Tag Archives: Web/Tech

Religion Gets Bad Rap

By Robin Hanson · January 21, 2012 10:50 am · Comments (73)

Indonesian police say a civil servant who posted “God does not exist” on Facebook faces a maximum penalty of five years behind bars for blasphemy. … He was attacked by a mob on his way to work. (more)

I’m an atheist, and dislike mistreatment of atheists. But I also have to admit religion often gets a bad rap. For example, I’ve been reading more science fiction than usual lately, some old and some new. I notice that they almost all include the trope of religious folks trying hard to hold back progress, often via terrorism. Perhaps this was once fair, but it doesn’t seem remotely so today. (And I don’t see it listed among other science fiction tropes.)

When religion helped turn foragers into farmers, it paid a lot of attention to sex. So religious folks still care a lot about sex, and have resisted sex-related techs, such as birth control, abortion, and IVF. But those techs are pretty old today, and only abortion remains strongly opposed. Yeah there are stem cell treatments, but that is a pretty tiny fraction of medicine.

A science fiction author from fifty years ago might have imagined strong religious oppositions to VCRs or the internet, because they aided porn. Or to cell phones with cameras because they allow sexting. Or to all sorts of “unnatural” medical techs. But overall, religious folks today seem just as pro-tech as others.

That doesn’t mean we don’t erect social barriers to new techs. But instead of being religious, most barriers today are regulatory and risk-based. As we have grown rich and eager to regulate each other, we have become more risk-averse and made it harder to introduce new disruptive techs. For example, computer-driven car tech is basically here and ready to go, but it will be a long time before we allow it. Same for automated flight and medical diagnosis,

Alas science fiction authors are reluctant to blame over-regulators as their anti-tech villain. Religion makes a safer target – most sf readers like regulation, but few are religious. Also, we tend to overestimate the importance of doctrine and dogma, relative to habits of behavior. Most religious dogma is silly and doesn’t meet our usual intellectual standards. But it also doesn’t much influence behavior. In fact, religious folks tend to have exemplary behavior overall. They work hard, are married and healthy, avoid crime, deal fair, help associates, etc. While it may seem plausible that people with crazy beliefs would do crazy harmful things, the opposite seems to apply in this case.

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Over-Regulated Flight

By Robin Hanson · December 3, 2011 4:10 pm · Comments (25)

Over-regulation is delaying the automation of flight:

Time was when a uniformed man would close a metal gate, throw a switch, and intone, “Second floor- men’s clothing, linens, power tools …” and the carload of people would glide upward. Now each passenger handles the job with a punch of a button and not a hint of white-knuckled hesitation. … And back in the day, every train had an “engineer” in the cab of the locomotive. Then robo-trains took over intra-airport service, and in the past decade they have appeared on subway lines in Copenhagen, Detroit, Tokyo, and other cities. …

Automation … runs oceangoing freighters, the crews of which have shrunk by an order of magnitude in living memory. … Today, the U.S. military trains twice as many ground operators for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as pilots for its military jets. Its UAVs started off by flying surveillance millions, then took on ground attack; now they are bering readied to move cargo and evacuate wounded soldiers.

In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot, whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two? Many aviation experts think not. ….

Still, UAVs have yet to find a place in even the humblest parts of the aviation business – surveying traffic jams, say, or snooping on celebrity weddings. Such work has not yet been approved for routine purposes, even when the aircraft is small and controlled by a human on the ground. …

Technical problems are hardly the entire explanation. The military has proved this time and again. … For nearly two decades, automatic landing systems have been able to drop and stop a jet on the fog shrouded deck of an aircraft carrier. … “There’s no harder job for a pilot than landing on an aircraft carrier.” …

Pilotless commercial flight is overdue … Civilian UAVs could easily and profitablyt be deployed to survey infrastructure and carry cargo. … Already, … an airliner’s software typically takes over flight secods after takeoff, handles the landing – and most of what happens in between. The pilot just “babysits.” … Global Hawk .. is able to fly itself home and land on its own if it loses its satellite link with its ground station. ..

As significant as the technical hurdles are, however, by far the biggest impediment to pilotless flight lies in the mind. People who otherwise retain a friendly outlook toward futuristic technologies are quick to declare that they’d never board a plan run by software. (more)

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Office By Combo Auction

By Robin Hanson · November 30, 2011 10:20 am · Comments (4)

Twenty years ago when I worked at NASA Ames, our group moved to a new office building. We put up a map of the new offices, and invited folks to put their name on a office they liked. People were ranked by seniority, and a higher ranked person could bump a lower ranked one from an office. People changed their office assignments based on what office they liked and who they wanted to be near until changes slowed to a trickle. And that was our new office arrangement.

Now imagine a much more elaborate system. Imagine that all the workers in your office are moving to a new building, requiring a new assignment of floor space to offices, conference rooms, copier/printer rooms, lunch rooms, hallways, etc. Now imagine that this assignment is done by combinatorial auction.

That is, imagine each person in your office has a budget of cash or bidding points, and submits bids saying how much he or she would pay for various office scenarios. Such bids can express values for:

  1. Whether one sits in an open cubicle or closed room, and how many officemates.
  2. Office features like size, windows, carpet, lights, climate controls, elevation, etc.
  3. Distance of office from entrances, bathrooms, conference rooms, lunch rooms, etc.
  4. Distance of office (in time or space) from the offices of other particular associates.
  5. Utilities like wired internet, big power plugs, or paper mail delivery.
  6. Local policies like if allow loud conversations, or food eaten at desk.

Given such bids, a computer could search for the office assignment that achieves the highest total bid value. Such an assignment might say:

  1. Who sits in which office.
  2. Which rooms are assigned as offices, conference rooms, lunch, printers, etc.
  3. If changes can be made, each office’s carpet, lights, windows, climate controls, etc.
  4. If changes can be made, what internet, power, etc. are supplied to each office.
  5. If partitions can be moved, the number and size of rooms.
  6. For each area, policies on loud conversations, food at desk, etc.

When choices like differing carpets vary in cost, cost functions could let one seek the assignment that maximized the total bid value minus costs. Such cost functions could express scale economies, such as it being cheaper to give all rooms the same carpets. When management cares about office arrangements beyond satisfying office workers, management preferences could be expressed in management bids, or in constraints on the final arrangement.

To save workers from having to express too many bid details, the process can be iterative, always showing a tentative assignment given the last round of bids, so bid elaboration efforts can focus on aspects that make a difference. (Bids themselves would stay secret.) Bidding assistant software might also infer preferences from user ratings of past or hypothetical offices.

Now even with a perfect choice of who gets what bidding budget, this process isn’t at all guaranteed to give an optimal office arrangement. For example, workers would likely underbid for shared resources like conference rooms; they’d want them but rather that others pay for them. There is now a whole academic field of “mechanism design” that studies the general problem of choosing rules for how such “direct revelation” bids are expressed, how they are updated across rounds, who wins what in the end, and who pays how much.

And yet, even the simple process described above would get a lot of things right, things that most offices get pretty wrong. After all, workers would actually get offices that had a consistent relation to their office preferences. Which makes it a shame that we don’t do this sort of thing more.

Yes, I realize that such computer-based solutions have not been feasible until recently, that there is work to be done to make them easy, and that innovation takes time. I also grant that bosses may see this as threatening their power, and that we may have social norms against using “money” in such a “personal” context (even in business!).

I also don’t want to give the impression that combinatorial auctions are my idea. I worked on them during ’93-’95 as a grad student under John Ledyard and David Porter. There is now a whole academic field of combinatorial auctions. See this book, its intro, and also articles on applications to environmental offsets, spectrum, airport landing slots, land consolidation, purchasing, and procurement of trucking and school lunches. See also a sf story.

And yes, assigning offices is far from the biggest problem we face in this world. This post mainly uses it as a vivid example to introduce the concept of combinatorial auctions. I’ll elaborate on a bigger application tomorrow.

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Kurzweil Rejects Ems

By Robin Hanson · October 23, 2011 3:00 pm · Comments (2)

I posted recently on Allen & Greaves criticizing “the whole brain emulation argument that we can simulate a brain without understanding it.” Ray Kurzweil responds that while he is far more optimistic on AI progress, he doesn’t believe in emulation without understanding either:

Allen mischaracterizes my proposal to learn about the brain from scanning the brain to understand its fine structure. It is not my proposal to simulate an entire brain “bottom up” without understanding the information processing functions. We do need to understand in detail how individual types of neurons work, and then gather information about how functional modules are connected. The functional methods that are derived from this type of analysis can then guide the development of intelligent systems. Basically, we are looking for biologically inspired methods that can accelerate work in AI.

It makes sense that since Kurzweil is so optimistic about rapid progress in so many technologies, such as life extension, he’d be optimistic about rapid progress in modeling the higher level organization of brains. Ems seem more likely to pessimists like myself — although we think emulation should be possible with far less than quantum chemistry detail, since the brain is a robust signal processing system, we estimate that the rate of progress to date suggests a long slow road to understanding brain organization.

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Trends Worth Tracking

By Robin Hanson · October 12, 2011 11:30 am · Comments (10)

Given our usual way of doing economic analysis, the question of which institutions will most increase economic welfare rarely depends much on the exact values of the sorts of parameters social scientists and the media track with such enthusiasm and concern. (more)

I’ve complained before about useless trend tracking, but I don’t mean to suggest that all trends are uninteresting. Some trends tell us about how well our institutions are functioning. For example:

Accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies. … The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation … from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis. The deviation … reached a peak in 1988 and then decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, not matching its 1988 level until … 2008.

Neither manufacturing nor IT showed the huge increase and decline of the deviation … that finance experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s, further validating the measure since neither industry experienced major fraud scandals during that period. The deviation for IT streaked up between 1998-2002 exactly during the dotcom bubble. (more; HT Tyler, Thoma)

Now that’s a trend to make me stand up and take notice! Similar parameters where I’d want to watch trends:

  • Marriage cheating and cuckoldry
  • Biased scientific papers, referee agreement
  • Wrongful convictions, faked evidence
  • Biased rulings by sports referees

These sort of trends track the health of specific institutions. When such an institution starts failing, we should be especially eager to reform it, using economic theory to suggest which reforms might be most effective.

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Adapt Or Start Over?

By Robin Hanson · September 21, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (6)

Sean Carroll has doubts on nanotech:

Living organisms … can, in a wide variety of circumstances, repair themselves. … Which brings up something that has always worried me about nanotechnology … tiny machines that have been heroically constructed … just seem so darn fragile. … surely one has to worry about the little buggers breaking down. … So what you really want is microscopic machinery that is robust enough to repair itself. Fortunately, this problem has already been solved at least once: it’s called “life.” … This is why my utterly underinformed opinion is that the biggest advances will come not from nanotechnology, but from synthetic biology. (more)

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement. Some designs are less prone to damage; with redundant parts all must fail for a system to fail; sometimes damage can be undone; and the faster a system is replaced the less robust it needs to be. Both artificial and natural systems use all four approaches. Artificial systems often have especially reliable parts, and so rely less on repair. And since they can coordinate better with outside systems, when they do repair they rely more on outside assistance – they have less need for self-repair. So I don’t see artificial systems as failing especially at self-repair.

Nevertheless, Carroll’s basic concern has merit. It can be hard for new approaches to compete with complex tightly integrated approaches that have been adapted over a long time. We humans have succeeded in displacing natural systems with artificial systems in many situations, but in other cases we do better to inherit and adapt natural systems than to try to redesign from scratch. For example, if you hear a song you like, it usually makes more sense to just copy it, and perhaps adapt it to your preferred instruments or style, than to design a whole new song like it.  I’ve argued that we are not up to the task of designing cities from scratch, and that the first human-level artificial intelligences will use better parts but mostly copy structure from biological brains.

So what determines when we can successfully redesign from scratch, and when we are better off copying and adapting existing systems? Redesign makes more sense when we have access to far better parts, and when system designs are relatively simple, making system architecture especially important, especially if we can design better architecture. In contrast, it makes more sense to inherit and adapt existing systems when a few key architectural choices matter less, compared to system “content” (i.e., all the rest). As with songs, cities, and minds. I don’t have a strong opinion about which case applies best for nanotech.

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Will We Ban Tone Readers?

By Robin Hanson · July 22, 2011 4:10 pm · Comments (30)

Humans communicate through many channels, including words, tone of voice, body position, facial expressions, etc. An “innocent” view is that these channels say similar compatible things; added channels mainly help us to say more things faster. A “hypocrisy” view, however, is that we say more socially-acceptable things via words, which can be more easily quoted, and via other channels we more say things we’d rather were not quoted, things often in conflict with our words.

These contrasting views suggest differing predictions about how we will react to new rapidly-improving techs for reading face/body/voice tones. Such techs watch and listen to the people around us, and tell us explicitly what their face/body/voice tones are saying. (Quotes from an article on such tech below.)

The innocent view suggests that we will welcome such techs as ways to help us read each other more clearly, helping especially those handicapped in reading such signals. The hypocrisy view, in contrast, suggests that we will resist and regulate such tech, to preserve familiar capacities for and habits of hypocrisy.

Many familiar regulations can be seen as attempts to preserve our habits of hypocrisy. For example, audio recording techs threatened to make our words reliably quotable, and our tone of voice as well, making it harder to say different things in private than we say in public. So we prohibited recording people’s voice without their permission. Similarly, new techs allowing cheap video recording of police activities threaten to expose deviations between how police often behave and how we say they are supposed to behave. So we are starting to ban them .(We may have police internal affairs groups report to police chiefs for similar reasons.)

Older examples are laws against blackmail and gambling, and our reluctance to enforce most long term promises. Blackmail threatens to punish and thus discourage activities we like, even though we denounce them, and challenges to bet show that we like to say things we don’t believe enough to support with a bet. Most long term promises are based on ideals we espouse but don’t actually want to act on.

I lean toward the hypocrisy view of human communication. Thus I suspect expression readers will be widely banned, especially recording or publishing their outputs, as an “invasion of privacy.” Though we may make sure the wording and/or enforcement of such laws is weak enough to allow their common use on ordinary people by firms and governments.

Anyone disagree? What odds will you give?

That article on expression reader tech: Continue reading "Will We Ban Tone Readers?" »

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Against Voter Foresight

By Robin Hanson · January 13, 2011 12:50 pm · Comments (20)

No tech is created unless someone imagines it. But how many imagine it, and for how long? Some techs are heralded decades in advance, with wide public discussion on possible implications. Other techs are only imagined by a few folks just before they are introduced. You might think it obvious that humanity does better when techs are imagined and widely discussed well ahead of time, but I have my doubts.

A good indicator that you think someone is rather irrational on topic is: you are reluctant to give them more info on it. When someone’s thoughts are especially messed up, you may well think they’d be better of not knowing more about it. They “can’t handle the truth”, you think. For example, if someone were especially irrational regarding an ex-lover, you might prefer they not hear any news about this ex-lover. Out of sight, out of mind, is what you’d be hoping for.

Unfortuately, my best guess is that public opinion is this messed up regarding techs that won’t appear for decades. Typically, when a public debate begins decades in advance of a potential new tech, it becomes a far-minded symbolic battle ground, where folks express grand positions on family values, materialism, inequality, nationalism, etc. The net effect is usually to inhibit the useful application of such techs. In contrast, when a tech appears mostly out of the blue, people tend to focus on whether they’d actually like to use it now.

For example, the pill and the web were both largely unheralded, and were thus quickly adopted and integrated into our lives. But if folks had seen thirty years in advance how the pill would change sexual practices, or how easily folks would give up privacy for web access, such techs might have been blocked or more heavily regulated, to our detriment.

IVF, genetic engineering, and nanotech, in contrast, were hotly debated well in advance of their feasibility. Such debates often were framed symbolically in ways quite at odds from typical practical application.

Yes new techs can introduce market failures, and yes with foresight and warning a rational public could mitigate such failures, to its overall benefit. But the biggest market failure regarding new techs is insufficient incentives to develop them. It can be good to have potential-developers envision techs ahead of time, so that they are inspired to do such developing. But wider awareness and concern tends to be hijacked into far symbolic land, where it mostly just gets in the way.

Alas this suggests that I should try not to make my speculations about the social implications of future tech too accessible to a wider audience. The chance of inspiring potential devleopers must be weighed against the chance of scaring everyone else.  Decisions markets about how to deal with potential future techs might allow us to better anticipate and prepare for such techs, because greedy contributors would be in a more realistic near mode.  But without such markets, I should watch what I say.

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The Future Is Bright

By Robin Hanson · January 12, 2011 10:30 am · Comments (27)

Three observations just came together in my mind.

1. LED light is in IEEE Spectrum’s top 11 techs of the decade:

With every decade since 1970, when the red LEDs hit their stride, they have gotten 20 times as bright and 90 percent cheaper per watt. … Even now, white LEDs are competitive wherever replacing a burned-out lamp is inconvenient, such as in the high ceilings and twisty staircases of Buckingham Palace, because LEDs last 25 times as long as Edison’s bulbs. They have a 150 percent edge in longevity over compact fluorescent lights, and unlike CFLs, LEDs contain no toxic mercury. (more)

2. When something gets cheaper, we use more of it:

The Jevons paradox … is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase the rate of consumption of that resource. … [It] has been used to argue that energy conservation is futile, as increased efficiency may actually increase fuel use. (more; see also)

3. More light makes most nice things look better:

Yesterday, when filming an upcoming TV show in an ordinary home, I noticed how much extra light they added to the room, even in daytime in a room with lots of windows, and how much better that made it all look to me.  The host explained how common this was, and that to make actors look good in a scene that viewers are suppose to see as dim, they actually use use extra dark materials for everything else in the scene.

I predict that over the next few decades, as lighting gets lots cheaper, we will make our indoor worlds a lot brighter.  This will start with “studio quality lighting” for high end homes, and then percolate to the rest of our spaces. You probably don’t notice just how much our indoor areas vary in their lighting:

Full, unobstructed sunlight has an intensity of approximately 10,000 fc [footcandles]. An overcast day will produce an intensity of around 1,000 fc. The intensity of light near a window can range from 100 to 5,000 fc, depending on the orientation of the window, time of year and latitude. (more)

The Illuminating Engineering Society … guidelines extend from lighting a public area using 2 fc to 5 fc level, to lighting special visual task areas of extremely low contrast and small size using 1,000 fc to 2,000 fc. The recommendations consider factors like occupant age, room surface reflectance, and background reflectance. (more)

At 60 years old, we need two to three times the light we needed at age 20, and also more shielding and diffusers since older eyes are more sensitive to glare. (more)

Added 11:30a: Eli points us to the August Economist:

Assuming that, by 2030, solid-state lights will be about three times more efficient than fluorescent ones and that the price of electricity stays the same in real terms, the number of megalumen-hours consumed by the average person will, according to their model, rise tenfold. … When gas lights replaced candles and oil lamps in the 19th century, some newspapers reported that they were “glaring” and “dazzling white”. In fact, a gas jet of the time gave off about as much light as a 25 watt incandescent bulb does today. To modern eyes, that is well on the dim side. (more)

Added 1:30p: More energy efficient windows also leads to more bigger windows and so more light.

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Get Eggs Froze

By Robin Hanson · November 16, 2010 4:40 pm · Comments (30)

A few years back I endorsed an unfairly-neglected tech to extend life: cryonics.  Yesterday, Amara Graps reminded me of a related unfairly-neglected fertility-promoting tech: egg freezing. Slate in March:

In 2004, the fertility field’s professional organization, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), declared egg freezing “experimental.” … In an unprecedented paper calling for the removal of the experimental label, three of the world’s most prominent researchers in egg freezing claim the technology has vastly improved and is safe: Frozen-egg babies, so far, have no more health problems than the rest of the population. Doctors who support the experimental classification argue that more research is needed and say they’re still uneasy offering the technology to vulnerable women who might unwisely be counting on their frozen eggs years after extraction. … Egg freezing … has been unfairly singled out. By comparison, the adoption processes of other breakthroughs in fertility medicine, such as freezing embryos, injecting sperm into eggs to help men with low sperm count, or screening embryos for abnormalities, have been more informal. … The ASRM did not assign them the term ‘experimental.’ “

In fact, egg freezing received such an outsized institutional smackdown that the ASRM pointedly said it “should not be marketed or offered as a means to defer reproductive aging.” Why the special treatment? Many members … feared women would use egg freezing as “baby insurance” by paying $8,000 to $13,000 per cycle to stash away some good eggs in case their fertility is gone by the time they’re ready to become mothers. …

Many IVF programs are achieving the same success rates using frozen eggs as they normally would with fresh eggs. … Other practitioners have less stellar results. Many have no data at all because they’ve never thawed the eggs they’ve frozen. Although 54 percent of American clinics now offer the procedure, only 1,500 babies have been created from frozen eggs in the world. … With more competition, professional standards would rise and the price might even go down.

Seems docs discourage freezing eggs because they fear people might find, horrors, that it works and adds value. Gee we wouldn’t want people using something that might save the world from a falling fertility collapse!  Sigh. Yes, let’s encourage this, and get usage up and costs down.

Let’s not forget at a big cause of falling fertility is women thinking they can wait longer than they can to have kids. Here’s Bryan citing a 2001 survey:

In the survey, “high-achieving women” are basically those in the top 10% of the distribution of female income. … Survey highlights:

  • 33% of high-achievers … are childless at age 40.
  • “Looking back to their early twenties… only 14 percent said they definitely had not wanted children. … More than a quarter … in the 41-55-year-old age bracket said they would still like to have children”
  • Only 1% … had a first child after 39.
  • 89% of young high-achieving women believe they can get pregnant into their 40s. In reality, only 3-5% of women in their early 40s are able to have a live birth using in vitro fertilization.

For more quotes, here is Nature in 2007: Continue reading "Get Eggs Froze" »

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