What Industries are Going to be Destroyed Next?

As I continue to sit here rather underemployed and somewhat dispirited with the job hunt, I figured I'd indulge in some schadenfreude and imagine what industries are going to be wiped out in the near future by good ol' technological progress. I started thinking along this course when desiring, as I often do, a car that can drive itself. They're getting fairly close with this technology, it might be on the road by 2020. As I generally hate driving, I'll enjoy this immensely, but there will be a fairly huge number of additional consequences. In addition to the possibility of saving 40,000 lives a year, we'll all be able to drink as much as we want without stranding ourselves at the mercy of America's shoddy public transportation.

On the jobs side though, there'll be a few upsets. At the moment, America has around 200k taxi drivers, 600k bus drivers, and more than 3 million truck drivers. As soon as automated cars become cheap, that'll be a fairly large hole in the economy. Then there's also the affect that if everyone stopped owning cars and using them in Zipcar like fashion, the entire automotive industry will take a huge hit as we could get by with far fewer cars if they were used more continuously. Amory Lovins will be thrilled.

But that's all only going to start around 2020 and I bet it won't fully be felt until ten years after that. In the short-term there's plenty of industries crumbling. Much of that is simply the economy, as many on that list are only vaguely related to technological change and therefore somewhat less interesting to me.

In terms of jobs that technological change might render obsolescent, well, I've said for awhile that as soon they can robotically make fast-food there will be a revolt, but, the Japanese aside, I don't imagine that being cost effective anytime soon. I feel we'll see cars automated long before restaurants because a car already costs in the range of 20 thousand, adding an automation system to that will end up being a relatively small addition.

Still, maybe my dislike of driving is making my car predictions too techno-utopian. Whatever happened with self-checkout for example? When I first saw those a few years ago, I figured they'd have expanded more by now.

Ah well, later, I'm sure there are plenty more good resources on how technology will render more jobs obsolete. Now if I could just get someone with a group health plan to hire me...

The Great Recession Continues

I haven't had that much to write about in the last... what? Ouch, almost a month. I've been putting most of my time into applying for jobs and trying to study up on whatever it is that software engineers are supposed to know these days (apparently it's a lot of web design).

As far as commenting on the world, well, I feel like I haven't had all that much to say recently. Still waiting to see if health care gets resolved in any coherent way, waiting to see if anything is made out of the mess in AfPak, waiting for the damn economy to get sorted out. Most of those things are horribly complex issues that don't really have easy solutions.

However, as I'm still unemployed and bitter about it, I suppose I can complain about the economy some more. From California to America as a whole, things could be better. Some of these problems might indeed be getting getting worked on, but at a horribly slow pace. That's why I tend to support radical overhauls of everything, practicality be damned.

I suppose I'm also waiting for augmented reality, life extension, fusion power and room-temperature superconductors to be invented, but I have even less to contribute on those fronts. To get us out of this economic mess though, I'm starting to think we're going to need some damn nice technological innovations.

Repaired and Recoved

Once again I made it back from Burning Man alive. I somewhat wish people would stop betting on my death, but it is fairly humorous.

It was, once again, a great experience, that fills me with such wellbeing towards my fellow man that I feel like a damn hippie. Not quite sure what that word might have meant back in the 60s, but it's interesting these days to see the different subcultures out at Burning Man, and how the hippie subtype compares to everything else. Whatever everything else is, I'm not the best at observing human nature. I'd like to read someone else's comments on the subject. In some ways the whole fracturing of mass media and popular culture has made things difficult. There's no agreed upon story for this decade, for this generation, and there is a benefit to having a story to live by. Have to think for ourselves, I suppose.

But back now, and doing well. Spent a good bit of time cleaning up the aftermath, having a birthday and then getting sick, but now am back on the attempting to find employment so as to avoid starving to death, but hitting that with renewed energy. We'll see if the economy is amenable to that.

Earnest Goes To Burning Man

The posting has fallen off a good bit in the last month, first because I was in a bit of a mood and then because I got tremendously busy prepping for Burning Man.  With my financial situation the way it is, it would probably be a lot more responsible for me to skip Burning Man and focus on finding a job, but, well, priorities are priorities, and I've found myself at the center of getting our camp up and running.  It'll be my fourth year out on the playa and at this point Burning Man is essentially the most important week out of the year for me.  Fortunately we've got some people out there doing their best to convince me that I'm taking part in an important cultural event and that I'm not simply frittering my time away.

If any of you reading this are going to be out there this year, look for us at the 7:30 Portal, Spider Melon Camp.  There will be 40+ of us, the social core of the group being members of the Stanford Band over the last two decades, and the rest various friends and acquaintances.  As for where the name/theme came from, such details are lost to conflicting hazy memories.  We've been changing the name every year as long as my group has been going, though some of our camp members were consistent members of other camps, such as Skullfuck, before my time.

The next two weeks will be an intense celebration before returning to the world of hunting down a living.  Fortunately my girlfriend is back in town and can help keep me on track.

Democracy 2.0 Revisited

I came across this article on an idea to improve the US Constitution, and it seemed fairly good to me. I continue to be quite interested in ideas to fix fundamental structural problems in our government, and I'm still waiting to see the California Constitution get rewritten.

In Which I Argue Science Fiction Philosophy

Well, I let this site get a bit behind after feeling a bit out of it for the last two to three weeks. However, I'm dragging myself back to health now, and would like to finish off this half-written post.

Realizing I've spent too much time arguing politics here, I wanted to write about something else and look at a philosophical question commonly raised in science fiction. An argument I often had with my friend Pfau, was regarding the hypothetical situation of whether or not one would be willing to use a Star Trek style transporter where a body is scanned, the data is transmitted and a copy of one is built in a different location. This, to some people, raises the objection that the original person/consciousness/soul/self/etc. is lost. Dollhouse raises several similar questions, as do all the science fiction that involves uploading people's brains to computers. Yes, this is all freshman philosophy, but as I'm still arguing with my friends over it, I wanted to have my say.

The crux of this debate, in my mind, is whether or not the concept of a singular identity, a soul, is valid. Many people imagine a person's identity to be continuous, singular and undivided. A person has a soul when they are born (or conceived, whatever) and that soul is them for the entirety of their life (and after, if you take that school of thought). Ignoring some of the finer points, this is generally how it is in all cases. We don't have transporters or uploading to make things complicated and we can get away with thinking of identities or souls that way. Our ethics, laws and customs assume that it always must be that way, but often the current concept is imperfect. A person's identity changes throughout their life; their mind, their body, all are different at different times, but because the change is continuous, we assume a singular, continuous identity or soul.

That's all well and good, but when we get into this hypothetical question involving technology that hasn't been invented yet, our concepts fair less well. The reason that some people would not want to be transported is because that break of continuity in space makes them feel that continuity would be broken in their identity or soul, and as that isn't allowed in their conception of identity or soul, they believe that they would have died. Some people, on various Star Trek forums, argue that continuity of self is maintained in Star Trek transporters because the new person is built with the old atoms, but I view this as completely irrelevant. We have already hypothetically given up continuity in space, and we are maintaining continuity of form, so I feel that continuity of matter is not important. Oddly enough there aren't many ethical questions raised by a lack of continuity in time, though I suppose this is an issue in some science fiction where they have to rework the definitions of death and inheritance law when people start cryogenically freezing themselves. Anyways, the question is, what forms of continuity are important for continuity of self?

As I would like to live in a world where such questions become relevant, I would like better answers. Should I be OK with being transported? If there is a copy of me, should I be afraid of death? If there is a copy of me, who gets my stuff? If my mind is copied into a computer, what rights should it/I have?

I believe that to answer this we should be prepared to recognize the continuity of identity as the convenient convention it is and not as an absolute. The person I am now exists at one moment in time, with some memories of the past. One's 'self', as an absolute in one moment of time, is constantly dying, as it does not exist from one time to the next. As no identity is perfectly continuous, then the issue of 'dying' or 'losing one's self/consciousness/soul' when being transported becomes much more irrelevant, and issues of what do with duplicates, or large discontinuities of time, become more issues of practicalities. This certainly doesn't answer the question, but it makes it much simpler.

Income and Democracy

Recently, I seem to have seen rather frequently the idea that democracy requires an average midlevel of income in a country. Of course, when I started writing this post and looking for evidence supporting that, the details seemed rather vague, and the main source I found for this was Fareed Zakaria.

However, assuming that this concept is somewhat accurate, that democracy generally isn't stable and self-sustaining in a country until GDP per capita hits about $5000 to $6000 a year, this raises a question for me. The real GDP per person back when the United States was founded was far below this, apparently approximately $917. We didn't have what we would consider a full democracy at the time, with only people with a certain amount of property or who paid a certain amount of taxes were able to vote.

This leads me to wonder if, with countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of promoting full democracy, should we instead have put into place a system where only the more well to do are allowed to vote, perhaps at the range that Zakaria mentions?

Of course, by the time all property requirements were dropped in 1850, average GDP was still only $1888, and this seems to disprove the initial assumption. More importantly are the ethical questions around this, as many would find property requirement as bad as requirements based upon race or sex. Still, it does make me wonder about how we are trying to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Houston

Just in visiting Houston for a bit as a launching pad for a vacation. Driving around the city, it definitely feels different and to be honest just set my teeth on edge. For a long while I've detested urban sprawl and this combines with my dislike for driving to have Houston give me a bad taste in my mouth. Of all the cities I've been to, I've preferred urban, walkable ones with good public transportation: Portland, New York, San Francisco, pretty much any city in Australia or Europe in comparison to the US. I generally despised LA for this reason, not simply because my parents are ashamed I was born there while my dad was finishing up his doctoral degree at UCLA.

LA though, always just struck me as an absolute mess, where sprawl somewhat happened through accident and incompetence. Admittedly, this isn't exactly true, and I haven't spent all that much time in LA, but that is the feeling I would get.

Houston, on the other hand, seems to be designed for the purpose of sprawl. The massive ring highways are extremely well designed for what they are and the more upper class suburban areas I visited seemed somewhat like resorts, in the vein of Sunriver, only with no sidewalks and no store within miles. There is apparently no public transportation system in the city aside from a few buses. It left me uneasy. I will give them that their housing prices are much much lower than most of the cities I enjoy so much and their traffic does seem to not be that significant, so there is something to it, but I would absolutely hate to live there.

I wonder how much of Houston's development comes from benefiting off of externalizing economic costs that should be taxed away, such as carbon admissions or subsidized greenfield development. Also, it makes me wonder of what would have to be done to reduce housing prices in cities such as SF or NY, or if those cities are simply better at internalizing external costs.

Or maybe I'm just a snobbish urbanite, and the external costs simply aren't that great, and I simply am willing to pay more for an urban environment of my choosing. I hope that's not the case though. Houston just feels wrong, and I would like to think it wouldn't look that way if the true costs of everything were taken into consideration. I'll have to look into it more, given that I've gotten these feelings after only seeing the city for two days.

Empiricism in Politics

The last few weeks have not been the most reassuring in terms of politics. I suppose this is mainly due to seeing the health care debate in America. From what I have seen of the argument, and my cursory examination of other countries health care options, I believe that a single-payer plan would be the best, and if not that, then at least a public option. Thus, reading the news on the health care debate alternatively angers and saddens me.

I hope that it works out in the end. After all, I could be wrong. I don't understand anything close to all the details in the plans being suggested now, and it is possible that the conservatives do have some good points. Possibly, whatever half-assed mess of a compromise that is delivered will actually function. I don't think it will be as good as what I want, but I can't tell for sure.

Thinking of this brought to mind an article I had read on empiricism in politics, claiming that in the future mankind would move towards making political decisions more on the basis of factual evidence. After a fair amount of searching, I believe I might have found it, in an article by J. Craig Venter. Of course, at times I doubt that facts will make anything of a difference in political debate. It's an effort having to bite my tongue around my girlfriend's father when he starts going on about how humans don't cause global warming.

There will always be policy debates, and most likely I won't be happy with what the majority decides. Obama's election did give me some hope that one could convince the public of a good idea, but I cannot put all my faith in this. Given my dim view of human nature, I put much more hope towards a technical solution to our problems. Or, to rephrase, a technically aided solution. It is not that I think that old-school political maneuvering for what I believe to be the right ideas is useless, it is that I think that relying only on them is inefficient. I have much more hope that we can do something new that will change the game and get us out of this mess.

How exactly this Democracy 2.0 can work out is still being worked on. I see several ways in which things could improve. I hope the social sciences, especially economics, can make some large leaps forward as more and more information is recorded and made accessible on the Internet. I imagine that some day we could have a good map of most people's social contacts, their locations, their tastes and preferences, and also a good idea of what they're spending money on. This seems fairly likely to me as things like Facebook, Amazon.com's recommendations and Last.fm become more widely used, and hopefully their information will become more open in the future. We've also got things such as reality mining that will provide a great amount of information. Put all this together with greater computing power to enable larger simulations, and maybe we can get to the point where we can actually make meaningful and useful economic predictions.

As far as actually making politicians try to work for the common good, well there's the hope that things like reputation markets and the Sunlight Foundation can force some more accountability out of elected officials.

Of course, as I said earlier, facts often don't do much at all in affecting a political debate. I can hope that a lot of the more idiotic political positions out there can be alleviated by neuropharmacology that raises every one's IQ 30 or so points. Beyond that, some bastards just disagree with me, and there's not much I can do about that.

All of the above are mainly ideas to make our current form of government more efficient and don't affect the major problems of democracy itself. How to replace democracy with something better though is quite a question. It's something I've put a good bit of thought into, and have only some vague ideas. As this post is getting fairly long, I'm going to save some of those thoughts for later.

Time for a New SimCity

I'm rereading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, for the first time in six years or so, and it's really making me want to reinvent SimCity.

Right now I'm on a chapter talking about how parks cannot be applied as magical talismans to raise property values and as that is how they were used in SimCity, I started to think about others ways in which it could be improved. One of the major things you would need is to simulate individual humans, down to their daily comings and goings, their interests, a rough sketch of what they see, and so on. Now computers have improved tremendously in the last years, but I'm still not sure that they can get to that level of detail. It would depend of course upon how many simplifications could be made, but in order to simulate the city in the level of detail that would make things talked about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities relevant, the program would need to have many more details, the different types of businesses instead of simply 'commercial' 'residential', model what times of day people are going places, cultural differences between people, etc.

Now, at a more basic level there are things that I've been thinking should be improved in SimCity for a long time in order to make it possible to do more realistic simulations of cities. There needs to be an ability to layout streets in any direction and not be restricted to a grid. There needs to be mixed use buildings that are seen in cities, where in one building there are commercial stores on the ground floor and residential apartments above. Furthermore, the basic plan of it costing money to zone out land always seemed a bit unrealistic to me. What of the pressures brought to bear in trying to keep people form expanding to new areas? Either trying to prevent sprawl in America or dealing with growing slums in India. There's never even been bums in SimCity!

Bear in mind that I haven't played SimCity since SimCity 4, not the Rush Hour expansion set, nor SimCities Societies. It is quite possible that some of the thoughts I've had have begun to be implemented, but certainly nowhere near the level that I would like to see.

There is also the point that SimCity is designed as a game, and that bogging things down in extreme levels of details might lessen the fun. I admit that that is a risk, but it can be overcome. It is not the case that someone playing such a game would be exposed to all these details, but for me, it would be more fun if I had the option to get down to the level where I could see them.

As for what those details will all need to be, well, I'll think more on the subject and get back to you.