Not only is this not relevant to the article, it’s also wrong. Computers cannot create new explanatory knowledge like humans can. One day they may. But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so we are not able to program it in computers.
"At least computers can't do that. Only humans can do that."
(GPT-3 demonstrably does that, or behaves in a manner indistinguishable from doing that)
"Well, at least computers can't do this other thing ..."
But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so we are not able to program it in computers.
The notion that humans must understand the programs that their machines are running is by no means a necessary one. Can AlphaGo's human programmers predict, debug, or even explain every move it made against Lee Sedol, for instance?
No, not really. Make a sufficiently-powerful predictive text engine, and you get something like GPT-3. Make a sufficiently-powerful expert system, and you get a chess engine that can beat every grandmaster. These things were predicted in sci-fi novels with descriptions of their algorithms decades before we had computers powerful enough to execute them.
For things like "intelligence" and "consciousness", the best we've got is on the order of Isaac Asimov's positronic brain: a total handwave, maybe with some technobabble or some oblique references to now-outdated models of psychology.
The stuff humans can do that computers can't, are the things we don't have algorithms for, and – funnily enough – things that "just throw a bigger neural net at it" don't seem to be actually solving (however much they're getting better at fooling people into believing they're solving).
"We might be able to solve this one day" doesn't mean we've already solved it.
The stuff humans can do that computers can't, are the things we don't have algorithms for
What are some examples? GPT-3 is already composing halfway-credible poetry and songs. (Edit: and it means nothing to say that "poetry and songs exist in its training data." The songs and poems it just gave me didn't.)
I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree, and it did that, too, complete with a unit test.
Don't focus on the current state of the art; pay attention to its time derivative. That's all that matters. When the tech gets 10x better, it will be almost indistinguishable from human thought. Another 10x will tie up the remaining loose ends.
> GPT-3 is already composing halfway-credible poetry and songs.
Poetry and songs abound in its training data.
> I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree, and it did that, too, complete with a unit test.
Such things abound in its training data.
GPT-3 can't produce anything novel. It's a search engine over natural generalisations of its training data, but it can't think for itself. It couldn't solve any of the unsolved problems of our day. Give it a maths problem with a known solution, and it might give you a half-way decent proof. Give it a problem without a known solution – even an easier one – and it'll flounder.
It absolutely does not mean nothing to say that poetry and songs exist in its training data. The criticism is not "it's just spitting out existing poems and songs"; it's "all it knows how to do is mimic (to greater or lesser degrees of accuracy) things in its training data."
GPT-3 takes a massive corpus of text in, and then spits out something that it creates by munging that together in probabilistic ways, assisted (if I understand correctly) by various humans providing feedback on that.
It has no comprehension of what it is doing. It has no "mental model" of the world. It has no "consciousness" of any kind, at any level.
Because of this, it cannot genuinely imagine, synthesize, or be creative. Sure; it can put together sequences of words that had never been put together in exactly that configuration before, but that's not really the same thing as "creating something new."
It can be entertaining, sure. It can even inspire insights in us—but it can never be genuinely insightful itself, because that requires understanding.
Before any stories had ever been told, humans thought of them, and told them to each other.
Before any paintings had ever been painted, humans imagined them from nothing, and painted what they imagined.
Just because reading other stories increases our breadth of material to draw from doesn't mean we require them to create.
GPT-3 has no ability to create something truly new, without reference to anything it's seen before. Period. It cannot imagine. It does not have consciousness.
The hype around it has tricked you into thinking it is much more than it is—either that, or that we are much less.
Point being, it does not follow that just because we don't know how our own brains work, we can't create systems that emulate them perfectly. It also does not follow that we will understand these systems.
Unless you believe in a soul, all that is necessary is to set up the correct initial conditions and let emergent behavior do the rest.
> But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so we are not able to program it in computers.
Without taking a position on whether or not computers can create new exploratory knowledge (how could one begin to say authoritatively that they can't?), this "so" doesn't follow. The fact that we don't know how to do something doesn't mean we can't program it in computers.
Cory gets it, that computing is a battleground for the future. Code is
war by other means. We will all be forced to pick a side. It would be
wise to familiarise ourselves with the lay of the land.
Too many issues and too many sides. Too much grey within each debate, too.
Computing appliances vs. general purpose machines. End-user control vs. vendor. Privacy vs. transparency. Freedom of expression vs. curated/"safer" experiences. Algorithms vs. humans in the loop. Governmental vs. corporatist vs. end-user freedoms. Cloud/timeshare/virtualization vs. on-premises/own your own machine/etc. Perpetual copyright and central ownership of culture vs. information wants to be free. Security vs. flexibility.
Not to mention after you get past the whole ideological debates, you have active state vs. state cyberwarfare and information warfare and other proxy battles... and cybercrime.
Computing and networking as mass-market phenomena is still new. As much as we pat ourselves on the back in tech for rapid progress, the social mechanisms and business models for all of this are still unstable.
> Freedom of expression vs. curated/"safer" experiences
I would tweak this to user-controlled curation vs platform-controlled curation. By itself, curation is not opposed to freedom of expression, it can be transparent (incoming emails sent to your spam folder) or hidden from end-users view.
One side is people like me, who largely try to use software to run our lives and at odds with all the following sides.
There are at least three surveillance apparatuses that seeks to record everything we do.
* the state-surveillance apparatus to extend its own power (see Snowden)
* the ad-industry-surveillance apparatus to increase their own profits.
* the social-media-surveillance apparatus that wants to increase our engagement and in-collusion with the ad-industry increase their profits.
The social-media companies + email companies that refuse to standardize their protocols.
Then there is the copyright industry that has created DRM with no regards to stopping legitimate usage of media bought by us.
There is the cloud-service providers that use open-source software to rake in billions of profits but won't donate 5 dollars to the creators of the open-source software.
The OS creators that make it harder and harder for power-users to use their computer as they want to.
The state-departments that force that use of apps on non-free OS/computers to access essential services.
I'm not sure those last two are different. You can however split the ad industry surveillance into (at least) two kinds.
The first is surveillance aimed at increasing the power of each individual advertisement by personalizing them to the victim, by their nature these typically seek all kinds of deeply personal information about someone's psyche but not necessarily their daily life.
The second is surveillance aimed at 'proving' the effectiveness of ads, these typically ignore people's interests but dig deeply into their daily activities, what they buy, what they see, what they hear, just to be able to claim it was their ad that made someone buy something.
- Team computers-control-the-humans (CCH): run by a small group of humans on a power trip and staffed by a much larger group of humans who don't mind the control as long as they get to be Better than Somebody™ in the overall hierarchy.
- Team humans-control-the-computers (HCC): those of us for whom not being in control of the computers around us is enough of a problem to warrant doing something about it.
CCH can't win because as they get closer they end up treating the muggles poorly, which give HCC a recruiting uptick. But HCC can't win either because as they get closer it stops feeling important to continue the fight.
I have not read the article yet, but this is what I predict the contents will be, namely "Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know He Has a New Book Coming Out."
I predict it will be an interview where Doctorow's trenchant commentary on how the emerging cyberdystopia can be meaningfully thwarted is by buying yet another novel by him about how a new technology is only being wielded incorrectly and if only the plucky hackers use it in transgressive ways, it will undermine the Institutional foundations of the technological order and not reinforce the status quo.
> "In your next novel, “Red Team Blues,” you focus on Martin Hench, a sixty-seven-year-old forensic accountant, who is tasked with recovering a set of stolen signing keys that, with some technical finagling, can permit one to rewrite a blockchain’s distributed ledger, swiping assets from one side to the other, as it were. Do you think blockchain tech is less secure than enthusiasts portray it to be?"
This is like every article/interview with authors ever. I'm not sure how much you listen to podcasts but most of the time when an author is being interviewed they have a new book coming out. Doing a round of interviews is one of the main ways authors raise awareness about their new books. Digital magazines, podcasts, talk shows, reddit AMAs, etc are all avenues for raising awareness that are actively encouraged by book publishers
If Doctorow seems like he’s selling his books harder, it’s only because he writes a LOT. Usually his posts have links to previous posts. He writes more in one space than many writers do, so why wouldn’t he hyperlink to his existing thoughts?
Doctorow (and Neil Stephenson and William Gibson to a lesser extent) have been doing this shtick for almost 20 years. They're either naïve to their real purpose--selling impotent dissent--or hacks knowingly selling impotent dissent. Neither reflects well on their sincerity.
Nothing large ever started small and grew. No idea ever took time to catch on. Anything that doesn't work immediately is worthless. Any dissent is therefore futile and anyone who indulges is clearly morally bankrupt or belongs in Jail as a traitor for publishing it. Consistency is actually a vice not a virtue. Praise Google and sacrifice your privacy to its benevolence.
(I don't much care for the fiction of Doctorow, Stephenson & Gibson released this century fwiw, Neuromancer is still good fun. Raffle the rest.) My point is its ok to be critical and remain so. Its ok to disagree with that criticism but if you really think the criticism is lame and by design to make cash, maybe suggest something more "potent" to back that up? Or a course of action you think such luminaries should follow? And I'm actually all ears on that.
You know, you might be right. I don't know Cory Doctorow (or Neal Stephenson or William Gibson). I can't fully explicate the longterm results of his creative outputs or the secondary or tertiary results of his work and it's not my place to judge. I don't know why I'm even on this website, honestly.
I personally could posit many ideas, technological or otherwise, that I think would result in a more perceivably just world, but ultimately those ideas have always been with us. It's never been a problem of lacking solutions, but of humans actually doing the work and using them.
I recant my negative judgments of Cory Doctorow's approach towards changing the technological trajectory and any imprecations towards his sincerity in achieving them. Even yet, my stupidity is now written in silicon for all the world to remember for as long as the record keeps. Let this be a lesson to somebody.
Despite being a wall of text, I leave this quote from Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Man in the Arena" for posterity and a reminder against cynicism and judging others:
"Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emot...
> but of humans actually doing the work and using them.
You've just identified a problem you believe needs to be solved. I wish I could say the same for myself but I can't and there it is. So for you, how to solve that problem in society. In all of: a small way, in a way that can be built on, in a large scale way. Hit on something fantastic, and I hope you do, it probably won't work right away. You'll probably have to spend some time convincing people and getting them used to the novel ideas (even if that novel idea is simply to actually follow this old idea). Spread the word? May involve repeating yourself in way that is predictable? Maybe not? What do I know!?!
Roosevelt gave that speech in France, 1910. The Europeans must have taken it seriously. Somehow, four years later, all the military powers of Europe went to war, each explicitly saying that they were acting only in self-defense, and the major cities of almost all those nations produced large demonstrations in favor of the war. It turned into total war, industrialization of killing by all available means, up to and including weapons of mass death and destruction, so horrible that the reality of it was not allowed to show its face in the media available on the home fronts. The consequences were so dismal that men, who, like Teddy Roosevelt, cherished violence, insisted on a do-over a generation later.
Roosevelt carried a big stick, but only spoke softly as a last resort. He advocates above doing something over doing nothing, but twists that around into promotion of violence, and hurls his "sneering disbelief" at the alternatives. In this new century, we must have the courage, "stern belief", and "lofty enthusiasm" required to move away from death and destruction.
Pre-judging an article without even reading it doesn't feel like the HN way (it would be interesting to know what percentage of HN readers would comment on an article they haven't read).
Personally, I do think he has a point. Agreed, he may make it repeatedly - in somewhat different ways - but none the less, I have sympathy for his point of view. I am sick to the back teeth of having control of my own computer being slowly taken away from me, one finger at a time.
I totally sympathize with the viewpoint. My contention is that monetizing that viewpoint acts as a pressure release that personally enriches Cory Doctorow and his publishers at the expense of actual effective action to avert the disaster.
This is the same argument that I levy at professional "effective altruists"--if you're profiting by and not subsidizing altuism (i.e. comparable net worth to those you're helping), you're by definition not an altruist, you're a symbiont at best and a parasite at worst.
RMS is an impotent (and some would say toxic) emissary for open software and hardware, but at least his principles directly align with his lifestyle. No one is being ferried into nascent manipulative technologies because of their supposedly "revolutionary" potential on his account.
Earnest question: Is your opinion that writing books and selling them is a bad form of advocacy? Is there a better one that doesn't require independent wealth?
I'm pretty familiar with Doctorow's body of work, and he writes freely for magazines, comes on podcasts, speaks at Defcon, and generally lives in service of the ideas that are articulated in his books. Part of advocacy requires messaging the same ideas over and over in different ways, since each person will be converted by a slightly different equation of messaging and delivery. I'm not sure I can agree with the nihilistic cynicism that rejects all text that has profit potential.
Having read a couple of prompts and replies in the past days, I am like 75% sure this response was written by ChatGPT based on its emphasis to stress uncertainty.
Then again, HN is the place of public discourse where I would expect expressing such caveats the most from human actors, too.
Retro-computing is the most promising trend I've seen in the computing tech world. Open source hardware designs based on the RISC-V instruction set, returning to writing low-level firmware for RISC-V boards, using a low-level language with an open-source compiler, and making that approach the norm for all simple devices, seems to be a huge growth area. Built-in manual overrides, direct access to device internals, the return of knowledge that's on the verge of being lost to so many American consumers, it all looks good to me.
Incidentally, this article uses the phrase 'cyberpunk' a lot but that genre is a lot more like 'cybernoir'. Look at for example Jean Pierre Melville films:
> Well, Big Tech is not the only concentrated industry. A bunch of concentrated industries use Big Tech antitrust as a pretext for going after Big Tech—not to end monopoly but to redistribute the industry’s share of the monopoly themselves. So, cable operators, phone companies, entertainment companies. I think it’s fair to say that the big entertainment companies don’t want to kill Google; they just want to take it over. Some of the energy that comes up to break up or tame Big Tech is coming from other sectors that are every bit as much in need of taming and breakup as Big Tech is.
This is the most notable bit of information in the article
The whole big tech thing has three camps: big tech itself, other corporations like telecoms which want to buy out tech companies like verizon bought out yahoo, and politicians in DC who want to blackmail tech companies and control the flow of information[0]
government regulation is a double edged sword, and wherever there's a bunch of money there's a bunch of people who want to take it
"Crypto is weird, because, much more so than other technologies, if you don't like crypto, crypto people really want to convince you that you're wrong."
> Ethereum is a project based around decentralized applications, which run on a scattered network of computers and don’t have a single owner who controls them. That would seem to be in line with what you want for the Internet, in the sense of more interoperability and more security. Or am I wrong?
(Interviewer essentially asks "What do you think about Ethereum?")
> I think distributed apps are a great idea. I am skeptical of smart contracts, which are the building block of distributed apps. Smart contracts are hard to get right. And this is not a thing that you can fix. *There’s this foundational idea in computer science called the halting problem, which says that, above a pretty minimal threshold, it’s impossible to know all the different ways that a program can behave.* One of the ways that computer scientists try to address this risk is by keeping Undo buttons around in our code.
(The rest of the response goes towards the need for reversibility & how smart contracts don't allow for that, even through it's possible to implement tokens with reversible transactions (see ERC20R & ERC721R).)
This was the point that I knew that Cory didn't even spend the bare minimum amount of effort to Google "Ethereum halting problem".
If he had even tried to do so, he would've known that Ethereum's solution to this problem is the gas limit, wherein:
- A set limit on how much gas can be used is submitted in the transaction
- If the limit is exceeded, the transaction fails & the state is reversed, as if there
Most of what he otherwise says is passable, all except for that part. Instead of admitting a lack of technical knowledge about the subject matter at hand, he instead goes on to espouse how reversibility at the base layer is required in order to create a useful system, instead of trying to make a system that doesn't need reversibility at the base layer in the first place.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] thread"At least computers can't do that. Only humans can do that."
(GPT-3 demonstrably does that, or behaves in a manner indistinguishable from doing that)
"Well, at least computers can't do this other thing ..."
But right now we have 0 clue how this happens in humans so we are not able to program it in computers.
The notion that humans must understand the programs that their machines are running is by no means a necessary one. Can AlphaGo's human programmers predict, debug, or even explain every move it made against Lee Sedol, for instance?
No, not really. Make a sufficiently-powerful predictive text engine, and you get something like GPT-3. Make a sufficiently-powerful expert system, and you get a chess engine that can beat every grandmaster. These things were predicted in sci-fi novels with descriptions of their algorithms decades before we had computers powerful enough to execute them.
For things like "intelligence" and "consciousness", the best we've got is on the order of Isaac Asimov's positronic brain: a total handwave, maybe with some technobabble or some oblique references to now-outdated models of psychology.
The stuff humans can do that computers can't, are the things we don't have algorithms for, and – funnily enough – things that "just throw a bigger neural net at it" don't seem to be actually solving (however much they're getting better at fooling people into believing they're solving).
"We might be able to solve this one day" doesn't mean we've already solved it.
What are some examples? GPT-3 is already composing halfway-credible poetry and songs. (Edit: and it means nothing to say that "poetry and songs exist in its training data." The songs and poems it just gave me didn't.)
I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree, and it did that, too, complete with a unit test.
Don't focus on the current state of the art; pay attention to its time derivative. That's all that matters. When the tech gets 10x better, it will be almost indistinguishable from human thought. Another 10x will tie up the remaining loose ends.
Poetry and songs abound in its training data.
> I just asked it to write some code to walk a k-d tree, and it did that, too, complete with a unit test.
Such things abound in its training data.
GPT-3 can't produce anything novel. It's a search engine over natural generalisations of its training data, but it can't think for itself. It couldn't solve any of the unsolved problems of our day. Give it a maths problem with a known solution, and it might give you a half-way decent proof. Give it a problem without a known solution – even an easier one – and it'll flounder.
your training data is all the poetry and songs you've seen in your life. so go on, write me a poem right now. a good one.
GPT-3 takes a massive corpus of text in, and then spits out something that it creates by munging that together in probabilistic ways, assisted (if I understand correctly) by various humans providing feedback on that.
It has no comprehension of what it is doing. It has no "mental model" of the world. It has no "consciousness" of any kind, at any level.
Because of this, it cannot genuinely imagine, synthesize, or be creative. Sure; it can put together sequences of words that had never been put together in exactly that configuration before, but that's not really the same thing as "creating something new."
It can be entertaining, sure. It can even inspire insights in us—but it can never be genuinely insightful itself, because that requires understanding.
The joke on humans is such a simple program as GPT3 can emulate humans so well.
Is GPT3 already smarter than all non human animals?
Before any paintings had ever been painted, humans imagined them from nothing, and painted what they imagined.
Just because reading other stories increases our breadth of material to draw from doesn't mean we require them to create.
GPT-3 has no ability to create something truly new, without reference to anything it's seen before. Period. It cannot imagine. It does not have consciousness.
The hype around it has tricked you into thinking it is much more than it is—either that, or that we are much less.
Humans had memories, and retold what had happened.
Rearranging previous things into new combinations is creation
> ... The notion that humans must understand the programs that their machines are running is by no means a necessary one.
True. But these two supposed explanations get equally handwavy and arational.
- I don’t understand it so AI cannot possibly do it
- I don’t understand AI so I don’t see why AI cannot do it
Unless you believe in a soul, all that is necessary is to set up the correct initial conditions and let emergent behavior do the rest.
Without taking a position on whether or not computers can create new exploratory knowledge (how could one begin to say authoritatively that they can't?), this "so" doesn't follow. The fact that we don't know how to do something doesn't mean we can't program it in computers.
But more realistically, if you have access to the hardware, in principle, you can do whatever you want.
Computing appliances vs. general purpose machines. End-user control vs. vendor. Privacy vs. transparency. Freedom of expression vs. curated/"safer" experiences. Algorithms vs. humans in the loop. Governmental vs. corporatist vs. end-user freedoms. Cloud/timeshare/virtualization vs. on-premises/own your own machine/etc. Perpetual copyright and central ownership of culture vs. information wants to be free. Security vs. flexibility.
Not to mention after you get past the whole ideological debates, you have active state vs. state cyberwarfare and information warfare and other proxy battles... and cybercrime.
Computing and networking as mass-market phenomena is still new. As much as we pat ourselves on the back in tech for rapid progress, the social mechanisms and business models for all of this are still unstable.
I would tweak this to user-controlled curation vs platform-controlled curation. By itself, curation is not opposed to freedom of expression, it can be transparent (incoming emails sent to your spam folder) or hidden from end-users view.
There are at least three surveillance apparatuses that seeks to record everything we do.
* the state-surveillance apparatus to extend its own power (see Snowden)
* the ad-industry-surveillance apparatus to increase their own profits.
* the social-media-surveillance apparatus that wants to increase our engagement and in-collusion with the ad-industry increase their profits.
The social-media companies + email companies that refuse to standardize their protocols.
Then there is the copyright industry that has created DRM with no regards to stopping legitimate usage of media bought by us.
There is the cloud-service providers that use open-source software to rake in billions of profits but won't donate 5 dollars to the creators of the open-source software.
The OS creators that make it harder and harder for power-users to use their computer as they want to.
The state-departments that force that use of apps on non-free OS/computers to access essential services.
The first is surveillance aimed at increasing the power of each individual advertisement by personalizing them to the victim, by their nature these typically seek all kinds of deeply personal information about someone's psyche but not necessarily their daily life.
The second is surveillance aimed at 'proving' the effectiveness of ads, these typically ignore people's interests but dig deeply into their daily activities, what they buy, what they see, what they hear, just to be able to claim it was their ad that made someone buy something.
- Team humans-control-the-computers (HCC): those of us for whom not being in control of the computers around us is enough of a problem to warrant doing something about it.
CCH can't win because as they get closer they end up treating the muggles poorly, which give HCC a recruiting uptick. But HCC can't win either because as they get closer it stops feeling important to continue the fight.
It'll be one of those forever wars.
Humans controlling computer-controlled humans
or the molecular H3CH
I predict it will be an interview where Doctorow's trenchant commentary on how the emerging cyberdystopia can be meaningfully thwarted is by buying yet another novel by him about how a new technology is only being wielded incorrectly and if only the plucky hackers use it in transgressive ways, it will undermine the Institutional foundations of the technological order and not reinforce the status quo.
Color me shocked.
(I don't much care for the fiction of Doctorow, Stephenson & Gibson released this century fwiw, Neuromancer is still good fun. Raffle the rest.) My point is its ok to be critical and remain so. Its ok to disagree with that criticism but if you really think the criticism is lame and by design to make cash, maybe suggest something more "potent" to back that up? Or a course of action you think such luminaries should follow? And I'm actually all ears on that.
I personally could posit many ideas, technological or otherwise, that I think would result in a more perceivably just world, but ultimately those ideas have always been with us. It's never been a problem of lacking solutions, but of humans actually doing the work and using them.
I recant my negative judgments of Cory Doctorow's approach towards changing the technological trajectory and any imprecations towards his sincerity in achieving them. Even yet, my stupidity is now written in silicon for all the world to remember for as long as the record keeps. Let this be a lesson to somebody.
Despite being a wall of text, I leave this quote from Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Man in the Arena" for posterity and a reminder against cynicism and judging others:
"Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievement of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emot...
You've just identified a problem you believe needs to be solved. I wish I could say the same for myself but I can't and there it is. So for you, how to solve that problem in society. In all of: a small way, in a way that can be built on, in a large scale way. Hit on something fantastic, and I hope you do, it probably won't work right away. You'll probably have to spend some time convincing people and getting them used to the novel ideas (even if that novel idea is simply to actually follow this old idea). Spread the word? May involve repeating yourself in way that is predictable? Maybe not? What do I know!?!
Good luck!
Roosevelt carried a big stick, but only spoke softly as a last resort. He advocates above doing something over doing nothing, but twists that around into promotion of violence, and hurls his "sneering disbelief" at the alternatives. In this new century, we must have the courage, "stern belief", and "lofty enthusiasm" required to move away from death and destruction.
I would rate your prediction "mostly false". Interesting comments on Big Tech and politics, blockchain, development of cyberpunk, future of AI, etc.
Personally, I do think he has a point. Agreed, he may make it repeatedly - in somewhat different ways - but none the less, I have sympathy for his point of view. I am sick to the back teeth of having control of my own computer being slowly taken away from me, one finger at a time.
This is the same argument that I levy at professional "effective altruists"--if you're profiting by and not subsidizing altuism (i.e. comparable net worth to those you're helping), you're by definition not an altruist, you're a symbiont at best and a parasite at worst.
RMS is an impotent (and some would say toxic) emissary for open software and hardware, but at least his principles directly align with his lifestyle. No one is being ferried into nascent manipulative technologies because of their supposedly "revolutionary" potential on his account.
I'm pretty familiar with Doctorow's body of work, and he writes freely for magazines, comes on podcasts, speaks at Defcon, and generally lives in service of the ideas that are articulated in his books. Part of advocacy requires messaging the same ideas over and over in different ways, since each person will be converted by a slightly different equation of messaging and delivery. I'm not sure I can agree with the nihilistic cynicism that rejects all text that has profit potential.
Then again, HN is the place of public discourse where I would expect expressing such caveats the most from human actors, too.
That being said, the assessment sounds solid.
Incidentally, this article uses the phrase 'cyberpunk' a lot but that genre is a lot more like 'cybernoir'. Look at for example Jean Pierre Melville films:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/06/the-noirs-of-melville
This is the most notable bit of information in the article
The whole big tech thing has three camps: big tech itself, other corporations like telecoms which want to buy out tech companies like verizon bought out yahoo, and politicians in DC who want to blackmail tech companies and control the flow of information[0]
government regulation is a double edged sword, and wherever there's a bunch of money there's a bunch of people who want to take it
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
For some, this is a difficult-to-ignore red flag.
- Aldous Huxley
General purpose computers will always do cryptocurrency if people want them to.
> Ethereum is a project based around decentralized applications, which run on a scattered network of computers and don’t have a single owner who controls them. That would seem to be in line with what you want for the Internet, in the sense of more interoperability and more security. Or am I wrong?
(Interviewer essentially asks "What do you think about Ethereum?")
> I think distributed apps are a great idea. I am skeptical of smart contracts, which are the building block of distributed apps. Smart contracts are hard to get right. And this is not a thing that you can fix. *There’s this foundational idea in computer science called the halting problem, which says that, above a pretty minimal threshold, it’s impossible to know all the different ways that a program can behave.* One of the ways that computer scientists try to address this risk is by keeping Undo buttons around in our code.
(The rest of the response goes towards the need for reversibility & how smart contracts don't allow for that, even through it's possible to implement tokens with reversible transactions (see ERC20R & ERC721R).)
This was the point that I knew that Cory didn't even spend the bare minimum amount of effort to Google "Ethereum halting problem".
https://jcrouser.github.io/CSC250/projects/etherium.html#:~:...
https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/#why-do-gas-fees...
If he had even tried to do so, he would've known that Ethereum's solution to this problem is the gas limit, wherein:
- A set limit on how much gas can be used is submitted in the transaction
- If the limit is exceeded, the transaction fails & the state is reversed, as if there
Most of what he otherwise says is passable, all except for that part. Instead of admitting a lack of technical knowledge about the subject matter at hand, he instead goes on to espouse how reversibility at the base layer is required in order to create a useful system, instead of trying to make a system that doesn't need reversibility at the base layer in the first place.