Future Present

So, as I noted back in January, I've been re-reading William Gibson. Specifically, the "Sprawl Trilogy" of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I've been picking the books up as I found them, and it took a while for there to be a new copy of MLO on the shelves anywhere nearby.

I'm still fascinated by how retro-futuristic it all seems, with random bits of technology, some arguably available today and some still pretty fare out, layered on top of a world that's still recognizable as being the mid-1980s. And it's the degree to which the technology isn't actually all that important to the story that stands out for me, in a way that it didn't when I first read the books back in the 1990s.

The idea that the technology is merely part of the set dressing is a common one; I suspect that a lot of the Star Wars franchise is built around the idea. The difference with Gibson is that he manages, at least to me, to still build a coherent world. Given the amount of data that various technologies in the world are capable of moving wirelessly, the lack of cellular telephony seems strange, but it doesn't give me the sense that it's random, in the way that much of the technology in Star Wars did.

Perhaps this is because it's done more in service to the story being written. When Case walks past a bank of pay phones in Neuromancer, and they each ring as he passes them, the understanding that the AI is attempting to reach him comes through clearly, and this softens the idea that the phones simply shouldn't be there.

I suspect that near-future science-fiction is always going to have a problem with "stepping on its coattails" as it were: technology that's going to be ubiquitous in 50 years time might still be so out in front of what's currently available that only a select few people are even aware that it has any potential. And this makes projecting into the future difficult, outside of "obvious" advances.

For myself, I find the look back into what a compelling vision of the future looked like more than a quarter-century ago to be fascinating. Perhaps I should pick up some other science-fiction of the 80s and 90s, and see what other version of the future resonated with people.

Good Reads

What does it take to be a "good news consumer?" Pew research asked this question, and posted a short article on the answers recently. While a plurality of people (some 32 percent) didn't answer, and a about 10% gave an answer that Pew coded as "Other," the most popular answers are listed below, in order of popularity:

1. Be discerning or skeptical
2. Follow the news or stay informed
3. Get news from quality sources
4. Research or fact check the news
5. Get news from a variety of sources
6. Get news from a variety of perspectives
7. Not share inaccurate information
8. Use the news to make decisions

I suspect that I would have fallen into the other category, because the first thing that comes to my mind is to understand the difference between being informed and being entertained. While I agree with the 3% of people who gave an answer of "Use the news to make decisions," I don't generally find most news to be actionable in that way. It's interesting, occasionally very much so, but things like "The U.S. threatens to revoke the Palestinian U.N. ambassador's visa," "Can the West survive ‘drastic’ Colorado River cuts?" or "Trump's priorities are in deep trouble after his revenge tour" don't have anything in them that I need to, or can, act upon.

And in that sense, they're not really all that informative. Not because the information wasn't new, but because there isn't much I can do with it, when it comes to decision-making. And this doesn't even touch upon the stereotypical "if it bleeds, it leads" type of story, which may give people a certain sense of danger, but doesn't offer anything in the way of solutions.

Now, I'm aware that my own news diet is particularly sparse when it comes to actionable information because I don't follow the news consistently enough to pay to subscribe to anything. And if one really wants information that's useful in making decisions, paying for it is the way to go. I've been toying with the idea for some time, but I'm the sort to go for a few days without really checking in on things, and in a situation where what's really being paid for is temporary access, that's a recipe for wasting money. I'm also unenthusiastic about trial periods that require credit cards, and automatic renewals, in the hope that I'll simply forget to cancel and become a recurring revenue stream. (But I understand the incentive structure. And the fact that this is a case where pretty much everyone is doing it.)

Am I a "good news consumer?" I suspect not. While I understand the difference between actionable news and the sort of things one reads as a diversion, I'm not really motivated to seek out "news I can use," as it were, and that limits my intake to things that I don't really gain much by learning. Perhaps I should rectify that.

Here "We" Go Again

Cure cancer... really? That's pretty big news, I wonder why it hasn't gotten out farther.

I think I'd like to nominate the human willingness to pass the buck as the most annoying thing. This is the sort of post that one makes to bask in the likes, upvotes and other forms of Internet applause that come from calling out a problem and laying it squarely at the feet of people who have better things to do than read social media posts by some rando.

"Greed and billionaires" are wonderful targets specifically because most people won't be bothered to stand up for them, and it allows for feel-good slacktivism; the audience can feel good about themselves for being supportive of the stand being taken, but that support comes at absolutely zero cost to themselves. "Billionaires" aren't going around with vacuum cleaners, sucking the money out of everyone's pockets: they're investing in and/or running businesses offering goods and services that everyday people want. Things that people like me (and yeah, I'll own this) would rather have. Would an end to world hunger, global climate change and cancer (I'm still dubious about that last one) be good? Absolutely. Is it worth more to me than the books I just bought the other day? Apparently not.

And I'm not the only one. There are any number of people who would rather spend their money on things that they feel enhance their material well-being than fund capturing human potential. That's how investors and board chairs and chief fill-in-the-blank officers become billionaires in the first place.

There's an idea that a bunch of wealthy people could get together, shell out a bunch of money and make the world a better place overnight, and still remain fabulously wealthy. (Whether or not that would actually be the case, I don't know.) Which is really just another way of minimizing the costs to others of the things that people want.

Presuming that there are cures for cancer that are waiting on nothing more than enough funding to float down from the heavens, it's somewhat within the power of the public at large to solve these problems. Wealthy people became so because the current rules allow for it. So step one is to change those rules.

But that becomes a collective action problem. The legislative majorities needed to enact such policies would require that a pretty good-sized chunk of the populace, at least here in the United States, put aside their differences and work together towards a common goal; and believe that they can reach that goal without inflicting unreasonable amounts of pain on themselves or otherwise doing something unpalatable.

And that's why it becomes easy to blame "billionaires." They could supposedly make all of these problems go away with sweeping acts of charity, and criticizing them for not doing so conveniently does away with all of the arguing and messiness that enduring solutions would entail.

Error Handling

When I was younger (a rather long timeframe, these days), I too would indulge in attempting to refute other people's ethical frameworks by coming up with a situation in which the correct thing, as presented by them, conflicted with my own ethical intuitions. There are a lot of different ways of answering this tactic, but one that I'm somewhat surprised that I never encountered is just to say: "Yes. And..?"

If the goal is to determine what some or another system of ethics says about something, what does it matter what a critic's intuitions says about the matter. The perception that the ground is level can easily lead someone to an understanding that the Earth is flat; and the most common response to this is, basically, to tell that person that their intuition is wildly incorrect, and leave it at that. So why is this not a more common tactic in ethics?

Of the approximately eight quadrillion variations on Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem that people have come up with, a common one is to posit a doctor who has six patients, five of whom are in dire need of organ transplants, while the sixth has healthy organs. Leaving aside the real-world logistical problems of such an act, a common knock on Utilitarianism is the idea that it says that it's ethically acceptable to kill the sixth patient so save the others. But I'm not sure why an actual Utilitarian would care: If killing patient six is the ethical thing to do, it's the ethical thing to do.

After all, the idea that other people's ethical intuitions are faulty when they disagree with one's own is not particularly controversial: the idea that the Trail of Tears was ethically unjustified, and that the people who supported the forced migration were wrong is mostly taken as given today. To argue that people at the time wouldn't have supported it if it had been ethically suspect would likely go nowhere.

So I wonder why so many people seem uncomfortable admitting to disagreements with other people's ethical outlooks. If the point behind the study of ethics is to get to a correct understanding of right action, it shouldn't matter if people feel validated by it.

Evaluated

I saw a social media post today claiming that Alphabet was now "worth $4.8 trillion." Considering that I didn't see any reporting on that anywhere, I'm dubious about that number, but it started me thinking. Just how does one determine how much a company is "worth."

After all, it wouldn't be possible to simply hand over $4.8 trillion and just own Alphabet... if a significant number of shareholders were all looking to proactively sell, the price would immediately drop. Likewise, if someone (or an organization) with a remarkable amount of liquidity decided to buy up a significant portion of the shares, the price would rise. Stock prices are generally set between buyers and sellers, and valuations are generally determined on the basis of some average of the transactions that take place over a given timeframe. So, at least as far as I'm concerned, the statement that "a given company is worth some number of dollars," doesn't really tell us anything.

Except, maybe, about investors. It occurs to me that to value a company is to presume that it's possible (at least in theory) for all of the shares to change hands over a reasonable span of time. Leaving aside for a moment the changes in share price that such a shift would bring about, any valuation implies that some amount of money is currently tied up in the company's stock. Some of it can be thought of as not being "real," since it doesn't matter how long the stock has been held by it current owner; if it hasn't been sold recently, and isn't currently for sale, no-one has to actually produce the money to buy it... but the owner is credited as having grown wealthier all the same.

And that wealth is counted just like money in the bank would be. A lot is made of wealth inequality, but it's rare to hear about how much of that wealth is represented simply in terms of an expectation that, if someone were to sell something, they would be able to receive a certain amount of money for it. But if all of these expectations were added together, how would that compare to the amounts of hard currency there is? Could people actually buy all of these companies at their stated valuations? Or do expectations represent the bulk of modern money supplies?