Schumpeter published this book in 1942 and can hardly be blamed for not having predicted the computer and information “revolutions,” which are tempting to see as concrete refutations of his theory. Arguing the contrary is an article from the IEEE Spectrum (June 2008, though I just came across it today), Singular Simplicity, by Alfred Nordmann.

I’d argue that I have seen less technological progress than my parents did, let alone my grandparents. Born in 1956, I can testify primarily to the development of the information age, fueled by the doubling of computing power every 18 to 24 months, as described by Moore’s Law. The birth-control pill and other reproductive technologies have had an equally profound impact, on the culture if not the economy, but they are not developing at an accelerating speed. Beyond that, I saw men walk on the moon, with little to come of it, and I am surrounded by bio- and nanotechnologies that so far haven’t affected my life at all. Medical research has developed treatments that make a difference in our lives, particularly at the end of them. But despite daily announcements of one breakthrough or another, morbidity and mortality from cancer and stroke continue practically unabated, even in developed countries.

Rather than identifying the social forces that may be responsible for a diminution in the rate of (future or current) technological advancement, Nordmann points the finger at inherent technological limits to, e.g. Moore’s law, or to the sheer amount of mental concentration it would require to drastically improve the speed of human-brain-to-computer communication.

If anyone out there on the intertubes is aware of economists who’ve done solid work exploring Schumpeter’s theses in the fifty or so years since he died, I’d be very interested to know. I see links between Schumpeter’s observation of the fall-off in innovation and the recent charge by some social critics (don’t recall who… perhaps Joseph Stiglitz, perhaps James Galbraith) who question the inflated role of financial instruments in “generating” wealth, as well as the the value of purportedly innovative new financial products.

As amenable as I am to such lines of thinking, I wonder sometimes whether the commonly heard worry about “all this money not being based on anything real” is actually getting at the root of the problem. Money, after all–especially since, but even before the abandonment of the gold standard–has always had something immaterial about it. It is a condensation of social trust, or as Simon Critchley (who I’m fortunate enough to get to study with at the New School for Social Research) wrote recently for the NY Times (Coin of Praise),

Money has a promissory structure, with a strangely circular logic: money promises that the money is good. The acceptance of the promise is the approval of a specific monetary ethos… This ethos, this circular money-promising-that-the-money-is-good, is underwritten by sovereign power. It is worth recalling that gold coins called “sovereigns” were first minted in England under Henry VII in 1489 and production continues to this day. It is essential that we believe in this power, that the sovereign power of the bank inspires belief, that the “Fed has cred,” as it were.

Blaise Pascal: Who can doubt that we exist only to love? Disguise it, in fact, as we will, we love without intermission.

Callwood goes on to write, in chapter two of Love, Hate, Fear, Anger and the Other Lively Emotions, that “Without hate, humans would languish all their lives in a warm stupor of passive contentment; without hate, they would need no companion but mother, since mother would be perfect.” This reads like the exact inverse of the role played by love in the Divine Comedy.

Of note in relevance to this particular video are two points:

First, it is narrow to focus on only the “terrorist threats” that are opened up by the development of this sort of technology, and unrealistic to expect that military research in such areas will be used only for “defence” purposes. Kurzweil elides the fact that the very people he is working with to ostensibly combat the pitfalls of this technology (the US military) are the most likely to use it.

Secondly, Kurzweil is right to say that these advances pose an “existential” threat to us, but not for the reasons he believes. A threat is not existential insofar as it threatens our existence, but rather (if I can venture an off-the-cuff formulation) insofar as it threatens our very humanity. The fantasy of a set of artificial intelligences that are of equal or greater intelligence than humans,  which have perfect recall of facts and figures, and which lack many if not all of the physicality that at least in part constitutes human-ness should raise serious questions about what implications the production of such an intelligence might have for human decision-making, politics and freedom in general.

Jurgen Habermas and others have already indicated ways in which genetic engineering poses a threat to human autonomy, and robotics of the sort envisioned by Kurzweil should also provoke similar concerns.

I first truly experienced HD TV during the most recent Superbowl. Anyone who’s watched sports in HD will know what I’m talking about when I say it quite literally looks like you’re there on the sidelines. An unreserved “thumbs-up”. But my first HD movie experience (watching X-Men III the other day) was quite the opposite.

The actors of course looked more “realistic” but the heightened realism absolutely ruined the illusion. It felt like I was watching a badly-overly-lit, budget documentary. The computer graphics scenes were the worst–it was like all of sudden the technology had gone back twenty years, and I was watching Superman on a blue-screen, as if he had been cut out by a five-year-old using Photoshop’s lasso tool. Okay, maybe not that bad, but I couldn’t stop picturing the characters as just actors in a studio. It was like the “movie” filter had been lifted, with the result that the actors looked realer but everything else looked faker.

Maybe it’s different for movies without extensive simulated explosions, aircraft and weapons. Maybe I’ll find out if I ever watch one of those movies.

All of this, in addition to the manifest benefts, of course probably would present new opportunities for abuse, invasive marketing techniques, and threats to users’ privacy.

A glimpse of this last concern was provided recently by a paper from some Google researchers (“Could your social networks spill your secrets?”) that details how data from two different social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn and Myspace) could be linked together to reveal the single person behind two different public profiles, despite the profiles being relatively anonymous and not directly linked. From the NewScientist article:

That approach is dubbed “merging social graphs” by the researchers. In fact, it has already been used to identify some users of the DVD rental site Netflix, from a supposedly anonymised dataset released by the company. The identities were revealed by combining the Netflix data with user activity on movie database site IMDb.

December 2009: As an addendum to this article, I direct your attention to “project gaydar”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kelly unfortunatley comes across a bit naive, as he discusses our inevitable dependance upon, and surrendering to, the envisioned “web 10.0″ without any critical hesitation or indication of cause for concern.

While SALT has hosted a bevy of fascinating and influential guests, including Craig Venter, Jimmy Wales, Francis Fukuyama, and Ray Kurzweil, Daemon: Bot-Mediated Reality by author and software engineer Daniel Suarez was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking (mp3 here).

Suarez describes our world as being increasingly run, unconsciously, by an increasing number of bots, defined as “narrow AI”: robots that are very good at doing one, narrowly defined thing, like scraping auto insurance rates from websites, deciding whether you qualify for a mortgage, and so on. The scenario of increasing automation raises a host of troubling questions about the possibility of privacy (this on the heels of an announcement of the UK’s intention to scan every single email correspondence) in a world where proliferating electronic devices silently communicate your information and daily activity to each other, opening up more and more points of entry vulnerable to exploitation and digital eavesdropping.

But more worryingly, and more interestingly, is the spectre of a society in which decisions are made by closed-source algorithms (bots), the inner workings and logic of which is unknown to the majority of humanity. This, says Suarez, leaves societies open to domination by a small set of people who control these bots or understand how they work (here Suarez, I think somewhat illegitimately, conflates this prospect with the worrying but not intrinsically related phenomenon of the growth of malicious Internet-based botnets).

Suarez’s proposed solution–or, better, proposed avenue of exploration–is a sort of open-source operating system for democracy, in which decision making is fully decentralized, and open source bots are used simply to filter and sort information which is then decided upon and acted upon by three levels of people: average citizens, recognized experts, and then a third circle of even more respected experts.

For instance, people receive news from bots of an environmental spill on their mobile devices; they read it and classify it, as part of their civic duty; bots pass on the info to experts (as determined by social-network-like authority/ranking systems), who enact another layer of decision-making; bots then pass this information on to a final (set of) decision maker(s) who allocates necessary human and financial resources to resolve the issue, all of this taking place without any centralized government.

Whether this could still be called democracy is of course up for debate. Before this sort of technology, an advanced technocracy was perhaps not possible or viable without representative democracy, but Suarez paints a fairly convincing, if sketchy and in outline form only, picture of what such a system would look like.

I have to say that the proposed solution is not a whole lot less concerning than the alternative of a world run by bots and tyrants. In any case, the ideas are fascinating, and credit must be given to Suarez for formulating them and linking them together in such a creative and challenging way.

First it was the Youtube video about how Facebook owns everything you put on it, and is (somewhat loosely) connected to all sort of people/agencies involved in various intelligence gathering initiatives and operations.

That aside, what was somewhat disturbing during the event today was the way no one seemed to have any qualms about Facebook’s gleeful blurring of the “advertisement / editorial” distinction that is sacred to reputable journalism (not to claim that Facebook is engaged in journalism, per se, but the analogy holds).

Facebook proudly promotes as a “best practice” that people using their ad system link up their ads to users’ social actions, so that when I see a news feed item that, for instance, shows my buddy has gone to some event, the event organizers who may have posted an ad for that same event can have their advertising content automatically incorporated into the news feed item, piggybacking their paid advertising onto legitimate news about what my friends are up to.

The other thing that bugged me…

was how the redesigned facebook profile page (due to come out next week, and currently viewable at http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php, though it’s pretty buggy) was being touted as a way to enable more/better “self-expression.”

I think we need to wonder about the degree to which trivial and largely superficial changes to our Facebook profile constitute an enhanced venue for self-expression. It’s a form of 21st century dandyism; I’m sorry, but if the way you express your “self” is by resizing certain boxes on your Facebook profile, your self is in dire straits.

The last thing that bugged me…

was the way we talk about addiction today, and how the goal of a Facebook developer (or of the creator of a new cookie, a new song, whatever) is to create something addictive. And, in the case of Facebook, not just addictive, but simple and pared down enough that it doesn’t actually involve any serious engagement. The goal of the creator is to create something that people will feel uncontrollably pulled to use, but only for short, intermittent periods of time with no purpose other than continued, addictive use. Consciously setting out to create things that are addictive is fairly ethically questionable.

I will take off my curmudgeon hat now.

Very interesting guy. But I have to take issue with his main point, which seems to be that group action just got easier. Rather than overcoming the pitfalls of group complexity by introducing hierarchy, he contends, the internet makes the connections that comprise group complexity easier to produce–they are “more lightweight.” But if a connection is lightweight, how much of a connection is it really? Is it a connection when it can be broken with as little consideration as it takes to click a link?

This is part of the problem of with viewing human relationships in terms of networks and network theory. Before computer networks, we didn’t talk about “building connections” or “creating social networks”, as if making friends and community was a straightforward process that could be envisioned in advance and reproduced mechanistically. I don’t deny that this is frequently a useful way of talking and describing the world, but the metaphors drawn from the world of production and fabrication only go so far in the world of human relations and action.