6 ms·

> The Magic Link’s slogan — “It Clears Your Desk, It Clears Your Mind” — perfectly encapsulates the irony of hindsight. Reminds me of that quote from Fredrick

by apo 7y ago

> The Magic Link’s slogan — “It Clears Your Desk, It Clears Your Mind” — perfectly encapsulates the irony of hindsight. Reminds me of that quote from Fredrick Pohl: "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam." I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles?

nostrademons 7y ago
Most of those already have known downsides from initial early adopter programs. Dams = disrupted fisheries, solar = rare earth mining pollution, wind = dead migratory birds, UBI = lazyness, universal healthcare = long waiting times, self-driving cars = nobody to blame when they crash, electric vehicles = battery disposal. It's like how we knew that the Internet obsoletes privacy long before Facebook came out, and have known that burning fossil fuels causes global warming for at least 30-40 years, and knew that there was shit in the meat since The Jungle came out in 1906, and knew that heavy industry causes pollution for about 150 years. We didn't care because the benefits to us were greater than the future drawbacks. As time goes on, we take the benefits for granted, but the drawbacks loom ever larger.
- rapind 7y ago
  Which early adopter program for UBI illustrated laziness? I'm actually opposed to UBI because I think everything is relative and it's really just upping the baseline, but from everything I've read it hasn't produced laziness in practice.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    There were experiments done in the U.S. in the late 60s and early 70s that showed a moderate (17% for women, 7% for men) reduction in work areas: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf It should also be noted that the same studies showed general increases in health (particularly mental health) and in education, so this is not an unambiguous loss. My point is that usually when you fix one metric, you introduce losses in other metrics. There's no free lunch (and if there were, people wouldn't work as hard to feed themselves).
    - pjc50 7y ago
      Improved mental health while doing less work should not be described as laziness! Individual have a sustainable workrate, and can exceed that for short or medium term periods, but at the cost of long term health. Calling "not exceeding your long term sustainable rate" "lazy" gives you something like the Japanese salaryman culture.
- novok 7y ago
  I think the greatest danger to a UBI program is something like easy student loans made tuition more expensive. It will just make the basics more expensive and you are back to square one. You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Yeah, I think inflation's the biggest risk. It hasn't shown up in any studies so far because they've been too small. If 1000 people have an extra $2k/month it doesn't measurably affect prices; if 100,000 people have an extra $2k/month suddenly everything becomes more expensive. Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. Build more houses and the price of housing comes down. Train more doctors (or nurse practitioners) and the price of health care comes down. Both of these industries have strong institutionalized cartels, though.
    - HillaryBriss 7y ago
      > Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. I always thought this was the biggest problem Obamacare (well intentioned though it is) left unaddressed. It looks like the ACA lacks the reforms that would allow supply to grow to meet demand.
      - nradov 7y ago
        Yes the bottleneck in producing more licensed physicians is currently the number of open residency slots in teaching hospitals. We need more funding for those. Every year some students graduate from medical school but are unable to actually practice medicine because they fail to get matched to a residency program.
        HillaryBriss 7y ago
        yes. also, though globalization is a two-edged sword, in this case it might have really helped the consumer with something the consumer really needs. i mean, the ACA might have additionally: * made it mandatory for US insurers to reimburse for care given by selected medical providers operating in selected foreign countries * allowed nurse practitioners to operate in all 50 states * eliminated barriers that, in effect, prevent doctors from foreign medical schools from entering the US and obtain a medical license * allowed US patients to order pharmaceuticals from Canada or other countries * allowed more pharmaceuticals which are already approved in foreign countries to be used in the US without additional FDA approval these sound like desperate measures, but many many US patients are actually quite desperate
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Some of your examples are unsupported by research. E.g. Uuniversal healthcare wait times: https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s... Wind bird strikes: https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s... And of course UBI = laziness is a moral judgement, not a rational argument about how humans should spend their time in a highly automated planetary economy. If you research the source material for these points, the rhetorical slants are obvious. The first is to encourage emotive responses ("bird strikes are bad and windmills cause them") while taking them out of context ("windmills kill far fewer birds and cause less migratory change than many other human activities"). The second is to exclude important contextual information and cherry pick figures to make a point. E.g. Canada's public health care system has long waiting times - which are clearly bad. But it's misleading to compare them directly with the shorter median waiting times in the US - because that excludes the >500,000 families bankrupted by the health system in the US every year for whom the waiting times for future treatment are effectively infinite. Decades of these kinds of distortions have made informed public debate very difficult. Building up a contextual and robust picture of the trade-offs of any activity takes a while, and the picture is only useful if it compares like for like across as many dimensions for as many competing possibilities as possible. That rarely happens in public debate - and it should.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    One of my points is that you can't separate the emotive response from the consequences of new developments. There's a cognitive bias that humans have (novelty bias) where when there's a great new technology or social change, we usually only see the positives, unless you're zooming in very closely and examining the development with a specifically critical lens. As the technology becomes more familiar, we become blind to its benefits and just take them for granted. Instead, our emotions zoom in on all the downsides - those little details that are insignificant in the bigger picture, but which become very annoying when everybody's using the technology every day. This is why life continues to suck despite 400 years of solid technological progress, even though nobody realistically wants to go back to the Middle Ages.
Abekkus 7y ago
In the shortest timescale? Military and Security robots.
wpietri 7y ago
> I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems. An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much. In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did. Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  wow. that's an amazing theme; awesome insight!
nathanvanfleet 7y ago
You just need to look to any other developed country to see universal healthcare.
- avs733 7y ago
  Honestly I think we are approaching a time where you could drop the other...
  - kazagistar 7y ago
    If you look at simple polls, maybe, but with the magic of gerrymandered and electoral college politics, majorities can lose, and with the power of Citizens United and superpacs, voting can be twisted by massive established industries fighting for their existence against the natural self interest of the vast majorty.
Tiktaalik 7y ago
>I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles? Self driving cars for sure. They remove the largest barriers to car use; that is, the costs of ownership, parking, and licensing. This latter fact means that they expand the total set of possible car drivers. All of this means that the amount of cars on the road is likely to explode, which will dramatically increase congestion. My expectation is that cities, which are already trying hard to shift people away from car oriented transportation options, will take a dim view of autonomous cars, and continue their efforts to shift away from the car.
- abecedarius 7y ago
  Simple answer: congestion pricing. The dystopian aspect I think will come from them being not self-driven, but Waymo-driven (or Tesla-driven, or whatever). You're not in charge, the corporation and the state are. That's not inevitable but it sure seems plausible. I remember when airline travel in the U.S. respected freedom of movement and even privacy.
  - kazagistar 7y ago
    That would make sense if privatization continues: the idea of nationalized free roads seems far to socialist for the rest of our society.
miguelrochefort 7y ago
Privacy

by apo 7y ago

nostrademons 7y ago

Most of those already have known downsides from initial early adopter programs. Dams = disrupted fisheries, solar = rare earth mining pollution, wind = dead migratory birds, UBI = lazyness, universal healthcare = long waiting times, self-driving cars = nobody to blame when they crash, electric vehicles = battery disposal. It's like how we knew that the Internet obsoletes privacy long before Facebook came out, and have known that burning fossil fuels causes global warming for at least 30-40 years, and knew that there was shit in the meat since The Jungle came out in 1906, and knew that heavy industry causes pollution for about 150 years. We didn't care because the benefits to us were greater than the future drawbacks. As time goes on, we take the benefits for granted, but the drawbacks loom ever larger.

rapind 7y ago
Which early adopter program for UBI illustrated laziness? I'm actually opposed to UBI because I think everything is relative and it's really just upping the baseline, but from everything I've read it hasn't produced laziness in practice.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  There were experiments done in the U.S. in the late 60s and early 70s that showed a moderate (17% for women, 7% for men) reduction in work areas: http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/conf/conf30/conf30a.pdf It should also be noted that the same studies showed general increases in health (particularly mental health) and in education, so this is not an unambiguous loss. My point is that usually when you fix one metric, you introduce losses in other metrics. There's no free lunch (and if there were, people wouldn't work as hard to feed themselves).
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Improved mental health while doing less work should not be described as laziness! Individual have a sustainable workrate, and can exceed that for short or medium term periods, but at the cost of long term health. Calling "not exceeding your long term sustainable rate" "lazy" gives you something like the Japanese salaryman culture.
novok 7y ago
I think the greatest danger to a UBI program is something like easy student loans made tuition more expensive. It will just make the basics more expensive and you are back to square one. You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Yeah, I think inflation's the biggest risk. It hasn't shown up in any studies so far because they've been too small. If 1000 people have an extra $2k/month it doesn't measurably affect prices; if 100,000 people have an extra $2k/month suddenly everything becomes more expensive. Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. Build more houses and the price of housing comes down. Train more doctors (or nurse practitioners) and the price of health care comes down. Both of these industries have strong institutionalized cartels, though.
  - HillaryBriss 7y ago
    > Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. I always thought this was the biggest problem Obamacare (well intentioned though it is) left unaddressed. It looks like the ACA lacks the reforms that would allow supply to grow to meet demand.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Yes the bottleneck in producing more licensed physicians is currently the number of open residency slots in teaching hospitals. We need more funding for those. Every year some students graduate from medical school but are unable to actually practice medicine because they fail to get matched to a residency program.
      - HillaryBriss 7y ago
        yes. also, though globalization is a two-edged sword, in this case it might have really helped the consumer with something the consumer really needs. i mean, the ACA might have additionally: * made it mandatory for US insurers to reimburse for care given by selected medical providers operating in selected foreign countries * allowed nurse practitioners to operate in all 50 states * eliminated barriers that, in effect, prevent doctors from foreign medical schools from entering the US and obtain a medical license * allowed US patients to order pharmaceuticals from Canada or other countries * allowed more pharmaceuticals which are already approved in foreign countries to be used in the US without additional FDA approval these sound like desperate measures, but many many US patients are actually quite desperate
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Some of your examples are unsupported by research. E.g. Uuniversal healthcare wait times: https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s... Wind bird strikes: https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-slayers-theyre-made-out-to-be-heres-why-79567 https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s... And of course UBI = laziness is a moral judgement, not a rational argument about how humans should spend their time in a highly automated planetary economy. If you research the source material for these points, the rhetorical slants are obvious. The first is to encourage emotive responses ("bird strikes are bad and windmills cause them") while taking them out of context ("windmills kill far fewer birds and cause less migratory change than many other human activities"). The second is to exclude important contextual information and cherry pick figures to make a point. E.g. Canada's public health care system has long waiting times - which are clearly bad. But it's misleading to compare them directly with the shorter median waiting times in the US - because that excludes the >500,000 families bankrupted by the health system in the US every year for whom the waiting times for future treatment are effectively infinite. Decades of these kinds of distortions have made informed public debate very difficult. Building up a contextual and robust picture of the trade-offs of any activity takes a while, and the picture is only useful if it compares like for like across as many dimensions for as many competing possibilities as possible. That rarely happens in public debate - and it should.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  One of my points is that you can't separate the emotive response from the consequences of new developments. There's a cognitive bias that humans have (novelty bias) where when there's a great new technology or social change, we usually only see the positives, unless you're zooming in very closely and examining the development with a specifically critical lens. As the technology becomes more familiar, we become blind to its benefits and just take them for granted. Instead, our emotions zoom in on all the downsides - those little details that are insignificant in the bigger picture, but which become very annoying when everybody's using the technology every day. This is why life continues to suck despite 400 years of solid technological progress, even though nobody realistically wants to go back to the Middle Ages.

Abekkus 7y ago

In the shortest timescale? Military and Security robots.

wpietri 7y ago

> I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems. An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much. In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did. Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.

appleflaxen 7y ago
wow. that's an amazing theme; awesome insight!

nathanvanfleet 7y ago

You just need to look to any other developed country to see universal healthcare.

avs733 7y ago
Honestly I think we are approaching a time where you could drop the other...
- kazagistar 7y ago
  If you look at simple polls, maybe, but with the magic of gerrymandered and electoral college politics, majorities can lose, and with the power of Citizens United and superpacs, voting can be twisted by massive established industries fighting for their existence against the natural self interest of the vast majorty.

Tiktaalik 7y ago

>I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles? Self driving cars for sure. They remove the largest barriers to car use; that is, the costs of ownership, parking, and licensing. This latter fact means that they expand the total set of possible car drivers. All of this means that the amount of cars on the road is likely to explode, which will dramatically increase congestion. My expectation is that cities, which are already trying hard to shift people away from car oriented transportation options, will take a dim view of autonomous cars, and continue their efforts to shift away from the car.

abecedarius 7y ago
Simple answer: congestion pricing. The dystopian aspect I think will come from them being not self-driven, but Waymo-driven (or Tesla-driven, or whatever). You're not in charge, the corporation and the state are. That's not inevitable but it sure seems plausible. I remember when airline travel in the U.S. respected freedom of movement and even privacy.
- kazagistar 7y ago
  That would make sense if privatization continues: the idea of nationalized free roads seems far to socialist for the rest of our society.

miguelrochefort 7y ago

Privacy