TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Tax policy doesn’t explain most of the rise in income inequality since 1979:
So, would we have avoided the increase in inequality over the period in question? Not even remotely. The 1979 scenario lines shows inequality rising a bit more slowly than what actually happened, but the underlying pattern is the same.
“Roughly 30 percent of the rise in post-tax, post-transfer inequality between 1979 and 2007 can be attributed to changes in the redistributive nature of tax and budget policy,” Fieldhouse concludes. “It is still the case, however, that shifts in the market distribution of income are the primary factors driving the rise in inequality.”
That, combined with rising inequality throughout the developed world over the period, suggests that it is mostly a result of larger, global trends.
June 26th, 2013Randy Barnett explains Justice Kennedy’s DOMA decision:
Because the logic of Justice Kennedy’s opinion for the majority in Windsor is novel, it is likely to confuse observers as it seems to have confused the dissenters. So in this post, I want to lay bare this logic, by explaining how it resembles, but also differs from, the federalism argument we made in our “Federalism Scholars” amicus brief (cited by the Court at page 23).
(Isn’t the Internet incredible? We get to read explanations of Supreme Court decisions from people whose work is cited by the court. The future is awesome.)
I haven’t had a chance to read the decision yet, but I’m looking forward to it after Barnett’s piece. Here’s a link to Kennedy’s decision.
June 26th, 2013Ross Douthat on the Supreme Court’s V.R.A ruling:
June 26th, 2013Yet that seems to be precisely what the Roberts Court did today. The decision’s argument for amending the V.R.A. is perfectly lucid, but it’s just that: An argument for updating a successful law to reflect contemporary realities, which under our system is supposed to be the role of the legislature rather than the courts.
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June 24th, 2013Regardless of the specific form of the federal government’s spying, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s structure is worrying:
The surveillance court is a different world of secret case law, non-adversarial proceedings, and rulings written by individual judges who rarely meet as a panel.
Judges generally confer only with government lawyers, and out of public view. Yet the judges have the power to interpret the Constitution and set long-lasting and far-reaching precedent on matters involving Americans’ rights to privacy and due process under the Fourth Amendment. And this fast-growing body of law is almost entirely out of view of legal scholars and the public. Most Americans do not have access to the judiciary’s full interpretation of the Constitution on matters of surveillance, search and seizure when it comes to snooping for terrorist plots — and are limited in their ability to challenge it.
Their decisions impact U.S. citizens heavily, yet we have no way to know what their decisions are, nor to challenge the programs their rulings enable. And we have allowed it to happen.
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June 18th, 2013I haven’t posted anything this week both because I was in San Francisco until Wednesday evening and because iOS 7 has taken me a while to wrap my head around, but Marco Arment wrote what I think is one of the more interesting pieces about the update:
One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.
I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS. After what we saw of iOS 7 yesterday, I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance.
He’s absolutely right. iOS 7 is so different—both aesthetically and functionally—that nearly all applications will need substantial updates. Applications that go un-changed will feel old and wrong in an even more dramatic way than applications that weren’t updated for retina displays. As a result, there’s going to be an App Store clearing.
But more importantly, this is an opportunity for new entrants into almost every category because it is so different. Application makers have a chance to re-think not only how they look, but what they do, and how they do it. The design concepts Apple introduced are in their infancy, and I think we all are going to help define them with the applications we build.
While talking with people at WWDC, I found myself starting to think that iOS 7 is early days in much the same way the iPhone was when the App Store was released. We have the chance to define the interfaces for the next five years. That’s incredibly exciting.
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June 14th, 2013Partly in response to my piece on the philosophy of Google Glass, Alan Jacobs wrote this:
But if awakening students from those slumbers has always been the task of the true educator, that task is all the more difficult in a time of technologies of knowledge, or “knowledge,” that asymptotically approach omnipresence. Google Glass, along with a whole range of similar technologies, enforces the very passivity which truly liberal education is concerned to defeat.
That’s absolutely right. Just as “the truth is in the cloud” for web services that sync data, I think we’re setting the stage for the web turning into some sort of ostensibly-neutral source of true knowledge. When we have immediate, unfettered access to the web’s information, it begins to take on a feeling of absolute truth, even for things that are inherently opinion or taste.
In 2010, I argued that this idea of “openness” that Facebook (and to some extent, Google) have pushed so much for—that we will all be better off if we share more of our lives and identity with the public—undermines public and private as separate spheres, and therefore also the space for people to form their own beliefs and identity. As the public sphere encroaches and overruns the private sphere, it is necessarily harder to experiment with new tastes, opinions and beliefs, and to settle on certain ones, because the entire process is more transparent for observation and judgment.
These things—devices like Google Glass, which give us immediate access to the web, and social networks, which push us to share more and more of ourselves with the public—are intertwined. The result could be, or already is, a greater emphasis on “Well, everyone else thinks…” and less on “Well, I believe this to be true because…”. And that should be profoundly worrying.
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June 3rd, 2013June 3rd, 2013First, you have to recognize that you’ve been “the product” your entire life. So were your parents and so were your grandparents. Television and radio, newspapers and magazines—they all sell your attention to their primary customers: advertisers. Even things you “pay for” sell you off to advertisers because you really don’t pay for them—you only cover part of the costs. Despite this obvious and longstanding fact of life, while everyone bitches about commercials, no one says TV networks are insidious or underhanded because they run ads.1 I’ve never heard of anyone boycotting Mad Men because they don’t want to be a product sold by AMC.
June 3rd, 2013This is the real problem with health care pricing in the U.S.: not the lack of sufficiently aggressive price controls, but the lack of meaningful price signals.
Dmitry Itskov wants to unlock us from the prisons of our physical bodies and upload “us”—the sum of our brain’s connections that create “us”—into affordable machine bodies. He believes this will free us to live better, more meaningful lives:
Mr. Itskov says he will invest at least part of his fortune in such ventures, but his primary goal with 2045 is not to become richer. In fact, the more you know about Mr. Itskov, the less he seems like a businessman and the more he seems like the world’s most ambitious utopian. He maintains that his avatars would not just end world hunger — because a machine needs maintenance but not food — but that they would also usher in a more peaceful and spiritual age, when people could stop worrying about the petty anxieties of day-to-day living.
“We need to show that we’re actually here to save lives,” he said. “To help the disabled, to cure diseases, to create technology that will allow us in the future to answer some existential questions. Like what is the brain, what is life, what is consciousness and, finally, what is the universe?”
As seems to happen, this is perfectly timed with my piece on Google Glass last week.
Perhaps I’m just cynical, but this story seems very much like a microcosm for much of technology, and especially Google Glass. There’s a very nice veneer on top of Itskov’s avatar idea, a veneer that says it’s to help people and to solve real problems like curing diseases (because our bodies will no longer be organic) and ending hunger (because the only sustenance we will require is electricity and maintenance), and to free people of the “petty anxieties” of day-to-day life like providing a living for you and your family. As a result, humanity will be free to tackle much larger issues.
I say it’s a veneer because whether Itskov’s vision has any chance at being realized or not (it certainly doesn’t in the relatively near future), his solution to these “problems” solves them by eliminating much of what makes us “human” in the first place. Who we are as individuals is not merely defined by the connections in our brains, but also by how we experience the physical world and interact with it, and our struggle to survive and improve our lot. Even if you can successfully map a person’s brain and re-create the individual within a computer as a result, they inherently won’t be the same person, or feel the same way, by nature of their new body. Sudden immortality, coupled with no need to ever seek food and survive, could play havoc with a brain evolutionarily-designed to focus primarily on it.
In other words, the “solution” may destroy what’s worth saving in the first place: humanity.
June 3rd, 2013On the Philosophy of Google Glass
May 31st, 2013Technology inherently alters how we live, what we do, how we think, how we die. Modern medicine has turned many diseases that, when contracted, brought along death more often than not into things of the past or minor annoyances, and injuries that would have been debilitating or deadly into ones that can be overcome. The motion picture didn’t simply make plays something that could be watched over and over again by many different audiences, but created a mass entertainment accessible by nearly everyone, and changed how we learn about news events and conceive of them. The car allowed for suburban sprawl, and for people to travel where they please, whether for the evening or for extended trips across thousands of miles; and in so doing, the car changed what the American “ideal” is, spawned innumerable cultural groups centered around it, and helped construct a rite of passage into adulthood for teenagers. Getting your driver license and first car is the first step toward being an adult, but also a right to freedom, to being able to go wherever you please on your own or with friends on nothing more than a moment’s notice.
So as long as humans have been creating tools to influence the world around us, the tools—technology—have been influencing us, too. It’s an inevitable byproduct of using something, and this isn’t exactly a new insight. Smartphones and now “wearable” computers like Google Glass are merely the latest human technology to influence their creators.
But while they may only be the latest example of something that’s been happening for as long as humans have created tools, there is, I think, something very different about so-called wearable computers like Google Glass. They have the potential to integrate themselves so deeply into the user that over time, and as they develop further, there will be little reason to differentiate between the device and the user. Removing your Glass device will feel very much like losing a limb or sense—something that you’ve grown used to depending on and using is gone. Through this much deeper integration, these devices could fundamentally alter the human experience and what it means to be human.
That might sound alarmist, like science fiction, or—if you own a smartphone—just remind you of that small moment of dread, like something’s wrong, when you leave the house without your phone.
Wearable computing has much more potential than “wearable” implies. Instead, through overlays on our vision (or more direct connections with the brain, potentially), things like Google Glass can become another sensory input as well as an output. Google Glass already allows you to look something up on Google (“Google, how tall is Mt. Everest?”) and get directions without ever pulling the phone out of your pocket, or using your hands at all; you ask, and the information is spoken to you or overlaid at the top of your vision. It’ll notify you about your flight this afternoon or messages you receive, and you can reply to the message, too. You can snap a photo or video. All without using your hands, and it’s all—again—on top of your vision.
The ultimate goal is to form a direct connection between our brains and the web, and all of it that entails. Google Glass is merely a first step toward that, and merely a hack that hijacks our vision to provide input to our brains and hijacks our voice for control. A direct connection with the brain is obviously ideal; there’s no “glasses” to wear, or need to use voice to control it, which isn’t very efficient. In Steven Levy’s In the Plex, he recounts a conversation he had with Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2004:
Back in 2004, I asked Page and Brin what they saw as the future of Google search. “It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.
“That’s true,” said Brin. “Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it will be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk to, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them and suggest useful information.
The web’s information will be our brain’s information, and the web’s services will our brain’s tools. We would be able to immediately answer whatever question we have, or information we need. If you’re fixing your sink, instructions on how to do so (or maybe a video?) are just a thought away. In a few moments, you’ll be able to make fabulous chicken tikka masala. Humanity’s knowledge will have a direct pipe into our brains. And you’ll be able to do incredible things, too. You could snap a photo with a thought, send a message to someone or file away something you’ve come across to a note-taking service. You could control your home’s lights and television. You could… well, the list goes on.1
And, of course, you’ll be able to check Twitter and Facebook, and post to them, wherever you are and while doing whatever else.
I say all this because I don’t think there’s a significant difference between doing all of this through a Google Glass-like device or some direct brain connection, as Page proposes. If they’re successful at their purpose, both will be quickly adapted into our senses. Just as we’ve gotten used to being able to pull out our smartphones whenever we have a spare moment or need to settle some dispute or trivia, we’ll reflexively ask Glass the answer to a question, or to snap a photo, or to check the news real quick, or to look through our Facebook and Twitter stream, even at moments when we probably shouldn’t. And since the amount of effort it takes to do so will be so much smaller than it is with a smartphone (which is already terribly small), we will do all of it with that much more frequency. No event will be complete without taking a photo and posting it to our social network of choice, because unless it’s documented and unless we’ve stuck it in everyone else’s stream, then it didn’t really happen.
I don’t think that’s a positive, and it says nothing about the social effects of having a web-connected camera and microphone strapped to our faces. (Dustin Curtis touches on it in his piece about his experience with Glass.) But what I find most troubling is the philosophy underlying Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s thoughts on devices like Glass. They say that Glass’s goal is to get technology “out of the way,” but that isn’t it. The idea is that we will all be better off if we’re always connected to the web, always on, and have uninterrupted and instantaneous access to it and humanity’s “knowledge.” The idea that Page expresses is that if I can immediately learn about something I don’t know much about, I’ll be better off. I’ll be able to make smarter decisions and live a deeper, richer life by spending the time it would have taken to research and learn about something on more meaningful and substantive tasks.
I think, though, that is a terribly deluded and shallow understanding of what it means to “learn” about something. When we—humans—learn about something, we are not simply committing facts to our memory so we can recall them in the future. That’s a very tiny part of a much larger and much more important process. To “learn” about something is to study the information (when historical events occurred, what happened, etc), find connections between it and other things we’ve learned and experiences we’ve had, and to synthesize it into something greater—knowledge. Knowing, say, the Pythagorean Theorem in isolation isn’t of much use, but connecting it to your need to identify another object’s location suddenly makes it very useful. And more abstractly, knowing Roman and Greek history isn’t very useful all on its own, but being able to learn from it and apply its lessons to current political difficulties might prove very beneficial.
Synthesizing information into knowledge isn’t an instantaneous process because that’s not how we work. We form conclusions and connections between new information and other things we know by thinking through it and living it. Conveniently, and crucially, taking time to learn something or to answer our own question by pouring through books and articles and our own investigation allows us time to do that. We have little choice but to draw conclusions and form connections between what we’re looking at and what we already know or have seen before because our brains are working over the material for the answer we seek. We find knowledge when we engage our brains. And, moreover, we often stumble into things unintentionally while actually looking for something altogether unrelated. Things that end up becoming more important than what we were originally looking for in the first place.
Page’s idea—that we would be fundamentally better off if we had immediate access to all of humanity’s information—ignores that. It provides facts, but elides conclusions and connections. What’s worse, it starves us of opportunities to use our skill for critical thinking, and since it is a skill and is therefore something that must be developed and practiced, it starves us of the chance to develop it.
I find that troubling. Glass is not a technology that is designed to amplify our own innate abilities as humans or to make us better as humans, but rather one that acts as a crutch to lean on in place of exercising the very thing that makes us human. I don’t find that exciting. I find that disturbing.
This may all sound like so much hyperbole. After all, we’ve adapted just fine to prior new technologies, despite Luddite claims that it will destroy us. And, undoubtedly, we will adjust to this sort of thing, too, and the world will not come crashing down. I think, though, that this sort of thing—a more intimate connection between us and computers—is a path we are heading down, and since its more intimate nature also makes it more influential over us, I think we should deeply consider what it’s intended to accomplish for us and what might happen to us in the process.
Technology isn’t a force of nature that just happens. It’s something that we create, and so we should question why we are creating it. This has always been true, but I think it’s even more important now that we do so.
Technology, I think, should exist to improve our lives as humans, to magnify the good and minimize the bad, rather than change our nature or experience. That’s what I believe.
That’s what I believe, and you may disagree. I would suspect many do, especially those with more of a bent toward transhumanism. And that’s fine. But we should be having a much larger discussion about our technology’s intent than we are now, because it’s only increasing in importance.
- If the idea of a direct brain interface seems ridiculous, it shouldn’t; researchers have shown that monkeys can control a robot’s motion with their brain activity, and the means they use are relatively rudimentary. The brain appears to be able to adjust to and adapt new sensory inputs. [↩]
While comparing Google Glass to a (theoretical) Apple-made watch, Ken Segall makes this observation:
Second, there’s the company’s love of humanity. That is, Apple has never created technology for technology’s sake. It creates technology that strikes a chord with human beings.
I’d restate that in a different way: Apple seeks to make technology that makes us better as humans, rather than try to change what we are. The Mac, iLife, the iPod, iPhone and iPad all fit this very well. None of them try to redefine what it means to be human.
Google Glass, as a technology, begins to do exactly that. It’s a first stab at providing an immediate connection between the web and our brains, and it does so by overlaying an interface on our most important sensory input. There’s no meaning in “it gets technology out of the way,” as Google is wont to say, because Glass is intended to always be in the way, to become a part of us in a much more literal way than smartphones have.
That’s not only unappealing to me, but I think the idea—that we will be better off if we literally integrate the web into ourselves and therefore very fundamentally change the human experience—disturbing.
May 31st, 2013
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