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Category: economics

Driving the Map, Not the Territory

Published May 28, 2014 by cgerrish

It's classic slight of hand. What's breathtaking is that it caught the entire country in its misdirection. Google demos its driverless car, the tiny one with no steering wheel and no brakes. The media shows us the pictures and then asks Detroit why this car is coming from the Silicon Valley and not the car manufacturers. Clearly another sign that U.S. manufacturers are hopelessly behind the times.

A few weeks ago Alexis Madrigal wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Trick That Makes Google Self-Driving Cars Work.” In his piece, Alexis explains how the trick is done. Self-driving cars have very little to do with the machinery of the car itself. In case you hadn't noticed Google has an extremely robust mapping application. The self-driving car can only drive itself through a territory with a sufficiently fine-grained 3-D map. That's because the car isn't really driving on the streets, it's driving on the map. This is a story about virtual reality for cars. And it's not about who builds the cars, it's about who owns the virtual streets.

 

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The 6th Time is the Charm

Published May 18, 2014 by cgerrish

When we look at the ecological catastrophe, we fail to see that it's already begun. Simply asking the question, “Has the ecological catastrophe begun yet?” is a signal that we're well past the beginning. We're on the inside of something that becomes visible to us as it reveals it has always enfolded us.

In Elizabeth Kolbert's book, “The Sixth Extinction”, instead of the dire warnings and hysterical laments about the end of the world, we see a calm journey to the places around the earth where species are in the late stages of extinction. Kolbert bears witness as the scientists around her record the effects of the rapid change in habitat. The life forms in these landscapes have deep ties to the slow moving patterns of the earth. As climate change accelerates, these ties are cut and whole species are set adrift.

The prose style of Kolbert's book is a smile of recognition; like the smile of someone saying a final goodbye to a loved one. The smile of someone who has experience loss before. It seems the most straight forward way of acknowledging our co-existence with other beings is at the moment when they're about to disappear forever. Kolbert is a calm witness; she says goodbye to individual life forms and whole species on our behalf.

Humans fancy themselves as highly adaptable. We can look around the world and see the varied and extreme conditions where humans have made a life. We're so quick that we believe we're exceptions. Other species may have a deep tie to the slow moving patterns of the earth, but we can a adapt to any pattern. It's this adaptability that defines us a species. Throughout our history we've looked for the thing that separates us from the animals, that thing that makes us special creatures on this planet. For a time we were the rational animal, our ability to reason set us apart. Now it's our belief that no matter what happens to the biosphere, we can adapt. Even if 90% of all other life forms were to suffer extinction, we could still make a go of it. Our existence is independent of the state of the biosphere or planet

The anthropocene is the unconscious effect of the sum total of human action on the geology and climate of the planet. The biosphere, thus changed by us, now turns and taps us on the shoulder. What was a deep, subtle and almost invisible power moving slowly in the background has emerged in the foreground. Like an unconscious thought made conscious, we believe that we can tame global warming with the power of our reason in the clear light of day.

Like Victor Frankenstein, we sit alone in our lab, attempting to reanimate a species, repair a damaged habit, stitch together enough of a biosphere to support the life forms we deem important. It's perfectly reasonable.

 

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Apps and Sturgeon’s Law

Published May 4, 2014 by cgerrish

jumbo-slot-machine

Despite the fact that the Network has a kind of permanent memory, it’s not very good at remembering certain things. Or maybe it’s just that we aren’t. We see what we want to see.

During the last internet bubble we learned about startups, venture capital and burn rate. There’s a small window for new technology companies to find an exit before they burn up. The more companies in a space, the more difficult the exit.

The last bubble was burst when a list of tech companies was published that compared their cash on hand to their burn rate. Suddenly it was simple to see how much time each company had to make a profit or an exit. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

The unlimited optimism of the time quickly turned into a climate of fear. Investors suddenly wanted to see revenues and profits. It changed everything. Should someone publish such a list today, it would have a similar effect. We’ve simply forgotten that start ups burn cash, and while many things are cheaper, the fuse has just been lengthened a bit.

Another thing we seem to forget is that free communications systems fill up with spam. It’s estimated that 70% of all email is robot-generated spam. Whenever a new social communications hub is created we think that this time it’ll be different. As a social networking system matures it attracts trolls and starts to fill with spam. It’s always worked that way.

If your company is marketing to a free (non-subscription) social network, it’s likely the audience is filled with robots and spam accounts. Free access to a social network lowers barriers to growth, but it also creates a fertile ground for gaming the system.

Recently I read that 80% of mobile apps are used only once. That seems like a high number until you remember Sturgeon’s Law. This law states that 90% of everything is crap. In light of that, 80% is actually an excellent number. The other thing this should tell you is that as the ecosystem of apps matures it will revert to the norm. That means the number of apps used only once is more likely to be headed toward 90% than 70%.

If an app store has 1 million apps, 900,000 of them are crap. That leaves 100,000 that might be useful. That’s actually a pretty big number. Some say that software is going to eat everything. It’s certainly going to try and eat everything. But despite the brilliance of the young engineers writing this ravenous software, 90% of what they produce is going to be crap. It’s easy to forget when everyone’s smiling, optimistic and sure that their new technology is going to fundamentally change the way we do this or that.

It might be more helpful to look at tech start ups as though they were a slot machine programmed to take your money 90% of the time. Some can afford to play games with those odds, most can’t.

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Pity Would Be No More: Google The Human Abstract

Published March 9, 2014 by cgerrish

The public relations profession was created to repair the reputations of the 1%. The robber barons who consolidated control over industry in the United States needed to boost their numbers in the polls, and thus began the professional publicizing of acts of charity. The technology industry and its titans have finally taken that lesson to heart.

Fighting tooth and nail, then threatening to leave San Francisco for more accommodating tax havens, technology companies have negotiated big tax breaks. They're special. Not the sense that they need an extra helping hand to get their business of the ground. It's just that they want to use every piece of leverage they have over the city. When what they've wrought becomes plain for everyone to see, the oldest public relations plan in the book is trotted out. They'll participate in the community, but only on their terms. Here it comes, sweet charity.

Instead of public services coming organically through our tax base and distributed through a public political process, the tech company decides what cause gets money and how much. The money they donate creates capacity within the public budget which is then redirected to other needs. In a few years when the corporations stop giving and the public budget can't accommodate the programs, they're eliminated. What seems to be a windfall is really a death sentence.

Criticism of charitable acts is a rare thing. That's why it's a classic public relations play for the 1%. Google funds a transportation program for low-income youth, Facebook buys a police officer, etc. PR firms are paid big bucks to make sure we all know about it. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

William Blake wrote “The Human Abstract” as part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Put this poem on the “experience” side of the ledger. His criticism of pity and charity continue to ring true. Out of the pity of the technology giants comes charity for the poor and disadvantaged. Blake shows us that it's not “pity” and “charity” you want to put up on a pedestal. It's a difficult case to make, but Blake does it. These virtues are symptoms, born of inequalities.

 

 

THE HUMAN ABSTRACT

by William Blake

Pity would be no more

If we did not make somebody poor,

And Mercy no more could be

If all were as happy as we.

 

And mutual fear brings Peace,

Till the selfish loves increase;

Then Cruelty knits a snare,

And spreads his baits with care.

 

He sits down with holy fears,

And waters the ground with tears;

Then Humility takes its root

Underneath his foot.

 

Soon spreads the dismal shade

Of Mystery over his head,

And the caterpillar and fly

Feed on the Mystery.

 

And it bears the fruit of Deceit,

Ruddy and sweet to eat,

And the raven his nest has made

In its thickest shade.

 

The gods of the earth and sea

Sought through nature to find this tree,

But their search was all in vain:

There grows one in the human Brain.

 

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