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"Modest improvements in communications" You are using a platform that can distribute that sentence to a majority of the human population, at a marginal cost th

"Modest improvements in communications" You are using a platform that can distribute that sentence to a majority of the human population, at a marginal cost that rounds to 0, in less time than it would take a human to type it. Another few days on the weather forecast for heavily populated areas that already have a team of forecasters on staff. For the rest of the earth, we have enabled forecasts to exist at all. in 1980, if I wanted the forecast for a remote spot on earth the answer was "hire a meteorologist". Now I can have a reasonably accurate forecast sent to me hourly via a satellite constellation for a single digit percentage of the cost of hiring a meteorologist. This has HUGE implications for logistics, agriculture scientific research, etc... Surveillance and death from the sky? The west has had no problem spying on citizens since the 1930s, and randomly killing people in less developed civilizations is a centuries long tradition for the west. All technologies have their downsides. Much like computing, metallurgy is one of the core technologies behind warfare (modern guns don't exist without steel, planes without aluminum, etc...). Niche artists and businesses can find an audience using the internet (using ad tech, I'll note). Lives are so routinely saved by cell phone technology, that we don't even bother noting the role that technology plays. I can use google translate to have a real time conversation with a stranger on the other side of the earth without having to worry about language. I taught myself how to design PCBs and had a prototype run made by a factory in a country that I've never been to, in less than a month. The effects of computer technology are so ubiquitous that I think they are almost invisible

dredmorbius 5y ago
Broadcast communications is an inherently rivalrous space, and the ability for any one person to reach others means of necessity that they are preempting anyone else from doing so. Given present population and life expectancy, the amount of time that can be equitably granted any individual on Earth by others is ... a small fraction of a second. The likelihood that any of my online utterances is seen by more than a few hundreds of people is very slight. I'd have a similar audience at any crowded city street corner, or on a university quadrangle. Worse, the existence of such a channel incentivises low-value ways to fill it. Advertising, robocalls, spam, phishing attempts, and fraud. It's somewhat enlightening to look over the Greek and Roman pantheon to realise that Fama was interested only in trumpeting the pronouncements of the gods, not considering their value or veracity, and that Mercury was the god not only of messengers, but of tricksters and thieves. Herbert Melville's The Confidence Man, from which the modern term derives, was set on the first great superhighway of the United States, the Mississippi River. Improvements in communications technology have much the same effect has handing out party favours to a room full of five-year-olds. Communications and intelligence isn't improved, though the noise floor is considerably raised. My point isn't that a few days' additional improvement on weather forecasts have no value. It is that in order to achieve this, MILLIONS OF TIMES increases in computer power are necessary. Which is to say that information-processing advances of an extreme degree deliver very, very modest additional benefits. Niche artists and businesses used to find an audience the old-fasioned way: locally, because of a phenomenon known as "friction". It cost too much to move goods (or audiences) long distances, so provisioning was local. It wasn't until the rise of the factory system, mechanised transportation, branding, and advertising, that it became possible to sell goods over a range of more than a few villages or towns (with rare exceptions). The consequence now is that: - Every manufacturer of a durable good is competing on a global basis, and production has a strong tendency to shift to where labour and environmental regulations can be most heavily suppressed. - Ephemeral production, as with software, video entertainment, music, fashion, banking, and propaganda centralises to where the non-ephemeralisable components of production are most suitably concentrated, giving rise to toponymic global centres (with possible variations based on language, culture, and regulation or legal jurisdictions): Hollywood and Bollywood, Nashville and Motown, Silicon Valley, New York / London / Frankfurt / Tokyo / Shanghai, Milan and Paris, Moscow and Macedonia. Cellphones are so gunked with junk calls that actual lost hikers will ignore incoming calls from unknown numbers, a problem communications service providers have seen coming for years. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383) I'm not saying that there are no benefits. But that there are also costs and consequences and counterveiling trends, and that many of the so-called gains have been offeset by losses either in the same domain or elsewhere.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Broadcast communications is an inherently rivalrous space, and the ability for any one person to reach others means of necessity that they are preempting anyone else from doing so. Given present population and life expectancy, the amount of time that can be equitably granted any individual on Earth by others is ... a small fraction of a second. The likelihood that any of my online utterances is seen by more than a few hundreds of people is very slight. I'd have a similar audience at any crowded city street corner, or on a university quadrangle. Worse, the existence of such a channel incentivises low-value ways to fill it. Advertising, robocalls, spam, phishing attempts, and fraud. It's somewhat enlightening to look over the Greek and Roman pantheon to realise that Fama was interested only in trumpeting the pronouncements of the gods, not considering their value or veracity, and that Mercury was the god not only of messengers, but of tricksters and thieves. Herbert Melville's The Confidence Man, from which the modern term derives, was set on the first great superhighway of the United States, the Mississippi River. Improvements in communications technology have much the same effect has handing out party favours to a room full of five-year-olds. Communications and intelligence isn't improved, though the noise floor is considerably raised. My point isn't that a few days' additional improvement on weather forecasts have no value. It is that in order to achieve this, MILLIONS OF TIMES increases in computer power are necessary. Which is to say that information-processing advances of an extreme degree deliver very, very modest additional benefits. Niche artists and businesses used to find an audience the old-fasioned way: locally, because of a phenomenon known as "friction". It cost too much to move goods (or audiences) long distances, so provisioning was local. It wasn't until the rise of the factory system, mechanised transportation, branding, and advertising, that it became possible to sell goods over a range of more than a few villages or towns (with rare exceptions). The consequence now is that: - Every manufacturer of a durable good is competing on a global basis, and production has a strong tendency to shift to where labour and environmental regulations can be most heavily suppressed. - Ephemeral production, as with software, video entertainment, music, fashion, banking, and propaganda centralises to where the non-ephemeralisable components of production are most suitably concentrated, giving rise to toponymic global centres (with possible variations based on language, culture, and regulation or legal jurisdictions): Hollywood and Bollywood, Nashville and Motown, Silicon Valley, New York / London / Frankfurt / Tokyo / Shanghai, Milan and Paris, Moscow and Macedonia. Cellphones are so gunked with junk calls that actual lost hikers will ignore incoming calls from unknown numbers, a problem communications service providers have seen coming for years. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383) I'm not saying that there are no benefits. But that there are also costs and consequences and counterveiling trends, and that many of the so-called gains have been offeset by losses either in the same domain or elsewhere.