People have rallied behind the store. There’s already a weblog dedicated dedicated to the cause.

That leaves Books Inc., who took over the space used by Printers, Inc. store in downtown Mountain View, as the only independent new bookseller in the area.

Neil Gaiman was supposed to do a signing over there to support Anansi Boys. He’s still going to Cody’s in Berkeley and Book Crossing in Corte Madera, but that means no signing in the South Bay unless his people could get him in Books Inc., which would be a logistical adventure.

A couple of days ago, a coworker asked me if I’ve been able to apply any of my economics training in my current profession.

Well, for one thing, I could had told you that pay-per-click creates perverse incentives for people to behave dishonestly in order to generate clicks.

And the pay-per-click people have no incentive to prevent click-farming:

FindWhat [the pay-per-click firm] has a policy prohibiting certain activities of this type [click-farming], and will likely terminate any affiliate account reported to them for abuse. However, terminating the account only means that FindWhat benefits from the hijacker’s activity without having to pay the hijacking affiliate. It’s a win-win situation for them.

Meuon declares: The real meat of the story is that the internet is not safe or trustworthy. As long as you pay for traffic, and deflect the cost of creating the traffic onto other users, yes.

If the companies hiring pay-for-click outfits wrote contracts specifying that they don’t pay for traffic generated by affiliates gaming the system, you remove the incentive for pay-for-click firms to look the other way while their system’s gamed.

The authors envision a state designed to protect the “integrity” of the home — autonomous family units composed exclusively of one woman, one man, and as many children as possible. As incentive for the mother to stay home and fulfill her “aptness for motherhood,” fathers would be paid a “family wage.” “Home economies” would replace the “control of big government and vast corporations,” whose demands have eroded the sovereignty of marriage-based families. The tax code would be amended to favor large families and small businesses.

So Canute, how’s that eliminating the tides by sovereign fiat working out for you?

The lack of vision, imagination, and creativity by the Christian Right leaves me amazed. They think they’ll deal with outsourcing by creating Purdah-lite, and handing out baby subsidies? The rest of the world will treat you as damage, and you remember the rest of that line.

Laugh at these people. They may have the ear of the President, but they’re still fools.

Other folks engage the problems, and have fun. “The Natural Family Manifesto” crowd have no Kung Fu.

It’s not the first time the Ministry has gone the pop culture route.

Manga on ‘serious’ subjects are not new. In 1988, the veteran artist Ishinomori Shotaro wrote Japan, Inc. about the trade wars of the period. Back then, Japan was worried about sending their automobile industry jobs to non-union plants in the US.

Bruce Sterling does not worry about a Vingean Singularity that renders humankind a powerless annoyance to transcendent artificial intelligences. Instead he worries about plain old human-driven technological change and nasty WMDs.

Cynthia and I drove up to the City to hear Bruce Sterling’s lecture for the Long Now Foundation at the Fort Mason Center. We had planned a quiet evening at home, watching Brian DePalma and Robert Altman, but Bruce gives great lectures, and after his recent talk at Microsoft I didn’t want to miss what could be a great talk. Thanks Cyn.

The talk can be found as an audio stream in Ogg and MP3.

Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation introduced Sterling. The topic was The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. Brand observes are discontinuities are potholes for group that’s planning for the next 10,000 years of human history.

The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!

Sterling starts with two definitions of The Singularity:

• Von Neumann to Ulam:

An unpublished speculation on the condition where the rate of change exceeds human control and comprehension.

• Vernor Vinge, a professor of mathematics in San Diego

The 1993 paper on the singularity is the cannonical defintion.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Fred Moulton reminds me that there’s been some philosophical papers in the past few years questioning if an emergent AI would decide to murder us all. Sterling didn’t mention these in his presentation.

However, Sterling’s not impressed with AI’s track record so far. He is not convinced that we’ll see ‘emergent’ AI.

He detours before heading to his next topic and discusses how the idea of the ‘singularity’ is a hard for SF writers to grapple. The technological singularity is impossible to communicate across, and thus the first way to read the title of his talk.

Dismissing Vinge

Sterling then puts up one of Vinge’s slides from his stump speech on the singularity. I can’t find these on Google or on Vinge’s site at San Diego State.

The slides are trend lines for computational power of machines compared to biological entities. A late 1990′s Mac is akin to a nematode. But while the Vax is a museum piece, the bacterium it supposedly superannuates still thrives.

He also has questions about Vinge’s definitions. Vinge talks about machines becoming self-aware, or ‘waking up.’ Biology does not, as of 2004, have a answer to what self-awareness is, so we cannot say if networked computers, ants, or a forest can or will have ‘woken up’.

There’s the matter of enhancing human intelligence, and Sterling’s open to that as being plausible. He then lays out alternatives to being super-smart. For example the psychologist Howard Gardner suggests we have multiple intelligences: cognition, emotional, physical, etc.

So instead of becoming some sort of human computing machine as the Mentats in Dune, enhancements might make us more able to be mindful, empathic, and realize what horribly rude people we are. One would hope they have good Prozac after that singularity.

Previous Singularities

Sterling lists three events that have singularity nature:

1. The Atomic Bomb
2. LSD
3. Computer Viruses

All three have changed the world, but only briefly.

Obsolescese and the Singularity

Sterling suggests the future will be a glut of undigested technical riches.

He continues with a new slide, Gartner Research’s Hype Cycle, a five-phase life-cycle of technology adoption. How ‘grown ups’ think about technology.

Of course, he adds, Gartner won’t tell you your business is dead as long as you have a budget for consultants.

The ‘S’ or logistic curve was the earlier form of Gartner’s hype cycle.

Returning to obsolescence, he asks the audience if we’d bother to pick up a copy of Windows 3.0 we found at the curb.

“The street didn’t pick up on the singularity.”

“There aren’t factions in the singularity movement.”

“The singularity has no end users.”

Schools of Thought

• Just No Way
• Superbian Transhumans
• Rapture of the Nerds
• Apocalypse

Judith Berman

• Singularity Resisters

Bill Joy

Science Fiction and Singularity

It’s a great way to make plot, “we had a singularity blow through”.

Ken McLeod’s Engines of Light novels, The Stone Canal, and The Sky Road are all about people living in the ruins of singularities.

We May be on the Edge of Nothing Important.

But we may be edging towards something important.

Like virus writers, the infrastructure of the singularity makers are well-contained. If you lock-up, bomb them, or take away their funding, they go away long before they produce anything self-sustaining.

There’s a large following for the singularity, but that crowd does not actively try to bring it about. This is the “geek rapture” crowd for whom Vinge is the equivalent of Left Behind.

They don’t imagine that a singularity could be monopolized, like the Biblical Fundamentalist version, or that it may be short lived: “And you have burned so brightly Roy.”

Science doesn’t reward thinking through consequences. We reward scary science that gives us things like hydrogen bombs, even the moral titans of science: Einstein, and Sakorov did their heavy lifting in the WMD area.

Containment

He suggests commercialization and broad patenting might stop a future singularity, but technologies with the biggest threat potential may pay off well in the market.

He suggests that two NGO superpowers may emerge who will attempt to marginalize the “kooks” on either side.

The conservative/religous opposition to stem-cell research may be an example of one of these new ‘superpowers’. The President’s Council on Bioethics’ report Reproduction and Responsiblity, talks about a biological singularity and opposes it.

Then there’s force. Sterling asks why wouldn’t a government ready to wage endless war on terrorism declare endless war on the singularity. The ‘nowhere to hide’ rhetoric of President Bush may extend from caves in Afghanistan to labs in China.

At this point, I must give a shout out to the Global Frequency, the sort of NGO one might want to have in this circumstance.

What Can We Say, Pace the Singularity

1. Posthuman is a soundbite.
2. Not just one singularity.
3. The posthuman condition is banal from a post human’s point of view.
4. Messy, embarassing, reversible singularites are preferable to the alternative.
5. It’s hard to be just a little bit dead.

Going back to Judith Berman, Sterling closes with the observation that the most adept political actors in the world right now are people who blow themselves up.

To get past that, we must go back to treating the future as process and not a destination.

I bet the folks working at those call centers must had had a laugh, especially if they were push-polling.

I’m surprised that Blame India Watch didn’t pick up on this one. And I would had passed on the link to them if they had contact info. Hint, hint.

The site’s slogan is: “Lost your IT job? Blame HR and your management. Don’t blame India, or Indians.” I’d add, blame the Internet, wage-differentials, and technology.

I’ve heard the same complaints about Amazon and Borders. I know a few people who write for a living, and they love Amazon and Borders. Because in rural East Texas there is only one place to shop: WalMart. And the only book you will find at WalMart is something on the order of Bill O’Reilly inciting the mob to throw non-Republicans in the furnaces. And before that, well, maybe your little hamlet had a library.

But even in the sticks, people have Internet access, and while Jeff Bezos will sell you Ann Coulter’s Kill All the F*ck*ng Liberals, he’ll also sell you The Left Hand of Darkness and other fine books.

I’m lucky and have an independent bookstore two blocks from my place. If you live in the ‘burbs, then if you’re lucky you will have a Borders. However, the Indie bookstore with the Booksense 76 shelf also features the same, nasty Right Winger books you’ll find at WalMart and Borders, because they sell, and the bookseller would like to stay in business.

I find it ironic that Slashdot is worrying about offshoring of programming. These are the same folks who cheer everytime a country like Israel or China chooses to go with free software over software written in America that costs money. Nice to know they care.

At a high level, you we can state that offshoring and choosing open source software are driven by first-order optimization: it may be, in some cases, cheaper to use Linux or outsource work overseas.

However, I don’t think the comparison holds up that well.

Much of what’s outsourced is ‘commodity’ work. Even if the projects were written in C# rather than Perl, that work would go overseas.

China and Israel’s choice to use Open Source over Microsoft tools means that for those decision makers, the Open Source value proposition is better than Microsoft’s, Apple’s, SCO’s, or HP’s (to name a few vendors.)

I don’t see offshoring going away unless eXtreme Programming and other rapid methodologies are adopted by IT organizations, and are demonstrated as less expensive than outsourcing ‘traditional’ methods.

However, there’s a market for platforms, and Microsoft, Apple, and Open Source compete.

Robert, if Microsoft wants China, then Longhorn, as software you buy, has to be more compelling then good old grubby command line and scary window manager Linux. But regardless of if it’s developed in .Net, J2EE, Project Builder, or LAMP, most likely we’ll see most IT work developed in China and India.

Zakaria doesn’t care for government by initiative either, and holds out California as an example of the destruction wrought: 85% of the state budget is out of the control of the legislature due to a combination of initiative-set mandates and restrictions, unfunded federal mandates, and entitlements.

Meanwhile, my fellow Californians blame the Governor and Legislature for a budget mess caused by a process that has removed authority from the people we elect to deliberate on budgets, and demand a recall. But when an advisor to a popular candidate to replace the Governor points out one of the reasons for California’s mess, they turn on both the advisor and the candidate.

It’s enough to turn one into a Burkean conservative.