"But technology is not neutral – and neither is code nor numbers. There are human, subjective judgements lurking behind the apparent objectivity offered by algorithms and the “user-friendly” operating systems. These technologies perform almost magically, while at the same time enabling all sorts of organizations to easily collect information about us, something that makes it that bit easier to usher in new forms of surveillance and control."
This paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately:
What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.
At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Well, that didn't happen. What happened is that desktop software become less important and things just started over for the web and mobile platforms. And, besides, those Adobe and Microsoft products are still commonly used and there are even some new proprietary players like Pages/Keynote that are probably even more widely used than their open source counterparts. I doubt this will be different in 20 years - the wheel will turn once again...
>At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written.
I still believe that but we went past the mark and dissolved our communities into the same pitfalls as the commercial software.
I consider windows 7, office 2010 and conversely Ubuntu pre-Unity with libreoffice to both hit the mark perfectly. Stuff just worked and we had control over our data. That was the last software I needed. Since then I've been dragged forwards into the future, the cloud and all the things that it brings.
Now it's going backwards again and we're losing control.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't improve but that was feature peak.
And CentOS 6 with the epel and nux-desktop repositories enabled has support until 2020 (relating to the pre-Unity Ubuntu reference). And you can have MATE on current stable Debian and not notice the difference.
But I think the OA was talking more about the network and what we reveal through it rather than the client devices we use.
Lot's of people, including several major open source communities and FOSS proponents. That was the goal of projects like KDE and GNOME, and smaller ones like Gnumeric, Evolution, GIMP, etc.
If not as a fully explicitly stated belief (which some did that too), the idea was nethertheless very prevalent that the endgames is: "we just replicate those programs and we take over the desktop with FOSS".
> What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software.
I would dare say that there's no end game, as long as we are making money out of it, without that much effort. We are terribly good at ensuring our job, at the expense of the end user.
We will keep doing software, even after the point where there's nothing to add. I mean, we already do so, right? How many features are added because engineers think it would be cool? Or, even worst IMHO, how many features are added because engineers think they are what users want/need? How many releases look like they were made just to keep programmers busy (and happy)?
We should be aware of this: most of the time, we are working for ourselves. We are even entertaining ourselves. How much % of the effort spent on a given software is founded on solid and systematic analysis of end user needs?
There were some stellar DOS/Windows productivity software like Lotus Agenda and Ecco Pro, which have never been replicated, despite multiple attempts to clone them on modern platforms.
Unikernels could extend the shelf-life of applications, reducing the need to comply with OS pressure for upgrades. Mature and battle-tested applications need security upgrades and the occasional minor bug fix.
Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change.
Windows XP has proven that customers will pay for not changing what works perfectly well. With virtualization to provide drivers for new hardware, mature OS/apps can live for decades.
> Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change.
I fully agree.
And I truly believe that the world would be a significantly better place if software developers worked for stability and fixing issues, instead of entertaining themselves with "cool" (to their understanding) features or migrations/refactors to new frameworks or languages (and yes, I know these are, sometimes, truly needed). We are way to good at justifying wasted effort and plain "play".
To make this happen, we will need stability-oriented business models and system architectures. E.g. is the business prepared to support multiple generations of SaaS product in parallel, so that customer migration is optional?
For offline software, is maintenance revenue enough to maintain a support team? What happens when most bugs have been fixed and customers stop purchasing maintenance? Is the business prepared to market old versions in parallel with new versions?
Buildings are understood to have a finite lifetime. They are torn down all the time.
The meager support provided with software is an intentional tradeoff. I'm sure it isn't the right choice all the time, and as you say, there probably is demand for a different set of tradeoffs, but for example, I have no desire to pay Microsoft up front for 20 years of support, I'd rather get shiny new things more often than that.
I'm saying that you aren't capturing the whole story.
Customers buy $100 shrink wrapped Windows (or $$ enterprise support for the same thing) instead of spending far more money on software that they would have more control over. So sure, the software companies are only living up to the smaller promise, but the customer didn't bother getting (and paying for) a better one.
That's true with commercial software, but we see similar issues with OSS software. It's not easy for any software producer to maintain an island of stable backports as the surrounding ecosystems move forward. The closest we have are LTS versions of operating systems.
But we don't yet know whether the market would pay for stable app versions that are encapsulated to remain compatible with new hardware and operating systems. The presence of client hypervisors on Windows 10 and OS X will enable new experiments. Perhaps a company can devise a marketing message, business model and toolchain which supports stability and forward-compatibility.
>> equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.
Software is relatively easy. Networks effects are hard. And there's no indication for free/open projects to be good at achieving network effect and stealing network effects from incumbents.
What about the World Wide Web? Doesn't it meet your criteria of free/open and also has achieved network effects to a t? Not sure which incumbent WWW stole from, but why should that be necessary anyway?
The WWW has ""stolen"" from the ""incumbents"" of television, libraries, walled-garden dialup services, newspapers, publishing, retail, travel, and telcos.
Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by previous generations. Imagine telling someone from the era of ocean liners that in less than a century, his descendants would be routinely flying across continents in hours for the price of a few meals, with safety levels so high it is massively more dangerous for them to take a taxi to work. Imagine the surprise of the world upon discovering nuclear weapons in 1945, the hope that came from knowing it was a clean and seemingly endless source of power. Or look at Asimov: he was a prescient writer in many respects, probably one of the if not the greatest SF writer there was, but his works completely ignore the connectivity that is pervasive today (when the NSA taps every phone and reads every email automatically, when they can recognize your face even turned, from a million CCTV cameras whose feed is parsed in real time, you can't have plots with people running away in cities undetected).
The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it...
Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so.
The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.
I'm not an expert in medieval history, but I have worked in India's countryside (specifically: Maharashtra, a few hours from Pune) with an Indian multinational and let me assure you that the peasants there (whose conditions of living economically mirror those of medieval peasants, although they have slightly more rights in theory) don't have much leisure time.
It's morning to evening back-breaking physical work, undernourishment as a matter of fact, and very high probability of death - some of the families we talked to had been 2/3 decimated by the age of 35, from traffic accidents, a host of diseases like cholera, snakes, you name it... There is no question when I'd rather live.
This. I think that before the industrial revolution, we had peak leisure (for an average individual) during hunter-gatherer times, and it went quickly downhill when we invented agriculture.
But sill, wealthy enough people, who have access to medicine and other resources still don't know how to be happier. They just are less sick and live more.
I disagree, but only based on empirical evidence (and I have no idea how one could measure it scientifically without getting into an argument as to what defines happiness - Maslow?).
I've lived in third world, "second" world, and a host of first world countries including the very desirable Australia, Singapore and Switzerland and I've definitely found a strong correlation between wealth (including scientific and political) and happiness.
Past a certain level of personal wealth and regardless of the surroundings (although they affect that level), philosophy becomes more important, but that's another argument. Even there, I'd argue more prosperous countries are correlated with sounder philosophies and happier HNWIs, but my sample size is much smaller.
As an aside - decimation refers to a punitive act in which the Romans would kill every tenth man. If you have 2/3 mortality, that's much worse than decimation.
I see this claimed a lot, but as someone who grew up on a farm and has decent understanding of the middle ages, I find it very, very hard to believe.
There was always work to done. If wasn't something that was pressing right now (fieldwork, baling hay), then it was needed to be done soon (fixing fences, equipment maintenance), or improving your infrastructure (building better winter pens for animals, better storage for hay/crops). Add to that without IC engines, all work has to be done using human or animal labor. A
Speaking of animals, they don't take days off. If you have milk cows, that's 20 minutes a day (for each cow) of milking by hand. Think your commute sucks? Try walking everywhere you go.
Just go to an Amish community and you will quickly see that they spend more than 40 hours a week working, and most communities still take advantage of some technology (small tractors, tools and other items that are manufactured by the outside world).
There seems to be this idea among office workers that the M-F, 9-5 "grind" of cube-life are the most terrible conditions humans have ever lived through, and it shows a laughably sheltered viewpoint.
>Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress
Only in technology.
Germany, for example, was a much better state ethically in 19th century than in 1914-1945 (or numerous other 20th century examples).
And it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necesarrily better than 18th century music or 1960 music, or 1970 music, or that a composer, just because of being born later, is better than Bach or Mozart.
Correct, I should have said constant technological progress.
Nevertheless, I think progress does not necessarily imply a value judgement, especially in humanities. The Darmstadt School composers did what they did not to produce better sounding music but to take the philosophy of the Second Viennese School and particularly Webern to its logical conclusion. Even Pierrot Lunaire has lower value than Brahms 1 to most laymen, but it is a landmark and important work for professional musicians and the history and academic research of music.
The lower value to laymen can even be argued to be, philosophically, the POINT of modernist music, to restore the elitism that was lost as technology allowed the masses to enjoy the art that was formerly the preserve of the elite, by separating them by taste instead of means (it takes some work to learn to enjoy Stockhausen, Boulez or Nono, and I suspect nobody truly enjoys Ferneyhough except as a statement or intellectual challenge). So, intellectually, Webern and Cage can be seen as greater than the much more pleasant Mendelssohn, even as the laymen prefer the latter, due to the impact of their work.
Technologically of course, all these composers had access to more as time went along. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier is even named after a recent technological improvement. Biber's extended techniques describe the frustration he had with the physical limitations of his day. The Spectral School (Grisey, Murail, etc.) arguably the "last" "innovative" movement in music (after the Second Viennese School, Darmstadt, minimalism and John Cage) is almost completely defined by technology or science.
So, I disagree with you: one can have an opinion on whether a composer in 2015 is greater than Bach or Mozart, which depends on one's values.
This aside, what did you think of the main point of my comment, an argument against the concept of the End Game?
"Nevertheless, I think progress does not necessarily imply a value judgement, especially in humanities."
"So, I disagree with you: one can have an opinion on whether a composer in 2015 is greater than Bach or Mozart, which depends on one's values."
You've contradicted yourself.
People may class their views or the views of others as 'progressive', but what does this really mean? Generally it means they have freed themselves of some of the dogma that is prevalent at the time. Progress in the arts then depends on clarity of thought. The time in which you were born does not guarantee that clarity, it depends on luck, being born at the right time for a particular disposition.
Technological progress is all fine and dandy, but there's an important distinction to make... Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology? If new technology supports a more fulfilling lifestyle then great, but if progress is just being made to broaden the reach of technology, regardless of its impact on life here and elsewhere, then what's the point? I would argue that's the limit, when technology stops serving us then we should stop pushing for it to grow.
"does not necessarily" -> "can have an opinion [...] depends on one's values"
This was in response to your original statement: "it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necessarily better than 18th century music".
I am stating that the superiority of one type of music, period or composer over the other is subjective, that is, that the value judgement changes depending on the person. Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another, even if this value judgement varies between persons - you need to frame the argument.
This was a sideline prompted by the idea that technological progress is objective (including in music); that is, one cannot argue rationally against the idea that knowing nuclear engineering is an improvement over not knowing nuclear engineering, regardless of its usage, that ignorance is never desirable. Science is the discovery of facts about nature through reason, even if the process itself is filled with uncertainty and "progress" between dogma (the earth is flat, then round, the centre of the world, then not...). Science can approach objectivity, which the arts cannot (even that judgment is subjective).
We appear to disagree here as you do not separate the knowledge from its intended use ("Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology?") and therefore create cases of "desirable ignorance". I consider that this brings unwarranted subjectivity to the argument as "humanity" needs to be defined (Imperial Japan would disagree that their defeat and restructuring in 1945 was done in the name of humanity, which much of South East Asia at the time considered a good thing; in the Japanese narrative, a global or much larger Empire of Japan would be a net positive by bringing Japanese civilisation to the barbarians). As far as I am concerned, the misuse of technology is a squarely political and/or philosophical problem separate from science and the blame goes to the users, not the scientists. Further, intention does not guarantee outcome: nuclear weapons have basically averted any new global conflict after WWII via MAD, but they were not designed with this purpose in mind. Apologies if I misunderstand your position.
1. "This was in response to your original statement..."
coldtea != ZenoArrow. No problem though, I'm sure it's just an honest mistake.
2. "Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another"
Let's split what is meant by 'better'. In terms of science and technology, you can have something which is measurably better. With personal preferences, the argument is that something is better if someone likes it better. I'd argue that this latter use of better holds little weight. Words have meaning when they act to convey a message, saying something is better when it's just something you prefer carries a weak message as it doesn't align with the 'measurably better' meaning that's commonly understood. Let's not mix the terminology of the subjective and the objective, the results are often a drag.
3. I disagree with your points about nuclear weapons. For one, yes I believe you can argue that ignorance is sometimes preferable. For example, I am ignorant of what it would truly feel like to kill someone, but am glad that such knowledge has eluded me. What little I know is enough to stop actively seeking to find out.
Rejecting ignorance completely means knowledge is always seen as a good, regardless of how or why it is obtained. I would argue that intention and purpose are very important. The intention to discover new ways to kill people is part of what certain science and engineering fields aid, regardless of whether these groups are deluded enough to believe that knowledge is always assured of its purity, and therefore feel no guilt.
4. Nuclear weapons have not stopped war, the actors involved in these wars either lack the resources to operate on a multinational scale or choose to fight war without declaring it. Consider how many puppet governments the US and its allies have worked on implementing over the last 60 years, are these not acts of war?
Apologies indeed - the great thing about HN is that users take second seat to the content! But sometimes it backfires.
On 2. - let's make it simpler then. The OP's (coldtea) premise is that it is not possible to say that one is better than the other ("it makes no sense to say"). The premise is incorrect because in my case, I can make the value judgment that one is better than the other, and further, it is probably safe to assume that most people also have their own ranking. In aggregate, people do make value judgments and do, therefore, make sense of "better".
I agree that it can get a little lengthy discussing subjective value, and not armed with years of philosophy studies, I'm not very good at it either.
On 4. - whilst several world powers such as the US, the USSR, France and Portugal have indeed fought proxy and covert wars to further the interests of a subset of their citizen, there has been no conflict of the scale and geography of World War II since World War II. Vietnam was localized in Vietnam, although it impacted US culture, precisely because Washington was afraid of starting a nuclear war. The only instances of WWII-level losses of lives were due to genocide, often from civil war.
As an extreme example of the power of MAD fear, the Yom Kippur War was ended by US intervention (or at least the threat thereof) saving the Israelis at the last minute after Golda Meir made the bet that arming the nuclear weapons would be detected by the CIA and result in exactly such intervention.
On 3., scientific knowledge available to the community is a very different thing to personal discovery of such knowledge. You do not need to know electronics, physics or applied mathematics to use a computer, and you do not need to know how to kill someone because there are people who specialize in this and keep the peace. But there is a difference in the type of knowledge that is the discovery and popularization of random forests, and knowing the feeling of taking someone's life.
Getting better at killing CAN have positive effects. The refined Blitzkrieg with modern equipment waged by the US in the first Gulf War, the product of decades of research on killing and invading, resulted in a very short war with almost no casualties on the offensive side (292 - all figures from Wikipedia), and relatively few on the defending side (20-35,000) and civilians (5,000) compared to what a more even war would have cost (for example, the Iran-Iraq war cost around 100,000 lives for each of these groups). I see this as a net positive.
Generally, financing an extreme imbalance of power results in global lasting relative peace, cf Pax Romana, Pax Britannia, Pax Americana.
Isreal - Unknown, but appear to have them in the 1970's
India - 1974
South Africa - 1979 to 1991
Pakistan - 1998
North Korea - 2006
Have any of the countries above avoided conflict since WW2? Perhaps France, China and South Africa, though it could be argued they've been involved in conflicts in other ways. The US, Russia, UK, Isreal, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all been involved with wars against other countries since WW2 ended even after they got nuclear weapons. Why do you suspect this is?
As for the Yom Kippur War, it's not one I'm overly familiar with, but it is relevant so thanks for mentioning it. However, the impression I get from reading this account was that the arming of the missiles was a cry for help in order to get the backing of the US. What would the Isrealis have stood to gain if they'd really set them off?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/06/opinion/the-last-nuclear-m...
It's not about being involved in regional, relatively minor conflict, but about avoiding annihilation. I did not say we have had no war, I said we have had no global wars of the scale seen fairly frequently until WWII.
For Israel, the idea was to convey the message of a desperate strike before succumbing (since the neighbouring countries were pretty clear about their intentions); if the message was not convincing, it wouldn't have had the effect it had. Meir took a risk that paid off handsomely. MAD is the only message as no nation today would get away with the aggressive use of a nuke, it is the option for desperate people and discourages total war which makes governments desperate. The Yom Kippur war is generally fascinating to read about and I really recommend digging, if you are interested in modern history and the Middle East.
Europe was under threat of the Red Army to such an extent that entire regions were mined with nukes on 3 day fuses (in some famous cases, with live chicken inside to keep the electronics warm) to take out the invading force once it had settled. Russia's foreign policy was of systematic undermining of Western civilisation in any way possible (through both fostering enemies in proxy wars, and Active Measures, which is a fascinating topic in itself on which much has been written by Gen. Kalugin and others - just look up famous KGB defectors).
Israel, Pakistan and North Korea obtained weapons to defend themselves against overwhelming regional threats by increasing the cost of invasion substantially; Pakistan also wanted to follow India's lead (famously "If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own." - Bhutto in... 1965 - luckily, India's foreign policy did not end up in an invasion of Pakistan, as the mountain of bodies from Partition may have led observers to think would happen).
The UK and France both were involved only in decolonization wars (Algeria, Indochina, Kenya, Malaya, Ireland... and modern French interventions are related to Francafrique) except for the Falklands, a territory too small to warrant exercising the nuclear option or even scale to the mainland, especially when the attacker was not nuclear; and Rhodesia, where British forces were deployed just long enough to allow Mugabe's forces to take the countryside safe from the RLI and Selous Scouts and therefore the election (the blame might also lie with the Scouts' miscalculation about British unwillingness to let Mugabe win, weakening Nkomo strategically).
Talking of Rhodesia, you have to understand the mindset of pre-1991 South Africa - every European colony in Africa was falling, one after the other, and South Africa felt the vice tighten as hostile borders closed in. The great thing about exporting commodities is that no matter the blocade the stuff still gets through, so you can get away with a lot. There were tankers in Iraq and Syria during their respective wars... (from what I hear, it's actually harder to move the money than the oil). The other reason for closeness with the US was the Cuban artillery and fighters in South West Africa and other places where the South Africans were fighting.
French and British nukes were aimed at Russia, with which they never fought. China's wars are and were defensive or internal, with the exception of Korea (and even the intervention in Indochina - the Maquis Chocolat reported beheading some officers from a Chinese division that moved early on - was the result of an internal conflict, pushing a Southern general out of the way to make way for a Northerner to take up the space, although I don't have the details at hand, see e.g. [1] if you can read French or follow Jean Sassi's trail); especially after the split from the Soviet, Mao needed his own capability to really scare off any new friends of the KMT.
The point stands: nuclear weapons appear to have staved off any further truly global conflict with dozens of millions of deaths. Lo...
"It's not about being involved in regional, relatively minor conflict, but about avoiding annihilation. I did not say we have had no war, I said we have had no global wars of the scale seen fairly frequently until WWII."
Global wars were fairly frequent? Perhaps in the 20th century, but throughout history most wars have featured only one or two nation states or uncoordinated resistance to the rise of empires. WW1 and WW2 were anomalies, we hadn't seen anything like them before or since. If the only recognisable form of war is now a world war, do we have to discount the smaller, more frequent skirmishes that are found in every known era of our time on this planet?
"TL;DR: We live in a period of unprecedented peace, even if it doesn't look like it looking at TV. Most Western countries even abolished national service... Nuclear weapons and MAD are a very likely contributing factor."
For Westerners, yes, but that's not exactly universal. There are some areas of the world that are a real mess, including parts of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East (plus North Korea in Asia).
My personal opinion is that people barely think about nuclear proliferation any more. Bar a few scare stories about Iran and North Korea, the common view seems to be that it was a Cold War era problem. No country would get away with using them anymore, so they're not seen as much of a threat. Furthermore, conflict frequently happens at a level where such weapons would be complete overkill (that's all the time really, but I doubt we'd ever accept their use on anything less than a global war). Yet, people still die from conflict every day. There are people alive today that will be dead next week because of conflicts stirred up by the actions of the Western world (and I'd include the 'war on drugs' and 'war on terrorism' in that list). What do we do about that?
Isn't this totally the wrong way of looking at this? Music written in 2015 is not necessarily better than music written in the 18th century, sure. But the musical world of 2015 is incomparably richer than that of the 18th century, because we have access to most of the best of their music, plus most of the best what has been written since, in a dizzying spread of recordings made in the last 90 years.
Technology is exactly the same, of course. You'd be hard pressed to say the new innovations of 2015 beat the new innovations of, say, 1980. But we still have everything from 1980, so the cumulative effect is progress.
>But the musical world of 2015 is incomparably richer than that of the 18th century, because we have access to most of the best of their music, plus most of the best what has been written since, in a dizzying spread of recordings made in the last 90 years.
Having access to past artifacts is not the same as producing equally good things (or ever better). Accumulation is not the same as progress.
Besides having access doesn't guarantee listening to it. If tons of people listened to the Beatles in 1965 and today we have access to their catalogue, but 90% listens to inferior crap, does it still count as progress?
>Technology is exactly the same, of course. You'd be hard pressed to say the new innovations of 2015 beat the new innovations of, say, 1980.
It's not about innovations. It's that today we can build a computer 2000000x times faster, better graphics etc than an 80s computer.
But we cannot write something vastly better to Homer or Plato, or compose something vastly better to Bach (or even merely better).
There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software.
Microsoft Word effectively reached this point many years ago. They keep making new versions, people keep buying new versions. It's by no means the only example.
Actually, technology is neutral. What isn't neutral is to what ends that technology is leveraged. The human ability to be smart brought us amazing technologies. Our ability to be wise is what will determine whether these technologies will eventually amplify our happiness or our misery, and I think the jury is still out on whether humanity is getting any wiser.
That's really not true: "the medium is the message" applies just as much to computer technology as it does to things we would more traditionally view as media. Think about the difference between a conversation you'd have on the phone versus one had over instant messenger versus one had via text message. The content is informed by the way in which it is conveyed; the properties of a piece of technology shape how we use it.
The quality of the message and it's impact are definitely influenced by the type medium but it does not follow that this makes the medium not neutral. Let's take an extreme case - a medium that when used will harm the receiver of the message. You might say that this medium is not neutral but the fact is that the medium is always neutral. What isn't neutral is the designer of that medium or the one who uses it. Even in the very unlikely case that both are ignorant of the harmful effects, the medium still remains neutral, much like a destructive force of nature is neutral.
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
Zawinski's Law
I guess when we reach the point where everything can read email (pretty close, if you replace email with 'receive messages'), there will be another function to be attained by every software with their newer versions. Maybe something like having its own neural net to adapt to the user.
"Version 12 of our monitor calibration software now can learn when you actually want your monitor calibrated, and when you want it somewhat offset, for those mornings where there's no work to be done and you just want to read email, which, by the way, can be read on the same monitor calibration software you've come to trust since version 5!"
Zawinski's Law of Hardware: Any device expands until it has a bluetooth API and a smartphone app. Those devices which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
The obvious low hanging fruit is helping humans avoid error. But you have to actually be prepared to admit error for this to happen. You have to be ... cognitively dissonant enough to treat error as just another information flow.
The "software end game" looks a lot like the show "How It's Made". Frankly, most of that is just PLCs, which are barely computers at all.
As to phone/desktop/laptop applications which do things for people, I think we're largely at satiety. That's always a dangerous prediction, but it's been at stasis now for quite some time.
IMO, the point at which the software can "understand" human articulation and make improvements; improvements to itself, to the system it operates within, to the world we live within. I'm thinking along the lines of the Star Trek universe as presented in TNG and later. They just ask the software for something and it complies. Human intelligence and creativity are still required, but no one has to "write software" any longer.
If you limit your question to current technology (I mean those things that we have now, and we can foresee - not those that will require some unknowable leap in scientific understanding), then the answer is 'no time soon.' This is because every founder, every manager, every customer has some "unique" change or feature request and some other human will have to build it.
> What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software.
You discontinue any sales of permanent licenses to your software, charge users $50/month to access it, pitch it as "Cloud" because clouds are the cool new thing, and hope people just suck it up and pay because your products are the industry standard and there aren't good alternatives.
But seriously, Adobe and Autodesk are textbook cases of this. People frequently stuck with years old versions of their software because it did everything it needed to. Development of 3ds Max has slowed to an absolute crawl over the last 5-10 years, with speculation that Autodesk is deliberately trying to kill it in favor of Maya.
But if you're stuck using it, you get to pay $185/month to support them not working on any notable improvements. Perpetual licenses to nearly all of Autodesk's products will no longer be sold after January 31st 2016, and Adobe has already made the transition.
I've thought that Office Suite software has basically been a "baked" product since about 2007. I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software. I mean, if that's what you're getting at.
Hell, you could almost make the case that the Windows operating system became a "baked" product when Windows XP came out and you no longer had to reboot your computer on an almost daily basis. I mean, that's why you'll hear howls and yelps from grandma and grandpa when some virus eventually comes to polish off Windows XP. Until then, you'll only get it from their cold, dead hands (sorry grandma).
But the concept of computing isn't going away for a long, long time. What's changing is the machinery being managed by code. First tablets and cell phones, and soon the Internet of Things (stupidest name evar). But even if we run out of wires and electricity, I suspect some day we'll be creating living things (tissues at first) that can perform a computation. So yeah, computerize ALL THE THINGS!
> I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software.
This was literally the reason for the design change in 2007 - they abandoned the toolbar system for the ribbon system exactly because 95% of all feature requests were for features that were already included in the product. People just couldn't find these features.
And so they reworked the UI, now users can find the features they want to use. And it generated so much bad publicity that they re-added the toolbar system to Office 2010.
Dan Geer published a relevant column last week in The Christian Science Monitor: "Opinion: The reasonable expectation fallacy".[0]
The lede: "The ability to delete yourself from the Web doesn't really matter. What really matters in the age of advanced surveillance is the right to not be correlated. Technology is always watching and capturing you, but the correlation is where the danger lies. Laws can change that, but only if enacted soon."
That's an interesting perspective from the "chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel". [0] But yes, it does seem inevitable: pervasive surveillance of everyone by
everyone. Like a global village aka small town.
However, I'm not convinced that laws would be enough. Criminals (large and small) don't care so much about laws. So arguably we're each responsible for our own privacy.
The ubiquity of requisite knowledge and technology, facilitated by leaks, may allow the sufficiently motivated to claw back some privacy. But sadly enough, perhaps the most highly motivated are the criminals. Not good.
I agree that laws protecting privacy would be good, criminals notwithstanding. I'm much less afraid of identity theft from a criminal, than I am that the police will come to my door someday and take me to prison because I match an algorithm.
I was being dense. Reading a recent post to cpunks, I get that Dan is calling for laws to restrict surveillance and correlation by private institutions and individuals.[0]
Now his position makes sense. He wants governments (presumably those who fund his firm) to have a monopoly on surveillance and correlation. While I agree on dangers from other criminals, restricting private institutions and individuals is authoritarian, unless there's an exception for whistle-blowing.
> I, for one, would gladly paraphrase John Perry Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace and say that the "weary giants of flesh and steel" should leave me alone but only if the "technology [that] is being imposed on a global scale without restraint" will do likewise. A pox on both; may they fight to a standstill somewhere other than my front room or my backyard.
66 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadThis paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately:
What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.
Who believed that?
I consider windows 7, office 2010 and conversely Ubuntu pre-Unity with libreoffice to both hit the mark perfectly. Stuff just worked and we had control over our data. That was the last software I needed. Since then I've been dragged forwards into the future, the cloud and all the things that it brings.
Now it's going backwards again and we're losing control.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't improve but that was feature peak.
But I think the OA was talking more about the network and what we reveal through it rather than the client devices we use.
If not as a fully explicitly stated belief (which some did that too), the idea was nethertheless very prevalent that the endgames is: "we just replicate those programs and we take over the desktop with FOSS".
I would dare say that there's no end game, as long as we are making money out of it, without that much effort. We are terribly good at ensuring our job, at the expense of the end user.
We will keep doing software, even after the point where there's nothing to add. I mean, we already do so, right? How many features are added because engineers think it would be cool? Or, even worst IMHO, how many features are added because engineers think they are what users want/need? How many releases look like they were made just to keep programmers busy (and happy)?
We should be aware of this: most of the time, we are working for ourselves. We are even entertaining ourselves. How much % of the effort spent on a given software is founded on solid and systematic analysis of end user needs?
Unikernels could extend the shelf-life of applications, reducing the need to comply with OS pressure for upgrades. Mature and battle-tested applications need security upgrades and the occasional minor bug fix.
Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change.
Windows XP has proven that customers will pay for not changing what works perfectly well. With virtualization to provide drivers for new hardware, mature OS/apps can live for decades.
I fully agree.
And I truly believe that the world would be a significantly better place if software developers worked for stability and fixing issues, instead of entertaining themselves with "cool" (to their understanding) features or migrations/refactors to new frameworks or languages (and yes, I know these are, sometimes, truly needed). We are way to good at justifying wasted effort and plain "play".
For offline software, is maintenance revenue enough to maintain a support team? What happens when most bugs have been fixed and customers stop purchasing maintenance? Is the business prepared to market old versions in parallel with new versions?
The meager support provided with software is an intentional tradeoff. I'm sure it isn't the right choice all the time, and as you say, there probably is demand for a different set of tradeoffs, but for example, I have no desire to pay Microsoft up front for 20 years of support, I'd rather get shiny new things more often than that.
Building owners (not builders) choose when to tear down buildings.
Software builders often choose to tear down software against the will of their customers.
Customers buy $100 shrink wrapped Windows (or $$ enterprise support for the same thing) instead of spending far more money on software that they would have more control over. So sure, the software companies are only living up to the smaller promise, but the customer didn't bother getting (and paying for) a better one.
But we don't yet know whether the market would pay for stable app versions that are encapsulated to remain compatible with new hardware and operating systems. The presence of client hypervisors on Windows 10 and OS X will enable new experiments. Perhaps a company can devise a marketing message, business model and toolchain which supports stability and forward-compatibility.
Software is relatively easy. Networks effects are hard. And there's no indication for free/open projects to be good at achieving network effect and stealing network effects from incumbents.
The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it...
Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so.
The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.
A medieval peasant most likely had more leisure time than you. Having a local technological maxima doesn't mean "constant progress".
It's morning to evening back-breaking physical work, undernourishment as a matter of fact, and very high probability of death - some of the families we talked to had been 2/3 decimated by the age of 35, from traffic accidents, a host of diseases like cholera, snakes, you name it... There is no question when I'd rather live.
I've lived in third world, "second" world, and a host of first world countries including the very desirable Australia, Singapore and Switzerland and I've definitely found a strong correlation between wealth (including scientific and political) and happiness.
Past a certain level of personal wealth and regardless of the surroundings (although they affect that level), philosophy becomes more important, but that's another argument. Even there, I'd argue more prosperous countries are correlated with sounder philosophies and happier HNWIs, but my sample size is much smaller.
There was always work to done. If wasn't something that was pressing right now (fieldwork, baling hay), then it was needed to be done soon (fixing fences, equipment maintenance), or improving your infrastructure (building better winter pens for animals, better storage for hay/crops). Add to that without IC engines, all work has to be done using human or animal labor. A Speaking of animals, they don't take days off. If you have milk cows, that's 20 minutes a day (for each cow) of milking by hand. Think your commute sucks? Try walking everywhere you go.
Just go to an Amish community and you will quickly see that they spend more than 40 hours a week working, and most communities still take advantage of some technology (small tractors, tools and other items that are manufactured by the outside world).
There seems to be this idea among office workers that the M-F, 9-5 "grind" of cube-life are the most terrible conditions humans have ever lived through, and it shows a laughably sheltered viewpoint.
The Whig view of history: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
See also Fukuyama's "End of history".
Only in technology.
Germany, for example, was a much better state ethically in 19th century than in 1914-1945 (or numerous other 20th century examples).
And it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necesarrily better than 18th century music or 1960 music, or 1970 music, or that a composer, just because of being born later, is better than Bach or Mozart.
Nevertheless, I think progress does not necessarily imply a value judgement, especially in humanities. The Darmstadt School composers did what they did not to produce better sounding music but to take the philosophy of the Second Viennese School and particularly Webern to its logical conclusion. Even Pierrot Lunaire has lower value than Brahms 1 to most laymen, but it is a landmark and important work for professional musicians and the history and academic research of music.
The lower value to laymen can even be argued to be, philosophically, the POINT of modernist music, to restore the elitism that was lost as technology allowed the masses to enjoy the art that was formerly the preserve of the elite, by separating them by taste instead of means (it takes some work to learn to enjoy Stockhausen, Boulez or Nono, and I suspect nobody truly enjoys Ferneyhough except as a statement or intellectual challenge). So, intellectually, Webern and Cage can be seen as greater than the much more pleasant Mendelssohn, even as the laymen prefer the latter, due to the impact of their work.
Technologically of course, all these composers had access to more as time went along. Bach's Well Tempered Clavier is even named after a recent technological improvement. Biber's extended techniques describe the frustration he had with the physical limitations of his day. The Spectral School (Grisey, Murail, etc.) arguably the "last" "innovative" movement in music (after the Second Viennese School, Darmstadt, minimalism and John Cage) is almost completely defined by technology or science.
So, I disagree with you: one can have an opinion on whether a composer in 2015 is greater than Bach or Mozart, which depends on one's values.
This aside, what did you think of the main point of my comment, an argument against the concept of the End Game?
"So, I disagree with you: one can have an opinion on whether a composer in 2015 is greater than Bach or Mozart, which depends on one's values."
You've contradicted yourself.
People may class their views or the views of others as 'progressive', but what does this really mean? Generally it means they have freed themselves of some of the dogma that is prevalent at the time. Progress in the arts then depends on clarity of thought. The time in which you were born does not guarantee that clarity, it depends on luck, being born at the right time for a particular disposition.
Technological progress is all fine and dandy, but there's an important distinction to make... Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology? If new technology supports a more fulfilling lifestyle then great, but if progress is just being made to broaden the reach of technology, regardless of its impact on life here and elsewhere, then what's the point? I would argue that's the limit, when technology stops serving us then we should stop pushing for it to grow.
"does not necessarily" -> "can have an opinion [...] depends on one's values"
This was in response to your original statement: "it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necessarily better than 18th century music".
I am stating that the superiority of one type of music, period or composer over the other is subjective, that is, that the value judgement changes depending on the person. Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another, even if this value judgement varies between persons - you need to frame the argument.
This was a sideline prompted by the idea that technological progress is objective (including in music); that is, one cannot argue rationally against the idea that knowing nuclear engineering is an improvement over not knowing nuclear engineering, regardless of its usage, that ignorance is never desirable. Science is the discovery of facts about nature through reason, even if the process itself is filled with uncertainty and "progress" between dogma (the earth is flat, then round, the centre of the world, then not...). Science can approach objectivity, which the arts cannot (even that judgment is subjective).
We appear to disagree here as you do not separate the knowledge from its intended use ("Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology?") and therefore create cases of "desirable ignorance". I consider that this brings unwarranted subjectivity to the argument as "humanity" needs to be defined (Imperial Japan would disagree that their defeat and restructuring in 1945 was done in the name of humanity, which much of South East Asia at the time considered a good thing; in the Japanese narrative, a global or much larger Empire of Japan would be a net positive by bringing Japanese civilisation to the barbarians). As far as I am concerned, the misuse of technology is a squarely political and/or philosophical problem separate from science and the blame goes to the users, not the scientists. Further, intention does not guarantee outcome: nuclear weapons have basically averted any new global conflict after WWII via MAD, but they were not designed with this purpose in mind. Apologies if I misunderstand your position.
1. "This was in response to your original statement..."
coldtea != ZenoArrow. No problem though, I'm sure it's just an honest mistake.
2. "Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another"
Let's split what is meant by 'better'. In terms of science and technology, you can have something which is measurably better. With personal preferences, the argument is that something is better if someone likes it better. I'd argue that this latter use of better holds little weight. Words have meaning when they act to convey a message, saying something is better when it's just something you prefer carries a weak message as it doesn't align with the 'measurably better' meaning that's commonly understood. Let's not mix the terminology of the subjective and the objective, the results are often a drag.
3. I disagree with your points about nuclear weapons. For one, yes I believe you can argue that ignorance is sometimes preferable. For example, I am ignorant of what it would truly feel like to kill someone, but am glad that such knowledge has eluded me. What little I know is enough to stop actively seeking to find out.
Rejecting ignorance completely means knowledge is always seen as a good, regardless of how or why it is obtained. I would argue that intention and purpose are very important. The intention to discover new ways to kill people is part of what certain science and engineering fields aid, regardless of whether these groups are deluded enough to believe that knowledge is always assured of its purity, and therefore feel no guilt.
4. Nuclear weapons have not stopped war, the actors involved in these wars either lack the resources to operate on a multinational scale or choose to fight war without declaring it. Consider how many puppet governments the US and its allies have worked on implementing over the last 60 years, are these not acts of war?
On 2. - let's make it simpler then. The OP's (coldtea) premise is that it is not possible to say that one is better than the other ("it makes no sense to say"). The premise is incorrect because in my case, I can make the value judgment that one is better than the other, and further, it is probably safe to assume that most people also have their own ranking. In aggregate, people do make value judgments and do, therefore, make sense of "better".
I agree that it can get a little lengthy discussing subjective value, and not armed with years of philosophy studies, I'm not very good at it either.
On 4. - whilst several world powers such as the US, the USSR, France and Portugal have indeed fought proxy and covert wars to further the interests of a subset of their citizen, there has been no conflict of the scale and geography of World War II since World War II. Vietnam was localized in Vietnam, although it impacted US culture, precisely because Washington was afraid of starting a nuclear war. The only instances of WWII-level losses of lives were due to genocide, often from civil war.
As an extreme example of the power of MAD fear, the Yom Kippur War was ended by US intervention (or at least the threat thereof) saving the Israelis at the last minute after Golda Meir made the bet that arming the nuclear weapons would be detected by the CIA and result in exactly such intervention.
On 3., scientific knowledge available to the community is a very different thing to personal discovery of such knowledge. You do not need to know electronics, physics or applied mathematics to use a computer, and you do not need to know how to kill someone because there are people who specialize in this and keep the peace. But there is a difference in the type of knowledge that is the discovery and popularization of random forests, and knowing the feeling of taking someone's life.
Getting better at killing CAN have positive effects. The refined Blitzkrieg with modern equipment waged by the US in the first Gulf War, the product of decades of research on killing and invading, resulted in a very short war with almost no casualties on the offensive side (292 - all figures from Wikipedia), and relatively few on the defending side (20-35,000) and civilians (5,000) compared to what a more even war would have cost (for example, the Iran-Iraq war cost around 100,000 lives for each of these groups). I see this as a net positive.
Generally, financing an extreme imbalance of power results in global lasting relative peace, cf Pax Romana, Pax Britannia, Pax Americana.
US - 1945
Russia - 1949
UK - 1952
France - 1960
China - 1967
Isreal - Unknown, but appear to have them in the 1970's
India - 1974
South Africa - 1979 to 1991
Pakistan - 1998
North Korea - 2006
Have any of the countries above avoided conflict since WW2? Perhaps France, China and South Africa, though it could be argued they've been involved in conflicts in other ways. The US, Russia, UK, Isreal, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all been involved with wars against other countries since WW2 ended even after they got nuclear weapons. Why do you suspect this is?
As for the Yom Kippur War, it's not one I'm overly familiar with, but it is relevant so thanks for mentioning it. However, the impression I get from reading this account was that the arming of the missiles was a cry for help in order to get the backing of the US. What would the Isrealis have stood to gain if they'd really set them off? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/06/opinion/the-last-nuclear-m...
For Israel, the idea was to convey the message of a desperate strike before succumbing (since the neighbouring countries were pretty clear about their intentions); if the message was not convincing, it wouldn't have had the effect it had. Meir took a risk that paid off handsomely. MAD is the only message as no nation today would get away with the aggressive use of a nuke, it is the option for desperate people and discourages total war which makes governments desperate. The Yom Kippur war is generally fascinating to read about and I really recommend digging, if you are interested in modern history and the Middle East.
Europe was under threat of the Red Army to such an extent that entire regions were mined with nukes on 3 day fuses (in some famous cases, with live chicken inside to keep the electronics warm) to take out the invading force once it had settled. Russia's foreign policy was of systematic undermining of Western civilisation in any way possible (through both fostering enemies in proxy wars, and Active Measures, which is a fascinating topic in itself on which much has been written by Gen. Kalugin and others - just look up famous KGB defectors).
Israel, Pakistan and North Korea obtained weapons to defend themselves against overwhelming regional threats by increasing the cost of invasion substantially; Pakistan also wanted to follow India's lead (famously "If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own." - Bhutto in... 1965 - luckily, India's foreign policy did not end up in an invasion of Pakistan, as the mountain of bodies from Partition may have led observers to think would happen).
The UK and France both were involved only in decolonization wars (Algeria, Indochina, Kenya, Malaya, Ireland... and modern French interventions are related to Francafrique) except for the Falklands, a territory too small to warrant exercising the nuclear option or even scale to the mainland, especially when the attacker was not nuclear; and Rhodesia, where British forces were deployed just long enough to allow Mugabe's forces to take the countryside safe from the RLI and Selous Scouts and therefore the election (the blame might also lie with the Scouts' miscalculation about British unwillingness to let Mugabe win, weakening Nkomo strategically).
Talking of Rhodesia, you have to understand the mindset of pre-1991 South Africa - every European colony in Africa was falling, one after the other, and South Africa felt the vice tighten as hostile borders closed in. The great thing about exporting commodities is that no matter the blocade the stuff still gets through, so you can get away with a lot. There were tankers in Iraq and Syria during their respective wars... (from what I hear, it's actually harder to move the money than the oil). The other reason for closeness with the US was the Cuban artillery and fighters in South West Africa and other places where the South Africans were fighting.
French and British nukes were aimed at Russia, with which they never fought. China's wars are and were defensive or internal, with the exception of Korea (and even the intervention in Indochina - the Maquis Chocolat reported beheading some officers from a Chinese division that moved early on - was the result of an internal conflict, pushing a Southern general out of the way to make way for a Northerner to take up the space, although I don't have the details at hand, see e.g. [1] if you can read French or follow Jean Sassi's trail); especially after the split from the Soviet, Mao needed his own capability to really scare off any new friends of the KMT.
The point stands: nuclear weapons appear to have staved off any further truly global conflict with dozens of millions of deaths. Lo...
Global wars were fairly frequent? Perhaps in the 20th century, but throughout history most wars have featured only one or two nation states or uncoordinated resistance to the rise of empires. WW1 and WW2 were anomalies, we hadn't seen anything like them before or since. If the only recognisable form of war is now a world war, do we have to discount the smaller, more frequent skirmishes that are found in every known era of our time on this planet?
"TL;DR: We live in a period of unprecedented peace, even if it doesn't look like it looking at TV. Most Western countries even abolished national service... Nuclear weapons and MAD are a very likely contributing factor."
For Westerners, yes, but that's not exactly universal. There are some areas of the world that are a real mess, including parts of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East (plus North Korea in Asia).
My personal opinion is that people barely think about nuclear proliferation any more. Bar a few scare stories about Iran and North Korea, the common view seems to be that it was a Cold War era problem. No country would get away with using them anymore, so they're not seen as much of a threat. Furthermore, conflict frequently happens at a level where such weapons would be complete overkill (that's all the time really, but I doubt we'd ever accept their use on anything less than a global war). Yet, people still die from conflict every day. There are people alive today that will be dead next week because of conflicts stirred up by the actions of the Western world (and I'd include the 'war on drugs' and 'war on terrorism' in that list). What do we do about that?
Technology is exactly the same, of course. You'd be hard pressed to say the new innovations of 2015 beat the new innovations of, say, 1980. But we still have everything from 1980, so the cumulative effect is progress.
Having access to past artifacts is not the same as producing equally good things (or ever better). Accumulation is not the same as progress.
Besides having access doesn't guarantee listening to it. If tons of people listened to the Beatles in 1965 and today we have access to their catalogue, but 90% listens to inferior crap, does it still count as progress?
>Technology is exactly the same, of course. You'd be hard pressed to say the new innovations of 2015 beat the new innovations of, say, 1980.
It's not about innovations. It's that today we can build a computer 2000000x times faster, better graphics etc than an 80s computer.
But we cannot write something vastly better to Homer or Plato, or compose something vastly better to Bach (or even merely better).
Microsoft Word effectively reached this point many years ago. They keep making new versions, people keep buying new versions. It's by no means the only example.
Zawinski's Law
I guess when we reach the point where everything can read email (pretty close, if you replace email with 'receive messages'), there will be another function to be attained by every software with their newer versions. Maybe something like having its own neural net to adapt to the user.
"Version 12 of our monitor calibration software now can learn when you actually want your monitor calibrated, and when you want it somewhat offset, for those mornings where there's no work to be done and you just want to read email, which, by the way, can be read on the same monitor calibration software you've come to trust since version 5!"
The "software end game" looks a lot like the show "How It's Made". Frankly, most of that is just PLCs, which are barely computers at all.
As to phone/desktop/laptop applications which do things for people, I think we're largely at satiety. That's always a dangerous prediction, but it's been at stasis now for quite some time.
IMO, the point at which the software can "understand" human articulation and make improvements; improvements to itself, to the system it operates within, to the world we live within. I'm thinking along the lines of the Star Trek universe as presented in TNG and later. They just ask the software for something and it complies. Human intelligence and creativity are still required, but no one has to "write software" any longer.
If you limit your question to current technology (I mean those things that we have now, and we can foresee - not those that will require some unknowable leap in scientific understanding), then the answer is 'no time soon.' This is because every founder, every manager, every customer has some "unique" change or feature request and some other human will have to build it.
You discontinue any sales of permanent licenses to your software, charge users $50/month to access it, pitch it as "Cloud" because clouds are the cool new thing, and hope people just suck it up and pay because your products are the industry standard and there aren't good alternatives.
But seriously, Adobe and Autodesk are textbook cases of this. People frequently stuck with years old versions of their software because it did everything it needed to. Development of 3ds Max has slowed to an absolute crawl over the last 5-10 years, with speculation that Autodesk is deliberately trying to kill it in favor of Maya.
But if you're stuck using it, you get to pay $185/month to support them not working on any notable improvements. Perpetual licenses to nearly all of Autodesk's products will no longer be sold after January 31st 2016, and Adobe has already made the transition.
http://www.autodesk.com/products/perpetuallicenses
https://creative.adobe.com/plans
Hell, you could almost make the case that the Windows operating system became a "baked" product when Windows XP came out and you no longer had to reboot your computer on an almost daily basis. I mean, that's why you'll hear howls and yelps from grandma and grandpa when some virus eventually comes to polish off Windows XP. Until then, you'll only get it from their cold, dead hands (sorry grandma).
But the concept of computing isn't going away for a long, long time. What's changing is the machinery being managed by code. First tablets and cell phones, and soon the Internet of Things (stupidest name evar). But even if we run out of wires and electricity, I suspect some day we'll be creating living things (tissues at first) that can perform a computation. So yeah, computerize ALL THE THINGS!
This was literally the reason for the design change in 2007 - they abandoned the toolbar system for the ribbon system exactly because 95% of all feature requests were for features that were already included in the product. People just couldn't find these features.
And so they reworked the UI, now users can find the features they want to use. And it generated so much bad publicity that they re-added the toolbar system to Office 2010.
The lede: "The ability to delete yourself from the Web doesn't really matter. What really matters in the age of advanced surveillance is the right to not be correlated. Technology is always watching and capturing you, but the correlation is where the danger lies. Laws can change that, but only if enacted soon."
That's an interesting perspective from the "chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel". [0] But yes, it does seem inevitable: pervasive surveillance of everyone by everyone. Like a global village aka small town.
However, I'm not convinced that laws would be enough. Criminals (large and small) don't care so much about laws. So arguably we're each responsible for our own privacy.
The ubiquity of requisite knowledge and technology, facilitated by leaks, may allow the sufficiently motivated to claw back some privacy. But sadly enough, perhaps the most highly motivated are the criminals. Not good.
[0] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015...
Now his position makes sense. He wants governments (presumably those who fund his firm) to have a monopoly on surveillance and correlation. While I agree on dangers from other criminals, restricting private institutions and individuals is authoritarian, unless there's an exception for whistle-blowing.
[0] https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008069.ht...
> I, for one, would gladly paraphrase John Perry Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace and say that the "weary giants of flesh and steel" should leave me alone but only if the "technology [that] is being imposed on a global scale without restraint" will do likewise. A pox on both; may they fight to a standstill somewhere other than my front room or my backyard.
[0] https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008081.ht...