13 ms·

Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

155 points by bostik 9y ago

braindead_in 9y ago
Here's a automated transcript in case you want to skim through it. https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d1aab375029c https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d...
- omnibrain 9y ago
  /u/cstross mentioned on Twitter that his script will appear on his blog in a few days.
jlebrech 9y ago
"this time germans are the good guys", history will tell.
- cgio 9y ago
  Ask southern europeans.
  - izacus 9y ago
    What do you want us to say? That Germany is first in line when it comes to privacy and customer protection?
  - fasteo 9y ago
    Southern European here. Could you elaborate ?
    - LeonM 9y ago
      I think it's a reference to WW2
      - rimliu 9y ago
        I think this is reference to Greece and its perceotion that Germany is somehow responsible for their irrespondible spending.
        ZenoArrow 9y ago
        The Greek debt crisis was as a result of using public money to bailout private banks. Whether that bailout was irresponsible is a matter for debate. https://www.globalresearch.ca/banks-are-responsible-for-the-economic-and-social-crisis-in-greece/5567357 https://www.globalresearch.ca/banks-are-responsible-for-the-...
        freeflight 9y ago
        That's a tad bit oversimplified, not just in terms of what actually happened in Greece, mostly private banks being bailed out [0] but also how that whole situation came about. There's been a big elephant in the room nobody really wants to talk about for quite a while now: EU's most successful economies running up massive export surpluses, which really hurt the weaker southern economies [1]. In that regard, it's in very bad taste, to just go "Them southern European countries are all just lazy and don't know how to handle money" because nothing about that whole situation is as simple as that. Just like it wasn't a coincidence that Greece crashed on the tails of the 2008 recession. In our globalized world, nothing of this scale happens in a vacuum, but it's just that much more convenient to put all the blame on the people of Greece supposedly just being too "lazy and clueless", as opposed to the "diligent and frugal Germans". As a German, I can assure you: Most Germans are pretty fed up with "being frugal" and not having seen any real wage gains in decades, for the sole purpose of driving this supposedly "economic miracle" of the Germany economy. Greece was a gigantic shame for the European idea, left out to die, used for IMF austerity experiments while being framed as "lazy people just don't know how to money", even tho it was their misery which boosted Germanys economic standing even further [2]. [0] http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-banks-study/a-19234391 http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-ban... [1] https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-saves-too-much-and-spends-too-little-why-germanys-current-account-surplus-bad https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-save... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-losing-tens-of-billions-of-e-germany-is-making-a-profit-out-of-the-greek-crisis/#6ac165d95409 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-...
    - wazoox 9y ago
      That's a reference to the austerity absurdly imposed upon Greece, Portugal and Spain (and soon Italy and France) though it has demonstrably worsened the situation (not for Germany, though, so you may say that it worked well enough for them).
  - ferongr 9y ago
    Don't ask me, I'm thankful for all the bailouts, debt restructuring and the dragging the inefficient, bloated public sector of Greece into the 21st centrury.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    Ask what? I'm Greek. We fucked up with money and paid the price. It's not the fault of the Germans.
eksemplar 9y ago
There is something interesting about the speed of things in regard to best practices. We've written a lot of code this year, that is likely going to be replaced rather than rewritten, because tech moves forward, which means all the time we've spent on doing it right, so it'll be easy to get into in five years, is essentially wasted. Not that we're going to abandon best practices, because you never know, but it's somewhat hilarious to think about how much effort we've wasted doing something right that no one will ever notice.
- tjoff 9y ago
  If the problem isn't trivial doing it right saves time during first implementation as well.
narrator 9y ago
Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the future because they don't believe there's going to be one. I think this is why China has risen so quickly. Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.
- fao_ 9y ago
  > and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one. Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism is a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    > and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Living in one of them it all to often feels like they are rolling back that system.
  - 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
I often reflect on this these days. Seems like the future chasing is not the solution. Society just need a fundamental subsistance obligation layer, a leisure layer and a fictitious layer for imagination purpose only.
sneak 9y ago
Great author; sadly another terrible keynote choice by the CCC.
- avian 9y ago
  Care to elaborate? I think the talk was on topic and a suitable kick-off for the rest of the congress. I found Stross' perspective on predicting the future and AI novel and interesting.
  - mrweasel 9y ago
    He's just a terrible speaker. The topic is well chosen and I'm certain the transcript will read very well. The presentation is bad though, Stross is not an engaging speaker, he's just reading what he prepared and that no a good way to keep people engaged and focused for an hour.
jorgec 9y ago
I predicted a future with flying cars and its not happening. Was i wrong? no, its the future that is wrong! (sarcasm).
lowglow 9y ago
(My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever) I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?) A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it? Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are. Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?). Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide. It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.
- codewithcheese 9y ago
  Daniel Suarez fiction works are very on point with near future while also being fun.
  - lowglow 9y ago
    Awesome. Which book would you recommend?
    - ylere 9y ago
      Daemon/Freedom, Change Agent
      - lowglow 9y ago
agumonkey 9y ago
Thanks for making me joyful about climate change induced collapse.
snomad 9y ago
Some comments as watching video... Corporation as AI is good analogy. But as with many, he stops short and repeatedly just says corporations. Please, every large group entity - governmental bodies, unions, non-profits - is an AI. And with/in those groups (and corporations) are also competing AIs. Comments about weaponized social media: It is odd that we in the West don't want to acknowledge / know / accept the US government and US tech firm roles in the Arab Spring and Ukraine. If we even go further back, really Wikileaks were the true pioneers in weaponizing social media.
- olegkikin 9y ago
  But corporation collections as paperclip maximizers is a bad analogy. Corporations generally produce something large numbers of people want (be it solar panels or cars in his example), whereas a paperclip maximizer AI produces paperclips that only it wants, destroying everything in its path.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    The "paperclip" in Stross' talk is not the item being produced, but earnings. If a corporations could massively increase its quarterly earnings by starting a nuclear war, it may well decide to do so. It is not that the item or service is useful or not in the short term, but that it will pursue a set goal with a single minded conviction. Another analogy may well be the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
  - Veedrac 9y ago
    The risk of a paperclip maximiser isn't that the paperclip maximiser wants paperclips, but that the limits of almost any reasonable goal become strongly perverse when one approaches the limits of feasible computation. Corporations are different because there are very strong diminishing returns on scale when it comes to how smart they can be.
zeep 9y ago
It would not play for me, but the direct link to the video did: https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-9270-eng-deu-fra-Dude_you_broke_the_Future_hd.mp4 https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-...

155 points by bostik 9y ago

Here's a automated transcript in case you want to skim through it. https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d1aab375029c https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d...

omnibrain 9y ago
/u/cstross mentioned on Twitter that his script will appear on his blog in a few days.

jlebrech 9y ago

"this time germans are the good guys", history will tell.

cgio 9y ago
Ask southern europeans.
- izacus 9y ago
  What do you want us to say? That Germany is first in line when it comes to privacy and customer protection?
- fasteo 9y ago
  Southern European here. Could you elaborate ?
  - LeonM 9y ago
    I think it's a reference to WW2
    - rimliu 9y ago
      I think this is reference to Greece and its perceotion that Germany is somehow responsible for their irrespondible spending.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        The Greek debt crisis was as a result of using public money to bailout private banks. Whether that bailout was irresponsible is a matter for debate. https://www.globalresearch.ca/banks-are-responsible-for-the-economic-and-social-crisis-in-greece/5567357 https://www.globalresearch.ca/banks-are-responsible-for-the-...
      - freeflight 9y ago
        That's a tad bit oversimplified, not just in terms of what actually happened in Greece, mostly private banks being bailed out [0] but also how that whole situation came about. There's been a big elephant in the room nobody really wants to talk about for quite a while now: EU's most successful economies running up massive export surpluses, which really hurt the weaker southern economies [1]. In that regard, it's in very bad taste, to just go "Them southern European countries are all just lazy and don't know how to handle money" because nothing about that whole situation is as simple as that. Just like it wasn't a coincidence that Greece crashed on the tails of the 2008 recession. In our globalized world, nothing of this scale happens in a vacuum, but it's just that much more convenient to put all the blame on the people of Greece supposedly just being too "lazy and clueless", as opposed to the "diligent and frugal Germans". As a German, I can assure you: Most Germans are pretty fed up with "being frugal" and not having seen any real wage gains in decades, for the sole purpose of driving this supposedly "economic miracle" of the Germany economy. Greece was a gigantic shame for the European idea, left out to die, used for IMF austerity experiments while being framed as "lazy people just don't know how to money", even tho it was their misery which boosted Germanys economic standing even further [2]. [0] http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-banks-study/a-19234391 http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-ban... [1] https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-saves-too-much-and-spends-too-little-why-germanys-current-account-surplus-bad https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-save... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-losing-tens-of-billions-of-e-germany-is-making-a-profit-out-of-the-greek-crisis/#6ac165d95409 https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-...
  - wazoox 9y ago
    That's a reference to the austerity absurdly imposed upon Greece, Portugal and Spain (and soon Italy and France) though it has demonstrably worsened the situation (not for Germany, though, so you may say that it worked well enough for them).
- ferongr 9y ago
  Don't ask me, I'm thankful for all the bailouts, debt restructuring and the dragging the inefficient, bloated public sector of Greece into the 21st centrury.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  Ask what? I'm Greek. We fucked up with money and paid the price. It's not the fault of the Germans.

eksemplar 9y ago

There is something interesting about the speed of things in regard to best practices. We've written a lot of code this year, that is likely going to be replaced rather than rewritten, because tech moves forward, which means all the time we've spent on doing it right, so it'll be easy to get into in five years, is essentially wasted. Not that we're going to abandon best practices, because you never know, but it's somewhat hilarious to think about how much effort we've wasted doing something right that no one will ever notice.

tjoff 9y ago
If the problem isn't trivial doing it right saves time during first implementation as well.

narrator 9y ago

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the future because they don't believe there's going to be one. I think this is why China has risen so quickly. Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.

fao_ 9y ago
> and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one. Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism is a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  > and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Living in one of them it all to often feels like they are rolling back that system.
- 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

I often reflect on this these days. Seems like the future chasing is not the solution. Society just need a fundamental subsistance obligation layer, a leisure layer and a fictitious layer for imagination purpose only.

sneak 9y ago

Great author; sadly another terrible keynote choice by the CCC.

avian 9y ago
Care to elaborate? I think the talk was on topic and a suitable kick-off for the rest of the congress. I found Stross' perspective on predicting the future and AI novel and interesting.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  He's just a terrible speaker. The topic is well chosen and I'm certain the transcript will read very well. The presentation is bad though, Stross is not an engaging speaker, he's just reading what he prepared and that no a good way to keep people engaged and focused for an hour.

jorgec 9y ago

I predicted a future with flying cars and its not happening. Was i wrong? no, its the future that is wrong! (sarcasm).

lowglow 9y ago

(My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever) I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?) A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it? Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are. Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?). Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide. It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.

codewithcheese 9y ago
Daniel Suarez fiction works are very on point with near future while also being fun.
- lowglow 9y ago
  Awesome. Which book would you recommend?
  - ylere 9y ago
    Daemon/Freedom, Change Agent
    - lowglow 9y ago

agumonkey 9y ago

Thanks for making me joyful about climate change induced collapse.

snomad 9y ago

Some comments as watching video... Corporation as AI is good analogy. But as with many, he stops short and repeatedly just says corporations. Please, every large group entity - governmental bodies, unions, non-profits - is an AI. And with/in those groups (and corporations) are also competing AIs. Comments about weaponized social media: It is odd that we in the West don't want to acknowledge / know / accept the US government and US tech firm roles in the Arab Spring and Ukraine. If we even go further back, really Wikileaks were the true pioneers in weaponizing social media.

olegkikin 9y ago
But corporation collections as paperclip maximizers is a bad analogy. Corporations generally produce something large numbers of people want (be it solar panels or cars in his example), whereas a paperclip maximizer AI produces paperclips that only it wants, destroying everything in its path.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  The "paperclip" in Stross' talk is not the item being produced, but earnings. If a corporations could massively increase its quarterly earnings by starting a nuclear war, it may well decide to do so. It is not that the item or service is useful or not in the short term, but that it will pursue a set goal with a single minded conviction. Another analogy may well be the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
- Veedrac 9y ago
  The risk of a paperclip maximiser isn't that the paperclip maximiser wants paperclips, but that the limits of almost any reasonable goal become strongly perverse when one approaches the limits of feasible computation. Corporations are different because there are very strong diminishing returns on scale when it comes to how smart they can be.

zeep 9y ago

It would not play for me, but the direct link to the video did: https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-9270-eng-deu-fra-Dude_you_broke_the_Future_hd.mp4 https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-...