Tag Archives: society

Technology and Society

It’s time to build a better web.







Reset the Net with code(love)

Longform Reflections




The geek shall inherit the Earth.



Download / By Namphuong Van

Changing the possible with code(love)








Download / By Marco sama

Rejecting Law School with code(love)







Technology and Society

Accelerating Forward

Are you thinking of the day you can go online, download a set of prints for your cup, print it out, drink from it with juice you have purchased with a virtual currency generated by machines?

That day is today.

To have lived one hundred years in the last century would have been generous. The next one hundred, including the time we live in now, will be positively thrilling.

As much as airplanes were thrilling years ago, the concept of personalized genetic sequencing, and medicine, interstellar travel, and technological singularity—the evolution of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence—have been fascinating: and now, very, very realizable, with several enterprises on the cutting edge of delivery— SpaceX, 23andMe, and IBM with Watson.

As the Wikipedia entry ominously predicts of technological singularity: it is a theoretical moment in time that will “radically change human civilization, and perhaps even human nature itself.” We are going to be living through several of those moments as technology in different fields progresses. What will this mean?

Countdown the Singularity with code(love)

Countdown the Singularity with code(love)—originally from http://www.singularity.com/

It will mean a new shift in the slow biological evolution of mankind towards an accelerated technological and moral evolution, based on knowledge. Moore’s law of doubling processing power every two years has become the norm across a variety of scientific fields.

There are reasonably few things that are near-certain in this, here are just a few:

Those who grasp how technology is advancing in different fields will not be surprised, and will benefit the most from it.

A premium will be placed on those who understand science, engineering, and technology. Learning those things and working with them is boss.

Shit is going to get real. There are going to be huge changes.

Keep calm and keep coding with code(love)

Keep calm and keep coding with code(love)

Humanity has held on by bridging the gap between cheap fossil fuels, and finite resources, and massive problems. Those are going to have to be tackled head-on soon.

The rest is very uncertain, none more than the element of what definitive path we choose to embark on together, and the classic question: will we do good, or will we do evil with our new capabilities?

The two stories that have struck me the deepest on this are when Oppenheimer took the scientific wizardly of splitting an atom, and was forced to construct a weapon that evaporated and damaged hundreds of thousands of people. Intelligence and technology do not grant immunity to evil.

The other story is about Ray Kurzweil, a fervent advocate of technological singularity, and his burning motivation for advancing technology: the reincarnation of his dead father in a virtual avatar, for one infinitely long conversation, transcending the time they had lost together parted by death.  Technology is not something that cannot humanize, and be used to explore the complex emotions and motives that power human nature.

Ultimately, what we do with the possibilities afforded to us will determine whether the upcoming century will be one of the brightest or darkest in human history. The only certainty is that those possibilities are coming, faster than ever.


You’re interested in printing out your design for a cup. Click here.

You’re interested in buying your juice with bitcoin. Click here.

You’re interested in learning to keep calm,  and coding. Click here.

You’re interested in a deeper reflection on Ray Kurzweil. Click here.

Technology and Society

A Moral Opinion on Bitcoin

Why ultimately the ideals of the system may triumph over its’ practicalities

On this, the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve System’s founding, it is worth remarking upon the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto and his bitcoin creations.

Are bitcoins prone to speculative excess, are they under-regulated, do they have some aspects of a Ponzi scheme? Do they represent the same tired attitude of having to burn societal value (in this case electricity, processing power, and fans) to gain private value? Is it possible Satoshi will come back and show us all his true face, while taking the system away with him?

Yes to all.

However, the ideals behind bitcoin represent the technologist’s perspective on how to cut the bloated financial sector to size. Bitcoin allows for individuals to use digital means to escape the real pressing needs of dealing with conventional banking systems (such as privacy, and avoiding the double-count of money). On that rationale alone, I can support Bitcoin in principle. Bitcoin may have had its’ Silk Road, but Wachovia had the Mexican drug cartels.

If only the penalties for those responsible were equivalent. Wachovia, after all, was fined a small percentage of its’ yearly profits and allowed to largely maintain “business as usual”. In contrast, Silk Road was shut down, and its’ owner was arrested. It is abundantly clear where government power fears to tread. Eric Holder, attorney general of the United States, put it best when he declared that some banks were becoming “too big to prosecute”.

Major banks have been caught in the last five years laundering drug money, laundering money for terrorists, forging foreclosure documents, manipulating markets, manipulating key interest rates, pushing shoddy products on clients, taking on unneeded risk due to Excel errors (London Whale), and generating a whole host of economic bubbles that put food and commodities away from the reach of those that need them most. The most infuriating aspect of this is that most of the time, they did this while they were under taxpayer protection and funding.

The Federal Reserve System, while nominally supposed to act as a check on the banks, has become dependent upon them to a point where it is abundantly clear that alternatives to the bloated financial sector must be considered. While bitcoin may be imperfect in terms of some of its’ practicalities, ultimately the ideal behind bitcoin stands out as a laudable cause that will triumph in some form, sooner or later, if we properly apply the lessons we should have learned in the last 100 years.

Technology and Society

The 21st Century Prisoner’s Dilemma

Decreasing labor in order to salvage profits, to the detriment of both

A prisoner’s dilemma is when two groups that would be better off cooperating in order to achieve a higher coordinated payout choose instead to sacrifice their better aggregate payouts because their individual incentives lead them to forgo cooperation.

Typically represented in a matrix form, one way to conceptualize it is to describe the following scenario: I and Stephen Colbert are both in prison for being fearless conservatives.  We are given the choice to either be silent or to cooperate with the statist authorities by informing on the other. If we are both silent, we would get two years each in prison, if we both informed we would get three years in prison, and if one of us cooperated and the other remained silent, the one cooperating would be free, while the other who was silent would get five years.

It is in both of our private interests to inform on the other, because then we face a choice between freedom if the other was silent, and three years if the other informed, rather than in the case of if we choose to be silent, in which case we face either two years in prison if the other was silent, and five years if the other informed.

In aggregate that means instead of having two years in prison if we both were silent, we will both inform on one another and get a negative aggregate outcome of having three years in prison each because it is in our private interest to arrive to this equilibrium, since both of us will seek the better payoff of informing on the other. We will harm each other as we seek to help ourselves.

The 21st century’s prisoner’s dilemma will be that every firm will not want to hire workers, but will want every other firm to hire workers in order to have a consumer base for itself. This is because the private payoff of having less labor (and saving on what for many businesses is the largest cost) is such a powerful private incentive. Despite what other businesses do in aggregate, it will almost always be better for the individual firm to shed workers.

Unfortunately, this will lead to a worse social equilibrium. Castes of the unemployed, political and economic volatility, and staggering inequality may become the norm. Ironically, this economic chaos will then lead to lower profits, as less consumers will be able to buy most products. If left unchecked, lower private costs will be overwhelmed by higher social costs.

The 1950s saw the rise of the Great Society, the establishment of the welfare state, and of mass infrastructure projects that set the foundation of the 20th century. We will have to do even better to build the 21st century, and ensure a balence between private and social incentives.

(Now please help break me and Stephen out of prison!)