[tmbchr]™

Government Is Technology



The one who governs is the one who’s got the bigger guns.







5 Reader Responses

  1. Svenson Says:
    November 7th, 2007 at 3:07 am

    HAHA! I love it. The olde “If the guy with the box cutter was able to take over the plane, he must be smarter and more capable than the pilot” argument. Perfect picture for it!!!

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 7th, 2007 at 1:10 pm

    This also explains why the government must maintain DARPA as an agency: they must constantly make sure that the best technology created is being created for them! Otherwise, they lose!

    I’m thinking maybe the best way for the US government to survive is to begin taking radical legal steps to prepare for the future: such as granting AI’s civil rights, etc. That way, any sentient computer program that exists or comes into existence will want to be an American before anything else, and the government will benefit from the technology and the association.

    Imagine having AI diplomats: AI’s which went out and tried to convince non-American AI’s to come over to our side…

  3. Svenson Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 7:37 am

    It all reminds me of this conversation I had in a coffee with this arguing the virtues of Arnie, (which he has) but only on the basis of the fact that if he achieved power, he must be the best. (like the guy on the plane with the box cutter) The problem is of course that in many places, the person whose best for the commonwealth isn’t the person who’s devoted himself solely to gaining power. This is manifesting with technology right now…DARPA or Microsoft or whoever doesn’t win if they suppress technology, because it all adds value to the commonwealth of which they are a part. Yet any technology can be related to a companies interests, or it can be related to military value, so this is exactly what they are doing.

    I wrote a paper on this called Cryptoculture, which listed off a number of big historical failures in information technology which all failed because they treated information like a physical commodity, going back to the alchemists. Its the idea of articially enforced scarcity: The problem isn’t in Microsoft or Darpa having some information, its in them wanting to have it like a physical commodity, which means suppressing others so they don’t have it. So if a doctor comes up with a brilliant machine to track emotions to bodily states that could prevent all sorts of diseases, it can be snatched from him because it might spot terrorists, or might have corporate potential that outweights its clear and present medical benifits. Either way its taken from his hands, and the doctors purpose, which was to gain recognition as an innovative healer, is crushed.

    So the optimal move for the doctor then is then not to try and innovate at all, but to get drunk and fuck around, producing nothing because he won’t control it anyway. Yet over in foobaristan, they’ve got this new approach based on maximizing the human potential and utilizing their people fully, integrating them with the system in all their individual freely chosen endeavors. The end result over time is that the commonwealth of foobaristan economically and militarily rises above US, rendering both microsoft and darpa irrelevant.

    God, I wish was an alien, and I could land on the whitehouse lawn and just give a few words of advice sometimes… :)

  4. speedbird Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 8:25 am

    > they must constantly make sure that the best technology created is being created for them! Otherwise, they lose!

    This is how the Cold War was won: the West had loads of stuff the East wanted; the East had nothing the West wanted. Mind you, the last nail in the coffin wasn’t a big gun (though some say Reagan’s Star Wars was a /fake/ ‘big gun’ to scare the willies out of the Russians) but the wonders of Nike and Pepsi-cola.

    In the cold war era the UK made sure of having loads of technology the other side wanted by employing a load of hyper-brainy misfits (otherwise completely unsuited to the demands of society :-D ) with bad hair, sandals with socks, and fairisle sweaters, in a place called Malvern. These guys would hang out with each other and work out the best possible way *in principle* to do various things. These things would often involve /potentially/ blowing stuff up, but the moral considerations of finding the best way of doing them weighed heavily against this. Bear in mind that very little was *actually* blown up in the Cold War. It was all about being the best. Walk silently and carry a big stick, and all that.

    More recently I met a guy who said ‘Policy now is that we just buy whatever Industry decides to make’. ‘What happens if it doesn’t meet the requirement?’ I asked. ‘Then we do without’, he explained. ‘As long as it’s on time and on budget, that’s all that matters.’

  5. speedbird Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 8:47 am

    Reading that through it strikes me that ‘having what others want’ neatly encapsulates the whole cold war era: a progression from the simple ‘having’ of WWII through emphasis on the ‘things’ of the cold war technological era and finally to merely ‘want’. As soon as the emphasis shifted to merely making the other side want whatever we had, the game was up. Me, I’m old-fashioned and my Gen-X head still likes Things; but all around me I see people who know for sure that the manipulation of abstract desire is the weapon of choice in this post-cold-war era.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.