Rants – Page 18 – a sibilant intake of breath

Automated facial recognition

As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.

London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.

To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.

Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.

Macs are also vulnerable

If you think your computer is secure because it is a Mac, you are dead wrong. The latest patch for OS X – 10.6.8 – contains 29 patches for security holes that allow arbitrary code execution. Any of those holes could be used to totally own your computer, circumventing any antivirus or encryption software you may be running. These 29 have been patched, but you can be sure there are others in the OS and in popular software like Flash and Adobe’s PDF reader.

If you want to keep a system safe, keep it physically disconnected from the internet.

Blowout 2100

The overall aim of governments and political parties in North America an Europe at the moment seems to be serving the interests of people who are about 50 and at least fairly well off. Keep stock prices and house prices up, prop up failing banks and car companies, keep pumping fossil fuels, don’t worry about climate change or what future generations will use for energy. After all, the core supporters of the politicians (especially when it comes to all-important campaign cash) will probably be dead by the time the most serious effects of climate change are felt. The same goes for the people in high-level decision-making positions in government and industry today.

It seems that future generations will have good cause to hate us. We have had climate change endlessly explained to us, with multiple convincing lines of evidence to back up the theory. We have been told what we need to do to stop it, but we have chosen to do nothing because we care about our short-term economic welfare more than anything else.

If that is the implicit attitude of the politics of today, it would be helpful if it was made explicit. “Vote for Party X for 30 or 40 more years of relative prosperity. After that, no promises.”

Climate wave crested?

At least for the next few years, it seems likely that the level of public concern about climate change has peaked, and attention will be focused elsewhere. That isn’t justified by the facts, but it seems to be the case, and it is the reality that people pressing for more action need to deal with now.

We have to be intelligent and determined enough to drive the emergence of acceptable climate change policies – ones that protect the planet which we all fundamentally depend upon from casual destruction, because people prefer to have cheaper electricity and transport right now. We need to do that despite how people are worried about other things, how the science is complex and challenging to understand, and how the ideal path forward can only be approximated through risk analysis. We need to try approaches until we find ones that work.

Why keep trying?

The other day, I was looking back over the photos I took at the Fill The Hill climate change event in Ottawa, back in October of 2009. At the time, the event made me optimistic. Here were all these young people concerned about climate change and ready to take personal action in response to it.

When I look at the photos now, the Hill seems a bit thinly populated. Contrast how many people turned out to express their concern about climate change with how many people get excited about a meaningless hockey game or concert and it seems like humanity has cause to worry.

The most important reason to deal with climate change is the ethical obligation we owe to future generations – the obligation to leave them a planet that can support their welfare. When it comes to how people decide on their priorities, however, it seems like such ethical obligations are very low on the list, way below personal financial welfare or convenience.

When I think about how the Amazon rainforest may be doomed because of human greenhouse gas pollution, along with the Great Barrier Reef and countless species, I feel overwhelmed with revulsion about how casually destructive our species is, and how little regard we show for the world which we inhabit and ultimately depend upon completely. We do not have the technical means to build a self-sustaining spacecraft and so the continued life of every human being on the planet depends on the continued operation of all the physical and biological processes that make the Earth habitable. Now – largely because we are fond of cheap energy – we are willfully assaulting those processes as though they are indestructible.

In the face of that, I wonder whether any personal efforts of mine are meaningful. If humanity as a whole is determined to commit suicide, why should I spend my life trying to stop it? The forces pressing for a sane and sustainable strategy seem to be far weaker than the forces that promise instant gratification today, with little consideration for whatever consequences follow.

Normally, this is where I would try to write an uplifting closing about how doing the right thing is appropriate, even when the odds are hopeless and when other people will actually resent you for making the effort. The noble course combines self-sacrifice (reducing your personal impact) with determined political action to try to produce a better outcome. While I still think that is true, and know my conviction will eventually return, it is feeling thoroughly sapped at the moment, partly by the way voters everywhere continue to make their political choices largely on the basis of their own short-term economic self-interest.

Humanity is very clever in a micro sense – when it comes to solving small problems in ways that benefit the solvers quickly and materially. When it comes to macro issues, it seems to be dumb luck and the sheer durability of nature that explain why we haven’t wiped ourselves out already. That isn’t much comfort though. There are limits to how much abuse nature can tolerate, and we have been beating it pretty harshly with a wrench lately (with still-worse abuse promised for the future). Perhaps humanity has no future, and perhaps the thing to do as individuals is choose whatever life seems most tolerable with that possibility acknowledged.

I am a values voter

The term ‘values voter’ is usually linked with social conservatism in the United States – people who want to stop the scourge of gay marriage, and so on. At the same time, the phrase is a useful and concise way to describe those who care much more about moral issues than economic self-interest, when choosing which political parties or candidates to support.

I care a lot more about whether a political party supports meaningful action on climate change than I do about what promises they make about the level of taxes I will pay or transfers I will receive. Even if a party offered to cut the income tax to zero for people making exactly the amount I do, I would not vote for them if they advocated intolerable policies in areas like minority rights or free speech.

Of course, we can only choose from among the candidates and parties on offer and there is invariably a serious problem with each of them. Still, in choosing the least of the evils on offer, the main considerations concern values rather than personal welfare.

Voting for moral reasons is an act that conforms to the golden rule. It is better for everyone if people refuse to be bought off with the promise of tax cuts or special spending. When people accept such vote-winning strategies, they become commodities to be bargained over by power-broker political factions rather than engaged citizens that care about the kind of society they inhabit.

What Google knows

I wrote before about how Google’s “Don’t be evil” slogan is really the minimum requirement for such a powerful organization.

Jacob Mchangama, a Danish human rights lawyer, has put this in a nice way: “The dream of all dictators is to know as much about you as Google does”.

Incidentally, that is all the more reason for companies like Google to refuse to comply with illegal search requests from governments.

Extinction logic

Living things are frequently presented with choices that involve a time trade-off. There is an immediate effect, and then there is a delayed effect. For example, you can quit your job today because you hate it, but may need to deal with delayed effects in a few weeks when your rent comes due, along with cell phone bills and all the rest. Sometimes, the delayed effect involves a different creature entirely from the immediate effect. For instance, a person assembling an automobile can do a shoddy job of assembling the steering or braking system, leaving some hapless future driver to deal with the consequences.

When the space of time between the two effects is long, there is more of an incentive to ignore the delayed effect. You might not be around (or even alive) to experience it. The same is true when the delayed effect is uncertain. Presented with the choice between something 100% likely to pay off right now, but only 50% likely to have a cost in the future, there is an incentive to take what you can get right now.

The biggest incentive exists when the creature that will suffer the consequences is totally unrelated to you. This situation is omnipresent in politics. Politicians are judged on the effect they seem to be having right now. Little consideration is given to consequences down the road and, by the time any such consequences have arisen, the politician and the people who voted for them are likely to be long gone, or at least no longer associated with the situation in the minds of the public. Also, because decisions impact one another, responsibility for outcomes usually gets hopelessly muddled. What actually occurs on the long-term is the cumulative consequence of choices made by different individuals, firms, and governments along with a large dose of random chance. A particular outcome – like a firm going bankrupt – cannot usually be attributed to a single cause. Rather, it must be said that various policies at different levels of government had an effect, along with managerial choices and technological change, not to mention relevant developments in other countries, etc.

All this seems to pose the risk of creating dangerous ratchet effects, where movement in one direction is possible but movement in the other is impossible or unlikely. While there may be situations in which the temptation to make some easy money in exchange for causing long-term problems will be rejected, those opportunities are going to keep arising and the people calling for a conscientious approach will not always win out. Indeed, they are likely to fail quite often, given that the people chasing the quick buck will quickly end up with goodies for themselves and for their supporters. A community might be able to resist the temptation to blow up a local mountain to access the coal inside on a series of successive occasions, but the choice not to do so is always temporary. By contrast, the one time when they decide to go with the dynamite approach closes off any possibility of restoring things to how they once were.

Whereas we have a strong personal interest in looting the future for our own immediate benefit, there is only really our sense of moral and aesthetics that holds those urges in check. Those senses often turn out to be very weak. Furthermore, the world will tend to select against people who take the long view. In the near-term, they seem like spoilers who forced everyone else to pass up a good opportunity. In the long term, the causes of outcomes are all muddled together, so the people who urged restraint probably won’t get any credit for what they protected. They also may not be around to benefit from any credit, if it is provided.

None of the ideas here are new, but the cruel logic I am trying to express seems to be extremely powerful and one of the strongest things working against humanity in the long term. If we are going to survive another 10,000 years, we are going to need to learn to discipline ourselves, and to support those who impose discipline upon us. We cannot just keep looking out for our personal short-term interests and hoping things in general turn out for the best.

Restricting purchase locations and pricing options for drugs

When it comes to recreational drugs, the objective of policy should be to prevent suffering while respecting the sovereignty individuals possess over their own bodies and minds. Our current approaches do not do that. Rather, they seem designed to either raise money or punish people. Neither of those objectives really serves the objective of reducing harm.

If you really want to restrict problematic usage of a drug, here are a couple of ideas for things you could do:

Restrict where it can be used to exclude desirable places like restaurants. For really dangerous drugs, restrict their use to medically supervised settings like InSite, Vancouver’s safe injection site for heroin.
Make selling them unprofitable. Do this by making the drug legal to sell, but illegal to profit from. You need to sell it for exactly the price you bought it for, and there are government stores like the LCBO that sell it for a low set price. This would eliminate any profit from producing or importing drugs, as well as eliminate criminal distribution networks for them with money flowing up and inward while drugs flow out and downward.

Imagine if convenience stores could only sell tobacco at cost. There would be no incentive to carry it, except perhaps the hope that customers who come in for tobacco will buy something with a mark-up on it as well. Requiring restaurants to sell alcohol at cost would hugely change the incentives they face. Right now, restaurants make so many profits from alcohol that the owners and servers both have a strong financial incentive to encourage people to drink. If they had to sell alcoholic beverages at cost, fewer restaurants would choose to be licensed and they would push alcohol on customers less. Given that alcohol is one of the most harmful drugs, that would have significant societal benefits.

Of course, there would be enormous resistance to any such policy. Restaurants and convenience stores want to hang onto their alcohol and tobacco profits, just as various organized crime groups want to hang on to profits from marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, etc. Still, society may well be better off in a world where drug policy seeks to encourage responsible use (which may mean no use at all) while simultaneously working to reduce the harm caused within society by drugs.

Decline of the rough and tumble dinner party

When I was a student, it was pretty common to be invited to a person’s home to sit on mismatched chairs and eat spaghetti on mismatched plates.

In post-student life, some people have gotten all fancy and started having ‘civilized’ dinner parties that set an unattainable standard for formality, complexity of food, and so on. I think it is plausible that this intimidates those of us who are less skilled and less well-equipped.

As someone who doesn’t expect to live in any place for more than a few years, I do not want to buy large numbers of matching things. I think I also preferred the cheap-wine-fuelled informality of student parties to the comparatively arid quality of many ‘adult’ parties. Some of that may be linked to the social sterility that Official Ottawa thrives at cultivating.

If things go unexpectedly well, my time in Ottawa will soon be over. Whether that is achieved or not, I think I should host a some-people-sitting-on-the-floor and no-fancy-appetisers-in-sight party sometime soon.