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> ...listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies... Well, I was already on board with that thesis. I'm not on board with

> ...listen to the professor when he connects it to the larger problem of technopolies... Well, I was already on board with that thesis. I'm not on board with (I assume) the proposed solution, which would be relying on new regulatory powers to resolve the issue. It doesn't help with other corporate oligopolies, so I'll need some convincing that this time it's different.

ilaksh 9y ago
My own proposal is basically to replace those companies with versioned, modular software or protocols/smart contracts. See my history for the comment I just made prior to this one about Bannon and competition.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  On some level that sounds good, but how does that protocol come into existence? Does the government write the protocols? Wouldn't they just design what relevant (i.e., Google, Amazon, et. al.) lobbyists tell them to? Who penalizes companies to aren't compliant with the protocols? What about the data? Data management isn't free and you can have a pristine protocols that are worthless due to garbage data.
  - ilaksh 9y ago
    The existing government absolutely does not write the protocols. Rather the ecosystem around the protocols (or more accurately maybe something like versioned semantic modules) becomes a new paradigm that supercedes traditional government. How or whether that type of thing comes into existence is obviously extremely challenging and isn't determined. I believe that useful governments will support some structures that enable these types of systems, but must not be allowed to directly control them -- we have too much evidence of how poorly that works out. That will be the remaining utility that allows the existence of traditional government, until these new systems are fully deployed. Yes, data management isn't free, and there are severe challenges related to that. But we have technologies that give us hope that we can find better ways to do data management than just letting Facebook or Google track everything we click on and store them in their own data centers.

ilaksh 9y ago

My own proposal is basically to replace those companies with versioned, modular software or protocols/smart contracts. See my history for the comment I just made prior to this one about Bannon and competition.

humanrebar 9y ago
On some level that sounds good, but how does that protocol come into existence? Does the government write the protocols? Wouldn't they just design what relevant (i.e., Google, Amazon, et. al.) lobbyists tell them to? Who penalizes companies to aren't compliant with the protocols? What about the data? Data management isn't free and you can have a pristine protocols that are worthless due to garbage data.
- ilaksh 9y ago
  The existing government absolutely does not write the protocols. Rather the ecosystem around the protocols (or more accurately maybe something like versioned semantic modules) becomes a new paradigm that supercedes traditional government. How or whether that type of thing comes into existence is obviously extremely challenging and isn't determined. I believe that useful governments will support some structures that enable these types of systems, but must not be allowed to directly control them -- we have too much evidence of how poorly that works out. That will be the remaining utility that allows the existence of traditional government, until these new systems are fully deployed. Yes, data management isn't free, and there are severe challenges related to that. But we have technologies that give us hope that we can find better ways to do data management than just letting Facebook or Google track everything we click on and store them in their own data centers.