Does computing make the world better?
brandons.me
brandons.me
I really like the author's sentiment that "It's okay to invent useless things, create beautiful projects for their own sake, etc." and I think that's the first step to creating something that doesn't take computing as capital, as dead labor.
Computing can be alive, experimental, playful, and helpful to our communities. It doesn't have to scale, make big profits, or attract billions in VC bucks; in fact, all of those things just seem to bring us misery. And importantly, they are all orthogonal to the software itself. I'm inspired by Robin Sloan's "An app can be a home-cooked meal" [1] and initiatives like NYC Mesh [2]. It's okay if our software merely brings joy to our families and local communities.
[0] https://blog.jse.li/posts/software/
I don’t think this is necessarily the case.
It’s not the means of production in and of themselves that are the issue.
It’s the historio-socio-cultural-political framework, or zeitgeist, within which we find ourselves, and the decision we make, continue to make, and tolerate.
A lack of leadership in any real sense of the word.
There is, as you say, a mutual recursion, but the tools are only doing what we’re making them do, and in that sense they are amplifying our poor choices.
Blaming the tools seeks to externalise responsibility.
1) 'Means of production' do not arbitrarily further inequality. The Industrial Revolution, which we may very well be still living through (ask a historian in 500 years ...) smashed the old class systems and enabled standards of living unheard of before.
2) 'Tech' is in its infancy, the measured surpluses i.e profits are going into the hands of the 0.1% but consumer surpluses are huge. The value of the things we can buy today are immensely greater than before. I play a free video game that has provided me with countless hours of entertainment. From 'older tech': I get this amazing stuff called 'electricity' out of my walls and literally fresh water (hot and cold!) for literally pennies - this is revolutionary. You can live better than a Roman Emperor by shopping exclusively at Walmart.
3) A few billion people have come out of 'extreme poverty' in the last 40 years, as basic material prosperity reaches every corner of the planet. Computing has been part of that. Despite our own ugly inequality, and all the ugly externalities (pollution etc.) - we shouldn't denigrate this fact: having 'a roof, food, the ability to communicate with people at a distance, basic medicine/healthcare, basic rule of law' ... this is heaven compared to any situation their ancestors would have lived in.
Computing is as worthwhile as we want to make it, much like most other things.
It's only heaven compared to how it was before. If you are born under the current system, you don't know what it's like to have lived in a worse time. So while our ancestors are probably astounded at our prosperity, having tasted the before/after, someone born now will not be grateful, because they don't have a hellish alternative to compare it to (besides people in other countries).
This "relativity" extends to other areas too, not just poverty. For example... torture. For our ancestors, torture meant having your spine stretch until it broke or being stuck in an iron box filled with spikes or being starved and beaten and stuffed in a tiny locker or any number of horrifically macabre prospects. Now torture is "being alone in a room". I'm not downplaying the psychological damage of solitary confinement, but relative to the torture POWs went through or the torture methods used in medieval times, solitary confinement almost seems like a reward.
The standard by which we gauge poverty, torture, happiness, etc. shifts as society improves.
There is an existential jump when going from starvation and oppression to having basic means. Going from basic means to 'advanced means' is much less of a jump.
Life was brutal 200 years ago for almost everyone, and it's simply not brutal now.
So yes, overall, I understand that in 100 years, people will find it hard to fathom 'how we lived' but really, I think that all future humans could handle living in our era without to much problem.
I'm the son of political exiles from a third-world communist country who taught myself programming through reading the web. Everyone around me, including my family, insisted I was wasting my life with software and didn't support that erudition. They would joke I would be watching porn all day. But because it was available online, they couldn't stop me.
By the time I was in my early 20s, I made it to FAANG to the most expensive city in the world, and made three times what my family household had made. Everyone else from my socio-economic class in my birth city remains in that city without exception; I even had offered to teach my friends programming in middle school but they refused.
In that regards, I don't care about this abstract objective of equality, that's certainly worth eschewing to increase income mobility and move people from poverty. Concern for financial equality over welfare just inspires disgust in me.
But it sounds like inequality and the abuse of power are the very things you escaped, no? Surely you at least sympathize with those still in that situation, whether your current circumstances allow you to take any action on it or not?
As a specific data point, we have a dramatically lower fraction of extreme poverty today than any time in the recorded history of humanity. Not causal per se, but a big inflection occurs around the advent of computers:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
This seems like a reasonable framework to address the title question in general.
Therefore, computing may just have saved millions of lives.
Griping about the evils of the current gripeable is a lot of fun, though. One may even argue it's the more important of the two.
No, we couldn't have. Computing has killed us all.
Good talk I watched the other day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&feature=youtu.be
Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity.
Computing is a surrogate activity factory. Social media makes people's lives more hollow, less connected, less human, but in exchange, gives them the illusion that they are living principled, meaningful lives, living in caves, like brains in a jar.
At root, it's not about "making the world better", it's about professionals looting the commons to live in fancy bubbles where the only competition is staying ahead of others in the bubble. Hacker News is not the place to say this, as it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Here's the situation on the ground for the working class and the supposed social good of the Internet: Every single one of my family members, parents included, is both a precariat and on Facebook all day, every day. They don't have social lives. They don't have stable employment. They don't have careers. They don't know how to cook, how to learn, how to grow as humans. They don't know how to think for themselves, let alone interpret what they read, see, or watch. They hate what the screen tells them to hate; they like what the screen tells them to like. They've been singularly paralyzed in development, despite every effort to free them from their bondage from people outside the process.
Every day, the memory of being a living, breathing human becomes more and more remote to them, and there's no stopping it, because the entire process is autocephalous.
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In fact I think they're especially beneficial when the "natural" means for getting that fulfillment does in fact cause harm. Or, even when the natural activity simply has no other costs or benefits, the surrogate version might be able to meet the fulfillment more effectively than the real thing.
In some sense, art's very purpose is to produce these surrogate experiences. I think they are essential to being a healthy, functioning human being.
Yes, they frequently replace deficits in an individual's life with something that would otherwise cause them to disrupt the status quo. The question remains, at what cost? Is it sustainable? Are these activities robbing some humans at the expense of others?
Consider a YouTube video: Water Bottle Flip 2. It's about five minutes long and has been nominally viewed 300 million times, plus change.
That's approaching 3000 years of human time spent for a single video on a single service. The audience was probably entertained for that period but at what cost? What could have been in that lacunae? What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years? What was the opportunity cost? For the countless children who watch it, what part of the pre-Internet childhood shared by all human history is being sacrificed for it? What part was sacrificed for the 23,000 years spent on Baby Shark?
I don't disagree that there is a place for moderation and art, but what we're seeing on a grand scale is that the ascendancy of cultural forms that enable moderation are themselves being consumed or otherwise blanketed out with dopamine levers that are the first thing many people touch in the morning and the last thing they touch at night. That's not playing guitar, restoring vintage computers, or collecting Magic cards. That's a massive undiagnosed public health crisis.
> What else could have been accomplished or learned with that 3,000 years?
A video does not become more or less of a waste of time, per person, based on how many people watch it.
You could identify a different statistic, say hours watched per person, and make a different "scale of video watching is wasteful" argument.
Uncle Ted aka unabomber.
[1]: figuratively speaking. Technically it's what got them out of living in caves, but bear with me here.
http://xahlee.org/p/um/um-s06.html
as a countering antecode, everyone I know uses the utilities of the internet to no major ill effect. and like you can point to many valid criticisms of modern tech and it's usage, but painting entertainment sources like discord and social media platforms like Facebook as "destroying the very notion of being human" sounds a tad exaggerated
Guessing about their age, your parents' development likely predated mass computing. Their inability to do these things is not caused by computers...
> If you're making useless things, you have a surrogate activity. We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal.
The concept of "surrogate activity" breaks down once you understand human action. Whether in pre-historic African savanna or in modern-day NYC, people always act to improve their present conditions. Humans are different from animals in that we can initiate voluntary conscious action.
Kaczynski doesn't differentiate between involuntary (animal) action in response to stimuli, and purposeful human action, which is not and never was about mere "biological needs."
> At root, it's not about "making the world better", it's about professionals looting the commons to live in fancy bubbles where the only competition is staying ahead of others in the bubble. Hacker News is not the place to say this, as it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Because humans prefer wealth to poverty, much of human action is about creating wealth. You can create wealth without "looting" others. In fact, it's a lot easier to corporate with others, trade, and help each other build wealth than it is to steal.
In any case, once humans have satisfied their basic needs, one way or another, they can then do what they want. Some will want luxuries, like expensive and visible possessions or travel and fancy meals. Others will accumulate wealth to try to obtain power and control over others, or at least financial independence for themselves so they can opt out of employment. Some will just relax and play games all day, or follow other hobbies or sports as they prefer. The latter are what you are classifying as "surrogate activity", but I don't know if there's really any harm in it.
Of course there are movements that say science, technology, industrialisation are things to be avoided, such as the Amish or primitivist anarchists.
Have you read Jacques Ellul (i.e. the ur-"Kaczynski-style" argument)? Ellul defines technique as "[..] the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." I don't think you can reasonably state that Ellul nor Kaczynski fail to "understand human action".
In this case, the problem isn't that people are maximizing their own self-interest. The problem is that they aren't. Yes, they're making a "voluntary" "choice" to use an addictive technology and a liberal, market-based society is providing individuals with what they actually "want" rather than what they think they want. What those people without antibodies "want" are Skinner Boxes and the market is happily providing them, all up and down the line. This does not seem to be resulting in a functional civic society.
> Humans are different from animals in that we can initiate voluntary conscious action. Kaczynski doesn't differentiate between involuntary (animal) action in response to stimuli, and purposeful human action, which is not and never was about mere "biological needs."
Where is the evidence that there is such a thing as "voluntary conscious" or "purposeful" action" and not "mere biological needs"? If there were a difference in principle between the two, how exactly does that invalidate the argument that "voluntary conscious action" is not triggered when people aren't bored and have meaningful hurdles to overcome in their own lives?
> Because humans prefer wealth to poverty, much of human action is about creating wealth. You can create wealth without "looting" others. In fact, it's a lot easier to corporate with others, trade, and help each other build wealth than it is to steal.
I'm sure that some members of every society that reached an equilibrium with their environment that was later disrupted by the intrusions of foreign markets would disagree. "Staying competitive" is a more compelling explanation for as to why "humans" "prefer" "wealth" rather than that all humans are naturally materialistic and acquisitive. If you don't run faster than the slowest member, you will be eaten. If you don't think faster than the slowest member of the tribe, you will be sacrificed. If you don't adopt, you will be enslaved by those who do. That's a great way to optimally allocate resources, but once again, this dynamic and addictive technology does not seem to be creating a functional civic society.
Rhetorically, theoretically, we are building tools that allow people to build. That opens the door to all kinds of positive ideas, and press: freedom, expressiveness, creativity, etc.
In practice though, we seem to have passed a point where things that enable that truthfully gain traction.
My go-to example is the Firefox phone. For what it was it was 'effin amazing: a way for anyone using HTML and CSS to directly program their phone, and make apps knowing little more than what you'd see in a w3schools tutorial. Everyone could be an app developer! It was such a leap from where we are today that it was incredible.
So, here you had an inexpensive tool that actually manifested the values we claim to care about: openness, creativity for all, a balance of simplicity and DIY.
But when it was released, what happened? Nobody cared.
A few hobbyists did, but nowhere near the numbers you would expect, based on the ideals above.
So it died, and was buried as an embarrassing failure. In my experience, most projects with similar aims die pretty quickly too, or stay within very, very tiny hobbyist circles.
The digital world we really live in, in 2020, seems to be mostly about fun-and-ez flashy entertainment. So maybe you make an app that makes it easier to share video; that may take over the world. Maybe it gamifies something usually boring: that may have productivity benefits, and do some good.
I do think the small, elite class of developers will continue to exist, and we'll make further improvements with the languages we use today, and things in that sense will get incrementally better. It's just not a quantum leap. The FaceBook-ization of the world will continue, even if FaceBook dies and is replaced. Basically, digital entertainment will expand and continue to gobble up the economy. It'll keep people employed.
But when that's digital technology's actual purpose, it's unsurprising that the outcomes are pretty uninspired, too.
That may seem like a pithy observation, but I think it actually says a lot about whether technology is a force for good, because it seems like technology also follows that same two-out-of-three rule.
The government is indistinguishable from the 10 biggest corporations, as it should be; and all the people need to live and distract themselves to death is provided by heavily automated labour and transport. A few people actually dollarCoins, but you've never seen one. Cash and unregulated cryptocurrencies are illegal, of course, as they aided and abetted terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, the alt-right, and possible alternatives to the powers that be.
Entering your shared containerpartment, you blink away the afterimages from your google glasses as you move to sit down in front of your itechscreen ('smart' was deemed an iq-slur last year, prompting some rebranding.) Your roommate doesn't ask you how the anti-trans-racism protest went; you've never talked to him.
The time between removing your glass and hooking in to the facetube feed is an unpleasant opportunity for your mind to reflect, as you gaze out at the decaying brickwork in the distance before closing the hatch to your cell.
You are free.
For starters, doing something not-fun, but socially beneficial and lucrative seems like a good thing, if that is someone's choice.
Also fun, not socially beneficial, and lucrative (assuming the job is not socially harmful), such as esports doesn't seem like a problem to me.
It's not hard to guess how this plays out.
In that case an energy gradient presumably allowed clusters of chemicals to reinforce each other's production, and we know how that turned out ... centralization into fully independent forms (cells) and an explosion of new forms that could colonize and customize environments far beyond their origin.
In this case, we have energy gradients vastly easier to tap into via diverse and deep economic gradients between supply and demand in the environment, i.e. us for now.
A very friendly place for a new form of life!
>Last week I was talking with my sister about how people in our society have gotten so toxic and tribal over the past decade,
False, there is even a famous meme of a fake book cover about it that is pretty spot on: "The world was always awful, a guide to world history for people who romanticize the past"
> The story of radiology in war offers a striking example of the unsuspected amplitude that the application of purely scientific discoveries can take under certain conditions. X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the time of the war. The great catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity, accumulating its victims in terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the ardent desire to save everything that could be saved and to exploit every means of sparing and protecting human life. > At once there appeared an effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of service. What had seemed difficult became easy and received an immediate solution. The material and the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment. All those who did not understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know learned; those who had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific discovery achieved the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar evolution took place in radium therapy, or the medical application of radiations emitted by the radio elements. > What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development shared between the new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of the nineteenth century? It seems that they must make our confidence in disinterested research more alive and increase our reverence and admiration for it.
That's similar to the sudden usefulness of video conferencing software to continue critical business (healthcare, education) during the pandemic. But video software hasn't been a "useless invention" - its use has been obvious ever since Doug Engelbart demo'd it.
Developers, to the extent that we do enjoy making useless things and designing useless abstractions, lack a north star akin to scientists' pursuit of "truth". Optimization and elegance come to mind, but they aren't established as ends-in-themselves in the same way that truth or knowledge is.
My gut (a programmer's gut) tells me that the comparison could hold up, especially if we adjusted our north star.
[0] https://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/curie/curie.pdf
As it is, I wouldn't mind seeing some level of tech exodus since I live in the area of one of the shittier Bay Area commutes. But computers tell me when traffic is especially bad and gives me alternate routes.
Utilitarian/capitalist: we are more efficient with resources.
Artistic: new media channels and techniques allow for increased expression
Experiential: one of the claims about the benefits of books, pre-Internet, is that it allowed you to experience places you'd never seen before. Computers, built on top of computing, allow us to have even deeper and richer self-driven experiences. How cool was it when Google Maps launched! I could explore parts of the world I pined for, wanted to visit, and eventually integrated its utility into my life much deeper -- no more need to purchase maps, etc. etc.
So from a practical perspective, I think computing has made life unambiguously "better" in several ways.
Is the "world" better? Probably not. But this isn't due to the tools themselves, but to the tool wielders. Power consolidation and maintenance is the realm of political science and political action. Computing has impacted this, some in positive ways and some in negative ways.
I think this article should really be: web developer wonders if there's more to computers than websites. Because I guarantee the scientist that used a computer to model disease and create a vaccine is not wondering if computers make the world better.
The OP should read-up on what "computers" were in the the early 20th century, and the error-prone toil that "automatic computers" sought to replace. There's so much that couldn't ever exist today if not for automatic computation.
With other animals we look at them stuck in zoos as being a worse existence than in their natural environment, and zoos are at least intentionally designed for the animals wellbeing. For ourselves the technological progressivist sees moving away from our natural habitat as inherently good.
Electricity, the steam engine, antibiotics, and agriculture all exist. We’ve been through multiple levels of life changing technological advancement yet people in general don’t seem particularly happy nor fulfilled. Better planes, cars, and other devices seems a moot point if those things didn’t get the job done. Hell, those things exist and people still kill themselves, or need a cocktail of antidepressants to make it through the day.
You would think if technological progress improved lives at all then such marvels would have managed to move the needle enough that rich western worlders who never have to directly expend effort on any of their basic needs ever again wouldn't intentionally kill themselves.
Computing, like every human activity, is subject to the gravitational forces of capitalist markets. Computing does whatever people who can make money with computing decide computing does.
There is a better question to ask than, "Is computing helpful or harmful?" It is, "Who gets to decide what gets researched, built, invented, and how it will all be used?"
Same thing with computing: Democracies around the world can use computing to spy on their people in order to suppress any political dissent.
Most of the 'negative' stuff really is derived from 'communication' I wouldn't put it on 'computing' so much.
Unfortunately in some societies it is now oriented towards augmenting evil. Like the Chinese Social score system.
- Define computing
- Define make
- Define world
- Define better