7 ms·

On the Moral Economy of Tech (2016)

112 points by mapleoin 9y ago

itsmenotyou 9y ago
I think as technologists we have a natural preference for clean technological solutions that don't involve politics or messy interpersonal relationship issues. Failing to confront that whole human sphere of life leads to negative consequences everywhere, and the talk does a great job of pointing out some of the macro social effects. On a similar note but a more localized scale I'm reminded of this talk on one of the downsides of moving to microservices being that people can avoid difficult conversations https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s
mark_l_watson 9y ago
Who was the author? I didn’t see attribution on the linked page.
- fiatpandas 9y ago
  Maciej Cegłowski
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Also known as 'idlewords here. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords
- wellpast 9y ago
  http://idlewords.com/about.htm http://idlewords.com/about.htm
  - czep 9y ago
    By the way, everything on his site is absolute gold, I can't remember a time I was so awed by someone's blog. Even his resume is brilliant and hilarious! I highly recommend browsing, it's great writing.
    - wellpast 9y ago
      Been poking around. I like his thinking. Apparently, "Paul Graham is a weenis," though. http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#2 http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#...
- Avshalom 9y ago
  more useful than a name https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com N.B. if you click on the parenthesized .com you get a link of everything from that site
pjmorris 9y ago
I'm not a SV resident, but I've visited several times, over decades, and this rings true... "Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people."
- Avshalom 9y ago
  It's basically trickle-down/voodoo economics. "the best way to end poverty is for me personally to be rich"
  - wpietri 9y ago
    And historically there's a lot of evidence this can work. But not if gains are concentrated in the hands of the already rich. Which had been the case in America for decades.
    - ivanbakel 9y ago
      That seems a bit of a truism, though - if wealth gains go to the poor, naturally they will become wealthier. Trickle-down economics imagines exactly that if the wealthy get the pie, they'll dole it out.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    We could debate the point of trickle-down, but the rich are not creating the poor. Something else is. SF has spent 330 million dollars to tend to their 15k homeless people. 22k a year. I dont know about you but I dont see them living 22k a year lives. And I see syringes, severely sick and mentally ill people walking the streets everyday.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  I mean, I feel like tech people have this sense of moral exceptionalism and don't understand the value of moral consensus in a democracy, as opposed to moral obligation by noblesse oblige. Something isn't only right or wrong in a democracy. You have to also build consensus through boots on the ground, not by expecting everyone to have moral revelations by magic. So, is there consensus in America that inequity and poverty are issues that rise to the level of national discussion? I would say no. So how do you go about having an interesting and durable agenda of attacking American inequity and poverty in an extra-legal way when you don't have consensus in a democracy? By flexing tech money muscle? Do tech people, excluding elites, have that much money, that they can buy their way to morality without first doing consensus work?
pjmorris 9y ago
More article-quoting: "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable." I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?
- jaredhansen 9y ago
  >I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think? It's the wrong question. People are deterministic, but that doesn't mean they're always predictable . In some sense, it's trivially true: we're physical systems, so of course* we're deterministic. The underlying physics that govern how the subatomic particles that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the brain, is pretty well established at this point -- so if someone wants to assert some kind of special exemption for human brains: "everything else in the observable universe obeys physical law, but this is different!" the burden of proof is going to be pretty damn high. And nobody has ever put forth anything like real evidence for such an exemption -- the fact that "we don't understand how the brain works" doesn't mean it doesn't work in some fundamentally knowable way. However, that doesn't mean that brains are (at least with current or reasonably-foreseeable-future technology) "ultimately tractable" even in principle, much less that we have any way of getting inside brains to see what people are going to do in real time. And the reason people care about whether people are "deterministic" or not is because we want to know how to influence them, and for what we should assign praise/blame etc., and there's a common hidden assumption that determinism removes our ability to do that in some way. But I think that assumption's false (you don't see determinists just throwing up their hands and declaring ethics don't matter). There's a massive amount of physical evidence for determinism and no evidence at all against -- I'm not sure how anyone with a science background could believe otherwise at this point. * "Predictable" here means something like "predictable by other humans, including via reasonably foreseeable technology". If we're in a simulation, the simulator can, by construct, "predict" the whole thing.
tboyd47 9y ago
A lot of the criticisms against SV these days echo Jonathan Swift's portrayal of the scientific communities of his day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa
samlevine 9y ago
> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. ... SNIP ... > In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software. Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- bpchaps 9y ago
  Serious question: what the heck is your point?
  - samlevine 9y ago
    The author correctly points out that the Bay Area's problems are political in origin, and that tech companies and technologists in general have been reticent to get dirty with politics. However, their solution, putting tech companies under more democratic control, does not solve the problems specified. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's work is under democratic control. As are the zoning policies which keep out poor and middle class citizens from the few parts of the country which have benefited from our economic growth. The companies that charge our local state and federal governments 10x what Europeans to build roads, bridges, mass transit and build other projects are very tightly controlled by our democratic systems. Facebook and Google are not preventing people from building housing. They are not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables", nor are they building drones that blow up civilians. They are building technology that allows advertisers to more accurately sell people stuff. It should be obvious to anyone at this point that this could be used for nefarious purposes. But so can any number of other technologies developed over the past two centuries. The 20th century was a testament to how much murder humans can commit when given the opportunity, and we did not need machine learning to make it happen.
    - 9y ago
isoskeles 9y ago
One thing I dislike about articles like this is that they get you to agree on some basic point, such as, "Hey did you notice that there is a lot of wealth AND poverty in San Francisco?" Yes, I agree with that. "Well, actually, it's libertarians' and techies' fault!" Oh okay, you were correct about the first part so you're correct about the second too. "Also, by the way, they're just like Hitler / Stalin / thinly veiled shout-out to something really bad!" > Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them. I do agree that San Francisco has this strange juxtaposition of impoverished hellscape versus obscene wealth. It's the main reason I plan to leave here within the next couple of years. But I'd do myself a disservice if I latched onto a thought that this is the fault of some political ideological minority in the area, or even the majority (bleeding hearts). This "poverty and misery" is the techies' fault in the same way that alcoholism is the fault of bartenders. All that said, I agree with the conclusion about data. There should be a moral obligation to limit or stop this storage. It creeps me the hell out, and it's why I don't use Facebook or Google any more, knowing that this doesn't fully solve the problem. I'll add that the metaphor he depicts is really great: > As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates. I don't want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I can't figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger. I just wish the writer were mature enough to make that argument without the scapegoating of ideology, or the wrong ideology. This isn't about libertarianism or "trickle down" (from HN comments) or capitalism or a dislike for politics, it's about technological progress. Ideologies that are opposed to the writer's scapegoats will also act in service of technological progress when it is convenient for them.
- old-gregg 9y ago
  It's not hard to read his point. For startups, the bay area is nearly almost the first market to launch in. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, numerous food delivery services, or anything aimed at the SMB market, all of this goes in production in bay area first and this place is closer to the ultimate digital utopia than anywhere else in the country. His point is that it doesn't make "the world a better place", presumably because all value is captured by the capital owners [his comparison to industrial revolution]
megamindbrian2 9y ago
I wish this could be said louder.

112 points by mapleoin 9y ago

I think as technologists we have a natural preference for clean technological solutions that don't involve politics or messy interpersonal relationship issues. Failing to confront that whole human sphere of life leads to negative consequences everywhere, and the talk does a great job of pointing out some of the macro social effects. On a similar note but a more localized scale I'm reminded of this talk on one of the downsides of moving to microservices being that people can avoid difficult conversations https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s

mark_l_watson 9y ago

Who was the author? I didn’t see attribution on the linked page.

fiatpandas 9y ago
Maciej Cegłowski
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Also known as 'idlewords here. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords
wellpast 9y ago
http://idlewords.com/about.htm http://idlewords.com/about.htm
- czep 9y ago
  By the way, everything on his site is absolute gold, I can't remember a time I was so awed by someone's blog. Even his resume is brilliant and hilarious! I highly recommend browsing, it's great writing.
  - wellpast 9y ago
    Been poking around. I like his thinking. Apparently, "Paul Graham is a weenis," though. http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#2 http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#...
Avshalom 9y ago
more useful than a name https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com N.B. if you click on the parenthesized .com you get a link of everything from that site

pjmorris 9y ago

I'm not a SV resident, but I've visited several times, over decades, and this rings true... "Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people."

Avshalom 9y ago
It's basically trickle-down/voodoo economics. "the best way to end poverty is for me personally to be rich"
- wpietri 9y ago
  And historically there's a lot of evidence this can work. But not if gains are concentrated in the hands of the already rich. Which had been the case in America for decades.
  - ivanbakel 9y ago
    That seems a bit of a truism, though - if wealth gains go to the poor, naturally they will become wealthier. Trickle-down economics imagines exactly that if the wealthy get the pie, they'll dole it out.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  We could debate the point of trickle-down, but the rich are not creating the poor. Something else is. SF has spent 330 million dollars to tend to their 15k homeless people. 22k a year. I dont know about you but I dont see them living 22k a year lives. And I see syringes, severely sick and mentally ill people walking the streets everyday.
threatofrain 9y ago
I mean, I feel like tech people have this sense of moral exceptionalism and don't understand the value of moral consensus in a democracy, as opposed to moral obligation by noblesse oblige. Something isn't only right or wrong in a democracy. You have to also build consensus through boots on the ground, not by expecting everyone to have moral revelations by magic. So, is there consensus in America that inequity and poverty are issues that rise to the level of national discussion? I would say no. So how do you go about having an interesting and durable agenda of attacking American inequity and poverty in an extra-legal way when you don't have consensus in a democracy? By flexing tech money muscle? Do tech people, excluding elites, have that much money, that they can buy their way to morality without first doing consensus work?

pjmorris 9y ago

More article-quoting: "As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable." I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?

jaredhansen 9y ago
>I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think? It's the wrong question. People are deterministic, but that doesn't mean they're always predictable . In some sense, it's trivially true: we're physical systems, so of course* we're deterministic. The underlying physics that govern how the subatomic particles that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the brain, is pretty well established at this point -- so if someone wants to assert some kind of special exemption for human brains: "everything else in the observable universe obeys physical law, but this is different!" the burden of proof is going to be pretty damn high. And nobody has ever put forth anything like real evidence for such an exemption -- the fact that "we don't understand how the brain works" doesn't mean it doesn't work in some fundamentally knowable way. However, that doesn't mean that brains are (at least with current or reasonably-foreseeable-future technology) "ultimately tractable" even in principle, much less that we have any way of getting inside brains to see what people are going to do in real time. And the reason people care about whether people are "deterministic" or not is because we want to know how to influence them, and for what we should assign praise/blame etc., and there's a common hidden assumption that determinism removes our ability to do that in some way. But I think that assumption's false (you don't see determinists just throwing up their hands and declaring ethics don't matter). There's a massive amount of physical evidence for determinism and no evidence at all against -- I'm not sure how anyone with a science background could believe otherwise at this point. * "Predictable" here means something like "predictable by other humans, including via reasonably foreseeable technology". If we're in a simulation, the simulator can, by construct, "predict" the whole thing.

tboyd47 9y ago

A lot of the criticisms against SV these days echo Jonathan Swift's portrayal of the scientific communities of his day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa

samlevine 9y ago

> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. ... SNIP ... > In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise democratic control over that software. Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bpchaps 9y ago
Serious question: what the heck is your point?
- samlevine 9y ago
  The author correctly points out that the Bay Area's problems are political in origin, and that tech companies and technologists in general have been reticent to get dirty with politics. However, their solution, putting tech companies under more democratic control, does not solve the problems specified. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's work is under democratic control. As are the zoning policies which keep out poor and middle class citizens from the few parts of the country which have benefited from our economic growth. The companies that charge our local state and federal governments 10x what Europeans to build roads, bridges, mass transit and build other projects are very tightly controlled by our democratic systems. Facebook and Google are not preventing people from building housing. They are not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables", nor are they building drones that blow up civilians. They are building technology that allows advertisers to more accurately sell people stuff. It should be obvious to anyone at this point that this could be used for nefarious purposes. But so can any number of other technologies developed over the past two centuries. The 20th century was a testament to how much murder humans can commit when given the opportunity, and we did not need machine learning to make it happen.
  - 9y ago

isoskeles 9y ago

One thing I dislike about articles like this is that they get you to agree on some basic point, such as, "Hey did you notice that there is a lot of wealth AND poverty in San Francisco?" Yes, I agree with that. "Well, actually, it's libertarians' and techies' fault!" Oh okay, you were correct about the first part so you're correct about the second too. "Also, by the way, they're just like Hitler / Stalin / thinly veiled shout-out to something really bad!" > Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them. I do agree that San Francisco has this strange juxtaposition of impoverished hellscape versus obscene wealth. It's the main reason I plan to leave here within the next couple of years. But I'd do myself a disservice if I latched onto a thought that this is the fault of some political ideological minority in the area, or even the majority (bleeding hearts). This "poverty and misery" is the techies' fault in the same way that alcoholism is the fault of bartenders. All that said, I agree with the conclusion about data. There should be a moral obligation to limit or stop this storage. It creeps me the hell out, and it's why I don't use Facebook or Google any more, knowing that this doesn't fully solve the problem. I'll add that the metaphor he depicts is really great: > As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates. I don't want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I can't figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger. I just wish the writer were mature enough to make that argument without the scapegoating of ideology, or the wrong ideology. This isn't about libertarianism or "trickle down" (from HN comments) or capitalism or a dislike for politics, it's about technological progress. Ideologies that are opposed to the writer's scapegoats will also act in service of technological progress when it is convenient for them.

old-gregg 9y ago
It's not hard to read his point. For startups, the bay area is nearly almost the first market to launch in. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, numerous food delivery services, or anything aimed at the SMB market, all of this goes in production in bay area first and this place is closer to the ultimate digital utopia than anywhere else in the country. His point is that it doesn't make "the world a better place", presumably because all value is captured by the capital owners [his comparison to industrial revolution]

megamindbrian2 9y ago

I wish this could be said louder.