We are just starting to learn what computers are for. Hopefully, instead of being tools of stealing our focus and invigilation some day we will collectively figure out how to use computers so that we can live better lives.
Epidemiology ought to be able to easily tease out ideal "life best practises" - actual good advice given to you by your phone - backed by the mistakes of a million others in just your situation.
if keeping a daily diary helps people make better life decisions imagine what that would do?
Imagine the power you’d have if you had people literally following orders based on a system of life that you’ve designed. And follow it they might if the perception of outcomes is positive.
As of mid 2019 26 million air tickets and over 4 million high speed rail tickets were refused based on SCS. Also some personal information is openly published about people with low SCS.
Elo rankings (not ELO) was first adopted in 1960, which while technically overlapping with computing's timeframe, the two are unrelated. Certainly Elo was not invented to play online chess or for the sake of computer-aided chess by any stretch.
There isn't one. We're simply the result of a bunch of lucky events and evolutionary forces.
I know some of my habits are awful (brushing teeth, exercise as of late, going on any walk outside) so I setup my phone to remind me every date at a specific time.
Can some of these be predetermined by an engineer? Yes! Can all of them? No.
Are not notifications intended by engineers to dictate a behavior? "To use my product" to what end various products are a means (Facebook, reddit, HN etc). I'd argue any product/system to which we join encourages us to follow it if we find it rewarding, regardless of positive outcomes (though surely the short term just look positive else what incentive exists to start?)
There is already a lot of real value in ubiquitous computing, automated warehouses, supply chain optimizations, digital entertainment, digital government services in many countries, I could go on for couple of pages now.
Recommendations and tracking are just a side effect. FB and Google ads are not whole "digital economy" on their own.
Is technology about, or only about optimizing value in supply chains?
Maybe you thought about optimizing content delivery, but I was thinking about computer games, VR, music production, which are digital entertainment and have nothing to do with supply chain optimizations.
The reverberations of the loudest (most magnified) permeate and shape ideology.
Hopefully the conductors get the frequency right for long term and long distance communication.
Every technological advance is usually both good and bad. Some are more good, some are more bad. Sometimes we gain a lot by it, and only lose a little, other times what we gain is not worth what we lost.
The problem with this idea is what makes life valuable the machine would not know. “Life’s best practices” is subjective, and therefore the machine could promote what one considers a best practice that another considers a worst practice.
My personal takes:
For (1), I don't think it is self-evident. I see that the pleasure from the consumption of junk food and that from the mass media has some parallel, but tech has a far greater degree of freedom -- it's potential to truly transform human lives (for good and bad)
For (2), the food industry, although, by its nature, conservative, is going still going through evolution. Maybe fast food doesn't have to be junk food. Maybe nutritional balance can be achieved without compromising taste and cost.
I bought a action camera that is the size of a palm, with hardware 3D gimbal stabilization and can track faces and other objects. The video from which I can stream to my phone via bluetooth and it came to my doorstep 2 days after I ordered it online.
All of that involves computers of various size, sitting either in a miniature hardware in my hand or somewhere in a huge data center, and worked in tandem to provide an experience that is just mindblowing 20 years ago.
Was that camera somehow necessary for you to lead a good life or is it yet another distraction from it?
The leading COVID-19 vaccine involves a lot of computers. From the production of the mRNA strands to the setup of the supply chains to communications between scientists.
And there are few things that we need more than an effective COVID-19 vaccine in order to lead a good life right now.
The computerized chain that got GP his camera is similar the the one that is used in the making of the vaccine.
GP's camera is just icing on the cake.
Is the Internet contributing to the good in their lives? A report recently that found children who play social online games and connect with friends online while locked down have better mental health than those that don't.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/23/video-...
And the industry profits with that by applying psychological gimmicks in their games, the same ones applied by Vegas' casinos. The problem here is that they are applied on children that are unable to fully fathom the mid-long term consequences of their decisions and that keeps them playing and forgetting the external world. Their mental health is better until the day their parents take away their devices and send them to play outside. Suicide rates doubled over the years. Antidepressants use doubled over the years.
Social media by itself is not the problem. How big techs use them to profit (The Social Dilemma) is the problem.
I agree with you that this is an issue in any kids physical external activity. But the difference is that these activities are often supervised by an adult and in an event of a bullying the participants are removed and also often punished, and also the victim is helped and assisted. Note that I use the word "often" because I know that there are parents that encourage bullying behavior as ~self-defense~, which I also disagree heavily.
We don't have adults supervising every Fortnite lobby. Most children do not know how to use reporting tools to report improper behavior by another player. And while they suffer from bad words, psychological threats and such, they can't just turn off their devices, because the game always offer them a reward, a new skin, virtual coins, lootboxes, etc, so they keep playing, and therefore we have a loop.
Just yesterday I reported a player who cheated on FIFA, by exploiting a glitch that enabled him to play with a team full of superplayers and legends. The whole process took me almost 30 minutes. Sometimes I think that they don't want us to report bad behavior because the process itself is tiring.
May I ask, what in a good life can not be classified as another distraction? Or are only human activities that someone from 1000 years ago can do pass the purity test?
The problem with the current trajectory of technology is that it seeks to strip us of autonomy. We are usually presented with means of consumption, rather than courses of action. I suspect that is what people mean when they discuss distraction.
I for one would much rather fill my life with pleasant distractions, instead of a Spartan utopian lifestyle that some other people tries to sell me as 'good life'.
Waiting 1 month to have something delivered is hardly what I call a good life. Let's celebrate the improvements where we can.
In lieu of that, I prefer my shipping delivered in 2 days vs. a month.
I mean I'm guilty of that, I frequently browse reddit mindlessly. At least I'm saved the obvious ads - for now anyway, I'm sure they'll crack down on 3rd party clients soon.
The growth of the health food market - or at least some subcategories of it which are genuinely healthy - would be an example of this happening.
Very true. However it’s easier for motivated corporations to steer people away from such information.
This can be done through both state-backed initiatives and non-governmental ones like Wikipedia, or speculatively, a public interest DAO that crowdfunds R&D. Gitcoin may be the first iterations of the latter.
Of course there are many cases where the consumer is underinformed, and harmed by what the market urges them to buy, and these need to be addressed.
...assuming they're given a meaningful choice in the first place. Consumers choose from what's available on the market, not from some abstract space of possible products. Not only is technology too complicated for the mainstream audience (and products on the market do their best to make everything seem like "magic" that cannot be understood casually by non-specialists), the market doesn't really listen to user feedback anyway, preferring to divine everything from telemetry.
Greed, in general, motivates corporations to make money. Sometimes, providing people with what they demand is the easiest way to profit. Oftentimes, there are better ways. Like investing in marketing to make people demand what you want to provide them. Or scam them through convoluted business models.
This is just a specific narrow view of computers and how they are used by people in day to day life. The larger picture is that computers have impacted every single industry/domain and that impact have indirectly made lives better in some aspect.
In the end, computers are just tools, tools to automate tasks. What task humans want to automate depends on their needs/desires and so does the consequences of them.
In order to reach a superintelligence level we need to solve the automation of gathering, evaluation and improvement of knowledge first.
And by automation, I don't mean wikis or something you can find via google. Wikis and the web currently are built for humans, not machines. If we are able to automate the semantic knowledge behind it and transfer it to neural networks, we will have limitless capabilities.
As a kid, I spent countless hours in the underground trains staring out of the window into the moving darkness. Today, if I am on the train, I read interesting stories I like.
As an another example, apparently area about my birth town had all sorts of unique and interesting places to hike. I had no idea that those places even existed before internet - blogs and forums.
And the more unusual hobbies (think aluminum casting for example) - did you know how had was it to find good information before internet?
Please do not equate internet to facebook and twitter. It is so much more than that - you just have to invest a bit of effort instead of blaming it.
This seems a bit like saying that we're just starting to learn what engines are for. What we use computers for will continue to evolve and we will never arrive at an end state.
If people realized the value computing can give, consumer electronics will be useful for them. But they want instagram and snapchat instead.
A significant portion of the value created is not captured by economic statistics, as they mostly deal with measuring economic resources that are scarce enough to have market prices.
Abundant goods are free like air, and are widely distributed, and automation has made many classes of goods/services fall into this category, like many types of information (compare trying to find your way around a city 20 years ago, to today using Google Maps, or trying to read up on some obscure subject 30 years ago by visiting a library, versus finding the Wikipedia page on it via a 3 second Google search on your phone).
As you rightly said, I just can't think of a domain that's untouched by computers.
Even in the fundamental science it's now impossible to do anything without massive data crunching machines. LIGO detection of gravitational waves, the first black hole images, and the plummeting cost reduction of full DNA over last two decades are a great example of how computers have irreversibly changed the way science is done.
We want to believe that the revolution should be altruistic in nature. Bettering the human race through only "positive" methods - Star Trek style utopia if you will.
But reality shows that even with all this available computing power, it's still a finite resource. Any finite resource is capitalistic in nature and will be subject to the aggressive expansionist.
It needs its checks and balances like other resources.
If I leave out the bad parts then the rest is mostly what I need to use because of external demands or because of technology itself (ie. problems that only exist due to technology itself)
I don't need to be available on communicator. My team and my family expects me to be or I am marked as unhelpful. That wasn't a problem when there wasn't expectation to be constantly available.
I don't need to have Uber installed, but it seems to be the only way to get a cab where I live.
I don't need navigation, but roads and intersections got so complicated and I got so reliant that I would not be able to reach my destination without it.
Etc.