The rise of cheap AI has the possibility of devaluing human labor in a scary way. When the free market prices the value of a human’s labor at about a year’s worth electricity for some AI, obtaining food and shelter is going to be a real pain in the ass. Socialism is going to be looking pretty good.

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…

I appreciate this reply. Imprimis let me just mention that I don’t intend “Luddite” as an epithet. Plenty of folks in this thread have embraced the term outright or sympathized with the movement, so I find it useful as a catch-all for the folks who think that there was something seriously wrong with Noah Smith’s post.

I think we share a lot of common ground over questions of privacy and proprietary software: I write free software (arguably for a living), run a free operating system, and am changing my distribution because the people in charge of it recently got caught up in privacy shenanigans. I do assume that CyberCorp would spy through my SEM eyes if they could, and contra some others in this thread I don’t assume that a democratic state will restrain itself from similar or worse acts, let alone check corporate malfeasance. (The electronic surveillance record of the US is objectively terrible and has been since electronic surveillance became an option. Neither are things much better, unfortunately, in many social democratic Western states.)

To offer another example, I find it appalling that an entire generation is already growing up in a culture in which it is taken for granted that one can’t execute a program on one’s own [sic] machine without asking permission from, say, Apple. I remain unsure, though, how legislation is supposed to address that: what explains the popularity of the iPad except that most people just don’t share my preferences? Should the law enforce the judgment that Apple should not be allowed to sell people computers to which they do not have (or apparently desire) root access? I think iPad users have got it profoundly wrong (and acknowledge that some of them are probably reading this through the touchscreens of their sleek white cages…), but I don’t understand how such a law would be welfare-enhancing. How many of them think that a democratically elected legislature should be allowed to confiscate their devices because they detract from the social good, pitting consumer against consumer by refusing to boycott machines that lack compilers by design? What’s the qualitative difference between the hypothetical scenarios you mention and this actually existing one, which many CTers are enthusiastic about? Are their choices false, subject as they are to social pressures?

Laws preventing CyberCorp from spying on your SEM eyes already exist, just as the 4th Amendment also exists, and neither have a very impressive track record at preventing state and non-state actors from engaging in illegal surveillance. (Per your hypothetical, cyborg eyes which censored copyrighted materials would be complying with existing IP law enacted by a formally legitimate government, not subverting it—which kind of illustrates my point.) Given that history, the least bad solution seems pretty clear to me: give individuals the tools to make their own decisions about the technologies they use. I don’t get the sense that the same state that harasses cryptographers, tried to ban email encryption, and vies with China for the world-historically largest internal surveillance program is likely to make good decisions for me about whether I get that bionic implant. I would like a Fourth Amendment with teeth, but I would also like a pony.

At the risk of misinterpretation, let me reiterate: I am extremely pessimistic about any law of the form ‘you’re not allowed to use __ technology’. I support legislation preventing our corporate overlords from doing things to you that you don’t consent to, but I also just assume that they will try. Hence I’d like to ensure that the very technologies which can safeguard against that are not, themselves, illegal. To that end, I’m very wary of legislation that would categorically restrict entire classes of technologies, especially those involving one’s own body, because (1) altering your body as you see fit is a human right, and (2) such laws beg to be misused. What I find far more likely than a law preventing AT&T from wiretapping your bionic eyes is a law that actually prevents you from disclosing the secret algorithm that AT&T uses to wiretap you. Analogous examples are not lacking.

I’m not sure how much disagreement there really is between us, but I hope that clarifies my view.

(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.

http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/us/Products/pages/ProductDetails.aspx?CatId=Amplifiers&ProductId=MC275

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/

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.

Keir@170/208: But who listens to lossless formats on iPods? I don’t have one myself, but it took a fair bit of work to find an application that plays FLACs on my laptop (finding an application that does it and that doesn’t have a ridiculous interface counts, especially since the one I used to use stopped working when I upgraded my OS). And it seems to me that it’s not an apples to apples if you’re not comparing things that are used with comparable frequency; I imagine that many fewer people are using their iPods to play FLACs on a decent set of speakers than were playing mid-range turntables into decent speakers for a similar experience. Why this is is an interesting question, perhaps (I suspect the answer is going to be somewhere in the area of vertically integrated monopolies).

Anyway I suspect sound quality doesn’t really affect how much most people enjoy music that much. The increased convenience of CDs is certainly nice, and MP3s perhaps more so, though on the other hand there was increased cost for CDs (driven partly by price-fixing).

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.

This is inanely idiotic, and ignorant of the actual history of the technology. It wasn’t until 1877 that you had playback, which is a massive “breakthrough” (if we want to think of there being “breakthroughs” which is I think quite dumb). So there’s one super obvious “breakthough” after 1860.

Why do so many people run their mouths on the internet without checking basic facts?

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.

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.

–bks