
The Coming War on General Purpose Computation  - jamesbritt
http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html?utm_source=assburner
======
jamesbritt
_I certainly appreciate Mr. Doctrow's willingness to help get the word out but
in my opinion a presentation at the Chaos Computer Congress is preaching to
the choir._

True. OTOH these sorts of events create video by-products that can be
distributed to other people (though Boing-boing is likely another choir).

Still, I found it interesting because of how he outlines the possible
reasoning for such maneuvers (e.g. screwing with DNS is portrayed in the same
light as dropping phone service for the head shop down the block), which can
help folks like use when we try to explain to non-geeks why things like SOPA
or walled-garden electronics are so bad.

~~~
sneak
I'm the choir you're talking about, on all of his major points, and I'd never
heard the term "cognitive liberty" before this video. I'd like to think I'm
well-informed on these topics, too.

These things are beneficial, if only for the same-page-ification that the
choir requires from time to time.

------
WildUtah
This isn't coming. A decade ago Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-Disney) ran a bill that
outlawed general purpose computers and made it a federal crime to posses a
compiler without a license.

It's long since been here and will continue. Government officials desire the
power to act with discretion to outlaw the computers they don't like and
tolerate those they do. The especially want the power to decide after the fact
and hold you retroactively responsible for anything they choose. The computer
industry with its empowerment of the masses and startup culture is especially
vulnerable to the usual bureaucratic power games so we will have to fight in
order to lose our freedoms more slowly.

The legislators and bureaucrats aren't stupid and they aren't ignorant of the
principle of Turing Equivalence. They love the idea that every computer can be
demonized and outlawed at once. They especially love the idea that every
programmer must hope for the forbearance of his superior in the bureaucracy,
forever focused on pleasing the big man in Washington on whose pleasure his
freedom depends.

It's like 1984 where Winston thinks that O'Brien will be his ally in reform
because O'Brien understands the corruption, abuse, and evil of the system.
Winston was wrong. The incumbents will not improve by being better informed.
The horror totalitarian future you want to avoid is exactly the dream they
cherish.

~~~
nerfhammer
I see this viewpoint as containing the following characteristics.

* the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing

* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably orchestrate society-scale things

* the idea that society-scale things can be planned at all, which entails that society-scale things can be predicted reliably

* the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group

* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular consciousness

* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular motivation exactly like that of a single human being, such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy

This type of thinking has been attractive to humanity for the last hundred
thousand years or so. It's like Hellenistic polytheism in which the natural
world could be understood as being comprised of human-like entities each of
which can be understood the way you would psychologize a single person. You
can understand the natural world as you would understand the complex interplay
of visceral motivations of different human-like minds. You might find it
similar to the world The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, any
given soap opera, any Shakespeare play; the game of the viewer is you have to
keep track of these different shifting alliances, relationships, and the
visceral motives (lust, price, envy etc) of all these different characters
plotting and scheming against each other; it's like porn for a certain part of
the mind, it's just part of being a social ape. It's doubtless that it's a
vital part of being a member of any small troop of chimpanzees, keeping track
of complicated relationships, who owes who what, who's allied with who, who's
sleeping with who, etc.

~~~
dextorious
"""* the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an
entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing"""

"fully conscious" is a weasel-word to disqualify the fact the fact that A LOT
of society-wide events DO happen because they are planned by an entity.

Not only an aggregate entity, like a government, but even a single man
sometimes. A dictator, for example, can (and historically has) pass a totally
arbitrary law or course of action of his own choosing. (Napoleon: "we shall
invade Russia").

"""* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably
orchestrate society-scale things"""

"Reliably" is another weasel-word here. Maybe a plan cannot ever go 100% as
planned, but entities DO exist that can determine a course of action society-
scale and make it happen. For example, NRA and it's lobbyists can pen, lobby
and have the congress vote for a specific law.

"""* the idea that society-scale things can be planned at all, which entails
that society-scale things can be predicted reliably"""

See adobe.

"""* the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group"""

Human characteristics (like "ambition", "ambivalence", "will", "shameless"
etc) are totally applicable to groups, even vague groups. Actually, those
characteristics as as easily applicable to single human s as to groups of
humans -- there's nothing that makes them inherently applicable to single
humans only.

"""* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular
consciousness"""

Singular is another weasel-word here. They might not have a "singular
consciousness", but they DO have an aggregate consciousness. I.e it's
statistics, not an exact measurement.

"""* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular
motivation exactly like that of a single human being, such as greed, avarice,
lust, pride, jealousy"""

Same as above.

In fact your arguments can even be applied to single human beings. Who said
that the idea that a single human being "can be understood as having a
singular motivation such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy" is not
silly?

We choose to generalize, we choose to make broad statements on data aggregates
etc, both on terms of single human beings and groups because IT WORKS, and
because it helps us understand and judge reality better.

It's like when we study chemistry: yeah, underneath it it's all physics, but
it's a nice level of abstraction to have and it helps us understand processes
and act better for a lot of cases.

~~~
nerfhammer
>> * the idea that society-wide events happen because they are planned by an
entity that is fully conscious of what it is doing

> "fully conscious" is a weasel-word to disqualify the fact the fact that A
> LOT of society-wide events DO happen because they are planned by an entity.

> Not only an aggregate entity, like a government, but even a single man
> sometimes. A dictator, for example, can (and historically has) pass a
> totally arbitrary law or course of action of his own choosing. (Napoleon:
> "we shall invade Russia").

Perhaps there is a difference between the claims that "events however they
turn out will generally be seen as having been intended" and "there are no
events that were intended as such", the latter of which your response would be
more applicable to.

Do you think that there's a difference between claiming "Napolean" wants X and
whatever the referent of "bureaucrats" is as wanting X that could be worth
discussing? That difference being a major thrust of my point.

Clearly the vague-group issue wouldn't apply very well to an absolute
dictatorship. Even with that dictatorship your example could be seen a strong
counter-example: Napolean's plan was to invade Russia but his plan completely
blew up in his face and ended up with a result that was absolutely not part of
his plan.

You say that "not only" vague entities can have plans and then discuss
dictators, so perhaps it's harder to think of examples of that.

>>"""* the believe that entities actually exist that could actually reliably
orchestrate society-scale things"""

> "Reliably" is another weasel-word here. Maybe a plan cannot ever go 100% as
> planned, but entities DO exist that can determine a course of action
> society-scale and make it happen. For example, NRA and it's lobbyists can
> pen, lobby and have the congress vote for a specific law.

Ok. Maybe sometimes something very specific and very short-term can be
achieved reliably by a specific organization with the intention to do so. It
is not true that there are no events that happen that were intended.

Perhaps if the poster had in fact given a very specific group with a very
specific plan then we could have talked about the likelihood of that
happening. I bet that would be a more useful discussion.

>> * the attribution of human characteristics to a vague group

> Human characteristics (like "ambition", "ambivalence", "will", "shameless"
> etc) are totally applicable to groups, even vague groups. Actually, those
> characteristics as as easily applicable to single human s as to groups of
> humans -- there's nothing that makes them inherently applicable to single
> humans only.

The poster made claims of EXTREMELY SPECIFIC human characteristics to vague
groups. They know about "Turing Equivalence", "love the idea that every
computer can be demonized", "love the idea that every programmer must hope for
the forbearance of his superior in the bureaucracy, forever focused on
pleasing the big man in Washington", "cherish" the "dream" of totalitarianism.

Even if some of the set of characteristics we could apply to humans could also
be applied to groups, the burden of proof on something as specific as above
would seem to be very large.

>>* the idea that vague groups can be understood as having a singular
consciousness

> Singular is another weasel-word here. They might not have a "singular
> consciousness", but they DO have an aggregate consciousness. I.e it's
> statistics, not an exact measurement.

I don't know what an "aggregate consciousness" is.

It sounds like "consciousness" in that term may have a somewhat different
sense than what we would normally mean by the word.

> In fact your arguments can even be applied to single human beings. Who said
> that the idea that a single human being "can be understood as having a
> singular motivation such as greed, avarice, lust, pride, jealousy" is not
> silly?

That's an interesting idea but actually I don't think people actually think
that way by default. I think people do in fact very often think of each other
as being motivated by greed, envy, lust, etc.

Even so, should ill-defined groups really be thought of as having motivations
"exactly like" that of individual people?

In fact I think we have a tendency to attribute group motivations as being
even more simple than that of a single person. A person could be greedy but
could also be wracked by guilt; a person could want Y today but change his
mind and want X tomorrow. It's difficult to think of a vague group attribution
that anyone would actually make that includes complex or conflicting
motivations or changes of heart, etc.

> We choose to generalize, we choose to make broad statements on data
> aggregates etc, both on terms of single human beings and groups because IT
> WORKS, and because it helps us understand and judge reality better.

I strongly disagree and don't understand why you could think that. "statements
on data aggregates" seems like a poetic way of referring to what is just some
sort of personal feeling or impression. I'm curious to know why you think "it
works" perhaps in comparison to other ways of thinking you've tried. I think
we think as we do largely because we are predisposed to do so based on
processes adapted from those of our pre-human ancestors, not because we tried
out several different ways and concluded this was the best among them. Even
so, perhaps any different way of thinking could have different merits and
flaws that we could discuss.

> It's like when we study chemistry: yeah, underneath it it's all physics, but
> it's a nice level of abstraction to have and it helps us understand
> processes and act better for a lot of cases.

I think this is an exceptionally poor analogy. Chemistry is extremely specific
and precise and well-defined and makes clearly falsifiable claims even if we
erased all knowledge of physics. If we could discuss such matters as precisely
as in a chemistry paper we could tell immediately how we could try to figure
out which claims could be true decisively. If someone wrote a chemistry paper
with as much vagueness as the poster I was replying they would be laughed out
of the auditorium.

------
Tycho
Somewhat ironically, the way mobile computing is obsessed with simple 'apps'
reminds me somewhat of the 'Unix philosophy' - lots of tools that do one
thing, which you can chain/pipe together into workflows to great effect. I can
see this taking off more if vendors and developers work more on simple
'piping' APIs. And other things like RDFs, Service-Oriented Architecture in
general.

And it could be so much more richer than the usual piping of text that happens
in Unix. Imagine, you take a picture with your camera phone; you pipe the
image to some sort of visual pattern matching program which isolates the faces
in the picture; which are then uploaded to an online facial recognition
service and the identities sent back to you; which are piped to a social
networking app to find which people list polka as an interest; and then
finally to your email/messaging program of choice so you can invite them to
your monthly polka event. THEN you can save this workflow and have it execute
from just a single camera shot... or have the camera input come from a
surveillance camera via bluetooth.

~~~
jamesbritt
_lots of tools that do one thing, which you can chain/pipe together into
workflows to great effect._

Sounds like Android's intents.

~~~
stcredzero
I think if Apple has their way (uncertain) then everything will become a
backplane for Siri.

------
DrCatbox
Its not just we vs them, as he mentions the possibility to print biological
structures is kind of creepy, so some control is necessary. You wouldnt want
kids printing out viruses and such far fetched scenarios.

We hackers have a responsibility to not only fight against stupid laws, but to
put in place sane ones, which respect freedom and privacy and also maintain
public safety.

~~~
qdog
I think he mentioned that as printing out biological structures that would eat
Monsanto's products. You can take this to mean it is creepy, but I think he
meant it was a threat to Monsanto and when Monsanto realizes this, they are
going to attempt to get legislation passed.

------
j_s
Is this war not already here? Perhaps it is not counted as a war since so few
are defending general purpose computation.

I certainly appreciate Mr. Doctrow's willingness to help get the word out but
in my opinion a presentation at the Chaos Computer Congress is preaching to
the choir. [Edit:] BoingBoing is a little closer to mainstream, but there's a
way to go.

~~~
JonnieCache
If you watch the talk, you will see that it was written for the choir. He
discusses the challenges and responsibilities that we as hackers will face in
future, and how they will go way beyond the current copyright wars. It was
something of a call to arms basically.

I was in the audience last night, and it was an excellent presentation. All of
the talks I have seen so far have been excellent, and I encourage you to check
out the 28c3 youtube channel, where prerelease versions of all the talks are
being posted (with extremely low delays I might add.)

<http://youtube.com/28c3>

Also, you can watch live streams here:

<http://28c3.fem-net.de/>

~~~
j_s
Thanks for the recommendation. I did watch the first half hour's worth, up to
the Q/A session. I didn't really hear any 'next action' though... was there
any recommendation on what I should be doing about this now?

~~~
JonnieCache
Not as such, it was more of a general thing about what might (probably will)
happen in the future, designed to provoke thought in the community. As he was
dealing in hypotheticals, however likely they may be, there was not much talk
of specific actions, as far as I remember anyway.

The Q&A was also very interesting, and it included more concrete discussion of
possible ways forward I think.

------
nextparadigms
We should send the video to our representatives and other SOPA/PIPA
supporters. Maybe some of them will get it.

~~~
plink
They will "get it" only if the video is accompanied by campaign contributions.

