9 ms·

Our love of technology risks becoming a quiet conspiracy against ourselves

78 points by abdias 11y ago

dang 11y ago
Url changed from http://phys.org/news/2015-06-technology-quiet-conspiracy.html http://phys.org/news/2015-06-technology-quiet-conspiracy.htm..., which points to this.
Omniusaspirer 11y ago
"But technology is not neutral – and neither is code nor numbers. There are human, subjective judgements lurking behind the apparent objectivity offered by algorithms and the “user-friendly” operating systems. These technologies perform almost magically, while at the same time enabling all sorts of organizations to easily collect information about us, something that makes it that bit easier to usher in new forms of surveillance and control." This paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately: What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.
- quonn 11y ago
  At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Well, that didn't happen. What happened is that desktop software become less important and things just started over for the web and mobile platforms. And, besides, those Adobe and Microsoft products are still commonly used and there are even some new proprietary players like Pages/Keynote that are probably even more widely used than their open source counterparts. I doubt this will be different in 20 years - the wheel will turn once again...
  - roghummal 11y ago
    >At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Who believed that?
    - batou 11y ago
      I still believe that but we went past the mark and dissolved our communities into the same pitfalls as the commercial software. I consider windows 7, office 2010 and conversely Ubuntu pre-Unity with libreoffice to both hit the mark perfectly. Stuff just worked and we had control over our data. That was the last software I needed. Since then I've been dragged forwards into the future, the cloud and all the things that it brings. Now it's going backwards again and we're losing control. I'm not saying that we shouldn't improve but that was feature peak.
      - walterbell 11y ago
        Fortunately, virtualization lets you run old operating systems on modern hardware.
        keithpeter 11y ago
        And CentOS 6 with the epel and nux-desktop repositories enabled has support until 2020 (relating to the pre-Unity Ubuntu reference). And you can have MATE on current stable Debian and not notice the difference. But I think the OA was talking more about the network and what we reveal through it rather than the client devices we use.
    - quonn 11y ago
      It was a common idea at open source conferences.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Lot's of people, including several major open source communities and FOSS proponents. That was the goal of projects like KDE and GNOME, and smaller ones like Gnumeric, Evolution, GIMP, etc. If not as a fully explicitly stated belief (which some did that too), the idea was nethertheless very prevalent that the endgames is: "we just replicate those programs and we take over the desktop with FOSS".
- paulojreis 11y ago
  > What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. I would dare say that there's no end game, as long as we are making money out of it, without that much effort. We are terribly good at ensuring our job, at the expense of the end user. We will keep doing software, even after the point where there's nothing to add. I mean, we already do so, right? How many features are added because engineers think it would be cool? Or, even worst IMHO, how many features are added because engineers think they are what users want/need? How many releases look like they were made just to keep programmers busy (and happy)? We should be aware of this: most of the time, we are working for ourselves. We are even entertaining ourselves. How much % of the effort spent on a given software is founded on solid and systematic analysis of end user needs?
  - biturd 11y ago
    you just described photoshop perfectly.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    There were some stellar DOS/Windows productivity software like Lotus Agenda and Ecco Pro, which have never been replicated, despite multiple attempts to clone them on modern platforms. Unikernels could extend the shelf-life of applications, reducing the need to comply with OS pressure for upgrades. Mature and battle-tested applications need security upgrades and the occasional minor bug fix. Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change. Windows XP has proven that customers will pay for not changing what works perfectly well. With virtualization to provide drivers for new hardware, mature OS/apps can live for decades.
    - paulojreis 11y ago
      > Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change. I fully agree. And I truly believe that the world would be a significantly better place if software developers worked for stability and fixing issues, instead of entertaining themselves with "cool" (to their understanding) features or migrations/refactors to new frameworks or languages (and yes, I know these are, sometimes, truly needed). We are way to good at justifying wasted effort and plain "play".
- minthd 11y ago
  >> equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available. Software is relatively easy. Networks effects are hard. And there's no indication for free/open projects to be good at achieving network effect and stealing network effects from incumbents.
  - lovemenot 11y ago
    What about the World Wide Web? Doesn't it meet your criteria of free/open and also has achieved network effects to a t? Not sure which incumbent WWW stole from, but why should that be necessary anyway?
    - pjc50 11y ago
      The WWW has ""stolen"" from the ""incumbents"" of television, libraries, walled-garden dialup services, newspapers, publishing, retail, travel, and telcos.
- crdb 11y ago
  Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by previous generations. Imagine telling someone from the era of ocean liners that in less than a century, his descendants would be routinely flying across continents in hours for the price of a few meals, with safety levels so high it is massively more dangerous for them to take a taxi to work. Imagine the surprise of the world upon discovering nuclear weapons in 1945, the hope that came from knowing it was a clean and seemingly endless source of power. Or look at Asimov: he was a prescient writer in many respects, probably one of the if not the greatest SF writer there was, but his works completely ignore the connectivity that is pervasive today (when the NSA taps every phone and reads every email automatically, when they can recognize your face even turned, from a million CCTV cameras whose feed is parsed in real time, you can't have plots with people running away in cities undetected). The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it... Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so. The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.
- EliRivers 11y ago
  There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Microsoft Word effectively reached this point many years ago. They keep making new versions, people keep buying new versions. It's by no means the only example.
- pizu 11y ago
  SOFTWARE IS NEVER FINISHED. JUST LIKE FASHION IS NEVER FINISHED ;)
  - odiroot 11y ago
    And just like fashion it moves in circles. Everything from the 80's is "hot shit" right now.
- placebo 11y ago
  Actually, technology is neutral. What isn't neutral is to what ends that technology is leveraged. The human ability to be smart brought us amazing technologies. Our ability to be wise is what will determine whether these technologies will eventually amplify our happiness or our misery, and I think the jury is still out on whether humanity is getting any wiser.
  - AngrySkillzz 11y ago
    That's really not true: "the medium is the message" applies just as much to computer technology as it does to things we would more traditionally view as media. Think about the difference between a conversation you'd have on the phone versus one had over instant messenger versus one had via text message. The content is informed by the way in which it is conveyed; the properties of a piece of technology shape how we use it.
    - placebo 11y ago
      The quality of the message and it's impact are definitely influenced by the type medium but it does not follow that this makes the medium not neutral. Let's take an extreme case - a medium that when used will harm the receiver of the message. You might say that this medium is not neutral but the fact is that the medium is always neutral. What isn't neutral is the designer of that medium or the one who uses it. Even in the very unlikely case that both are ignorant of the harmful effects, the medium still remains neutral, much like a destructive force of nature is neutral.
- sanoli 11y ago
  "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Zawinski's Law I guess when we reach the point where everything can read email (pretty close, if you replace email with 'receive messages'), there will be another function to be attained by every software with their newer versions. Maybe something like having its own neural net to adapt to the user. "Version 12 of our monitor calibration software now can learn when you actually want your monitor calibrated, and when you want it somewhat offset, for those mornings where there's no work to be done and you just want to read email, which, by the way, can be read on the same monitor calibration software you've come to trust since version 5!"
  - shalmanese 11y ago
    Zawinski's Law of Hardware: Any device expands until it has a bluetooth API and a smartphone app. Those devices which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  The obvious low hanging fruit is helping humans avoid error. But you have to actually be prepared to admit error for this to happen. You have to be ... cognitively dissonant enough to treat error as just another information flow. The "software end game" looks a lot like the show "How It's Made". Frankly, most of that is just PLCs, which are barely computers at all. As to phone/desktop/laptop applications which do things for people, I think we're largely at satiety. That's always a dangerous prediction, but it's been at stasis now for quite some time.
- jqm 11y ago
  I don't know if there is an end game for software, but there is undoubtedly an endgame for our involvement with software.
- delinka 11y ago
  "What is the software "end game"?" IMO, the point at which the software can "understand" human articulation and make improvements; improvements to itself, to the system it operates within, to the world we live within. I'm thinking along the lines of the Star Trek universe as presented in TNG and later. They just ask the software for something and it complies. Human intelligence and creativity are still required, but no one has to "write software" any longer. If you limit your question to current technology (I mean those things that we have now, and we can foresee - not those that will require some unknowable leap in scientific understanding), then the answer is 'no time soon.' This is because every founder, every manager, every customer has some "unique" change or feature request and some other human will have to build it.
- sogen 11y ago
  check disney's wall-e
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  > What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. You discontinue any sales of permanent licenses to your software, charge users $50/month to access it, pitch it as "Cloud" because clouds are the cool new thing, and hope people just suck it up and pay because your products are the industry standard and there aren't good alternatives. But seriously, Adobe and Autodesk are textbook cases of this. People frequently stuck with years old versions of their software because it did everything it needed to. Development of 3ds Max has slowed to an absolute crawl over the last 5-10 years, with speculation that Autodesk is deliberately trying to kill it in favor of Maya. But if you're stuck using it, you get to pay $185/month to support them not working on any notable improvements. Perpetual licenses to nearly all of Autodesk's products will no longer be sold after January 31st 2016, and Adobe has already made the transition. http://www.autodesk.com/products/perpetuallicenses http://www.autodesk.com/products/perpetuallicenses https://creative.adobe.com/plans https://creative.adobe.com/plans
- dummy7953 11y ago
  I've thought that Office Suite software has basically been a "baked" product since about 2007. I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software. I mean, if that's what you're getting at. Hell, you could almost make the case that the Windows operating system became a "baked" product when Windows XP came out and you no longer had to reboot your computer on an almost daily basis. I mean, that's why you'll hear howls and yelps from grandma and grandpa when some virus eventually comes to polish off Windows XP. Until then, you'll only get it from their cold, dead hands (sorry grandma). But the concept of computing isn't going away for a long, long time. What's changing is the machinery being managed by code. First tablets and cell phones, and soon the Internet of Things (stupidest name evar). But even if we run out of wires and electricity, I suspect some day we'll be creating living things (tissues at first) that can perform a computation. So yeah, computerize ALL THE THINGS!
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    > I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software. This was literally the reason for the design change in 2007 - they abandoned the toolbar system for the ribbon system exactly because 95% of all feature requests were for features that were already included in the product. People just couldn't find these features. And so they reworked the UI, now users can find the features they want to use. And it generated so much bad publicity that they re-added the toolbar system to Office 2010.
roghummal 11y ago
Dropcam.
mirimir 11y ago
Dan Geer published a relevant column last week in The Christian Science Monitor: "Opinion: The reasonable expectation fallacy".[0] The lede: "The ability to delete yourself from the Web doesn't really matter. What really matters in the age of advanced surveillance is the right to not be correlated. Technology is always watching and capturing you, but the correlation is where the danger lies. Laws can change that, but only if enacted soon." That's an interesting perspective from the "chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel". [0] But yes, it does seem inevitable: pervasive surveillance of everyone by everyone. Like a global village aka small town. However, I'm not convinced that laws would be enough. Criminals (large and small) don't care so much about laws. So arguably we're each responsible for our own privacy. The ubiquity of requisite knowledge and technology, facilitated by leaks, may allow the sufficiently motivated to claw back some privacy. But sadly enough, perhaps the most highly motivated are the criminals. Not good. [0] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0617/Opinion-The-reasonable-expectation-fallacy http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015...
- ccvannorman 11y ago
  I agree that laws protecting privacy would be good, criminals notwithstanding. I'm much less afraid of identity theft from a criminal, than I am that the police will come to my door someday and take me to prison because I match an algorithm.
- mirimir 11y ago
  I was being dense. Reading a recent post to cpunks, I get that Dan is calling for laws to restrict surveillance and correlation by private institutions and individuals.[0] Now his position makes sense. He wants governments (presumably those who fund his firm) to have a monopoly on surveillance and correlation. While I agree on dangers from other criminals, restricting private institutions and individuals is authoritarian, unless there's an exception for whistle-blowing. [0] https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008069.html https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008069.ht...
  - mirimir 11y ago
daodedickinson 11y ago
Today I had the thought that "technology can be defined as the process of turning people into hikikimori" but nah.

78 points by abdias 11y ago

dang 11y ago

Url changed from http://phys.org/news/2015-06-technology-quiet-conspiracy.html http://phys.org/news/2015-06-technology-quiet-conspiracy.htm..., which points to this.

Omniusaspirer 11y ago

"But technology is not neutral – and neither is code nor numbers. There are human, subjective judgements lurking behind the apparent objectivity offered by algorithms and the “user-friendly” operating systems. These technologies perform almost magically, while at the same time enabling all sorts of organizations to easily collect information about us, something that makes it that bit easier to usher in new forms of surveillance and control." This paragraph relates to a thought I've had lately: What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Obviously we're in a climate of rapid advancement and meta shifts currently but it seems as though that will inevitably end at some point. Proprietary software that can profitably leverage personal information is bound to hit the market first, but even if it takes 50+ years you have to imagine that equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available.

quonn 11y ago
At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Well, that didn't happen. What happened is that desktop software become less important and things just started over for the web and mobile platforms. And, besides, those Adobe and Microsoft products are still commonly used and there are even some new proprietary players like Pages/Keynote that are probably even more widely used than their open source counterparts. I doubt this will be different in 20 years - the wheel will turn once again...
- roghummal 11y ago
  >At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this will be the last software ever written. Who believed that?
  - batou 11y ago
    I still believe that but we went past the mark and dissolved our communities into the same pitfalls as the commercial software. I consider windows 7, office 2010 and conversely Ubuntu pre-Unity with libreoffice to both hit the mark perfectly. Stuff just worked and we had control over our data. That was the last software I needed. Since then I've been dragged forwards into the future, the cloud and all the things that it brings. Now it's going backwards again and we're losing control. I'm not saying that we shouldn't improve but that was feature peak.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      Fortunately, virtualization lets you run old operating systems on modern hardware.
      - keithpeter 11y ago
        And CentOS 6 with the epel and nux-desktop repositories enabled has support until 2020 (relating to the pre-Unity Ubuntu reference). And you can have MATE on current stable Debian and not notice the difference. But I think the OA was talking more about the network and what we reveal through it rather than the client devices we use.
  - quonn 11y ago
    It was a common idea at open source conferences.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Lot's of people, including several major open source communities and FOSS proponents. That was the goal of projects like KDE and GNOME, and smaller ones like Gnumeric, Evolution, GIMP, etc. If not as a fully explicitly stated belief (which some did that too), the idea was nethertheless very prevalent that the endgames is: "we just replicate those programs and we take over the desktop with FOSS".
paulojreis 11y ago
> What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. I would dare say that there's no end game, as long as we are making money out of it, without that much effort. We are terribly good at ensuring our job, at the expense of the end user. We will keep doing software, even after the point where there's nothing to add. I mean, we already do so, right? How many features are added because engineers think it would be cool? Or, even worst IMHO, how many features are added because engineers think they are what users want/need? How many releases look like they were made just to keep programmers busy (and happy)? We should be aware of this: most of the time, we are working for ourselves. We are even entertaining ourselves. How much % of the effort spent on a given software is founded on solid and systematic analysis of end user needs?
- biturd 11y ago
  you just described photoshop perfectly.
- walterbell 11y ago
  There were some stellar DOS/Windows productivity software like Lotus Agenda and Ecco Pro, which have never been replicated, despite multiple attempts to clone them on modern platforms. Unikernels could extend the shelf-life of applications, reducing the need to comply with OS pressure for upgrades. Mature and battle-tested applications need security upgrades and the occasional minor bug fix. Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change. Windows XP has proven that customers will pay for not changing what works perfectly well. With virtualization to provide drivers for new hardware, mature OS/apps can live for decades.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    > Imagine the societal chaos if buildings rerranged themselves without warning or just disappeared ("end-of-support"). We are missing an analytic framework to calculate the economic benefits of stability and costs of pointless change. I fully agree. And I truly believe that the world would be a significantly better place if software developers worked for stability and fixing issues, instead of entertaining themselves with "cool" (to their understanding) features or migrations/refactors to new frameworks or languages (and yes, I know these are, sometimes, truly needed). We are way to good at justifying wasted effort and plain "play".
minthd 11y ago
>> equally competitive open source and freedom respecting alternatives will eventually become available. Software is relatively easy. Networks effects are hard. And there's no indication for free/open projects to be good at achieving network effect and stealing network effects from incumbents.
- lovemenot 11y ago
  What about the World Wide Web? Doesn't it meet your criteria of free/open and also has achieved network effects to a t? Not sure which incumbent WWW stole from, but why should that be necessary anyway?
  - pjc50 11y ago
    The WWW has ""stolen"" from the ""incumbents"" of television, libraries, walled-garden dialup services, newspapers, publishing, retail, travel, and telcos.
crdb 11y ago
Why should there be an end game? The history of human civilization is one of constant progress, with leaps so large they are almost impossible to imagine by previous generations. Imagine telling someone from the era of ocean liners that in less than a century, his descendants would be routinely flying across continents in hours for the price of a few meals, with safety levels so high it is massively more dangerous for them to take a taxi to work. Imagine the surprise of the world upon discovering nuclear weapons in 1945, the hope that came from knowing it was a clean and seemingly endless source of power. Or look at Asimov: he was a prescient writer in many respects, probably one of the if not the greatest SF writer there was, but his works completely ignore the connectivity that is pervasive today (when the NSA taps every phone and reads every email automatically, when they can recognize your face even turned, from a million CCTV cameras whose feed is parsed in real time, you can't have plots with people running away in cities undetected). The most exciting part of working in technology in general, and software in particular, is that you get to be at - or at least better understand - the cutting edge and see those changes before they become more broadly accepted. For example, machine translation used to be cutting edge AI research in top secret intelligence projects, yet today you can translate entire webpages in Chrome with right click -> "Translate to English". For free. Hell, your portable Star Trek-like computer can take a photo of the Japanese menu for you and convert it to something understandable, then translate your response back to Japanese for your waiter. The Babel Fish is real! Given a bit more time, some better brain-computer interfaces and a larger corpus, we might well be able to converse in any language without learning it... Software is this generation's equivalent to steels and mechanical engineering during the Industrial Revolution, and nuclear weapons and power in the 20th century - we have conquered the physical realm pretty thoroughly but have only made baby steps in knowledge compared to what is possible. Even neuroscientists will admit we know relatively little about how the brain really works. Just look at statistical learning: the field has only really blossomed in the last 15 years or so. The reason for proprietary software and IP is always the same: to generate via extremely expensive R&D leaps in knowledge and products that allow the researching company to reap outsized returns. Yesterday, it was operating systems and office suites. Today, it's applications that need things like massive GPU clusters for deep learning, or knowing how to scale complex services (like Google Image Search) to billions of users, or weak AI (self-driving cars). I would love nothing more than a glimpse to the technology of 2060 or 2600, although I doubt I would be able to grasp even a fraction of what it represents. Just knowing the problems they are trying to solve then, would be fascinating.
EliRivers 11y ago
There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. Microsoft Word effectively reached this point many years ago. They keep making new versions, people keep buying new versions. It's by no means the only example.
pizu 11y ago
SOFTWARE IS NEVER FINISHED. JUST LIKE FASHION IS NEVER FINISHED ;)
- odiroot 11y ago
  And just like fashion it moves in circles. Everything from the 80's is "hot shit" right now.
placebo 11y ago
Actually, technology is neutral. What isn't neutral is to what ends that technology is leveraged. The human ability to be smart brought us amazing technologies. Our ability to be wise is what will determine whether these technologies will eventually amplify our happiness or our misery, and I think the jury is still out on whether humanity is getting any wiser.
- AngrySkillzz 11y ago
  That's really not true: "the medium is the message" applies just as much to computer technology as it does to things we would more traditionally view as media. Think about the difference between a conversation you'd have on the phone versus one had over instant messenger versus one had via text message. The content is informed by the way in which it is conveyed; the properties of a piece of technology shape how we use it.
  - placebo 11y ago
    The quality of the message and it's impact are definitely influenced by the type medium but it does not follow that this makes the medium not neutral. Let's take an extreme case - a medium that when used will harm the receiver of the message. You might say that this medium is not neutral but the fact is that the medium is always neutral. What isn't neutral is the designer of that medium or the one who uses it. Even in the very unlikely case that both are ignorant of the harmful effects, the medium still remains neutral, much like a destructive force of nature is neutral.
sanoli 11y ago
"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Zawinski's Law I guess when we reach the point where everything can read email (pretty close, if you replace email with 'receive messages'), there will be another function to be attained by every software with their newer versions. Maybe something like having its own neural net to adapt to the user. "Version 12 of our monitor calibration software now can learn when you actually want your monitor calibrated, and when you want it somewhat offset, for those mornings where there's no work to be done and you just want to read email, which, by the way, can be read on the same monitor calibration software you've come to trust since version 5!"
- shalmanese 11y ago
  Zawinski's Law of Hardware: Any device expands until it has a bluetooth API and a smartphone app. Those devices which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
ArkyBeagle 11y ago
The obvious low hanging fruit is helping humans avoid error. But you have to actually be prepared to admit error for this to happen. You have to be ... cognitively dissonant enough to treat error as just another information flow. The "software end game" looks a lot like the show "How It's Made". Frankly, most of that is just PLCs, which are barely computers at all. As to phone/desktop/laptop applications which do things for people, I think we're largely at satiety. That's always a dangerous prediction, but it's been at stasis now for quite some time.
jqm 11y ago
I don't know if there is an end game for software, but there is undoubtedly an endgame for our involvement with software.
delinka 11y ago
"What is the software "end game"?" IMO, the point at which the software can "understand" human articulation and make improvements; improvements to itself, to the system it operates within, to the world we live within. I'm thinking along the lines of the Star Trek universe as presented in TNG and later. They just ask the software for something and it complies. Human intelligence and creativity are still required, but no one has to "write software" any longer. If you limit your question to current technology (I mean those things that we have now, and we can foresee - not those that will require some unknowable leap in scientific understanding), then the answer is 'no time soon.' This is because every founder, every manager, every customer has some "unique" change or feature request and some other human will have to build it.
sogen 11y ago
check disney's wall-e
wlesieutre 11y ago
> What is the software "end game"? There has to a point where there's nothing else worth adding to most commonly used software. You discontinue any sales of permanent licenses to your software, charge users $50/month to access it, pitch it as "Cloud" because clouds are the cool new thing, and hope people just suck it up and pay because your products are the industry standard and there aren't good alternatives. But seriously, Adobe and Autodesk are textbook cases of this. People frequently stuck with years old versions of their software because it did everything it needed to. Development of 3ds Max has slowed to an absolute crawl over the last 5-10 years, with speculation that Autodesk is deliberately trying to kill it in favor of Maya. But if you're stuck using it, you get to pay $185/month to support them not working on any notable improvements. Perpetual licenses to nearly all of Autodesk's products will no longer be sold after January 31st 2016, and Adobe has already made the transition. http://www.autodesk.com/products/perpetuallicenses http://www.autodesk.com/products/perpetuallicenses https://creative.adobe.com/plans https://creative.adobe.com/plans
dummy7953 11y ago
I've thought that Office Suite software has basically been a "baked" product since about 2007. I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software. I mean, if that's what you're getting at. Hell, you could almost make the case that the Windows operating system became a "baked" product when Windows XP came out and you no longer had to reboot your computer on an almost daily basis. I mean, that's why you'll hear howls and yelps from grandma and grandpa when some virus eventually comes to polish off Windows XP. Until then, you'll only get it from their cold, dead hands (sorry grandma). But the concept of computing isn't going away for a long, long time. What's changing is the machinery being managed by code. First tablets and cell phones, and soon the Internet of Things (stupidest name evar). But even if we run out of wires and electricity, I suspect some day we'll be creating living things (tissues at first) that can perform a computation. So yeah, computerize ALL THE THINGS!
- stephengillie 11y ago
  > I doubt 99% of MS Word users are going to need a feature that isn't already in the software. This was literally the reason for the design change in 2007 - they abandoned the toolbar system for the ribbon system exactly because 95% of all feature requests were for features that were already included in the product. People just couldn't find these features. And so they reworked the UI, now users can find the features they want to use. And it generated so much bad publicity that they re-added the toolbar system to Office 2010.

roghummal 11y ago

Dropcam.

mirimir 11y ago

Dan Geer published a relevant column last week in The Christian Science Monitor: "Opinion: The reasonable expectation fallacy".[0] The lede: "The ability to delete yourself from the Web doesn't really matter. What really matters in the age of advanced surveillance is the right to not be correlated. Technology is always watching and capturing you, but the correlation is where the danger lies. Laws can change that, but only if enacted soon." That's an interesting perspective from the "chief information security officer for In-Q-Tel". [0] But yes, it does seem inevitable: pervasive surveillance of everyone by everyone. Like a global village aka small town. However, I'm not convinced that laws would be enough. Criminals (large and small) don't care so much about laws. So arguably we're each responsible for our own privacy. The ubiquity of requisite knowledge and technology, facilitated by leaks, may allow the sufficiently motivated to claw back some privacy. But sadly enough, perhaps the most highly motivated are the criminals. Not good. [0] http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0617/Opinion-The-reasonable-expectation-fallacy http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015...

ccvannorman 11y ago
I agree that laws protecting privacy would be good, criminals notwithstanding. I'm much less afraid of identity theft from a criminal, than I am that the police will come to my door someday and take me to prison because I match an algorithm.
mirimir 11y ago
I was being dense. Reading a recent post to cpunks, I get that Dan is calling for laws to restrict surveillance and correlation by private institutions and individuals.[0] Now his position makes sense. He wants governments (presumably those who fund his firm) to have a monopoly on surveillance and correlation. While I agree on dangers from other criminals, restricting private institutions and individuals is authoritarian, unless there's an exception for whistle-blowing. [0] https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008069.html https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2015-June/008069.ht...
- mirimir 11y ago

daodedickinson 11y ago

Today I had the thought that "technology can be defined as the process of turning people into hikikimori" but nah.