Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last
hplusmagazine.com
hplusmagazine.com
Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air.
Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious, that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along with the great stuff.
I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different ways.
Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure.
It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride.
All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.
Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?)
But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?)
Oh -- just want to mention that I don't see this as being nation state driven, and it is not the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"
(yes, you can call me damn hippy!)
Can you define "raw capitalism"?
That should be interesting.
Corporate charters are granted by the government.
Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc) is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars).
It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic system.
>> Some examples please.
Watch a tv show in 2010: Go to your library's computer (or the computer you probably already have), access hulu.com, watch for free with minimal commercials.
Buy a song in 2000: Drive to a store, buy the CD for $15 and cd player
Buy a song in 2010: iTunes or Amazon for $.99.
The point is not that nothing is free, or that it may never be free, but that it's very cheap and very accessible with less effort and fewer different orthogonal pieces of specialized hardware.
This rule of thumb does seem to apply much more strongly to the speakers of Asian languages than the speakers of European languages, though.
There is only a certain period of time from which you can profit from any particular good. If you make a hamburger, you have probably 2 hours to sell it before it goes bad and is worthless.
And likewise, if you create a cell phone, you have maybe 2 years to sell it before nobody will want it. And if you make a movie, you have a few months where you can sell the movie (in a theater) and make money from it. Once the movie hits the internet the ability to make money off it decreases (piracy will happen more in the future, not less). Make a new app for the iPhone and you have a few months where you can make money before a free alternative arises.
This is technological deflation. And the pace is increasing. The time you're able to make money is decreasing rapidly. Mathematically, as that time approaches 0, the effective price of everything starts reaching $0. Why buy anything today, when it'll be effectively free tomorrow?
The film may be free but it will be "old", and the app may have a free clone but people (businesses) still pay for old proprietary software now instead of free clones.
The price for that particular hamburger will be $0 once it's mouldy. It only reaches $0 when nobody will pay anything for it so it never actually reaches $0. Now imagine McDonald's developed technology that could produce a million hamburgers per second really cheaply. I imagine the price of hamburgers would become practically $0. This is essentially what's happening to most aspects of our technology, information, and digital goods.
* The film may be free but it will be "old", and the app may have a free clone but people (businesses) still pay for old proprietary software now instead of free clones.
It's not that it instantly drops to $0. It's deflation, the price decays over time. The longer a film is easily available on the internet, or the longer a "good-enough" free app is out the more the price of the film and app fall. The pace of this deflation is increasing as technology makes it easier and cheaper to produce and distribute digital goods.
So what explains the trend that things are getting cheaper? I think it's because people learn more quickly the value of something. I can sell an ignorant person a moldy hamburger if I'm cruel. They may not know, or may be so hungry they'll take the short term reward without being aware of the long term damage. Today, I can hardly make a movie without having every intending consumer become painfully aware of every alternative.
It's that value is suddenly more transient. I think it's because the speed of information causes the time constants on those transients to shrink drastically.
A good example is personal servants. In 1910 a middle class family in England would be able to afford several full-time servants. Nowadays it's far more expensive, because the ratio between middle-class wages and minimum wages is much higher.
A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment. But the cost of providing a given teacher-to-student ratio will go up over time.
I think you'd have to agree that any time you apply technology to a particular "problem", the cost of solving that problem goes down. As technology progresses, the problems become cheaper and easier to solve. And now I can go to Walmart and buy a chair for $5 instead of fashioning one out of oak. Or I can buy a $12 electric stand-up lamp, instead of burning whale-oil in a hand lamp.
So, although oak and whale-oil is never going to be free, the cost of sitting down and having light at nighttime, is essentially free at this point.
* A good example is personal servants.
This is not an example of technology. But alas, these days we do not require a servant when I can pop a TV dinner in a microwave and eat a meal in 5 minutes.
* A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment
Ever visit http://www.khanacademy.org/ ?
Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more expensive over time.
But if nurses cost too much, once we start applying technology to that problem, we could probably find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of nursing health care. Eg, robots, tele-doctors, cheap home healthcare etc.
You don't actually get a 1Gb hard disk made and on your doorstep for $0, but you do get much more space for the same money than you did three years ago so cost per Gb falls and falls towards zero.
(Though I don't follow how this counts as the "cost of almost everything" unless you say something like, a new car costs the same as one ten years ago but now comes with more features, so each feature cost less than it used to" perhaps?).
The price of something that has been automated is zero.
Food might start to go down at some point but I don't see land and raw materials declining for a little while, though if telecommuting from Utah or outer-Mongolia becomes easy, land might well get cheaper.
Health care's an odd thing. Maybe enough biology research will bring the price down but so-far it's increased the price. A lot of this comes because of a market that's happy to absorb a higher priced replacement for a given item if the replacement can claim superiority in other ways. This sound OK but it's had truly poisonous results. Open source biology could eventually have an impact here.
Energy is a long story in itself...
Still, it's interesting to think about these tendencies.
And it doesn't help that many people eat crap and refuse to walk anyplace.
I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney? Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose you Pikachu! Yay!"
The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh abridged :))
It can only get better from there.
Who's with me?
http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-makin...
Johnny Test ain't half bad, either, in terms of shorter stuff, and there are plenty of others. It's not all Pikachu. GP, you're not watching the right channels.
>10. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably...
he forgot
11. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes
Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.
GO HUMANS!
I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations.
Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its implications in Rainbow's End.
Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?
That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.
As "combat methods" require more intelligence, it will become harder for governments to control the population.
Convincing an army of hackers to follow a military order without questioning it is much harder than convincing some kids it's cool and patriotic to run towards a front line with a gun in their hands.
Flags and national anthems will lose much of their political importance.
Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.
> Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff.
Uh huh. http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/
> Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)?
There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium-Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days, then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been tried yet, etc.
"Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!"
Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.
but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example
Cautious is saying "I wont invest in xyz singularity technology until I'm convinced it works" or "I'm not planning my retirement fund based on living to 150 until I see people routinely living to 150 starting where I am now" or "I've seen 80 claims of new technology fall through, so this has to have extra strong evidence to convince me it's not in the same class".
Saying "I'm too pessimistic for this happy happy future world" isn't cautious, it's something else.
(Also: perhaps, possible, maybe, just, for example? I can't say why but you are strongly hammering into your post that you think someone is an idiot you have to speak down to. Me, or the article author, or both. That's the kind of social signalling you dismiss yet you are doing it (and so am I. Everyone does).
"May you live in interesting times"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566#
But I'll be patient.
Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I never end up at a party at this guys house.