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The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an inte

The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Part of the fear wasn't just of a high priesthood that controlled knowledge, language and thought itself as everyday work and modern life became more machine-like. But of a New Religion: where Science becomes the last true God. One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. We attempt to solve one problem, like controlling the weather, by introducing remedies according to our current state of the art capabilities. And accidentally introduce cataclysms that cannot be reversed. Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Its too pricey. The culture has shifted as well. From ICBMs to private space enterprises. And it's that cultural feedback loop, that civilizing progress as ideas are shared instantly about the globe, that very few were able to foresee.

nicoffeine 5y ago
> Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing) is still very much developed by governments, because they are the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access Programs." [1] > From ICBMs to private space enterprises. "China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts say" [1] I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of corporations. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-programs-and-the-pentagons-ecosystem-of-secrecy https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-p... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nuclear-missile-silos/2021/06/30/0fa8debc-d9c2-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nucle...
- blfr 5y ago
  I don't think John von Neumann would be particularly impressed by fusion reactors that don't really work after decades in development or papers with thousands of authors out of CERN.
  - nicoffeine 5y ago
    "A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.” ― John von Neumann
    - blfr 5y ago
      It's not mathematics and, unlike in the atomic era, they're not becoming useful.
      - nicoffeine 5y ago
        Are you seriously claiming that mathematics aren't being used to build fusion reactors and particle accelerators?
      - nwah1 5y ago
        Fusion research on one hand is much like a ceremonial money pit where we light a mountain of cash on fire every year. Fusion power itself will likely not have much practical application anytime soon, because other power sources will be far more economical. But if we consider fusion power to be a backdoor way to get funding to research superconductors, plasma physics, and so on, then there is something valuable in the manner of that von Neumann quote, even though their proximate goal is probably all but useless for now.
bumby 5y ago
>progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated While I agree, isn’t the flip side of this that _bad_ ideas can be much more efficiently communicated as well? I know the counter is that the best remedy for bad information is better information but at least when poor ideas are amplified by human cognitive biases, is transmission efficiency a good measure of progress?
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  It calls for a bit of strategic thinking that may come off as reckless and nilhistic but logically sound. * If iterations of will in the end come out "correct" then speeding it up will help progress in process up until a limit. * Conversely if we cannot come across the "correct" answer eventually as a species we were already doomed and it isn't like we are making matters worse. (Putting aside the definitional issues of technically already being doomed in an entropic universe.) I stick to binary outcomes here by design due to "optimal" being not only non-computable but non-definable. There is a popular argument about "bad information traveling faster than good" but it doesn't quite convince me. The speed may also be its own undoing via overexposure undermining its credibility. There is a notable historic pattern seen in England, Boston, Ireland of theocrats getting in charge and so taxing everybody's patience they cause declines in religiousity athiests could only dream of. Respectively Cromwell and the puritans being so bad people went back to nobility, "Banned in Boston" censorship, and theocratic abuses including the Magdalyne Laundries.
titzer 5y ago
> And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. My reading of this article is that von Neumann was talking about carrying capacity, and not some runaway or rogue technology from exploding. We are just too big for this planet. He says this over and over.
acituan 5y ago
> failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. I find it harmful to equate mere proliferation with democratic participation. Sure, you have many terminals, but most of the information processing is still lopsided towards the centralized "server". When recommendation algorithms shove content down people's throats, only consequential participation expected from them is to engage with the ads, and they can't talk back to ads. The rest is almost as "democratic" as watching TV. > One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And it is a bad measure. A psychotic person's mind also communicates tons of ideas back and forth, in fact too "efficiently". Propaganda posters from an airplane also communicates very efficiently. The idea that mere communication makes progress is what we've been thought by the engagement-maximization culture. Real measure of progress is the extent those ideas converge towards the truth. How they can form a pattern of meaning that increasingly conforms to the reality. Current tech cares about none of those, and no wonder there is a crisis of meaning making and acceleration from departure from reality, just like a psychotic person. > Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. It is just developed in secret by large scale internet companies now. For most of the tech most of the people have the most screen time with, what content is recommended why, what data is processed how etc are the biggest secrets.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Running mainly a few apps/websites tightly controlled by a few companies strongly incentivised (by greed and their governments) to keep a tight leash in the type of content that can be consumed AND created. I think Orwell and Huxley foresaw many of these perfectly clear even before the term "cold war" existed.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Don't forget the developers who instead of hippies who were going to change the world sold their soul to the marketing industry.
  - Ostrogodsky 5y ago
    Yes, I am old enough to remember how we were all sold the promise of the "information superhighway", a bright future of a fully open, inclusive network where people would share knowledge freely in an instant. Every passing year the Internet has become: - More censored. - More commercialized. - Less open, more walled-gardened. - More banal (For example, academics used to write long Usenet posts, then they started to write blogs, now they mostly bicker on twitter) - Less sincere and personal, now people mostly use it as just another PR tool.If you dont conform, you will be cancelled, downvoted,banned, etc. Now, before someone comes to accuse me of "Old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds syndrome", I fully accept that in absolute terms we have more good things now, but the signal/noise ratio is also a very important thing, or as papa Stalin used to say: "Quantity has a quality on its own" , for every thoughtful post,blog,site we are drowned in thousands of crappy sites and it is not always very easy to distinguish them, because it is the sad reality that quality publications will little by little become crap just to survive or fit-in.
selfhoster11 5y ago
> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. That internet node not only isn't an equal peer in the global information network (thanks to simple things like NAT, but also more insidious problems like increased battery drain when P2P apps are active and the OS killing background apps "for your convenience"), but it is also a telescreen that you carry at all times and even pay for its upkeep. You can keep this democratisation of technology, if that's what it looks like.
- pabs3 5y ago
  Isn't IPv6 more common than IPv4 on mobile networks these days?

nicoffeine 5y ago

> Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing) is still very much developed by governments, because they are the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access Programs." [1] > From ICBMs to private space enterprises. "China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts say" [1] I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of corporations. [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-programs-and-the-pentagons-ecosystem-of-secrecy https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29092/special-access-p... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nuclear-missile-silos/2021/06/30/0fa8debc-d9c2-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-nucle...

blfr 5y ago
I don't think John von Neumann would be particularly impressed by fusion reactors that don't really work after decades in development or papers with thousands of authors out of CERN.
- nicoffeine 5y ago
  "A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.” ― John von Neumann
  - blfr 5y ago
    It's not mathematics and, unlike in the atomic era, they're not becoming useful.
    - nicoffeine 5y ago
      Are you seriously claiming that mathematics aren't being used to build fusion reactors and particle accelerators?
    - nwah1 5y ago
      Fusion research on one hand is much like a ceremonial money pit where we light a mountain of cash on fire every year. Fusion power itself will likely not have much practical application anytime soon, because other power sources will be far more economical. But if we consider fusion power to be a backdoor way to get funding to research superconductors, plasma physics, and so on, then there is something valuable in the manner of that von Neumann quote, even though their proximate goal is probably all but useless for now.

bumby 5y ago

>progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated While I agree, isn’t the flip side of this that _bad_ ideas can be much more efficiently communicated as well? I know the counter is that the best remedy for bad information is better information but at least when poor ideas are amplified by human cognitive biases, is transmission efficiency a good measure of progress?

Nasrudith 5y ago
It calls for a bit of strategic thinking that may come off as reckless and nilhistic but logically sound. * If iterations of will in the end come out "correct" then speeding it up will help progress in process up until a limit. * Conversely if we cannot come across the "correct" answer eventually as a species we were already doomed and it isn't like we are making matters worse. (Putting aside the definitional issues of technically already being doomed in an entropic universe.) I stick to binary outcomes here by design due to "optimal" being not only non-computable but non-definable. There is a popular argument about "bad information traveling faster than good" but it doesn't quite convince me. The speed may also be its own undoing via overexposure undermining its credibility. There is a notable historic pattern seen in England, Boston, Ireland of theocrats getting in charge and so taxing everybody's patience they cause declines in religiousity athiests could only dream of. Respectively Cromwell and the puritans being so bad people went back to nobility, "Banned in Boston" censorship, and theocratic abuses including the Magdalyne Laundries.

titzer 5y ago

> And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. My reading of this article is that von Neumann was talking about carrying capacity, and not some runaway or rogue technology from exploding. We are just too big for this planet. He says this over and over.

acituan 5y ago

> failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. I find it harmful to equate mere proliferation with democratic participation. Sure, you have many terminals, but most of the information processing is still lopsided towards the centralized "server". When recommendation algorithms shove content down people's throats, only consequential participation expected from them is to engage with the ads, and they can't talk back to ads. The rest is almost as "democratic" as watching TV. > One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And it is a bad measure. A psychotic person's mind also communicates tons of ideas back and forth, in fact too "efficiently". Propaganda posters from an airplane also communicates very efficiently. The idea that mere communication makes progress is what we've been thought by the engagement-maximization culture. Real measure of progress is the extent those ideas converge towards the truth. How they can form a pattern of meaning that increasingly conforms to the reality. Current tech cares about none of those, and no wonder there is a crisis of meaning making and acceleration from departure from reality, just like a psychotic person. > Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. It is just developed in secret by large scale internet companies now. For most of the tech most of the people have the most screen time with, what content is recommended why, what data is processed how etc are the biggest secrets.

Ostrogodsky 5y ago

> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Running mainly a few apps/websites tightly controlled by a few companies strongly incentivised (by greed and their governments) to keep a tight leash in the type of content that can be consumed AND created. I think Orwell and Huxley foresaw many of these perfectly clear even before the term "cold war" existed.

AniseAbyss 5y ago
Don't forget the developers who instead of hippies who were going to change the world sold their soul to the marketing industry.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  Yes, I am old enough to remember how we were all sold the promise of the "information superhighway", a bright future of a fully open, inclusive network where people would share knowledge freely in an instant. Every passing year the Internet has become: - More censored. - More commercialized. - Less open, more walled-gardened. - More banal (For example, academics used to write long Usenet posts, then they started to write blogs, now they mostly bicker on twitter) - Less sincere and personal, now people mostly use it as just another PR tool.If you dont conform, you will be cancelled, downvoted,banned, etc. Now, before someone comes to accuse me of "Old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds syndrome", I fully accept that in absolute terms we have more good things now, but the signal/noise ratio is also a very important thing, or as papa Stalin used to say: "Quantity has a quality on its own" , for every thoughtful post,blog,site we are drowned in thousands of crappy sites and it is not always very easy to distinguish them, because it is the sad reality that quality publications will little by little become crap just to survive or fit-in.

selfhoster11 5y ago

> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. That internet node not only isn't an equal peer in the global information network (thanks to simple things like NAT, but also more insidious problems like increased battery drain when P2P apps are active and the OS killing background apps "for your convenience"), but it is also a telescreen that you carry at all times and even pay for its upkeep. You can keep this democratisation of technology, if that's what it looks like.

pabs3 5y ago
Isn't IPv6 more common than IPv4 on mobile networks these days?