Noah Smith had me going for a minute there

I remember when people scoffed at the notion most workers would be forced to use computers. Now, scant decades hence, many of us are little more than slaves to these glowing rectangles. Oh sure, “increased productivity,” “higher living standards,” Facebook — does any of that matter when we’ve forfeited our very souls?

Just try getting a job after telling employers you won’t use a computer for moral reasons. Workers have no rights at all in this regard.

As far back as the Neolithic, we find skeletal evidence of repetitive stress injuries caused by frequent use of grinding stones. There may be Paleolithic evidence that I am unaware of. Pointing out that adoption of technology comes with costs as well as benefits ceased to be trenchant around 2000 B.C.

Hey!

Well, I actually wasn’t intending to write a Swiftian satire, but I obviously did ignore most of the dangers of cyborg technology. I figure everyone will be thinking very hard about those, and in addition, lots of sci-fi books are already painting pictures of cyborg dystopias, so I figured I didn’t need to duplicate their effort… ;-)

It is interesting to think about how this would affect employment contracts…that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother post…

But by the way, note that many of the new cyborg technologies are non-invasive. Those won’t require people to get any “modifications”, any more than learning to use a lathe is a “modification” of your brain.

Exactly my point…

“It seems pretty obvious how they would be win-win: They’d be agreed to voluntarily by two mentally competent adults.”

Ah, the Econ 101 fallacy. Or in this case, Mankiwism.

And God us keep
from single vision
and mentally competent adults

No, it doesn’t rhyme. Nor reason, for that matter, and I am done forever with Matthew Yglesias. I know he won’t mind.

Relevant reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress

I am not an economist, so I enjoy reading blogs to learn more.

Today I learned that a free market can exist simply by virtue of two mentally competant adults, nothing more.

Who knew?

@Chaz:

The line between coercion and consent becomes most interesting when applied to cities, taxes, and local businesses.

For example, if a city enacts a new tax, is that coercion? Or a free echange between mentally competant adults?

Certainly, compliance is not mandatory, enforced with a gun; or is it?

A property owner can easily sell his land and move to another city, or negotiate with the city over the rate. We see stadium owners do this all the time. So really, there is no coercion involved, whatsoever.

Viewed in this light, the negotiation between a property owner and city, is no different than the negotiation over wages between a Wal-Mart greeter and Wal-Mart.

Win-Win!

RSA, noninvasive methods are slow mainly because they’re bad; there is too much noise, and we don’t know how to extract the signal without a lot of data. Fortunately, people are working on that problem and they’re becoming faster all the time (especially in the prosthetics realm.)

William Gibson has presciently touched on this issue, as on so many others: the reference in Count Zero to the fact that a simstim actress’s Zeiss-Ikon eyeballs belonged, according to her contract, to the company. Clearly necessary to have such things implanted in order to play such a role in the medium; obviously that’s wholly consensual and not at all troubling.

@11

“Though pretty much any representative of the clan (or even McMegan) could have voiced it, Matthew speaks with a kind of savant-like authenticity about such things.”

Matthew Yglesias really has turned into the David Broder of the paleobloggers.

@RSA

The challenge, which I don’t know can be resolved in the near future, is that non-invasive brain-computer interfaces are very slow. (I don’t do research in this area, but I work with people who do.) To my knowledge the best non-invasive BCIs allow users to control an external device like a keyboard, a cursor, or a robot at a rate of about one bit per second.

That’s why I think they’ll be slow in spreading out for non-medical purposes. The implants would be competing with attachable and mobile devices that might not be as fast or capable, but are probably cheaper and easier to use/repair. Those augmented reality glasses that Google is making might not be as capable as a hypothetical implant into your eyes, but the glasses can be easily taken off if they break. Your augmented eyes are another story.

Then there are the rejection issues . . .

@ Brett:

That’s why I think they’ll be slow in spreading out for non-medical purposes.

That’s my thought, too. My impression is that the vast majority of changes we ask doctors to make to our bodies (some even cosmetic) we expect to be permanent. Cyborg technology would be as complex as any consumer technology we have today, and I don’t expect any of the gadgets I have right now to last the rest of my life. Not to mention the idea of planning some downtime for the firmware in my artificial eyes to be upgraded… Let’s see, what was the help desk number again?

I tend not to be a Luddite, because the bad guys almost never are

I tend not to be a free-marketeer, because the bad guys almost always are. Saying “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” presupposes that you can’t beat ’em.

John@10: You’ve covered the plots of most of the episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex there.

Mao@18: Not true. The bandwidth of the human eye is about 10 megabits/second. That’s not even as fast as my internet connection, never mind the ridiculous claim about “more than a Cray can organize in a year”. Simulating the local environment well enough to generate that amount of information is beyond the ability of present-day hardware, but certainly not outside the limits of plausible next-few-decades hardware.

Those interested in these ideas and issues might also enjoy reading R. Scott Bakker (Neuropath) at his blog Three Pound Brain.

Replace ‘cray supercomputer’ with the equivalent ‘4 year old mobile phone’ for proper understanding of the context in which that statement was made.

Saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” presupposes that you can’t beat ‘em.

Good luck winning the fight for Luddism, hoss.

As a hearing aid user, I myself am a cybernetic organism in the sensory sense, and I myself am potentially at risk for some of those issues suggested by John David Galt at 10. Any ole bluetooth capable hearing aid could be hacked–HACKED, I tell you! Meanwhile, I suffer from the perception that I’m not as fully capable a worker as the next guy without visible imperfections.

The fucked up part about the direction of this thread is that most cybernetic projects require training on the part of the user to in order to gain that extra productivity. Even when it comes to just learning how to hear again with new hearing aids with newfangled gizmos and programs. Sometimes, surgical solutions like cochlear implants do not succeed such that everyone hears normally, because how the brain interprets the new, improved, datastream can be pretty variable. Everyone with good nerves hear, but auditory processing can be an issue. For all of *that* though, cochlear implants are aggressively promoted for very young deaf children because deaf people can have serious difficulties with the technology of language, even the hearing unrelated stuff of reading and writing. Militating against a universal program of cochlear implantation is a concern for all of the living deaf people who communicate through ASL and the value of the culture that is preexisting.

Just understanding about the cybernetic issues and productivity when it comes to deaf people would make anyone think that Chris Bertram is being fundamentally unserious when it comes to additional cybernetic issues. The class issue. Poor people get analogue hearing aids. If they happen to have state support, they get digital hearing aids, and *hopefully*, they get real training and help from the audiologist in creating a good fit. This class divide will be the same for virtually all future technologies that work best as “second nature”, from the art and artifice of thinking and rhetoric, to the Internet, to apnea devices, to biofeedback techniques, to advanced sensory input/output, to medical tags and aid algorithms, so forth and so on. You all are thinking of the all the glamorous shit, when what’s more likely are smart knee braces and advanced artificial lenses for eyes, for old people and combat pilots alike. Plus the complete missing the point about the probably existence of a substantial extra support infrastructure for anything like an equitable distribution of any cybernetic regimen. Badly fitted cybernetic devices are going to be a far more critical problem than hearing a crime that didn’t occur or some idiotic permaspamming.

*social democrat

[aeiou] I’m half surprised not to see a denunciation of the railroad and a condemnation of Nate Silver included in this post. Is there any reason that Bertram’s argument does not apply to literacy, stone tools, or clothing?

“Crazy old man yelling at clouds” is a role that only Clint Eastwood can even half pull off successfully.

Michael Harris, there is certainly a distinction to be made between voluntary and involuntary.

But voluntary choices are no more guaranteed to be “mutually beneficial” than involuntary choices.

The “mutually beneficial” characteristic is a property of choices — voluntary or not.

Pointing out the “mutually beneficial” nature of involuntary choices just shows how shallow the claim is that voluntary choices must be mutually beneficial.

I don’t know. It seems to me that a potentially useful discussion is degenerating into alternative estimates of angels on pinheads.

Each mutual transaction presupposes a counter factual — can you NOT enter the transaction? If the status quo is not an option because of something beyond either party’s control, that’s one thing. But if the status quo is ruled out by the other party, that’s different (I don’t get to keep my money AND my life). I don’t see the sense in describing the net effect as mutually beneficial.

@50 Michael Harris,

This your first visit to a Bertram thread? Everyone to his right (in other words, roughly everyone) is a fascist wolf in hyena’s clothing, and he won’t be fooled by it, not one bit.

Everyone to his right (in other words, roughly everyone)

Some people have a very limited idea of the political spectrum.

@53 JW Mason,

Indeed.

The link @22 is brilliant!

I miss John Emerson.

@Hermenauta 32,
very good. The chapter of Consciousness Explained where the quote in 18 is from, the very first chapter of the book, is actually about the dreams and hallucinations. Here, I found a page with a longer excerpt:
http://konyv.uw.hu/consciousness_explained.htm

If you think about it, it seems pretty clear that simulating all realistic details of any, even the most trivial real life experience of an active, free-willing agent, has to be an impossible task.

Ehrmahgerd, erd herminerm!!

…sorry, just had to say that. Carry on. ;-)

I’m with Pat @62. I can see that in some obvious respects, cyborg modifications are different from wearing glasses or using a PC.

But I would be interested to hear which of those differences are in your view the most significant.

To pick up one of your points, literacy is now a condition of employment for many (most?) jobs, and has had a huge impact on dynamics in the workplace and beyond.

Looking forward to your more nuanced thoughts.

@Mao #59

“If you think about it, it seems pretty clear that simulating all realistic details of any, even the most trivial real life experience of an active, free-willing agent, has to be an impossible task.”

I agree. My point is, precisely, that maybe you don´t need to simulate “all realistic details” to develop a “reality” that your brain can accept without suffering any “uncanny valley” effects. Actually, the “reality” we experiment at any moment in time is far from “realistic” or accurate _ for example, we are endowed with sensors that only allows us access to a very small window of the eletromagnetic spectrum.

Also, a lot of experiments with the physiology of vision seems to corroborate the theory that we actively create some of the aspects of what we see. Because of phenomena like this, it´s very likely that the more we dwells into the mechanisms of perception, the more we will be capable of building virtual realities that need not to be an “exact” representation of the real world.

By the way, I think I should be permitted random Yglesias-bashing, if I feel like it. I have never met him in the flesh, nor am I related. Yet I bought a hard copy of Heads in the Sand when it came out.

I love the singularity video at #22, and it highlights one of the major differences between the next round of technologies and previous ones, which is that the new ones will be pervasively governed by license agreements. The ways in which they benefit and harm us will depend more on the terms of those agreements than on the engineering aspects of the technology.

Good luck winning the fight for Luddism, hoss.

Not that you’re wrong, but “Good luck beating back whatever bosses want to do to their employees, losers” isn’t a very appealing argument.

I hadn’t registered StevenAttewell’s comment @42, but he and I agree. Egalitarians should also worry that “if access to cybernetic enhancement is rationed by wealth, then anyone who couldn’t afford those cybernetic enhancements could be systematically shut out of access to economic opportunity.”

Not that you’re wrong, but “Good luck beating back whatever bosses want to do to their employees, losers” isn’t a very appealing argument.

If you see any and all technological change as an opportunity for bosses to exploit workers in hitherto impossible ways, then it’s a fair comment.

But I don’t see the world that way. I think that there is some nonzero amount and configuration of technology that maximizes workers’ bargaining power. I do not see technological progress as one straight line from fairness to slavery.

Surely a better comparison than clothes or literacy would be something like the steam-powered weaving frame? Which was, in fact, a bit of a total disaster for the British working class when it was brought in with no regulation or legal safeguards, on the easy free-market assumption that everything would be all right and that nobody would sign up to any contracts that weren’t advantageous to themselves. Eric Hobsbawm’s famous essay on the Luddites makes it pretty clear that they were objecting to the easily-forseeable political and economic consequences of the steam-frames being introduced into the (already hardly utopian) English factory system, rather than to technology itself. Within fifty years, the failure of the Luddites had resulted in making places like Salford as close as you like to hell on earth.

Or to put it in a “shorter” form, the neoliberals and any other lovers of capitalism present might want to consider before they get too starry-eyed about cyborgs, that the last big step forward in man-machine interaction brought us right to the brink of Communist revolution in Europe.

I am having a hard time, right at present, thinking of a major technological change in any labour-intensive industry that didn’t have pretty awful consequences for workers up front (in most cases with the balance reasserted by later legislation after things had got really bad). Maybe nitrate fertilisers or minimills. Other than that I’m coming up pretty short.

Hmm, I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the IT revolution and automation have allowed lots of people to switch from physically difficult, dangerous factory work to more comfortable desk jobs. Remember how common industrial accidents used to be, even with safety laws and worker’s comp?

And the industrial revolution itself moved people from farms to cities. That seems to have been a good move.

Really it seems to me that any technology that increases workers’ value to firms increases workers’ bargaining power vis-a-vis firms. Maybe it doesn’t always increase it as much as it should, but it does seem to increase it.

Workers have made incredible gains in the last 100 years, in real wages, in working conditions, in benefits, in work-life balance. Some of that was due to legislation, but I think a huge chunk of it was due to the simple fact that technological progress made workers more valuable, and so increased their bargaining power.

Noah Smith, the last 100 years? You’ve decided to start your trend analysis before the invention of the transistor?

As Krugman pointed out with his graphs, the last 30 years — you know, since the integrated circuit — have reversed this trend.

Workers have made incredible gains in the last 100 years, in real wages, in working conditions, in benefits, in work-life balance. Some of that was due to legislation, but I think a huge chunk of it was due to the simple fact that technological progress made workers more valuable, and so increased their bargaining power.

Also whoa whoa whoa here – why do you start the clock in 1912???? And even if we do decide to do that, is the distinction between “legislation” and “technology increasing the bargaining power of workers” tantamount to yaddayaddaing things like The General Strike?

Seriously, Noah, if you’re just going to say that “the bargaining power of workers” is just something to do with “their perceived value to employers”, then you’re not exactly going to change the minds of people who don’t like economists because they think we’re profoundly ignorant of really elementary historical, social and institutional facts.

[…] then you’re not exactly going to change the minds of people who don’t like economists because they think we’re profoundly ignorant of really elementary historical, social and institutional facts.

Economist or not, I like you, dsquared.

But as for Noah — I don’t think he’s trying to change those people’s minds, so much as he is trying to propagate exactly that profound ignorance of which you speak. After all, he has a political point to make.

Homo economicus will choose to say (and even believe!) whatever makes him the most money to say.

Fu Ko, what are you talking about? What do you think my “political point” is?

I am having a hard time, right at present, thinking of a major technological change in any labour-intensive industry that didn’t have pretty awful consequences for workers up front

Do you have any idea how boring routine office jobs were before the invention of email and the web? The only thing to do was hang out by the water cooler and hope one of your coworkers had a good story.

What has value to workers such that they can negotiate with capital is free will. That means that it’s typically when labor shortages that you see in a strike or during wartime (or when most everyone else is dead of plague) that one sees greater claims to society’s bounty by workers. The number of industries with highly non-fault tolerant standards, for safety or other reasons, such that they need committed workers, can capably employ only a small fraction of the workforce. Even then, a government sufficiently sociopathic will disregard tofu houses and rickety nuclear plants, in favor of more control over labor by virtue of their commitment to having a desperate and underpaid labor force.

We already have the broad outlines of cybernetic issues. Think about that woman who died in Ireland, for example–from the perspective that she is a machine for making babies, to the legal and practical mechanisms of evading the fetal heartbeat nonsese (and neonatal ICUs), to the medical profession that didn’t go far enough for her, since she wasn’t white.

Cyberization isn’t really distinct from any other tools that might be created for human use or utilized for the workforce.

To the extent that it has distinct issues, I would say that it’s primarily:

1) It’s generally a statement that some individual is worth putting capital within–from George W Bush getting a good education to Dick Cheney getting a heart transplant. It’s usually all about being at the expense of outsiders.

2) Embedded intelligence and assumptions–this is about design. Everything around us has embedded thoughts, from cars fitting roads to bank analyzing whether certain transactions are truly authorized by the accountholder. The new cyberization, epitomized by the Pill, is able to have a higher order relationship with the surrounding social infrastructure. There will be conflicts, both in how the cybernetic tool predetermines lifestyles, such as heart pacers having to be away from certain devices, and in how people with new cybernetic adaptations could take advantage of what were once fringe activities–think the broadening of the Internet in the Middle East and portable telecom devices.

3) And of course, how you see yourself, like gender reassignment surgery–or psych meds.

And amuse ourselves with a stick and a piece of string!

This part does conform to my recollection.

Noah, aren’t you standing in for Steve Landsburg?

Them’s fightin’ words…

But from what I see, you’re propagating the standard right-libertarian blindness of power-relations and the complexity of “voluntarity,” with respect to the immediate issue at hand — leading me to suppose that this is your regular schtick.

Sounds like you just wrote those words down because they kind of felt truthy…got any evidence? Can you quote something I’ve written which supports this thesis?? Have you actually read my blog at all??

Noah, again, I apologize. I only jumped to a conclusion based on what I read here and in the one blog post you linked here. I do think that that blog post constitutes evidence, but it isn’t conclusive proof of anything. I do apologize for treating it as if it were — and more importantly for making the issue personal (especially since I’m not using my real name here, and you are). Of course, if you do want to clarify your political position explicitly, I will certainly believe whatever you have to say for yourself rather than my own weak intuitions.

(BTW, it isn’t what you said, but what you avoided talking about. So I can’t demonstrate it with a quote, except to quote someone who replied to you: “If the scenario was that a person could get a implant and a higher wage, or keep his old wage, your post would make sense – but I think you are missing the point.” But really, I don’t want to defend my impression, just to explain where it came from.)

Also, I’m sure you realized the Steven Landsburg comment was totally 100% a joke (alluding to Michael Harris @50).

@ ben wolfson:

The keyboard itself is a brain-computer interface…

“Brain-computer interface” is a term of art. One well-known definition: “A brain-computer interface is a communication system that does not depend on the brain’s normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles.”

Oops, middle sentence got lost somewhere in the middle. “…insofar as automation has improved things for some people, it’s done so at the expense of lots of others…”, or words to that effect.

Neville: Regarding unemployment, I know it’s a problem, but it’s also the case that the percent of people in the U.S. who have jobs is higher than it was in the 1950s or 1960s. There is higher long-term unemployment – 4% of the labor force now, compared to maybe 1.5% in past decades – but it is not clear that technology is the culprit there. I’m certainly open to the idea, but I want to see some evidence.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the increased societal wealth generated by technological advancements have made it easier, both politically and practically, to ensure a basic standard of living for the unemployed through government benefits.

Regarding the impact of urbanization, it is not clear to me that we should take infrastructure investment out of the equation. More people in cities = more political demand for urban infrastructure investment. Over time, that seems to have led to durable, long-lasting, significant improvements in the standard of living of workers, including poor workers.

Barry: I don’t have data on the distribution of nonwage compensation, I only know that the median has gone up. Of course, that’s in dollar value, and a lot of that may simply reflect declining health care productivity (more dollars spent for worse outcomes).

Fu Ko: If you want to divide the intellectual world into competing teams by a knee-jerk intuitive classification system, and then launch vigorously into a condemntation of anyone who doesn’t immediately seem to be on the team you’ve chosen for yourself, be my guest, but I’ve always thought that people who do that sort of thing are silly. Just go read my blog if you want to know about my ideas.

Noah, if someone apologizes for misreading you — which happens approximately never on the Internet — it seems churlish not accept the apology, and say something snarky in reply.

I am happy to stand in for Steve Landsburg in this discussion, and save Noah from being smeared by such an association, as long as someone is prepared to hose me down afterwards.

A timely post over at 3 Quarks Daily: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7277

Very interesting discussion here. I’m following it intently, using technologically enhanced vision – which is to say, reading glasses.

People who work in factories often find them interesting, challenging, and engaging places to work (some of us even find some of them quite beautiful).

Depends on the factory of course, but I did a fair amount of hanging around packaging machinery factories when I was doing my dissertation research. If I ever become a reclusive multibillionaire, I’ll have a room in my mansion with a tea-bag making machine kept working 24-7 – they are altogether wonderful to watch (a little like the Rube Goldbergesque machine in Edward Scissorhands, if rather more practical).

Indeed; I thought that Chris’s initial presentation of Noah Smith’s piece as a bit of dry satire was meant in earnest, so I was surprised to see Smith show up to suggest otherwise.

In the year of eighteen and two – Peg and awl
In the year of eighteen and two – Peg and awl
In the year of eighteen and two – Peggin’ shoes was all I’d do
Hand me down my peg, my peg and awl

They invented a new machine – Peg and awl
They invented a new machine – Peg and awl
They invented a new machine – Prettiest thing I ever seen
Throw away my peg, my peg and awl

Pegs a hundred pair to my one – Peg and awl
Pegs a hundred pair to my one – Peg and awl
Pegs a hundred pair to my one – Peggin’ shoes it ain’t no fun
Throw away my peg, my peg and awl

In the year of eighteen and three – Peg and awl
In the year of eighteen and three – Peg and awl
In the year of eighteen and three – New machine it set me free
Throw away my peg, my peg and awl

[ song probably has it wrong, the machine was invented in the 1860s, but this scans better ]

Dsquared 82: the steam turbine. The Davy lamp. The pneumatic drill. The steam shovel. The oil fired boiler. Electric lighting. Come on, you’re Welsh. Think of the miners FFS.

CB: you’ve got the definition of ad hominem wrong again.

“Do you have any idea how boring routine office jobs were before the invention of email and the web? ”

I think you will discover that boring routine office jobs (a three word tautology) are just as boring and routine as they ever were. It’s just that the amount of effort that employers have put into dıstracting workers from the reality of the boring routine work they do has increased.

vinyl is an elitist and snobbish obsession. The only way to “enjoy” vinyl was on a machine the average person could not afford. Everyone else had to put up with crackling, warped sound, the hiss of the needle, and regular loss of purchased goods as the records warped and decayed, or got scratched because you can’t afford a halfway decent needle.

I don’t think the issue here though is Chris Bertrams “luddite” tendencies vis a vis LPs, god rest their vinyl souls. It’s the awful shallowness of economists’ view that every step in human progress has been due to technological advance rather than social organization. Plus, cyborg buttons to make workers compliant. Surely that’s an innovation that will make a motzah in a certain adult-oriented section of the entertainment industry…

(also I’m surprised ajay that you didn’t mention databases in your list – you’re a librarian aren’t you? Gone are the days of the card file…)

perhaps if we could install a button that enables us to enjoy scratched music at the flick of a (mental) switch, the eternal cd vs. vinyl debate would become irrelevant …

“If you want to divide the intellectual world into competing teams by a knee-jerk intuitive classification system, and then launch vigorously into a condemntation of anyone who doesn’t immediately seem to be on the team you’ve chosen for yourself, be my guest, but I’ve always thought that people who do that sort of thing are silly.”

Spoken like a man who won’t accept an apology. Also, this sounds exactly like someone who divides the world into competing teams–one team being those who divide the world into competing teams, and the other team which does the same thing while condemning the practice. I’ve always thought people who condemned other people for condemning people were sort of silly, except when I do it.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of consenting mentally competent adults.

” The only way to “enjoy” vinyl was on a machine the average person could not afford.”

If you could have seen my friends and me in 1975 jumping around to “Born to Run” cranked up on my crappy all-in-one radio-phonograph-cassette player with the speakers the size of cinder blocks, or my girlfriend and me lying in bed in 1979 on a Sunday morning with the Ricky Lee Jones album I gave her for her birthday on the same shitty machine, you would never say such a stupid thing.

131: good point. Go on, dsquared, explain how the poor librarians suffered when their card indexes were wrenched brutally from their hands by Teh Terrible Technocrats.

My comment is moderation because, I think, I misspelled my email. here a a repeat feel free to delete one or the other

Card catalogs, as opposed to date bases, where the a hard copy of institutional memories. Amended by hand in many cases the card catalogs represented lot of work by trained professionals to understand and assess the books under their care. Large electronic databases do not represent the same level of engagement nor are they as useful to readers, which is not to say that e databases are useful but they are not hands down better for librarians and their patrons.

Nicolas Baker wrote about this years ago in the The New Yorker.

re CB @126 and following vinyl/cd
I agree with Chris – CDs web etc are no advantage at all.
the key to understanding this is to look at the mind of the person at each point; at any point, people are more or less the same – they have the same satisfaction and problems;
eg vinyl : my records get scratched, they are heavy (hey, yeah – how many of you lugged cases of lps around, etc)
CD: they get scratched, stuck in the player
Mp3s: I have to pay (gasp) for what i want, etc

the point is, each person, from the 60s 70s today, lp cd mp, has the same happiness in the moment

the only exception to this is medical progress
and, if i may as a PhD in the biz, the amount of medical progress we are going to have in the next 50 years is going to make W Gibson and Neuromancer look tame.
thats my prediction

Given the quality of some of the digital remastering (awful) it isn’t obvious that the CD listener has a better musical experience (and I’m pretty sure the iPod user doesn’t).

Given the quality of some books written today (awful) it isn’t obvious that the reader has a better reading experience than before Gutenberg.

I think there’s something wrong with this form of argument.

I have a few acres that were heavily logged in the 1930s and haven’t burned since. They have far too many very scrawny ponderosa pines which I’ll either cut or they’ll eventually burn catastrophically.

I have a hand saw and a gas powered chain saw. The hand saw provides a much pleasanter experience. It’s quieter, always starts, doesn’t stink, and stores more easily. However, I surely do cut a lot more trees more quickly with the chain saw.

I’m not sure that ‘user experience’ is always quite the proper measure of the advantages of one tool over another, at least without more unpacking.

I grew up using a library system where all the branches and regional libraries, instead of card catalogs in drawers, used printed books with photographs of all the cards that had been in the catalog at the time the book was printed. There were two series, plus supplements, apparently randomly overlapping, and supposedly a secret code at the bottom of the “card” to say which libraries were supposed to have each book on the shelf. Certainly I think of this system with nostalgia.

@148

“And don’t you find getting up every 20 minutes to change the music kind of spoils the mood? ”

A small quibble, you could stack hours of records on a turntable.

well then we definitely shouldn’t introduce the debate about the merits of the Dewey decimal system …

Tom Bach@143 – “Card catalogs, as opposed to date bases, where the a hard copy of institutional memories.”

Why can’t this be true of a database ?A database is or can be exactly the same thing and without all the tedium that caused Philip Larkin to complain about foreigners, wimminfolk etc. I suspect you are conflating spidered-up raw corpus and curated presentation – whether curated by wunderbar algorithm (no such thing atm, despite tall claims) or wunderbar human librarian.

Aside from “better” or “worse”, where the balance is pretty subjective, one often unnoticed aspect of new technologies is the extent to which they trade some notion of efficiency (usually wage savings) for flexibility and adaptability. A roomful of clerical workers can be redirected, split, added to, trained in a new task all pretty quickly. Making any large change to a big database is an affair of years of planning, lots of tooth-sucking consultants explaining why its going to cost you an arm and a leg, invisible technical problems and (usually) a god-awful mess as the change rolls over the users.

Recording music erases harmonics and overtones. Nothing can better the unamplified human voice. It is like water from a mountain spring. Every instrument aspires to it.

Engels @152: “This thread was doomed from the moment vinyl vs CDs was mentioned.”

True, but it’s not entirely inappropriate. The debate is a pretty good synecdoche for the general argument: “This new technology is great / terrible.”

I suspect that if CDs, or MP3 files, or whatever, were the expensive and space-consuming option, people would construct rationalisations for why they sounded better in support of their status content…

I’m just glad no-one mentioned valve amps.

ENGELS! Hush your mouth. Nobody talk about solid state or digital modelling! Nobody!

I wonder if the article linked to below which has been attracting some attention (ironically) on the interwebs is of relevance to the OP.

“(Between 1870 and 1970) life …had… utterly changed. The interstate highway system was almost completed. Air conditioning was universal in commerce and widespread in residential homes. Air travel by 1970 had been completely converted to jets with no further increase in speed. Consumer appliances were universal in the United States, with only the microwave oven still waiting to be invented and diffused.

A common feature of this innovativon revolution was that many of the improvements could only happen once.

Speed of travel was increased from that of the horse to the jet plane in a century but could not happen again. The interior temperature that in 1870 alternated between freezing cold in the winter and stifling heat in the summer reached a year-round 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22C), and that could not happen again. The U.S. was transformed from 75 percent rural to 80 percent urban, and that could not happen again. ”

Compare this with now.

“Attention in the past decade has focused not on labor-saving innovation, but rather on a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things as we could do before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages. The iPod replaced the CD Walkman; the smartphone replaced the garden-variety “dumb” cellphone with functions that in part replaced desktop and laptop computers; and the iPad provided further competition with traditional personal computers. These innovations were enthusiastically adopted, but they provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labor with machines.

A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of Innovation Revolution (IR) #2 compared to the subset of IR #3 inventions that have occurred since 2002. You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002.

Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious. The audience realizes that it has been trapped into recognition that just one of the many late 19th century inventions is more important than the portable electronic devices of the past decade on which they have become so dependent.”

http://www.nber.org/papers/w18315.pdf?new_window=1

@172 Krugman has also been discussing this. I got the link to the Gordon paper from one of Krugman’s NYT columns.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/is-growth-over/

faustusnotes: I wasn’t trying to signal anything with my musical choices when I was a teenager. I liked the music I listened to and I wanted more of it.

If you say so :). Do you mind if I ask whether you shared your musical discoveries with others? Or if your distinct musical taste was a way of distinguishing yourself from your peers? Speaking from my own little-town experience, you must have been an exceptionally self-contained, un-peer-pressured, un-status-conscious teenager.

Chris, spare me “a high quality listening experience.” Did your LPs jump? Did they scratch? Did you have to replace the stylus, and if so how much did it cost? Did your records warp and die? Records are shit. Objectively shit. Because of all the obvious flaws in their operation. These aren’t subjective experiences like Harold’s harmonics – they’re obvious examples of inferior tech, like records being permanently wrecked by a skipping needle, or sounding like someone is singing through a sack. Similarly with CDs, which were better than vinyl but perennially dodgy – do you claim they’re not? Modern technology solves all that. MP3s don’t degrade, skip or die, and you can flush your iPod down the toilet and still listen to the music. Try that with an Iron Maiden picture disc and see how far you get.

Tomslee, no I didn’t tell my friends about my music. In my dusty country town the only music that was accepted by my friendship group was thrash metal. I kept the rest to myself. In fact, I didn’t like Metallica (something of a cardinal sin in my friendship group) until I had a near-magical experience falling asleep on a hot summer’s day listening to Master of Puppets (not on vinyl, obviously, or I wouldn’t have been able to make out the voices through the hissing). I had the good fortune to catch some alternative radio stations from a bigger city (an unusual event) one christmas eve, and discovered some new bands – but it took two years to track them down physically. Let’s hear it for big clunky discs, eh? The modern equivalent of me (poor bastard!) would hear the name, go straight to youtube to check out some examples, then download a slab of new music. But hey, it’s not vinyl, so that kid must be some kind of barbarian with no musical sense, right? How can they handle that compressed shit?!

Is there anyone here who knows anything about music?

Wiki:

Many oscillators, including the human voice, a bowed violin string, or a Cepheid variable star, are more or less periodic, and so composed of harmonics.

Most passive oscillators, such as a plucked guitar string or a struck drum head or struck bell, naturally oscillate at not one, but several frequencies known as partials. When the oscillator is long and thin, such as a guitar string, or the column of air in a trumpet, many of the partials are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency; these are called harmonics. Sounds made by long, thin oscillators are for the most part arranged harmonically, and these sounds are generally considered to be musically pleasing. Partials whose frequencies are not integer multiples of the fundamental are referred to as inharmonic. Instruments such as cymbals, pianos, and strings plucked pizzicato create inharmonic sounds.

The untrained human ear typically does not perceive harmonics as separate notes. Rather, a musical note composed of many harmonically related frequencies is perceived as one sound, the quality, or timbre of that sound being a result of the relative strengths of the individual harmonic frequencies. Bells have more clearly perceptible inharmonics than most instruments. Antique singing bowls are well known for their unique quality of producing multiple harmonic partials or multiphonics.

Music played on an AM car radio sounds fine to me because I like music. I also like ketchup, cassette tapes, and CDs.

I am not really qualified to discuss physics but I can hear the extra overtones and harmonics in live (and also in analog) music and can tell that their presence make for an incomparably different experience. Just as a fresh-picked tomato is superior to a cold-storage one. Metaphorically speaking, it has more overtones and harmonics. This is not “elitism” but quantifiable fact.

The gains achieved by technology are real, but so are the losses.

http://performingsongwriter.com/t-bone-burnett/

Harold: I think Slayer’s early live performances would offer a counterpoint to your claims.

Chris: are you saying you have never been in a public facility where a cd has skipped? Never experienced the staff rushing over to the cd player to stop the horrible sound of a cd getting jammed? This has never happened to you or anyone you know with vinyl either? But *I’m* the one who is wrong on the internet?

I’ve always been a fan of album cover art and particularly the work of Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley and the iconic work they produced for the Grateful Dead. I consider it to be a real loss because I don’t believe this form translates well in the CD format.

The elitism of Illuminated Manuscripts:
Traditional “Slow Reading”, as described by Anthony Grafton, who writes that the “distinctive approach to texts” of the Benedictine monasteries might be called ‘slow writing and reading’ ” and:

—contrasts as sharply with contemporary practices in reading and writing as Slow Food does with McDonald’s. The Benedictine rule allowed each monk to borrow one book a year from his monastery’s collection. This he was to read and meditate on, slowly and with concentration, in his few free hours. Public readings from the Bible and other central Christian texts, held at mealtimes, reinforced the instruction drawn from the carefully chosen Christian classics in individual cells. So, even more powerfully, did a central Benedictine task: that of copying the canon of sacred texts and their Christian commentators, precisely and accurately, on sheets of skin that would last for centuries, when bound into codices, and serve generations of Benedictine readers in their turn.

The Renaissance Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius argued, in a famous screed against the printing press, that this Benedictine way of engaging with texts was uniquely valuable because it eliminated all the slippages that can come between books and readers. Those who adopted this regime would be transformed by what they read:

He who copies accepted and holy texts will not be burdened by vain and pernicious thoughts, will speak no idle words, and is not bothered by wild rumors…. And as he is copying the approved texts he is gradually initiated into the divine mysteries and miraculously enlightened. Every word we write is imprinted more forcefully on our minds since we have to take our time while writing and reading. The repeated reading of Scripture will inflame the mind of the writer and carry him happily to total surrender to God.

–Anthony Grafton, “Jumping Through the Computer Screen”, a review of Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton’s Reinventing Knowledge, from Alexandria to the Printing Press, New York Review of Books (December 23, 2010).

I know where this crowd would come down on the question whether I should replace my Advent Legacy speakers, with their weight and placement issues, with mini-speakers and additional toy storage.

“Yes, clearly, when I go jogging and bring an iPod along, my enjoyment is no different than if I were carrying a turntable for the same purpose.”

It seems possible that, by listening to your ipod 16 hours a day every day, you weaken, dilute your enjoyment. In the end, you might just kill it altogether. It might become a habitual noise. You’ll suffer if it’s taken away, but you won’t enjoy it. Like breathing.

It seems likely that enjoyment as a function of abundance and convenience is not monotonic…

Some of the CD bashing on this thread is seriously OTT. CDs don’t scratch CDs. People scratch CDs. Put them back in the flipping cases.

Variations in dynamics (loud and soft) not only within a phrase or section but also within single notes, I should have said.

Anyone who bought rock LP’s with tracks remastered for CD in the mid- to late eighties knows perfectly well that the ultra-bright high registers were recognizable enough as a hallmark of the new technology that cymbals and such were enhanced on the new recordings to make them sound “right.” They sounded ultrabright on phonograph, too, as they hadn’t sounded when they were first released. But this isn’t inherent in the technology. I have an early CD of piano solo music that I hate because it sounds tight and dead, showing off the ability of the technology to be noise-free, but I also have a 78 of Pablo Casals remastered onto CD that has the qualities of the earlier recordings (as opposed to the qualities that were expected on new string solo recordings at the time).

I’ve never tried listening to an MP3 on the Legacies. I wonder what it would sound like.

Trying to return the thread to its original point, it seems to me that there are two different bur related issues: the desirability of new technology and its impact in the workforce. It seems to me that it’s pointless to talk about the desirability of a technology not yet invented and the impact of a given technology in the workforce it’s not easy to predict.
As Dsquared says, working conditions in early industrial age were terrible, but they also enabled the creation of trade unions strong enough to challenge the system and achieve substantial gains. Absent the kind of geographical concentration of workers and better communications that the industrial revolution made possible, the kind of political organizations that fought against these working conditions would not have been possible.
We live in an age were these kind of union-friendly environments are dissappearing (the service sector, with its dispersed workforce, is an example), but we should not assume that every technological advance will be union-unfriendly.
Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but the impact of it should be analyzed with an eye towards the political-organizational angle, whose consequences may be large.

I’m just a little troubled by relatively glib short statements, the subtext of which is “consenting adults making mutually beneficial transactions? don’t make me laugh!”, which is kind of what was going on upthread. A little bit of nuance and detail would help.

I think this is worth re-emphasizing. Comments like Chaz’s (#16), in their efforts to dismiss the ‘generalized uncritical tech-enthusiasm’ that so plagues us, seem to also reject the most vanilla small-l Millean liberalism in order to do so. Individuals may not always choose wisely, let’s grant, but that is a far cry from establishing that some other authority is likely to choose better for them, especially on fundamental questions like “to what extent should I (further!) augment my natural abilities through technology, broadly construed?” Perhaps mutual consent is not sufficient for justice as you conceive it, but certainly there’s a strong prima facie presumption against overriding mutual consent that has to be argued for case by case?

@Phosphorious #124,
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the bespectacled have implicitly consented to electron microscopes for eyes, but inasmuch as those in this thread who are vaguely unsettled by technological enhancements are content to issue wisdom-of-repugnance-type arguments instead of specific concerns about the merits of specific technologies, I think it’s perfectly pertinent to point out that technological augmentation is a human practice whose history spans millenia, some of whose myriad benefits are quite literally right over one’s nose. At the very least, it would be remarkably improbable if this moment were the precise moment in human history that augmentation turned bad on the whole for us. Isn’t it much more likely that we consider the past benefits of technology to be familiar whereas the future benefits are definitionally uncertain, and therefore scarier? If I were a critic of human augmentation, I would want to ensure that my views were easily distinguishable from mere status-quo bias.

I’m made a little uneasy by the observation that the self-styled Luddites in this thread apparently find themselves obliged to deny any net benefits from technological progress whatsoever (!). That point seems so obviously settled to me (I invite you to tour a modern hospital, laboratory, university, factory or home if you are uncertain) that I would think King Ludd’s camp should be worried about one person’s modus ponens becoming another’s modus tollens. (The Luddites find it necessary to deny the CD to make room for their political economy. I accept the CD, therefore…)

Make whatever arguments about economic justice you would like (and I am likely to agree) but it still seems unavoidable that in order to distribute wealth justly you need some wealth to distribute: comparing the world economy of 2012 to the world economy of 1712, have industrial technologies made us more capable or less capable of meeting human needs? Many of the opposing arguments in this thread seem to be variations on the plight of the buggy-whip maker, without an explanation of why the standard rebuttal to that argument does not apply. Preventing efficiency-increasing innovations in order to sustain workers in inefficient industries seems tantamount to kicking an economy in the shins so that you may feel sorry for it. Grant whatever retraining programs and other elements of the social welfare state you want, but making people do the jobs of machines is the only actually dystopian vision that has been seriously suggested so far.

I regretfully admit that this thread seems so vulnerable to Poe’s law, literally from comment one, that I am unsure how to proceed respectfully. So now, if you will excuse me, I literally must go finish a paper which we hope will ultimately have applications in reducing the cost of recombinant genetic technologies, e.g. synthetic insulin.

/eppur si muove

Steven,

2 wrongs, etc. I first responded to “Why do these guys always go on about voluntary contracts? Aren’t involuntary contracts mutually beneficial in exactly the same way?”, which I still think is invalid, not least based on the “exactly”.

To rebut the short and glib statements you point out exist, a glib short statement contra the original isn’t going to help. We end up in the realm of ‘Tis! / ‘Tisn’t! / ‘Tis! / ‘Tisn’t!

(Or: An argument isn’t just contradiction.
-It can be.
-No it can’t. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
-No it isn’t.
-Yes it is! It’s not just contradiction.
-Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
-Yes, but that’s not just saying ‘No it isn’t.’
-Yes it is!
And so on.)

Pat @203 gets it. If we haughtily dismiss voluntary contracts between consenting adults as ridiculously Landsburgian (or Yglesian), we’re presuming that there is some authority (and some policy process) that will make better choices. I’m kind of inclined to go with minimal restrictions on autonomous, voluntary actions as a default setting, while allowing for more serious and extensive restrictions based on well-defined justifications. That’s a glib short statement for space considerations, but it deliberately leaves lots of room for negotiation.

Each mutual transaction presupposes a counter factual — can you NOT enter the transaction? If the status quo is not an option because of something beyond either party’s control, that’s one thing. But if the status quo is ruled out by the other party, that’s different (I don’t get to keep my money AND my life). I don’t see the sense in describing the net effect as mutually beneficial.

For purposes of deciding whether a transaction is “mutually beneficial”, once the status quo has been ruled out, I don’t think it matters whether that status quo is ruled out by the other party, some third party, or a force of nature. That’s particularly true in a situation like this–if I choose not to become a cyborg, I can no longer make the same income I do now because other people will choose to become cyborgs. Other people’s “mutually beneficial”, “voluntary” choices have ruled out my status quo.

But I do appreciate the lucid way you put things above. What divides “voluntary” from “involuntary” choices is not anything to do with freedom, liberty, or autonomy, but whether or not the status quo is an option. But the status quo itself was not a voluntary choice.

If we haughtily dismiss voluntary contracts between consenting adults as ridiculously Landsburgian (or Yglesian), we’re presuming that there is some authority (and some policy process) that will make better choices.

Voluntary contracts have many virtues, but there is a very good alternative policy process: democracy. People can vote for legislators to decide what kind of contracts are permitted and what kinds are not. This gives voters the option of preserving some kinds of status quo that the market would otherwise take from them.

@203.

I don’ t think there are any Luddites on this thread, self-styled or otherwise. The distinction is between quantitative and qualitative changes in technology and unrepeatable “breakthroughs”.

Say, for example, you wanted to record someone’s voice, or music, before 1857. You simply could not do it. It was impossible. Then, in that year Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph. After that it became possible. This was a quantitative breakthrough. Something that was literally impossible… became possible. What some commentators seem to be getting confused about is that all the events in the history of recording techniques after 1857 are qualitative changes… not quantitative. MP3s are phenomenally more advanced phonautograph’s. But that, essentially, is what they are.

And please note that this breakthrough,once made, cannot be made again.

Or take flying. Before 1783, if you wanted to fly, starting from the ground, you simply could not do it. It was impossible. After the Montgolfier brother’s flight in a hot air balloon, you could. There is a huge leap in technology between Concorde and a hot air balloon but for the passenger ıt’s in terms of speed and comfort. The difference, in other words, between the Boeing 747 and the hot air balloon is qualitative not quantitative.

And this breakthrough, once made, cannot be made again. You cannot reinvent manned flight. Likewise you cannot reinvent the cooker, the fridge, the TV, the radio, the submarine etc. You can refine them, yes, but not reinvent them.

The OP presupposes that the human race can continue to make quantitative breakthroughs in technology more or less indefinitely. But common sense suggests otherwise.

208, You are right, my comment at 196 was a generalized (and futile) complaint about amplified music. Not musical reproduction. Obviously, there is no going back, however. The possibility of reproduction had begun to standardize performance from the very first, even before the invention of the flat or even cylinder recording. The tempered as opposed to natural scale (eighteenth century) standardized as opposed to variable tuning (nineteenth), ideal of fidelity to the written score as opposed to improvisation and ornament inserted at libitum (twentieth) are all pretty recent developments.

However, CDs do have obvious advantages. Fidelity of reproduction is not one of them, however.

God only knows where faustusnotes grew up, but it must have been a strange place in which only the rich people listened to vinyl, and yet vinyl was shit. [“The only way to “enjoy” vinyl was on a machine the average person could not afford.”, “Records are shit. Objectively shit.”].

In contrast, in generic English suburbia in the 70s, pretty much every family had a record-player. A lot of teenagers had their own. Once cassettes got popular, people started buying cheap-ass “integrated stereo systems” with dual tape decks, tuner, amp, speakers, and a turntable on the top, priced from maybe £100. They were crappy, but the sound from the turntable was certainly no crappier than that from the tapes (which had usually been recorded from someone’s vinyl in the first place: Home Taping [Was] Killing Music). Millions of people of all income groups enjoyed vinyl – Bloix nails this – and faustusnotes’ denial of this obvious historical fact marks him as an idiot, or possibly a troll. Maybe he’s never heard of the 1960s?

For the record [“Did your LPs jump? Did they scratch? Did you have to replace the stylus, and if so how much did it cost? Did your records warp and die?”]: No, no, maybe three times in my life, about £20, and no, not really. I still have almost all the vinyl I ever owned, and my share of that once owned by my parents, and it still plays fine, and it still (with a very few exceptions) doesn’t jump or scratch. I bought my turntable in about 1995, second-hand, for about £40, after the previous one suffered some sort of permanent electrical borkage. God only knows what faustusnotes was doing with his records to fuck them up so badly. Using them as oven mitts?

Surely the crowning glory in faustusnotes’ long train of idiocy is this: “These things all had in common the problem of moving parts, a barbaric idea now fortunately missing from decent music systems”. Happily, the idea of a music system without moving parts (and therefore incapable of generating vibrations) brings us full circle to the actual subject of the post. Discuss.

Michael Harris @205 – agreed that mutual glibness doesn’t get us anywhere.

However, I think if we step past the libertarian a priori assumption that all legal contracts are entirely voluntary transactions between equal partners and that coercion only exists in its strong form, we could perhaps agree that agreements in the labor market exist on a spectrum from revolutionary expropriation (where the workers have all the power and the employer none, with worker cooperatives existing as it were off the spectrum) to slavery (where the employer has all the power and the workers none), and the question before us is where in the middle the status quo lies – and it’s this status quo that should inform the default setting on our labor market regulations.

And that status quo can be ascertained – there’s plenty of labor economists, labor relations experts, labor historians, even a few labor journalists out there who could help us pin down what the relative balance of power is between the average worker and the average employer so that policy can be built around that.

Moreover, I wouldn’t agree that we necessarily are “presuming that there is some authority (and some policy process) that will make better choices.” The technocracy is not the only model here. Arguably, all that needs to happen is for policy is to adjust the power differential so that free agreements can resume on equal footing – the collective bargaining approach favored by the National Labor Relations Act. Alternatively, one could think of “bright line” regulations that rather than deciding the precise detail of agreements instead act to set floors and ceilings so that the negotiations between one worker and their employer can’t be undercut by a second worker who’s willing to compromise not only their own health, safety, or living standards, but those of the first worker.

Michael Harris —

You brought up sexual consent a couple times now. I’m not sure what kind of point you’re making. Compliance with “fuck me or you’re fired” is not considered sexual consent. So if we’re going to apply the standards of sexual consent to employment, then the demands of employment are simply, unequivocally, involuntary.

In the ordinary employment relationship, the employer has a total monopoly over the entire dollar income of the employee, and total discretionary power over the working life of the employee. I don’t think much nuance is necessary here. This is not a power-situation in which consent is meaningful. Employers and employees are as inequal as teachers and students. Sexual consent law already recognizes this.

Pat @203

Fair enough; status quo bias is deeply entrenched and hard to overcome, and certainly the world is better off for technology. I find the “Vinyl is better than CD” argument tedious and wrong-headed. But you say:

” At the very least, it would be remarkably improbable if this moment were the precise moment in human history that augmentation turned bad on the whole for us”

This is exactly my worry: that we are in an era where global corporations wrote the laws that define what “consent” is. And “property”. And “fair.” Do you honestly think that CyborgCorp wouldn’t spy on you through your cyborg eyes if it could? Or that it wouldn’t attempt to enforce copyright by not allowing you to see certain things without paying a subscription fee?

The worry. . . perhaps as you say, unfounded. . . is that this time it is different, the next round of technological upgrades will be a world apart from what we are used to. This is what the techno-boosters would have us believe, if we are to take their talk of the Singularity seriously.

Again, I’m no luddite, but the argument “Glasses good therefore chip implants containing proprietary software good” strikes me as somewhat glib.

matt w @218

Apple has its own lossless codec, known as ALAC (sometimes ALE according to Wikipedia). See

http://www.mcelhearn.com/2011/10/28/apple-lossless-codec-goes-open-source/

Hidari, mp3s are very different qualitatively from phonographs. The difference is the ease with which they can be copied. Everyone can copy them, instead of the copying technology being held by a small class of publishers. They can be copied over copper wires, copied from one end of the world to another, copied infinitely without marginal cost and without loss of quality. You can also delete an MP3 to make room for a different one, on the same medium, with no loss of quality.

(That is the difference in terms of functionality; the differences in the underlying techniques are also qualitative. Also, other less significant functional differences include the ability to embed text, graphics, and video, and the ability to compare one copy to another to determine whether they are identical.)

The difference between the Boeing 747 and the hot air balloon is also qualitative: the air balloon cannot travel against the wind, or even cross-ways to the wind. Thus, for most points A and B, the balloon cannot make the journey from A to B. For those which it can make, it cannot make the round-trip from B to A.

I really don’t like the vinyl/mp3 debate. It’s a rathole. (But look at me, falling into it like everyone else.) And it’s not really about the technologies at all: people are conflating digital recording/playback technology with the particular audio standard of the Compact Disc. Optical media itself is capable of encoding vastly more information than vinyl media, for the same cost in space/money/material.

C.f. DVD-Audio (on the market since 2000). DVDs are optical media with ~10x the resolution of CD media. BluRay is optical media with ~100x the resolution of CD media. If people aren’t encoding audio at 100x the resolution of CDs, it’s certainly not because optical media technology doesn’t let them.

I just saw this:

If we haughtily dismiss voluntary contracts between consenting adults as ridiculously Landsburgian (or Yglesian), we’re presuming that there is some authority (and some policy process) that will make better choices.

The issue isn’t about “better choices” at all. We don’t have inalienable rights of tenants, or judicial standards of substantive unconscionability, or minimum wage laws, because these constitute “better choices.” We have these things because without them, the “best choice” for the powerless is to submit to unconscionable exploitation by the powerful.

When a judge throws out a contract because its terms are unconscionable, I do not for a second need to believe that the judge is capable of making “better choices” than the people who signed the contract, in order to support the judge having that power. The judge’s choice isn’t better than the choice made by the powerless person who signed the contract — the judge’s choice is unavailable to the person who signed the contract.

The judge can command that the more powerful person forgive a debt, or release an asset, or provide reasonable time to allow compliance with terms, or strike this or that line-item from the contract, and so on. A person offered a bad deal can be told “take it or leave it,” but if you say that to a judge…