
On the Moral Economy of Tech (2016) - mapleoin
http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
======
pjmorris
I'm not a SV resident, but I've visited several times, over decades, and this
rings true...

"Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll
through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the
heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential
theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that
have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by
maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we
finally make life better for all those other people."

~~~
threatofrain
I mean, I feel like tech people have this sense of moral exceptionalism and
don't understand the value of moral consensus in a democracy, as opposed to
moral obligation by noblesse oblige.

Something isn't only right or wrong in a democracy. You have to also _build_
consensus through boots on the ground, not by expecting everyone to have moral
revelations by magic. So, is there consensus in America that inequity and
poverty are issues that rise to the level of national discussion?

I would say no.

So how do you go about having an interesting and durable agenda of attacking
American inequity and poverty in an extra-legal way when you don't have
consensus in a democracy? By flexing tech money muscle? Do tech people,
excluding elites, have that much money, that they can buy their way to
morality without first doing consensus work?

~~~
Kalium
Tech people in SV and the Bay live in a world where they experience consensus
as a series of badly broken systems. The deep, durable pockets of poverty and
misery? Built and maintained by democratic consensus. The needs-much-
improvement public schools of SF and Oakland? Built and maintained by
consensus. The state of BART? Built and maintained by consensus.

People on average don't _like_ poverty, misery, gentrification, unreliable
public transit, and spiking rents. But on average, people around here _do_
seem to like all the things that contribute to those. Prop 13, "neighborhood
character" concerns halting housing construction, and bus stops every block
are all popular.

I can't claim to speak for everyone here. But personally? I see a lot of
broken systems that I cannot fix. Where my attempts to help fix things for
everyone are not only ineffectual, but actively unwelcome.

In light of that, I do what I can. I make myself comfortable. If I cannot
address the suffering of others, I can at least limit my own suffering. No
lives are improved if I join in the suffering of others to indulge some
bizarre impulse to self-flagellate. My own suffering is not a moral
imperative.

~~~
conanbatt
Well said. Rent control, prop 13, NIMBY all things that deepen the terrible
consequences that are seen everyday.

And its crazy to me to visit Seattle right now and also find my way walking
next to so many mentally ill homeless people.

I'm not big on most socialized solutions, but taking care of mentally ill
people roaming the streets is one of those that are very easy to agree to. Yet
the topic everyday is Trump this or that,while you had to walk past 10-20
people to get to the office.

There is some massive cognitive dissonance going on, that I think I can easily
think and talk about because im a foreigner.

~~~
Kalium
It's hard to take care of the mentally ill who live on the streets, especially
in California. They cannot be legally confined for treatment until they are
deemed a threat to themselves or others, and that's a pretty high bar. Until
then, it's up to them to seek treatment. Many don't want it or can't handle
the organization / discipline to stay treated.

As a result, it's not nearly as tractable a problem as it seems.

~~~
conanbatt
Yet cities like buenos aires with rampant poverty don't have this issue and it
doesn't nearly as much to solve that particular problem.

It is a problem of policy and one that affects both the homeless and the non
homeless people tremendously. I guess if the couple that had kept the presidio
street and were to put up the homeless tents there , the problem would find a
solution much faster.

As many others, its a problem of political will. What is unique, is that
people everyday have to deal with homeless people in SF and yet its not a top
agenda. Smoking pot is tho.

------
itsmenotyou
I think as technologists we have a natural preference for clean technological
solutions that don't involve politics or messy interpersonal relationship
issues. Failing to confront that whole human sphere of life leads to negative
consequences everywhere, and the talk does a great job of pointing out some of
the macro social effects.

On a similar note but a more localized scale I'm reminded of this talk on one
of the downsides of moving to microservices being that people can avoid
difficult conversations
[https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s](https://youtu.be/kb-m2fasdDY?t=8m2s)

------
isoskeles
One thing I dislike about articles like this is that they get you to agree on
some basic point, such as, "Hey did you notice that there is a lot of wealth
AND poverty in San Francisco?" Yes, I agree with that. "Well, actually, it's
libertarians' and techies' fault!" Oh okay, you were correct about the first
part so you're correct about the second too.

"Also, by the way, they're just like Hitler / Stalin / thinly veiled shout-out
to something really bad!"

> Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting
> reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a
> shame not to learn them.

I do agree that San Francisco has this strange juxtaposition of impoverished
hellscape versus obscene wealth. It's the main reason I plan to leave here
within the next couple of years. But I'd do myself a disservice if I latched
onto a thought that this is the fault of some political ideological minority
in the area, or even the majority (bleeding hearts). This "poverty and misery"
is the techies' fault in the same way that alcoholism is the fault of
bartenders.

All that said, I agree with the conclusion about data. There _should be_ a
moral obligation to limit or stop this storage. It creeps me the hell out, and
it's why I don't use Facebook or Google any more, knowing that this doesn't
fully solve the problem. I'll add that the metaphor he depicts is really
great:

> As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a
> forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very
> potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only
> accumulates. I don't want to see the fire come, but at the same time, I
> can't figure out a way to persuade other people of the great danger.

I just wish the writer were mature enough to make that argument without the
scapegoating of ideology, or the wrong ideology. This isn't about
libertarianism or "trickle down" (from HN comments) or capitalism or a dislike
for politics, it's about technological progress. Ideologies that are opposed
to the writer's scapegoats will also act in service of technological progress
when it is convenient for them.

~~~
old-gregg
It's not hard to read his point. For startups, the bay area is nearly almost
the first market to launch in. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, numerous food delivery
services, or anything aimed at the SMB market, all of this goes in production
in bay area first and this place is closer to the ultimate digital utopia than
anywhere else in the country. His point is that it doesn't make "the world a
better place", presumably because all value is captured by the capital owners
[his comparison to industrial revolution]

------
pjmorris
More article-quoting:

"As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working
with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings.
These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the
natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions,
and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist
that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer
sometimes enjoyable."

I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He
didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?

~~~
jaredhansen
>I recently asked a friend whether he thought people were deterministic. He
didn't think so (I don't either.) What do you think?

It's the wrong question. People are _deterministic_ , but that doesn't mean
they're always _predictable_ _.

In some sense, it's trivially true: we're physical systems, so of _course*
we're deterministic. The underlying physics that govern how the subatomic
particles that make up the atoms that make up the molecules that make up the
brain, is pretty well established at this point -- so if someone wants to
assert some kind of special exemption for human brains: "everything _else_ in
the observable universe obeys physical law, but _this_ is different!" the
burden of proof is going to be pretty damn high. And nobody has ever put forth
anything like real _evidence_ for such an exemption -- the fact that "we don't
understand how the brain works" doesn't mean it doesn't work in _some_
fundamentally knowable way.

However, that doesn't mean that brains are (at least with current or
reasonably-foreseeable-future technology) "ultimately tractable" even in
principle, much less that we have any way of getting inside brains to see what
people are going to do in real time.

And the reason people care about whether people are "deterministic" or not is
because we want to know how to influence them, and for what we should assign
praise/blame etc., and there's a common hidden assumption that determinism
removes our ability to do that in some way. But I think that assumption's
false (you don't see determinists just throwing up their hands and declaring
ethics don't matter). There's a massive amount of physical evidence for
determinism and no evidence at all against -- I'm not sure how anyone with a
science background could believe otherwise at this point.

* "Predictable" here means something like "predictable by other humans, including via reasonably foreseeable technology". If we're in a simulation, the simulator can, by construct, "predict" the whole thing.

~~~
njarboe
I'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic. That idea
was the state of the art understanding in say the 19th century (billiard balls
and Newtonian physics), but quantum mechanics, at the beginning of the 20th
century, fundamentally changed the understanding of reality at the lowest
level.

For a good layman's introduction I would suggest, "QED The Strange Theory of
Light and Matter", (1986) by Feynman. Hard ideas but clear prose. I like to
read it every few years to remind myself of the fundamentals.

~~~
RandomOpinion
> _I 'm not sure why you think the underlying physics is deterministic._

If conclusive evidence were found that human consciousness is fundamentally
dependent on QM processes to function, that would be a Nobel Prize-worthy
discovery. Aside from some minor papers exploring the topic, no such evidence
has been found AFAIK.

~~~
njarboe
The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced by
quantum effects. Over a short period of time the functioning of the neurons in
the human brain will be influenced by QM enough that the billiard ball, clock
work, deterministic view of the future unfolding is not correct.

~~~
RandomOpinion
> _The functioning of chemistry in individual cells definitely are influenced
> by quantum effects._

So? Transistors used in modern computers directly depend on quantum effects
(semiconductor physics was an outgrowth of QM) as well, yet we do not need to
take into account QM when writing software or designing microprocessors.

~~~
njarboe
Where will my body be in five years? Quantum effects will definitely be
manifest enough that the answer to that is not deterministic. Maybe because I
am not a professional philosopher I'm missing the special meaning of the work
deterministic as used here. I think the point of the OP was that computers are
a specially designed system that is very complicated, but at the bottom
created by humans who have spent a lot of time and effort to make it
deterministic unlike the the "real" world.

------
samlevine
> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard
> because they involve politics. But they should involve politics.

... SNIP ...

> In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise
> democratic control over that software.

Tighter control over targeted advertising by Facebook won't suddenly help with
crappy zoning or infrastructure projects designed to maximize the extraction
of wealth from taxpayers while minimizing the results.

~~~
bpchaps
Serious question: what the heck is your point?

~~~
samlevine
The author correctly points out that the Bay Area's problems are political in
origin, and that tech companies and technologists in general have been
reticent to get dirty with politics.

However, their solution, putting tech companies under more democratic control,
does not solve the problems specified.

Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's work is under democratic control. As are the
zoning policies which keep out poor and middle class citizens from the few
parts of the country which have benefited from our economic growth. The
companies that charge our local state and federal governments 10x what
Europeans to build roads, bridges, mass transit and build other projects are
very tightly controlled by our democratic systems.

Facebook and Google are not preventing people from building housing. They are
not building tools for the government to round up "undesirables", nor are they
building drones that blow up civilians. They are building technology that
allows advertisers to more accurately sell people stuff.

It should be obvious to anyone at this point that this could be used for
nefarious purposes. But so can any number of other technologies developed over
the past two centuries. The 20th century was a testament to how much murder
humans can commit when given the opportunity, and we did not need machine
learning to make it happen.

~~~
bpchaps
I'm not sure I'm following your points. You're moving back and forth between
_enormous_ historical and current problems and sweeping the platitudinal meat
under the rug.

It's easy to point to those problems and say,"Yeah, but this is nowhere near
what it used to be!". If a global, location and interests tracking system
looks like a duck, then it's probably a duck.

Disclaimer: I work for an advertisement company. Opinions are my own.

~~~
samlevine
> I'm not sure I'm following your points. You're moving back and forth between
> enormous historical and current problems and sweeping the platitudinal meat
> under the rug.

The problems America faces are largely controlled by democratic systems.

Google, Facebook, et al are neither the cause nor the solution to the problems
described by the author of the post.

If we decide to turn ad networks into surveillance systems used to commit
crimes against humanity it will be because our democratically elected
representatives were told to do _something_ by voters and they did so.

~~~
bpchaps
If you don't mind me asking, what sort of political, civics or activism work
have you done? What you're saying rings true to a point, but it's not useful
to the conversation and comes off as armchair naivete.

------
tboyd47
A lot of the criticisms against SV these days echo Jonathan Swift's portrayal
of the scientific communities of his day:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laputa)

------
mark_l_watson
Who was the author? I didn’t see attribution on the linked page.

~~~
wellpast
[http://idlewords.com/about.htm](http://idlewords.com/about.htm)

~~~
czep
By the way, everything on his site is absolute gold, I can't remember a time I
was so awed by someone's blog. Even his resume is brilliant and hilarious!

I highly recommend browsing, it's great writing.

~~~
wellpast
Been poking around. I like his thinking.

Apparently, "Paul Graham is a weenis," though.
[http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#...](http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm#2)

------
megamindbrian2
I wish this could be said louder.

