Category Archives: Technology

So is the spreadsheet an example of job-destroying automation?

Posted on by

Interesting thought from Tim Harford in his FT column:

Consider an idea dreamt up in 1978, released in October 1979, and so revolutionary that the journalist Steven Levy could write just five years later: “There are corporate executives, wholesalers, retailers, and small business owners who talk about their business lives in two time periods: before and after the electronic spreadsheet.”

Spreadsheet software redefined what it meant to be an accountant. Spreadsheets were once a literal thing: two-page spreads in a paper ledger. Fill them in, and make sure all the rows and columns add up. The output of several spreadsheets would then be the input for some larger, master spreadsheet. Making an alteration might require hours of work with a pencil, eraser, and desk calculator.

Once a computer programmer named Dan Bricklin came up with the idea of putting the piece of paper inside a computer, it is easy to see why digital spreadsheets caught on almost overnight.

But did the spreadsheet steal jobs? Yes and no. It certainly put a sudden end to a particular kind of task — the task of calculating, filling in, checking and correcting numbers on paper spreadsheets. National Public Radio’s Planet Money programme concluded that in the 35 years after Mr Bricklin’s VisiCalc was launched, the US lost 400,000 jobs for book-keepers and accounting clerks.

Meanwhile, 600,000 jobs appeared for other kinds of accountant. Accountancy had become cheaper and more powerful, so people demanded more of it.

Nice illustration of the complexity of the ‘automation = job-killer’ argument.

Accidental empires

Posted on by

From an interesting (if sometimes chaotic) interview by Kara Swisher with Adam Fisher, author of Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley:

“Silicon Valley still actually makes things, but less and less. We had an economy that was based on making things first, making chips and then computers, and then making bits of software, and then at some point we started getting everything for free; in quotes, “free.” And it stopped being an economy that made things. It became an economy where people made money by extracting things, by mining data.

So it flipped from a making economy to an extraction economy, and we have all the dysfunction that you would see in a mining site in the third world. Mining economies, extraction economies, are kind of corrupt economies because one person or one company ends up controlling everything.”

Fascinating, rambling interview with stories that sometimes bring one up short. Worth reading (or listening to) in full.

The unhinged discourse around AI

Posted on by

Useful essay in the Guardian by Oscar Schwartz on the clickbait-driven inanity of public discourse about AI. Sample:

Zachary Lipton, an assistant professor at the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University, watched with frustration as this story transformed from “interesting-ish research” to “sensationalized crap”.

According to Lipton, in recent years broader interest in topics like “machine learning” and “deep learning” has led to a deluge of this type of opportunistic journalism, which misrepresents research for the purpose of generating retweets and clicks – he calls it the “AI misinformation epidemic”. A growing number of researchers working in the field share Lipton’s frustration, and worry that the inaccurate and speculative stories about AI, like the Facebook story, will create unrealistic expectations for the field, which could ultimately threaten future progress and the responsible application of new technologies.

Good stuff. Lipton’s blog is terrific btw.

One quick tip for improving coverage. Most stuff labelled as “AI” is actually just machine learning. So why not say that?

Asymmetrical vulnerabilities

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

In their book, The Future of Violence, Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum point out that one of the things that made the Roman empire so powerful was its amazing network of paved roads. This network made it easy to move armies relatively quickly. But it also made it possible to move goods around, too, and so Roman logistics were more efficient and dependable than anything that had gone before. Had Jeff Bezos been around in AD125, he would have been the consummate road hog. But in the end, this feature turned out to be also a bug, for when the tide of history began to turn against the empire, those terrific roads were used by the Goths to attack and destroy it.

In a remarkable new paper, Jack Goldsmith and Stuart Russell point out that there’s a lesson here for us. “The internet and related digital systems that the United States did so much to create,” they write, “have effectuated and symbolised US military, economic and cultural power for decades.” But this raises an uncomfortable question: in the long view of history, will these systems, like the Roman empire’s roads, come to be seen as a platform that accelerated US decline?

I think the answer to their question is yes…

Read on

Hofstadter’s Law and self-driving cars

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter, an American cognitive scientist, formulated a useful general rule that applies to all complex tasks. Hofstadter’s law says that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law”. It may not have the epistemological status of Newton’s first law, but it is “good enough for government work”, as the celebrated computer scientist Roger Needham used to say.

Faced with this assertion, readers of Wired magazine, visitors to Gizmodo or followers of Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s sainted technology correspondent, will retort that while Hofstadter’s law may apply to mundane activities such as building a third runway at Heathrow, it most definitely does not apply to digital technology, where miracles are routinely delivered at the speed of light…

Read on

Why surveillance techology is usually better than we realise

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

The images of the moon’s surface coming down from the orbiters were of astonishingly high resolution, good enough to blow up to 40ftx54ft pictures. When Nasa engineers initially stitched the images together they had to hang them in a church to view them. Eventually, they found a hangar where they could be laid on the ground for astronauts to walk on them in stockinged feet in order to search for suitable landing sites. Sign up for Lab Notes – the Guardian’s weekly science update Read more

For decades, nobody outside of Nasa and the US military knew how good these images were. The few that were released for public consumption were heavily degraded and fuzzy. Why? Because the cameras used in the lunar orbiters were derivatives of the cameras used in high-altitude US aerial reconnaissance planes and satellites and the Pentagon didn’t want the Soviets to know the level of detail that could be derived from them.

In a way, we shouldn’t be surprised by this revelation. It’s an old story: powerful states have often possessed more sophisticated surveillance technology than their adversaries – or their citizens – knew or suspected…

Read on

Tech-driven wealth is the new aphrodisiac

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

It’s a quintessential Silicon Valley story. A smart, attractive 19-year-old American woman who has taught herself Mandarin while in high school is studying chemical engineering at Stanford, where she is a president’s scholar. Her name is Elizabeth Holmes. In her first year as an undergraduate she persuades her professor to allow her to attend the seminars he runs with his PhD students. Then one day she drops into his office to tell him that she’s dropping out of college because she has a “big idea” and wants to found a company that will revolutionise a huge part of the healthcare system – the market for blood testing services. Her company will be called Theranos.

Holmes’s big idea was for a way to perform multiple tests at once on a tiny drop of blood, and to deliver the results wirelessly to doctors. So she set about pitching to investors…

Read on

‘Social credit’ in China

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

In the old days, western snobbery led to the complacent view that the Chinese could not originate, only copy. One hears this less now, as visitors to China return goggle-eyed at the extent to which its people have integrated digital technology into daily life. One colleague of mine recently returned exasperated because he had been expected to pay for everything there with his phone. Since he possesses only an ancient Nokia handset, he was unable to comply and had been reduced to mendicant status, having to ask his Chinese hosts to pay for everything.

If the future is digital, therefore, a significant minority of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are already there. More significantly, the country’s technocratic rulers have sussed that digital technology is not just good for making economic transactions frictionless, but also for implementing sophisticated systems of social control.

Read on

The Bitcoin/blockchain story: a mixture of greed and idealism

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column:

Because I write about technology I am regularly assailed by people who are exercised about so-called “cryptocurrencies” like bitcoin, which most of them regard as a scam. But when I reply that while bitcoin might be newsworthy, the really important story concerns the blockchain technology that underpins it, their eyes glaze over and they start looking for the nearest exit as they conclude that they are in the grip of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

And, in a sense, they are. Blockchain technology is indeed important, but it seems largely incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, even though the web teems with attempts to explain it…

Read on

How about an Angry Founders Club?

Posted on by

Lovely rant by Dave Winer:

We should start an “Angry Founders of the Internet” social club to discuss what the fuck happened and how can we tell people about the magic that underlies the crapware that the bigco’s are shoveling at us. It really is beautiful and amazing in there. Think of it this way. It’s easier to take the Interstate highway everywhere, but if you do that, you miss the charming B&Bs, the dramatic beaches, restaurants, jazz clubs. The thrill of riding a bike, hiking the Appalachian Trail, skiing. All that intellectually unperpins this.

I’m not a ‘founder’ — though I count some of them among my friends. But I sympathise with Dave. The technology remains as magical as ever. It’s the corporate capture of it that rankles — plus the passivity and gullibility of so many of our fellow-humans.