues, they were mostly favorable during the critical early years. (See, for example, this review (PDF) of the impact of the FCC's Computer inquiries on the Internet's development.) Energy, however, has not been a wide open field for a long time, with its recent history characterized more by regulated utilities and oil cartels than by bottom-up innovation.

The point of mentioning all this is that our mental model for how innovation works has been shaped by our recent experience with innovation in computers and the Internet, a model that may not serve us well when figuring out to how develop more sustainable sources of energy. It's great to have new-fangled approaches to producing and storing energy, of course, but there's much more to be said for getting the policy right, so that the right solutions, old or new, can arise without difficulty.

¹ Email me if you want to know the details.

The Facebook Revolt

Everyone, it seems, now has a problem with Facebook, Laura McGann's kiss-off to the site being the latest example. Besides being a sieve when it comes to personal information (and a G-rated porn site to boot), Facebook's ubiquity has, ironically, taken the luster off its value as a social network. A while back, Matt Frost wrote that he gave up on Facebook because seeing the daily online activity of people he knew long ago ruined his appreciation for them. No one is a hero to his valet, and, it seems, no one is a fondly remembered long-lost pal to his Facebook friends.

I'm not ready to give up on Facebook just yet -- although my inability to fully delete information from my profile made me almost delete it out of frustration. (Fortunately, Facebook's strategic use of emotional blackmail kept me around.) I have some friends I keep up with on Facebook that aren't on Twitter -- which with Gmail is where I spend most of my online life -- and having even a placeholder Facebook account is something of a necessity for managing your online reputation. Perhaps just as important is the fact that Facebook is quickly becoming the de facto universal login key: Unlike OpenID, which was supposed to have fulfilled this function, a Facebook ID already has value to the user, and so it's easy to move from that to using it to log in to other websites. Of course, Twitter can also serve that function, but not nearly as many websites offer login through Twitter as they do through Facebook; hopefully, that will change.

Video Games as Art

Like pretty much everyone under the age of 40, I found myself disagreeing with Roger Ebert's rather misguided polemic against the idea that video games can be art. Clearly there are a wealth of games out there now that not only include artistic accoutrements but also, like Braid or Passage, tweak the conventions of video games for artistic ends.

I think it's worth focusing on that latter aspect: To the extent that we can talk about video games as art, as opposed to mere entertainment, it's because art games typically do something that is common in modern art in particular, which is to comment on the norms that have accumulated around video games over the past 20-30 years. Braid, for example, calls into question the assumptions embedded in save-the-princess adventure games going back to Mario and Zelda. Similarly, games like Shadow of the Colossus take a common video game goal -- kill the bad guys -- and subvert it: The protagonist is told by this disembodied voice to slay these beautiful, majestic creatures, and of course we, as the player, comply -- only to find out, too late, the true harm we have caused.

It may be helpful to think of video games as being more akin to the plastic arts, like painting, sculpture, or mixed media, than to narrative art forms like film or literature. Expecting video games to have the same sort of narrative density that a book or a movie have may be setting the bar too high, making it easy to dismiss video games as an art form. I like to think of a game like Passage as being like one of those interactive art installations you might find at MoMA or the Hirshhorn: It provides a singular moment of epiphany, rather than the presentation of a whole world. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think the comparison to modern art is apt: Compared to, say, the Lascaux cave paintings or works from the Renaissance, modern art frequently is accused of not living up to traditional standards. ("My kid could paint that!" "My kid could play that and rack up a high score!") But, of course, modern art is supposed to challenge our assumptions about art and about the world, and it seems to me that those video games that aspire to that belong in the same category.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Farhad Manjoo Tries Out the iPad

His comment here, I think, gets to the heart of my reservations about the iPad:

Choire Sicha says that the iPad spurns creative people, but it seems more appropriate to say that it resists "power users," people who like to customize their machines to do things better, faster, and more productively. The iPad resists customization; there is only one way to do most things on this device—Apple's way.

And of course, power users like myself are a clear minority among the computer using population. So I don't really begrudge Apple trying to do what it's always done, which is to make the computing experience more accessible to more people. But still...

The Magical World of the iPad

You know what the iPad reminds me of? There was a feature on older Macs, circa System 7, that restricted users to a simple panel of applications and files, preventing them from getting into the guts of the software. (It was used primarily in schools and for "kid-friendly" home computers.) The iPhone, and now the iPad, seem to be run according to the same principle.

Not that that's a bad thing: The iPhone and, by all accounts, the iPad are beautifully designed and capable of making everything from video to web browsing to reading e-books a blast. No one should expect anything less of Apple, after all. But I think a lot of the anxiety you hear in those criticizing the iPad (e.g., Mark Pilgrim) comes from a fear that Apple is leading the charge toward the infantilization of the average computer user: The iPad, among other sins, is locked down and restricts the users from adding any applications that don't have Apple's approval; nor can you access the core functions of the iPad via the command line, as you can on OS X.

But how different is this, really, from the situation for the average computer user today? From the beginning, Apple has been all about making computers and devices "for the rest of us," and the progress of computer technology over the last 30 years has been in line with that mission -- hiding the complicated and just giving us the simple. And it's been wildly successful: Whether you use a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine, a GUI is now the standard manner of interacting with a computer; moreover, most people, I'd wager, only use a few applications, mostly pre-installed, in their daily use. To be sure, Apple is being overprotective in embracing, for the iPad, the walled garden model that it has used for the iPhone. But fears that the iPad's arrival spells the end of the culture of hackers seems, at this point, overblown. Hackers and tinkers are already a minority among computer users, anyway, and I doubt the iPad will exacerbate that dynamic.

On the other hand, the folks defending tinkering aren't wrong, in the general sense that it's somewhat disturbing that so many people in our society are using devices that they neither understand nor care to understand. We're all guilty of this, in one way or another: John Gruber's comparison of the iPad to the automatic transmission may well be correct. Not knowing the intricacies of a modern car doesn't impair one's ability to function in society, any more than not hunting for or growing one's food does. But simply being aware that the things one considers conveniences are in fact the products of generations of effort, ingenuity, and expertise is, I think, salutary. At the very least, it helps one avoid the mindset of passive consumption that modern society can fall prey to. Clarke might have been right that a sufficiently advanced technology is no different than magic, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing to accept that as inevitable.

The Virtue of Enforced Minimalism

So last weekend, my laptop's hard drive died. I had just recently gotten an external hard drive, but didn't get around to actually backing up my data until it was too late; as a result, there's a better than even chance that about three year's worth of data has been lost. So let that be a lesson to you.¹

On the other hand, starting from scratch (and upgrading to Snow Leopard to boot) has been an oddly freeing experience. For one thing, I've discovered that TextEdit (the barebones word processor that comes with every Mac) does the job for about 75% of my writing tasks. Another realization is that a lot of stuff I accumulated on my old hard drive simply wasn't that essential. It's not a terribly original insight -- in the age of the intertubes (see footnote below), possession of information matters less than access, in the form of search, social networks, webtools, etc. -- but I couldn't help but notice.

¹ I should add that, between Gmail, Google Docs, and Dropbox, I actually haven't lost that much. The main thing that bites was losing all my music downloads -- but compared to the plight of the vast majority of people on this planet, I really should be counting my blessings.

The Genealogy of Netiquette

Trolling through the public waves on Google Wave is a fascinating experience; there's a freewheeling atmosphere to it reminiscent of the early days of the Web. It won't last, I fear, once it's opened up to the public: Right now the community of Wave users is small enough and homogeneous enough (i.e., conscientious tech-savvy folk) that one could drop in on any of the public waves, like a BBS or chat room, and participate meaningfully in the conversation. When the spammers, the trolls, the flamewar-mongers, and all the other riffraff of the Net are allowed in, public waves won't be nearly as fun.

That's why I'm transfixed by the discussions attempting to outline what the rules of etiquette for Google Wave should be. (As it turns out, the main topic of discussion on Google Wave is... how to use Google Wave.) Some have suggested importing rules of behavior from other venues, including BBS, chat rooms, wikis, etc.; but I suspect that, though Google Wave incorporates a lot of other web media, its users will have to evolve new forms of etiquette to make it a worthwhile experience. For example, what does it mean to have personal or colloquial forms of communication (e.g., IM or blog comments) subject to editing by other users, as in wikis? Who can be said to be the owner or person in control of a wave, if those terms have any meaning in this case at all? What is the rule for deciding if a person should be included in a wave, given that one can anyone can add any of their contacts to a wave without their permission? The process by which these questions are answered will no doubt be messy, but I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

First Impressions of Google Wave

I got an invite from my brother, who was one of the elect 100,000 who got the first round of invites from Google. At first, it was exciting -- I get to be one of the first to experience the next revolution in technology! -- but the first question I had, once I got a look at all the features, was: So what am I supposed to do with it?

To be sure, I can certainly see how Wave could become huge: It really does integrate email, IM, online collaboration à la Google Docs, and no doubt many other things into a seamless whole. (I especially like how it devises a viable alternative to Evite.) The proof, however, will come when many other people -- and especially those whom you work with and socialize with -- start using it as well. Right now it's merely a curiosity, not an email or IM killer.

It's also buggy as hell: I tried using the Bloggy Wave robot to write this post and wound up losing the whole thing. It's just as well: Turns out Bloggy only sends waves to a special wave blog, not existing ones. Nevertheless, Wave shows a lot of promise, as the folks at Lifehacker demonstrate.

Annals of Geoengineering

From io9:

A group of scientists have a radical idea for combating climate change: terraforming the Sahara Desert and replacing it with a lush forest.

[...]

The idea is to plant Eucalyptus Grandis, which survives well in heat, which would be watered using drip irrigation. The trio claim the trees would lower the Sahara's temperature by up to 8°C Celsius [sic] in some areas, bring clouds to reflect the sun's rays back into space, and capture eight billion tons of carbon each year.

The cost? $2 trillion a year. That translates to about $68/tCO₂.¹ So, expensive, but not outrageously so; certainly it would be more cost-effective than the late Cash for Clunkers program. But then, as is often the case with geoengineering, there are the side effects:

[T]he forest would also likely prevent iron-rich dust from the sands from blowing into the Atlantic Ocean, iron that nourishes marine life. And the increased moisture could bring a plague of locusts down on not just the Sahara, but the rest of Africa as well.

This is why I'm often puzzled when geoengineering is proposed as an alternative to reducing carbon emissions, as opposed to an adjunct to it: Most of these schemes have side effects that tend to be as bad as if we just did nothing about climate change. On the other hand, if iron depletion of the oceans does become an issue, we can always dump more in -- which turns out to be another, and equally dubious, geoengineering plan.

¹ $2 trillion/(8 billion tC * 3.67) = $68.12/tCO₂.

Life After People

Gregory Clark's column on the future of unemployment seems to have gone over like a lead balloon; both left and right have given it a good pummeling. To recap: Clark argues that continuing technological progress, particularly in computers, will make the unskilled portion of the labor force unemployable. As he puts it:

So, how do we operate a society in which a large share of the population is socially needy but economically redundant? There is only one answer. You tax the winners -- those with the still uniquely human skills, and those owning the capital and land -- to provide for the losers.

Now, there's certainly a kernel of truth to this: As Mike Konczal notes, the long-term unemployment rate is at an all-time high, and the trend seems to point to the continued disappearance of unskilled workers from the work force. But Clark seems to have closed off any possibility of our society adjusting to technological progress in the way that every generation since the onset of the Industrial Revolution has adjusted: Some jobs disappear, but new ones are created, and people train to fill those jobs. The process by which this happened, to be sure, was messy and often unjust, but one can't deny that each generation since the onset of the Industrial Revolution adapted in this manner; and that, outside of major financial crises, the developed world has not been afflicted with a large underclass of the permanently unemployed.

Induction, however, is a dangerous thing, and it's all too facile to say that the computer revolution (including the Internet, AI, and robots) won't be any more disruptive than previous technological breakthroughs. What can we say about Clark's argument that doesn't dismiss it as neo-Luddism? I find myself borrowing liberally from both Reihan Salam and Ryan Avent for my thoughts on this. Salam, echoing Will Wilkinson and Tim Worstall, points out that economic incentives for low-income households can affect enormously how technological progress impacts their livelihoods -- though I think that government tax and welfare policies have mattered less than automation and globalization have, in terms of mass unemployment among the unskilled.* I like Salam's idea of wage subsidies, so that jobs for the unskilled that pay less than what can be lived on can still be taken; still, he is right to note that financial remedies may not do much about the social disruptions that would take place in the wake of mass automation.

Avent, for his part, says that the dystopia of a robot-run society with billions of superfluous people is likely not even feasible, either physically or economically. That point is important: how our energy policy plays out over the next few decades will be a big determinant of how technological progress will affect low-skilled labor. I can see a world in which oil is over $200/bbl severely hampering the supply chain for computers and robots, along with everything else. Not that that would be insurmountable -- domestic manufacturing, including for robots, could well revive in that environment -- but paying attention to resource constraints is always important when talking about the future.** Too often, we get utopian happy talk that blithely assumes physical abundance will always be with us and that technology will overcome any scarcity issues. In other words, that man-made capital is substitutable for natural capital, rather than being complementary.

Avent also notes that Clark's focus on unskilled labor is bizarre given that computerization is likely to hurt the highly educated as much as, if not more than, the less educated. I'm currently reading A Farewell to Alms (albeit at a glacial pace), and it seems to be a theme of his that social change is the product of social, or even genetic, behavioral traits. The Industrial Revolution happened because Europe, England in particular, was populated with descendants of the rich, not the poor, and thus had the traits needed to build an industrial civilization. So the ability of institutions to improve the lot of the poor is fairly limited: Either you have the social environment for economic growth, something that develops slowly over long periods of time, if at all; or you don't. That may or may not be the case (I'm skeptical, to say the least), but transposing that analysis onto the present day economy, where workers of all backgrounds are in danger of being made redundant, seems to have caused Clark's argument to go astray.

* This points to an ambiguity in Clark's op-ed: Is he talking about just American workers or the world as a whole? The wage differential between the average American worker and the average Chinese worker, say, is pretty large, and I suspect it would take a while for even robots to surpass the Chinese in that respect.

** Of course, if we become less reliant on fossil fuels, unskilled labor may yet have a chance -- let's not forget the green jobs debate. Yet again, automation could make even that moot.

UPDATE: Also read Tom Lee's thoughts on the subject. For myself, if the robot revolution leads to a Star Trek-style socialist utopia, I think I could get on board.

Wasting Time Productively

As is well known, the problem with combating global warming is that the costs of mitigation are mostly upfront, while the benefits, in terms of avoided destabilization of the Earth's climate, are in the future. This doesn't jibe well with human behavior, which is more attuned to taking on direct and immediate threats, such as war or terrorism or (for some people) same-sex marriage.

But suppose that failing to control pollution and develop clean energy resources resulted, not in extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels, but ZOMBIES??! That's the premise of the Web game Super Energy Apocalypse, which take real data on the cost of energy and toxic waste removal and pairs it with a typical "defend your base against enemies" scenario. It's pretty amusing, both for its playablity and for its assumptions about human psychology. Sustainable resource management? Boring! Killing zombies with wind-powered gun turrets? Fun!

Fun with Webtools

So this is making the rounds today, which draws on a map of metropolitan areas with surplus single males or single females that garnered some attention a while back claimed to show that the East Coast was full of lonely single women and the West Coast full of lonely single men. However, that map may have painted with too broad a brush, as Ezra Klein notes:

The original map counted all singles between the ages of 20 and 64. The new map lets you screw with some sliders for a data range. And the results are fascinating. On the young end of the spectrum, single men outnumber single women just about everywhere. If you hold the ages to 20-34, DC, for instance, has 27 extra single men for every 1,000 people. Shift the slider so it tracks folks from age 45 to 60, and DC has 48 more single women for every 1,000 folks.

One can find a kind of proof of this in another webtool that's making the rounds, which is a mashup of Craigslist personal ads and Google Maps. You can filter the results according to sexual preference, and the thing that jumps out most when one look at the DC area, say, is that there are considerably more men seeking women and men seeking men than there are women seeking men or women seeking women. This assumes, of course, that most of the people who post Craigslist personals are in the 18-44 age bracket, so take it with a grain of salt.

Recommendation

If you're like me, a MacBook user who vastly prefers Firefox to Safari, you've been in a bind for a while: There's been no way to read PDFs in-browser without downloading them first, which is a bit of a hassle. Now the guys who brought you BugMeNot have the solution: PDFMeNot, which lets you, among other things, embed PDFs into web pages. But it's the Firefox extension which is really helpful: it sends every PDF link to their website, making is possible once more to read PDFs in-browser. Not the greatest discovery in the world, but the company behind both sites deserves praise.

Deep Thought of the Day

The cell phone is the Swiss Army knife of the 21st century.

Pain in the RSS

I like Google Reader a lot, but one of the annoying things about it -- perhaps this is true of other RSS software -- is that I will often get a post reacting to a post before I get the original post itself. So, for example, this morning I read Tyler Cowen's critique of Dani Rodrik's progressive trade vision, then read, an hour later, Rodrik's post on... his progressive trade vision. Maybe I'd be better off living backwards, like T.H. White's Merlin.

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

OK, we now officially live in the future.