Bugging

I set out, every year, to have my taxes completed well in advance of April 15th. And this year, I thought that I'd gotten quite the jump on it. It had been a week or so since I'd received the last of the forms I needed, and I sat down to get everything squared away. Only to run into an obstacle at the last moment.

Namely, that there was a bug in the H&R Block software that I was using for tax preparation, and it was convinced that I'd left a field blank, even while it showed me the value that it had calculated for the field. I went back to that section of the data entry process, and tried it all again, only to encounter the same error. And the error prevented me from e-filing the documents. Which wasn't, in and of itself, a huge problem. After all, I could just as easily have printed everything out, and dropped it into a mailbox.

What bothered me about it was that this was a fairly serious problem, that prevented the use of one of the primary features of the software, and is was present in the production release. And it pertained to a situation that was not new... people could just as easily have encountered this problem in previous years, so this was a failure in a system that had worked previously.

One of the problems that people have with modern capitalism, at least as they often encounter it, is that there always seems to be a drive to cut as many corners as possible, in the constant quest for marginally better shareholder value. Almost to the point where poor quality becomes an end in itself, something that investors affirmatively look for, as a guide to where they should place their assets.

I think the problem that institutions have in the United States, whether it's capitalism, or something like the press, is the the people who run them don't see their long-term health as enough of a benefit to themselves (or anyone else, for that matter) to look after it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that when people come to the conclusion that capitalism runs primarily on rent-seeking and exploitation, that they're no longer going to support it. But if the time horizon is always the next quarter, and no farther, the idea that in ten years, or even five years, people are going to turn on this system becomes a problem for later. So why not continue to squeeze the orange has hard as one can?

In the story of the goose that laid golden eggs, the moral is often taken to be that the greedy killers should have been happy with what they were getting, rather than hoping for a single massive payday. But as I understand the tale, their problem was that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the goose. And I think that this is what's happening now. Investors fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the society that they rely upon for their investments to be worth anything. And so they're going to be surprised when it can't, or won't, support them any longer.

Countdown

It's taken as a given that economic trade produces "winners and losers." But in a nation like the United States, where social trust is low and individualism is high, this seems like a recipe for long-term instability, as populism rises on both the Left and the Right.

While the desire of economic winners to keep their gains is understandable, what's less clear is why they expect the losers to simply accept that they're going to be left behind. I suspect that part of it is that low social trust tends to manifest itself as a belief that others are incompetent. Why worry about the impacts on other people, when one is convinced that those other people are easily distracted away from problems or not brave enough to start a conflict?

But I'd be willing to bet that a commitment to the Just World Hypothesis is also at work. People tend to be unwilling to see their own benefits as having been gained by past injustices, and there is also a tendency to believe that other people also understand the current situation as just, and accusations of prior bad acts to be made in bad faith. And I think that this worldview, which supposes that people know that they deserve to be in the place they are in, pushes back against ideas that a more equitable balancing of economic forces should be considered.

Given how much people view the current wave of automation as being disrespectful of them, it remains to be seen if it will create tangible benefits that mollify the public before a general anger boils over into a reaction that sets the technology back, at least here in the United States. These competing clocks are invisible, at least to me, and so I have no real sense of which one may be ticking faster than the other.

Billion-Dollar Baby

So, I've been hearing people talk about the idea of autonomous automation allowing for one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies. It's a topic that comes up on financial and technology podcasts from time to time.

And it's raised a question for me... What would these companies sell? Now, I get that it could be something new and wonderful that no-one has thought of yet, so I'm really asking what characteristics the goods and services they would offer would have.

Because if we're talking about a company that's 1 human being, and X number of automated agents, then anyone who has access to X number of automated agents could make the same thing. There could be other capital needs, but perhaps not, depending on what exactly it is that's being produced. So how does our one-person company protect its market(s) well enough to get to a billion-dollar valuation, rather than simply becoming a proof-of-concept for a number of other market actors? Would it need to be something where the primary market is people who don't have access to the same level of automation?

And, speaking of proof-of-concept, if our one-person company demonstrates that a whole class of goods/services could be produced entirely with automated agents, that could really do a number on the employment market. So does their product or service also need to be more-or-less downturn-proof? And how would that work in practice? Would it create demand for physical human labor in another area? Or would it be something that isn't aimed at the public at large? (Which goes back to the first question... because if other people could make their own version, anyone with the means to copy the product or service might not be a good long-term customer.)

In the end, I understand that talk of one-person, billion-dollar valuation companies is really about a level of techno-"optimism;" the idea that capital could create its own labor, and thus result in fairly big gains for the investor class... But I think that a lot of the speculation makes the implicit assumption that nothing else changes in the overall environment, and I suspect that wouldn't be the case. We'll see, I suppose, sooner or later.

Deduced

There are a couple of rather famous deductive arguments for the existence of God.

Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument can be considered to be a direct argument... it explicitly references God.

• It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
• God exists as an idea in the mind.
• A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
• Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined that does exist).
• But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the being-than-which-none-greater-can-be-imagined.)
• Therefore, God exists.

The Kalām cosmological argument, on the other hand, might be considered an indirect argument... it claims the Universe has a cause, but doesn't directly say anything about said cause. Other people, however, have added on to it.

• Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
• The universe began to exist.
• Therefore, the universe has a cause.

In each case, the final sentence, the one that begins "therefore" is considered to be true if one accepts the preceding statements, the premises, to be true. And this is part of what makes them popular. An apologist will walk someone through the premises, seeking agreement with each one, and then present the conclusion as granted. Which I get, because it works. The only way to avoid having to either agree with the conclusion or admit to following faulty logic is to deny one or more of the premises, which are generally held out to be common-sense statements that no-one should have a problem with.

But I was reading about these, as part of my amateur interest in philosophy, and it occurred to me: What do these arguments actually mean, anyway? Sure, they have their "common-sense" meanings, but is that actually what they mean?

Take the Ontological Argument. What does "greater" mean in this instance? How should it be understood? The argument doesn't hold up as well if I substitute "taller" for "greater." Because if it's true that "a being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, taller than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind," it does not follow that if I imagine a being a million feet tall, that there must be some real being that's taller than that. It appears, at least to me, to indicate that imaginary height does not matter. Going back to "greatness," this would seem to indicate that I find whomever I consider to be the greatest, and bestow the title of "God" upon them, but that's where it ends.

Likewise with the Cosmological Argument, what does it mean to "begin to exist?" I like to build plastic models as a pastime. And it's true that at some undefined point in the assembly process, a Mobile Suit or an aircraft "begins to exist." Now you don't see it, now you do. But it began to exist because it was assembled from parts that already existed. It's generally presumed that in the Cosmological Argument that the universe began to exist ex nihilo, but there's nothing in the syllogism itself that requires that interpretation. And because the Big Bang is, effectively an Event Horizon, there's no way of knowing whether the Universe simply sprang into existence, or if our current spacetime is simply the current arrangement of matter and energy that already existed in some or another form. So then, even if it's understood that the Universe began to exist, I'm not sure that this tells us anything, especially if energy may be neither created nor destroyed.

Now, to be sure, I don't think that I've put these two long-standing arguments to rest. I'm not that smart. I'm fairly certain that other people have come up with similar objections, and that someone else has come up with counter-arguments. I'm just surprised that I haven't encountered them, and their counters, more often.

On the Rails

One of the interesting things about buzzwords is that they acquire widely-understood, yet completely informal, definitions. My favorite recent example is "guardrails," which has become a shorthand for, effectively, building robust harm-prevention measures into new technologies. Which is interesting, because in the everyday world, that's not what guardrails are designed to do. Consider this post I made about a pickup truck going off the road near where I lived at the time.

The problem wasn't that the guardrails didn't work as designed... it was that an airborne pickup truck was not one of the situations that they'd been designed to contend with. But the guardrails were there; anyone happening by would see them. The point could be made that a new design may have been in order, but it was clear that they had been put in place.

And I think that is somewhat lacking in many of today's discussions of technological guardrails; the difference between inadequate and non-existent guardrails is non-obvious. And so for "guardrails" to be evident, they have to be so obvious as to be intrusive.

I have a set of "kitchen knives" that need to be disposed of. I nearly never used them (in part because they were just that bad), and I've finally gotten around to buying a semi-decent quality knife block with semi-decent quality knives. The "easy" way to dispose of the old knives would be to securely cover their blades in duct tape and throw them away, but I figured it was worth asking about online to find out if there were any better ways. No luck... my question was removed; likely before anyone saw it. The "guardrail" visibly did its job, but did so by presuming that my query was too dangerous for public consumption. Doubtless, there are likely people for whom that's the intended outcome, but it strikes me as overzealous.

And while it's clearer that guardrails are working when they're intrusive, that provides an incentive for people to move to where there are no guardrails. Granted, I'm not going to go searching for a free-speech haven just to ask for a good way to ditch some kitchen utensils, but I doubt that everyone finds their questions as trivial as that one.