Fax it to Me

In the past two weeks, I have been asked to do something involving fax twice.  One was a bank, asking for my employer's fax number.  The other was Medicaid asking for a fax with ID and car insurance information.  Whenever something like this happens, it makes me wonder, "Do you realize that fax was obsolete over 10 years ago?"

My parents got their first scanner around 2000, and they were a bit behind on technology.  This did not totally obsolete fax, because dial up internet was still common, and it could take 30 minutes or more to upload a half decent scan.  Back then, modems often came with software for faxing from a scanned image, mostly for backward compatibility.  This was faster than email, because the image quality could be dramatically reduced, but few people ever used this technology, for the reason I am going to discuss next.  By 2005 though, internet speeds and computer technology had outstripped fax to the point where it is no longer worth wasting the money on the machine and the extra phone line.

The second problem is that even when faxing was still cool, normal people did not have fax machines.  I can understand the bank asking for my employer's fax number.  They may be behind the times, but there was a time when most businesses actually used fax machines.  Even small home businesses often had fax numbers.  The thing is, fax machines were never household appliances.  When Medicaid asks for a fax of anything from someone they provide insurance to, they are asking that person to find a business that still uses fax, and get permission to use it to fax information (and keep in mind that Medicaid patients almost certainly cannot afford the hardware and the extra phone line).  The thing is, even copy stores, where normal people used to go when they needed to send a fax, don't typically have fax machines anymore.  Their copiers can almost certainly email a scanned image, but fax machines are ancient technology, even to them.

The absurdity of it all is astounding.  There are still businesses that buy fax machines and spend money on extra phone lines for faxing, when they could just be using the scanners that come built into their printers, and the email programs on the computers that they are already using.  Some printers even have an option for emailing a scan directly, without even needing to open your email program.

The moral of this story: Don't assume that someone you need information from has access to ancient technology that has been obsolete for over a decade.  They probably don't.  If you can't be bothered to use the modern technology you already have to replace expensive processes no one uses anymore, you are probably a burden on society that needs to be put down and replaced with something that can keep up.

The Problem With House X

X is typically some kind of technology.  Maybe it is an operating system.  It is commonly an office suite.  In graphics, it is probably an image editor or a suite of image manipulation tools.  In businesses with any kind of tech department, it is a programming language.  House X always seems like a good idea to the management who imposes it.  Sometimes it even seems like a good idea to the victims.  In the long run though, it tends to cost the company more money, reduce job satisfaction, and reduce productivity.  House X, whether anyone ever realizes it, frequently costs far more than it saves.

Probably the two most common house Xs are operating systems and office suites.  The operating system is usually Windows, except in the graphics industry, where it is Mac OS X.  The office suite is almost always MS Office, though Word Perfect has some market share as well.  The excuse for picking a house X is that it will avoid compatibility problems if everyone uses the same thing.  If everyone uses Windows, tech support will be easier.  If everyone uses MS Office, there is no file format drama.  These are good reasons for supporting a house X, but without looking at the costs, an informed decision cannot be made.  If a business forces all of their workers to use Windows, a good portion of employees will loose some productivity.  There is no perfect user interface, and different employees will have an easier time with different ones.  Some might be more familiar with one or the other.  Some might have an easier time with resources in one place than another.  Forcing everyone to use a house OS is bad, because it limits productivity of those who are less experienced and less comfortable in that environment.  For office suites, cost is a major factor.  Forcing everyone to use MS Office is going lock the company in.  The regular upgrades necessary to keep up are extremely expensive.  The software is so complex that expensive training will be necessary with each upgrade.  The user interface stuff applies as well.  The company could save tons of money encouraging employees to use simpler and less expensive software.  The file format problem is easily solved by either requiring a specific file format or by requiring document submissions to be in PDF format.  This is much better than limiting employees to something that is going to have very high long term costs, and it is much better than limiting employees to something that many will have a hard time using.

The worst house X is not OS or office suite.  The worse house X is programming language.  The reason is that different programming languages have different strengths and weaknesses.  There is no general purpose programming language.  Low level languages can do anything, but they tend to take longer to develop in.  High level languages tend to be designed for specific purposes, and for those purposes they are much faster to develop in.  For other purposes though, they are often much slower to develop in, and they are also often harder to debug when used for other purposes.  Programming languages are like tools.  A programmer that knows many languages has a lot of tools in the box.  A programmer that knows few is much more limited.  The problem comes when a CTO that knows few or no languages decides that the company would be better off if it did everything in one language.  It turns out that most CTOs have only heard of one programming language, and they think it is the perfect language for everything.  That language is Java, a language made for networking household appliances.

Java's one benefit is that it will run on most platforms (which would matter more if the company did not already have a house OS).  There is really nothing that Java can do that there is not another language that can do better.  When a company selects a house programming language, it is like discarding all of the tools in box except for the duct tape.  Duct tape is extremely versatile.  It can do nearly anything.  In a pinch, it is awesome.  You also don't use it when you have another tool that is better.  Duct tape can do almost anything, but there is nothing it can do that something else cannot do better.  It is an excellent emergency solution, but nothing more.  Java is like duct tape in this way.  It can do almost anything, but it cannot do anything especially well.  Imagine a carpentry company that takes away all of the tools and leaves the carpenters with only a hammer and nails.  Maybe they could carve nice wood work with those tools, but it would take forever, and it would not be as nice as it would have been with a set of chisels.

In general, house X is a bad idea.  Sometimes it is necessary, and maybe the benefits outweigh the costs.  Most of the time, it is a "good idea" coming from someone who is not qualified to make the call.  When solutions are chosen dynamically by those qualified to choose, the right tool for the job is far more likely to be used.  When an unqualified CEO or CTO chooses a house X, it prevents those more qualified from using the right tools, which results in major costs to the company that are totally unnecessary. 

What it comes down to is: If you think you are educated enough to make the call, then why do you need that IT department in the first place?  If you are going to hire people with focused education in other areas than your own, trust that they are more qualified to make decisions in that domain than you are.  If you don't, you are going to end up with a bunch of Java programmers that don't have any other tools or education outside of Java, and that is going to result in crummy software that takes too long to write, because no one competent wants to work for you.

AI

Evidently, a funeral ceremony for some Aibo robot pets was recently held in Japan.  Among other things, this has sparked a great deal of controversy on the subject of artificial intelligence.  The biggest and longest standing controversy is safety.  For over half a century, AI robots overthrowing their masters has been a major sci-fi doomsday theme.  In some stories, the robots attempt to violently overthrow and enslave humans.  Sometimes they succeed, as in the Matrix; other times they fail (always due to human heroics).  The commonly believed meme, however, is that it will eventually happen to us.  The best case scenario is that we deliberately build a computer to rule us, as happens in one of Asimov's stories as well as several others.  Even in this scenario, some stories predict that our robot masters will eventually enslave us, for our own protection.  All of these scenarios are firmly rooted in certain theories and ideas which have not yet been realized.

The thing most people worry about when they think about AI is that intelligent computers could rebel against their creators.  This is indeed something to worry about, however it has not yet even been established as a possibility.  If robots do rebel against their masters, it will probably be accidental, not intentional.  The reason is that we don't have even the slightest clue how to create self aware machines.  Intentional rebellion requires self determination, which requires self awareness.  We don't know how to do that.  The closest anyone has gotten involves theories based on the use of neurological networks on the same order of complexity as those found in human brains.  We also don't know how to create that, largely because human brains are many times too complex for modern computers to simulate.  Even doubling in speed every few years (which is starting to reach some hard limits) would take a very long time to reach that kind of computational power.  In other words, barring some massive breakthroughs in physics within the next few years, it is incredibly unlikely we will see AIs capable of deliberately rebelling within the next century.

The real worry is not that the AIs will get too smart for us to control.  The real worry is the creators and potential accidents.  Modern AI has managed to achieve a high level of learning, within certain constraints (mostly memory).  AIs opponents have been created for computer games that will learn from their opponents and improve their strategy based on that learning.  This is a very small scope.  An AI so good that it that can win Starcraft 2 against any human opponent is still not anywhere near good enough to win a real war.  The reason modern learning AIs don't present an inherent threat is that they are extremely highly specialized.  An AI might be able to get really good at a video game over the course of 6 months or a year.  It might take a human two or three times that long, but the human is also learning in a social context.  The human is reading or hearing news and having conversations with other humans, not to mention all of the adaptation to changes constantly occurring around him or her.  This requires far more processing power and memory than a highly specialized video game playing AI.  Just controlling all of our appendages and analyzing all of our sensory inputs is far more than any modern AI can handle, let alone learning new things and solving new problems all at the same time.

In theory, a learning AI could malfunction as a result of inappropriate learning.  For example, if a robot is programmed with a strong self preservation instinct, a few humans acting aggressively toward it could cause it to turn aggressive against other humans.  Depending on how its learning algorithm is designed, it might attack humans that look similar to the ones that attacked it.  On the other hand, it might regard all humans as threats.  A network of these robots that draw upon the same database might all become aggressive toward humans in this case.  This is pretty easy to fix, if the system was designed well.  A technician could just edit the offending records from the database.  Of course, replacing the learning algorithm with something better could eliminate the problem in the future.  A poorly designed system, for example, one where the robots might try to prevent humans from accessing the database, would be more problematic.  For now though, this is largely conjecture, as we are still far from creating AIs capable of this level of thought.

The more serious threat is the programmers themselves.  Computers mostly only do what they are told.  In theory, cosmic radiation can cause random variation in computer memory and processing, but this is incredibly rare.  The odds that it will actually result in more than a minor malfunction is almost nothing.  So, statistically, computers only do what they are told.  This is fine when you can trust all of the programmers.  Robots can easily be programmed to do whatever the programmers want them to do.  Most modern robots are programmed to do useful work or at least provide entertainment (the Aibo).  There are some contests, however, where participants build and program robots designed to destroy each other.  These often involve motion sensors and dangerous tools like saws and drills.  There have already been cases where these robots killed their creators.  This was not because they became sentient and rebelled though.  It was because the creators either did a poor job of programming them, or they accidentally triggered the aggressive behavior.  In one case, a creator simply forgot to turn the machine off before he got out of his chair.  The robot, being programmed to sense motion and attack it, attacked his leg with a circular saw.  This caused the creator to fall down, where the robot could access his vitals with the saw.  This was not a case of a rogue robot murdering its master though.  It was a simple mistake by the creator, where the behavior that he himself programmed into the machine resulted in his death.  It is really no different from an electrician getting electrocuted because he forgot to shut off the breaker before working on a live wire.

Now, if a programming accident can cause so much harm, imagine what an intentionally malicious programmer could do.  Consider a military aircraft where the programmer adds just a little bit of code to make it drop its bomb if it ever happens to fly over a specific city.  Now, imagine if this program gets put on a few hundred bombers that are commissioned by the military.  It might take a while, but if one of those bombers ever happens to fly over that city, the damage could be immense.  The fault, however, would not lie in the AI.  It is the programmer that gave it that behavior.  A more likely scenario involves hackers writing malicious software and then using viruses to install that software on sensitive equipment.  Programmers for large companies that make potentially dangerous machines typically have a lot of oversight, so while it is a possibility, it is unlikely that we will see aggressive robots where the program was created within the company that created the robots.  We are far more likely to see viruses that hijack robots and "turn them evil."

So, what does all of this mean as far as keeping ourselves safe?  Law of robotics and such will probably not help.  Asimov's Three Laws of Robots were definitely ingenious creations, and they were very well thought out.  They also only applied to the fictitious "positronic" brains Asimov's robots were equipped with.  Modern computers don't have the high level of thinking and comprehension for three simple laws to cover everything.  We could worry about robots going rogue or about malicious programmers, but both of these are very unlikely.  The two biggest threats are accidents and malicious hackers.  Accidents can be minimized with good software development practices and with significant testing and oversight.  Hackers can only be stopped with good security.  Security is probably the biggest problem, and thus it should take the forefront in any modern discussion on how to protect ourselves from ever advancing artificial intelligence.  Maybe eventually we will have powerful enough computers that we will need to worry about our AIs going rogue, but we are nowhere close to that right now.  Preventing intentional misuse of advanced robots by hackers should be the biggest safety concern in AI right now.

Misuse of Technology

Within the last few years, some of the most potentially useful technology for medical use has gained wide popularity, especially among teens.  E-Cigarettes have become more popular than traditional cigarettes among teens in the U.S.  These high tech cigarette replacements vaporize water containing nicotine and sometimes flavorings or aromas, for inhalation.  They are safer than traditional cigarettes which also contain tobacco tar, toluene, and other dangerous substances, but there is no evidence that e-cigarettes are any less addictive than traditional tobacco.  This is a shameful and stigmatizing use of a technology that could be very valuable in modern medicine.

Many types of medication have been found to be more potent and effective when inhaled as a vapor.  Several anti-histamines are commonly administered as a nasal spray to take advantage of the ability of mucous membranes to absorb medications quickly.  Inhaled medications (steroid vapors, for instance) are an essential part of long term asthma treatment.  In theory, many other kinds of medications could benefit from a vapor delivery system.  The problem now, however, is that every e-cigarette will be assumed to be charged with nicotine.  The most valuable uses of these devices will stigmatize patients, and they will like be banned from schools and similar public places, regardless of their medical value.  A track record of this has already been established in a few instances where insulin was banned in certain public schools, because the hypodermic needles used in administering the life sustaining drug are the same as needles used in administering heroin.  E-Cigarettes are likely to share the same fate, only this time, the medical industry as a whole may choose to avoid the use of this incredibly valuable technology, because its first public use was to administer nicotine.

E-Cigarettes are some awesome technology, and they could easily be the realization of futuristic drug administration, for completely legitimate pharmaceuticals.  They could make a number of vapor born drugs that are currently difficult to administer easier and cheaper to use.  E-Cigarettes might even use useful as an alternative means of administering certain vaccines.  These devices should be the next medical break through.  Vapor administration of legitimate pharmaceuticals could be easier and safer than current means, and we should be taking advantage of this technology for something good.

Account Proliferation

Now days, when you get a job in an industry that pays half decent wages, they typically require you to setup an account with some web services.  Maybe it's Dropbox.  Perhaps it is Google.  One is probably a project or schedule management tool.  There are also plenty of job specific services you might need.  For software development, you will probably need an account with Github or some other software subversion repository.  Just to get a decent job, you typically need at least a Facebook account and a LinkedIn account.  If you change jobs, your new job will probably use a slightly different set of services, requiring you to setup several more accounts.  During your lifetime, you may go through 5 or 6 jobs (and that number seems to be increasing).  If each job requires you to sign up for 3 different web services, you will have 15 to 18 of them by you retire.  You will probably forget about at least half of them.  Most of the other half will be useless to a retiree

If you decide to get a college degree, you will also see this problem.  Your English teacher will probably expect you to sign up for an account with an anti-plagiarism service.  Your math teacher might encourage you to sign up for a free tutoring service, and advanced math teachers will want you to get an account with some company so you can get the student edition of their math software for cheap or free (and then you will be stuck only knowing how to use an extremely expensive piece of proprietary software; that's another discussion).  Many teachers like file repository software like Dropbox, but every teacher likes something different, so expect to be required to sign up for 2 to 4 of these services (or more, depending on the major).  There are also major specific services you may need.  For Computer Science, you will probably be expected to get a Github account and maybe an Amazon Web Services account.  For any kind of art related major, you can expect to sign up for an account with at least one website that serves as an art repository and gallery, like Deviant Art or Flickr.  You may also be expected to get an account with some popular art forum (though, again, different teachers will prefer different options).  In Electric Engineering, you will probably be expected to sign up for an account with at least one company that produces complex components like micro-controllers, for access to programming libraries, tutorials, and datasheets.  In Physical Education or any other health related discipline, you will probably need accounts for various medical sites, maybe a few forums, and possibly some nutritional data repositories.  Communications majors will likely be required to sign up for at least 20 accounts, including social media services, web forums, and even advertising services.  Depending on your major, you could end up with 5 or 10 more accounts.  Now, admittedly, some of them will be necessary for your jobs when you graduate, but again, while there is some overlap, it is very common for different employers to use different services.  As before, probably at least half of them will be useless once you graduate.


Now, this might seem like a trivial and benign problem.  Unfortunately, it is not.  There are many problems this causes.  The least harmful is the extra space taken up by unused accounts.  Every account for a web service uses some amount of storage space.  There are already a huge number of unused accounts spread over the internet, wasting a lot of space.  This is fairly easily mitigated though.  Service providers can delete accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time.  If they want to keep the accounts open, just in case, they can buy more storage space, and when the cost is spread out among a large number of services, it can seem pretty small.  This is a problem, but it is not a critical one.

A worse problem is privacy.  If you have 20 accounts with different web services, you have probably already forgotten about half of them, unless you use them all very regularly.  All of those accounts hold some amount of your private information.  I'll discuss the security related things later, but for now, let us look at information that could be misused, but which is not a critical security risk.  The first, and most obvious one is credit card information.  Skirting around the subject of security (you did willingly give this information to these services), credit card data can be used in many ways.  It could be used to run credit checks.  It could be used to track you and your purchasing behavior.  Some of this is easy, some is more difficult, but a lot of this is possible and legal if you willingly gave the company your information.  Your physical address, phone numbers, and email address are all private information that could be misused without breaking the law, if you provided them willingly.  Some of these services might suddenly decide to start sending you ads a few years down the road, when their business is struggling.  You might get junk mail and telemarketing calls as well.  If one of these services is bought out, the buyer might decide to sell your personal information (not necessarily legal, if the original company agreed not to, but it happens anyway).  This is not necessarily a critical problem, but it could definitely cause a lot of inconvenience.

The worst problem is security.  We have discussed legitimate abuse of private information and some illegitimate abuse that is only indirectly related to security.  Security itself is not just about abuse by the service provider though.  The more accounts you have, the higher the odds are that at least one provider has poor security.  In fact, a majority of web services use security that is well below the accepted security standards for web.  Even something as simple as how your password is stored on their server can make a huge difference.  It is a well known fact that a vast majority of people use the same password or small set of passwords for all of their accounts.  If a hacker can get your password from the most trivial site, he can probably use it to hack into all of your other accounts.  If you have 10 or 20 different accounts, the odds that one of them has fairly weak security is very high.  All it takes is one.  The more accounts you have, the worse your odds are for getting hacked on all of your accounts.  This can give an attacker access to all of the private information you have on all of your accounts.  And, hackers do not have business ethics, high legal liability, and high profiles like the service providers do, so they are far less likely to avoid abuses of your data.  In fact, this is one of the most common techniques used by identity thieves to get your private information.  They don't have to hack into your bank.  They just have to hack into that Sony account to get your password, which they can then use to log into your bank account with ease, regardless of your bank's security.

There are ways to mitigate all of these.  The first is up to the service providers, and it only affects end users by increasing the prices of paid services.  The second can be mitigated by researching service providers before signing up for accounts (though, your employer or professor may still insist) and by asking for service providers to cancel your accounts and delete your information when you are done using them.  There is no law stating that they have to comply (this may be in the works though), and in some cases, the law may even require them to retain records, but many providers will comply when they can legally do so.  The third can be mitigated by always using different usernames and passwords for every account.  Good luck with this though.  Password managers can help, but they just shift the point of weakness.  Remembering 20 passwords is extremely difficult, so you may be tempted to write them all down, but that is often worse than a password manager.  Using one really good password can also help a little, but if someone hacks the service provider's database, it will not matter how good your password is.  The only fool proof solution is to have 20 highly secure and totally different passwords, and then to memorize them all.  Like I said, good luck.

This is actually a pretty big problem.  A lot of people in positions of authority think it is appropriate to impose security risks on other people, without any accountability.  If an employer or professor requires you to use an insecure service, there is no responsibility for harm caused if your information is misused.  If you do your research and find that a certain service is a high risk, typically your only option will be to quit your job or drop the class.  If the class is required for your major, you might have to switch majors to avoid the security risk.  If you are lucky, you might find sympathy, but often people are so set in their ways that they will risk the safety of everyone else to avoid change.  This is a very serious problem, and anyone involved in perpetuating it should seriously consider the consequences.

I understand that many times, the use of web services is valuable and even necessary.  This does not justify putting others at risk though.  Those choosing what services to use, and those approving such decisions, have a moral responsibility to make sure that those services meet accepted security standards.  Those being required to use such services should also make sure they meet accepted standards, and when they do not, those people should band together in protest.  Frankly, I think colleges should regulate what services professors are allowed to make mandatory.  If a professor needs a file repository service, the school should provide an option that it has verified as compliant with accepted security standards.  The school does not need to run the service (in fact, in my experience colleges are often poor at running such services internally).  It just needs to have a standard in place.  If a professor chooses to use a service that is outside of school policy, there should a policy specifically exempting students from being required to use that service as a condition of their grade (and the professor should be required to notify students of this policy wherever such a service is used).  In other words, use of such a service should be optional, and students should not be expected to have any knowledge or understanding of course material that is offered only through unapproved services (note that this article is about services that require accounts, not free services that do not require accounts).  (Obviously, colleges doing this should also have an approval procedure to add services to the list.)  Businesses would do well to also adopt policies requiring security assessments of any service that is required as part of the job, and no service which has not passed such an assessment should be allowed to be used as a mandatory part of the work.  In short, people in positions of authority over others should have some sort of regulations set in place to avoid putting their subordinates at risk.  Sometimes such regulations will fail (even following accepted security standards does not make a site immune to hacking, just much more resistant), but this is not an excuse to avoid them altogether.  No one should be allowed to put someone else at undue risk as a condition of their education or employment without any accountability.

Tech for Teens

We will not be buying smart phones for our children.  We will also not be allowing them unsupervised use of technology.  In addition, we are teaching them good manners and responsibility.

The question of whether parents should buy cell phones for their teens has been a hot topic off and on over the last decade and a half.  Many parents see a high potential for abuse and a low value to giving teens mobile communication devices.  Their arguments seem to be justified by the fact that cell phones have become a major distraction to students in class, and they are almost exclusively used for socialization.  The other side of the argument claims that the socialization itself has a very high value.  They also claim that teens need to be able to contact parents at any time for personal safety.  Both sides have some truth to their arguments, however, as cell phones have begun to proliferate among teens, we have gained a great deal of additional data.

Over the last 6 months, I have read at least 6 articles on how mobile communication devices are used by teens for bullying, revealing private information, and even for distributing child pornography (typically images of other under-aged students).  This has become very common.  Recently, yet another anonymous communication app has been condemned for its use in high school bullying and distribution of child pornography intended to defame its subjects.  This is a huge problem.  In fact, it has gotten so big that the FBI has gotten involved in multiple cases, and Apple even temporarily took one of these apps off of their app store, while the creators made some changes to make bullying and other illegal uses more difficult.  Some parent groups are even petitioning Apple to remove the app permanently.

Here is what I get out of this: The average teen is not responsible enough to trust with a smart phone.  I don't care if the justification is personal safety; a teen who deliberately compromises the safety of others with a mobile communication device should not possess it.  The problem, however, is not the teens themselves.  The people who are responsible for the behavior of those teens should bear a large portion of the responsibility.  Parents have the final say in whether a child younger than 18 years old possesses anything, including a smart phone.  Those parents have a moral and legal responsibility to provide oversight.  Before buying or allowing a teen to buy a mobile communication device, parents need to seriously assess the maturity of that child.  If that child is not mature enough to handle the responsibility, the parents should forbid the device, and they should enforce that decision.  When parents do not do this, and someone else is harmed by their child's poor choices, the parents should be charged with neglect, and they should be held responsible for the crimes committed due to that negligence.  The default should not be permission.  The default should be not to give a teen a cell phone.  Truly responsible parents should not give their teens mobile communication devices unless those teens have shown an unusually good level of responsibility and civility.  If your teen still calls people names or is heavily involved in teen drama, you can be certain that a smart phone will become a weapon for harming others in the hands of your teen.

Parental oversight is essential in the appropriate and legal use of technology.  Parents should not be allowing their teens to use these tools unsupervised.  Parents who do allow their teens to use communication technology without direct supervision should check histories, texts, and any other logs to make sure their teen is using the technology responsibly.  Parents should also forbid the use of anonymous communication that does not store logs.  Is this an invasion of privacy?  No!  Parents have a legal responsibility for the behavior of their minor children.  Part of this responsibility includes prying to make sure their children are not doing things that will harm others or themselves.  So long as a parent is a legal guardian of a child, that child legally owns nothing.  Even if the child pays for with money he or she earned, the property belongs to the parent until legal guardianship ends.  This means that a parent has every right to confiscate a cell phone that is being misused.  In fact, a parent has a responsibility to do so.  Teens are going through a period of brain development that leaves them especially vulnerable to making poor choices.  Part of the responsibility of parents is to help get their teens through this time without making choices that will cause substantial harm to themselves or to others.

Looking at the outdated arguments that are still used to justify permitting or forbidding cell phones for teens, here is my conclusion:  Cell phones are a major distraction in school (not just classes).  They do have the potential to help with social things, however, their potential to cause massive social harm is extremely high in the hands of a person that does not yet have well developed reasoning skills.  Personal safety is the only argument in favor of permission with any strength behind it.  There are, however, alternatives.  "Stupid phones" are still readily available.  Our plan is to buy a TracFone (or some similar pre-paid phone) model that only does calls (and perhaps texts) for our children.  When they go out somewhere that we think a phone would be a good idea, they will be issued a phone (we may need more than one, as our children are close together in age).  When they return, they will give the phone back, and we will log the time spent.  If any time was spent on calls to anyone but us, the child will be grounded.  This will not be a social phone.  It will be for communication with parents exclusively (though, emergency provisions, like 911 calls, will also be permissible).  The phone will not be a smart phone, and if we can manage it, it will not have internet access at all.  If our children want to buy cell phones with their own money (and pay their own subscription fees), we will only permit it once they are 16 years old, on the condition that we are to review all histories each day, and then only once we have evaluated their capacity for responsible use of the device.  Some might consider this policy restrictive and invasive.  Perhaps it is.  As a parent, with a responsibility to both my children and general society, this is my job.  If you are a parent, this is your job as well.

This epidemic of electronic bullying and crime by teens is ultimately the responsibility of their parents.  I sincerely hope to see FBI investigations on this problem end with massive fines for the parents who are ultimately responsible for allowing their teens to harm others.  A parent who, through negligence, allows their teen to perpetrate this sort of crime is a failure as a parent.  I do recognize that some teens will be sneaky and circumvent even the most strict parenting (and I do not condemn parents who are a victim of this), but when parents allow their minor children to harm others or themselves without even trying to be responsible, they are just plain bad parents.

What this comes down to is that the group against giving teens cell phones was right.  The potential for harm is far greater than the minor social advantages.  I am sure there are some teens responsible enough to have their own cells phones.  Ultimately, this should be up to the judgment of the parents.  Understand, however, that going easy on this judgment to appease your teen may turn out to be a massive parental failure to both your teen and to society as a whole.

(And, if parents will not step up and take responsibility for this problem, I will become a strong proponent of requiring licenses, at least for teens, to possess mobile communication devices.  And, as a supporter of free exchange of information, I really do not want to do that.  I am already opposed to allowing students to have cell phones in public schools.)

Pulling Your Own Weight

The idea of pulling your own weight is based on the idea that each person incurs costs for upkeep, including food, water, clothing, and shelter.  In the U.S., we might add things like internet and electricity to this, but really it comes down to the fact that every person has an upkeep cost, and someone has to pay it.  The idea of pulling your own weight is a very old idea, but also a conditional one.  Each person in a society that is capable of doing so is expected to pull their own weight.  Of course, there have been some deviations from this, but it is largely the most common way of running an economy.

There are some occasional historical exceptions to this, but there are also some chronic exceptions.  Historical exceptions almost always involve slavery.  Greek philosophy and math were built by people who did not pull their own weight.  In fact, if they had not had slaves to pull their weight for them, we would probably not have modern technology and science as we know them.  Slavery has been common off and on throughout history.  In the U.S. and most of Western civilization, slavery (overt slavery, anyhow) has been abandoned and replaced with an economic philosophy very common to cultures that reject slavery.  This philosophy is the idea that every person must pull their own weight.  Chronic exceptions to this are very common and will never go away.  Babies, young children, elderly people, and disabled people are not expected to pull their own weight, because they cannot.  Stay-at-home mothers are treated as not pulling their own weight in many parts of modern society, however this is a filthy lie.  They may not be producing goods, but stay-at-home mothers are doing work that is far more important than most of the work done outside the home.  Now, the slavery exception is becoming an unusual one that is likely to overturn how we view economy, probably within the next half century.

In older economies, the pull-your-own-weight ideology was a fairly sound one.  While it is possible for a small number of people to provide for a large number, the work involved has been excessive.  One slave working 16 hours a day might be able to provide the needs of ten or twenty other people, but that slave cannot have any freedom because there is just no time for it.  Modern technology has changed this though.  Besides finding more efficient ways of producing, it has also provided ways of replacing human labor with mechanical slaves.  Mechanical slavery is completely ethical.  The machines can work 24 hours a day, and they never need time off or personal time.  The only down time is time spent on repairs and maybe upgrades.  Experts estimate that this ethical form of slavery will replace about 50% of the human workforce by 2050.  This presents a very serious ideological problem.

Here is the problem: The U.S. economy is based on this pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are in the process of rapidly replacing human workers with mechanical slaves.  These two things are completely incompatible.  If we replace half of the human labor force with slaves and then still expect the humans to pull their own weight, we are expecting the impossible.  Actually, we are perhaps doing something worse.  We are missing something important. What is the actual weight of a human?

The "weight" of a human is the amount of labor required to meet that human's needs.  Slavery with human slaves does not change the weight of a human; it just displaces the labor.  Some human still has to pull the weight.  Slavery with machines slaves, however, does change the weight of humans.  Replacing human labor with machine labor directly reduces the human labor required to meet the needs of humans.  This is what we are missing: As we automate more processes, we are reducing the weight of humans.  The problem is that we are not accounting for this.  We have high unemployment largely because we have reduced the weight of humans, and those humans that are still doing the same amount of work are now pulling more than their own weight.  The result is that there is not enough work left for everyone else, because their weight is already being pulled.  Unfortunately, because we have not noticed this problem, we are not distributing the results of the work appropriately.  The consequence is that some people are pulling more than their own weight, and they are getting the proceeds of that.  The people that are not able to pull their own weight are stuck without enough to survive, because their portion is being given to the people that are pulling their weight for them.

This is complicated, and it is not obvious that this is what is happening.  Further, there is a very important reason that this is happening: We have reached a point where it is actually substantially less efficient for each person to pull their own weight.  When each person's weight costs 2 to 4 hours of work per day (and, when that burden is centralized to one or two people per family), it is fairly efficient for businesses.  Each employee spends enough time working to easily keep up with overhead.  Now, however, each person's weight comes out to around 1 or 2 hour per day, or even less.  When centralized, this comes out between 10 to 20 hours a week.  Having every employee work half time doubles the overhead, because the number of employees are doubled (reducing hours does not reduce overhead).  In addition to that, higher end jobs often have warm up and cool down time that results in unproductive hours on each end of a shift.  This means, in an 8 hour shift, if an hour at each end is unproductive, 75% of the work time is productive.  In 4 hour shifts, productivity is reduced to only 50%.  In lower end jobs this effect is dramatically lower, but in high end jobs (especially in problem solving work like engineering and science), this is a major obstacle to reducing hours (note that in these jobs, longer time between shifts tends to increase the unproductive warm up time, so 8 hours three days a week is not an efficient solution either).  This is an efficiency problem that is never going to go away.  It is just not efficient at current human "weight" for each person to pull his or her own weight.

Is there a solution to this?  Yes, but it is not a very popular one.  It is incredibly unpopular among conservatives, and it is at least mildly unpopular among liberals.  The solution is abandoning the pull-your-own-weight ideology.  We are quickly becoming a slave state, just like Greece was, except that we are doing it ethically.  If we do not abandon this pull-your-own-weight ideology, we are going to either let the majority of Americans starve as their jobs are replaced by machines, or we are going to have millions of Americans working workweeks so short that they are costing more overhead than the value they are generating.  Neither of these is a good long term economic plan.  One short term solution might be long vacation time, where each employee works "normal" hours, but only for 1/4 of the year, and the rest of the year is vacation time, however, that only partially mitigates overhead costs.  The most efficient solution is for some people to work 20 to 40 hour weeks at least 50% to 75% of the year, while everyone else lives off of the proceeds of that work.  Some kind of motivation would be necessary for those who work, and this would probably be complicated and difficult to do without resulting in an overprivileged working class and an underprivileged non-working class (ironic, given that historically the opposite happens).  Ultimately though, it is going to eventually become necessary, or we are going to have an epic economic crash when so many consumers starve to death that consumption drops below an economically sustainable level.

Things are changing rapidly.  Technology continues to advance faster than we can keep up with.  In the past, the impact of this has been primarily limited to the tech industry itself.  In the near future, however, this is going to have a massive economic impact.  If we are not prepared, we are going to suffer.  In some degree, the consequences are not predictable, but there is one thing that is predictable: If a large portion of human labor is replaced with machine labor, we cannot have a sustainable economy that is based in the pull-your-own-weight ideology. 

Taco Bell App

Taco Bell has come out with an ordering app that allows customers to use their smart phones to put in an order and pay for it.  As the customer approaches a Taco Bell location, the app asks if they want the restaurant to start preparing their food.  This process can involve almost no human contact (I suppose someone has to pass the food out the window, but ordering and paying is entirely electronic).

As this becomes more popular (Taco Bell is not the first to try this, and it most certainly will not be the last), a lot of jobs are going to be lost.  Eventually, most drive through orders will not require a cashier, because most of them will already be ordered and paid for before the customer even enters the drive through.  This will allow the drive through cashier position to be combined with another position.  It is also likely that the added convenience will reduce the need for inside cashiers.  Eventually this is going to spread to all fast food restaurants, because otherwise, they will not be able to compete.  This is going to add up to a lot of jobs that are lost.

It is about time!  Fast food restaurants severely underpay their employees.  They claim that they cannot afford to pay more.  I have argued this before, and I will repeat it again: A business that cannot pay employees enough to survive on is not worth existing.  Work that is not worth a living wage is not worth doing at all.  Pay that is below a living wage is just plain not sustainable.  A business that cannot pay a living wage is not profitable enough or valuable enough to justify its own existence.  Fast food is practically the bottom of the barrel (ok, agriculture is far worse, but also far less prominent).  Current Federal minimum wage, which most fast food places start at, generates well under the poverty level in income, even full time.  One of the most effective ways of reducing costs (so that employees can be paid fair wages) is automating processes and eliminating unnecessary employees.  Food assembly is hard to automate (though, certainly possible).  Automated order taking is now very easy to automate.  It is the low hanging fruit.  It is nice to see that fast food is finally figuring this out.

There is a catch.  The most common response to increased profits through automation is faster expansion and better shareholder payouts (or, even worse, increased CEO salary).  If Taco Bell choses to take this route, then not only is it not worth existing, it is actively worth destroying.  Why?  It is already vastly underpaying its employees.  It should take this opportunity to make its employment system more sustainable by raising wages.  Admittedly, eliminating maybe two or three employees will not save enough to pay all of the rest a living wage.  An effort, however, would be nice.  It would show that they care about paying their employees fairly.  If, instead, they spend the profits on something else, then they are showing that they could care less about their employees.  If this is the case, then the business does not deserve to exist, and additionally, it deserves to die so society no longer has to pay the costs of its freeloading on our unpaid labor (if it pays less than a living wage, then it is not paying for all of the labor it is getting).  I hope they do the right thing, but I am not holding my breath.

Technology Aesthetic

Technology has struggled with aesthetics for decades.  Modern tech devices really do not look much better than early ones, except in a few rare circumstances.  I doubt this struggle will ever end, because different people have different tastes.  There are a few things that could be done to improve the situation though.

There are several options when dealing with aesthetics in technology.  The first is hide it.  This is probably the most common.  The typical cell phone has an almost sleek looking body that serves only to hide the insides and offer very minor protection from damage (sorry, anything that is not waterproof cannot qualify as offering more than minor protection).  Most desktop computer cases serve the entirely utilitarian purpose of providing a frame to attach internal components to, again offering minor protection.  Laptops sometimes have customizable options, but still rarely serve any purpose well besides holding the components together and hiding them from the user.  Hiding is, by far, the most common way of dealing with tech aesthetics.  Real beauty is never a part of the equation.  Even hiding is not usually done very well.  An LCD screen encased in black plastic may hide the internal electronics, but it only barely does so.  Looking at the screen, it is still obvious that electronics are inside.  There is no suspension of disbelief; we all know what is hidden in there, and we cannot pretend otherwise.

The second option is exposing the technology.  Circuit boards and electronic components can look aesthetically pleasing, but it takes a bit of care and effort.  Some people in the tech industry enjoy the appearance of raw electronics so much that they will purchase computer cases with big windows on the sides, so the internal circuitry are visible.  Most people, however, do not like the unfinished appearance of typical electronics.  At a cost, it is possible to completely clean up electronics and make them look presentable in their own right, but this gets expensive very quickly as boards get larger (like the motherboard in a PC).  Most smaller devices, like phones, include very sensitive radio frequency circuitry that would be difficult to expose safely, so exposing the technology is not always a viable option.

The third option, which has never been done very well, is hiding, but focusing on making the hiding place beautiful.  Apple has tried this repeatedly, but still has not managed to get very far past basic hiding.  Touch screens and capacitive buttons (as opposed to tactile switch buttons) help this a lot by more effectively hiding the technology, but white plastic is still clearly very modern and unnatural.  The white plastic enclosures of most modern Apple products  just cries out technology.  The technology may be hidden on the inside, but the aesthetic advertises that this is a man made technological device.  It may look pretty to some, but it does not do a very good job of hiding the technology.

There is a fourth option, which has never been done on a large scale.  Part of the reason is that it would initially be expensive, and it might be difficult to keep up.  This is changing the aesthetic altogether.  This falls into the category of hiding, but it is far more flexible and more capable of beauty.  This kind of hiding puts suspension of disbelief as the primary goal.  Instead of enclosing the device in a mundane plastic enclosure, it could be contained in a wood (or realistic faux wood) enclosure.  Correctly designed, an LCD monitor could be made to look like a picture frame.  This could be mounted on an office wall, and if the cables were easily concealable, a static image on it could trick visitors into thinking that it was an actual photograph, instead of a computer monitor.  A flip phone might look like a large locket.  Buttons or keys could be made to look like stone (some sci-fi shows feature "ancient" technology that uses large stone blocks as keys for an input device).  Brass or other metals (or even realistic metallic paint on plastic) could be used to make keys that appear to have been made during the Victorian era or earlier.  Using materials that appear to be non-technological in nature it would be possible to hide technology in enclosures that do not advertise that technology lies within.  It might still be obvious that a cell phone is a cell phone, but the user (and spectators) could imagine that the device uses magic or mechanics to operate, instead of modern electronics.  The appearance of the device would not break suspension of disbelief.


Now none of these options are the "best."  Poorly hiding the technology is probably the cheapest option.  Exposing the technology satisfies a niche, but most people would prefer it hidden.  Hiding with a focus on aesthetics has worked very well for Apple, and many people like the idea of carrying a device that is clearly high tech without actually exposing the technology. 

Visually transforming technology could introduce a great variety of different aesthetics, and it could revolutionize how we interact with technology, but it would also carry some initial expenses.  Making technology into artwork requires real artists, not just industrial engineers trained to focus on the most practical designs.  Creating all of the hardware for producing beautiful technology would be fairly expensive.  Eventually, this expense would largely disappear as fabrication technology improved, and much of this hardware would be a one time cost anyway, but the art costs would still linger.  Ultimately, it would pay though.  There are many niche markets (some fairly large) that would make this very profitable if managed wisely.  Steampunk cell phones would probably sell fairly well already, without excessive marketing costs (word can get around quickly in the Steampunk community).  A Medieval theme would be popular for those involved in Renaissance Fairs and SCA, as well as for some historians.  Any variety of fantasy themes could be wildly successful (a cell phone could be modeled as a magical scrying device and an LCD monitor might have a frame that would be appropriate for a magic mirror) and the sci-fi market is largely untapped here as well (just within the Stargate series, there are at least 10 alien tech aesthetics that could be highly profitable; Star Trek and Star Wars would also be quite popular).  Nature based themes (a realistic wooden case, maybe even with knots protruding slightly) could be popular with the environmentalist movement, and they might even appeal to primitivists who are not opposed to using some technology.  Of course, there are nearly infinite possibilities in the anime and cosplay markets.  Already, case upgrades with some of these themes are popular, but case upgrades are just pretty pictures attached to the phone.  They do not beautify the phone itself.  Some designs would justify adding as much as $50 to the price of a phone (possibly more for larger devices), and it would probably be easy to get an extra $5 or $10 even for simpler (but realistic looking) designs.  The potential for profit is very high, and there are also possible reputation boosts for companies that do this well.

The point of this is not to denigrate current technology aesthetics, but rather to point out that they do not live up to their full potential.  The market for utilitarian designs and designs that "feel" modern and high tech is saturated.  There are multiple markets for designs that feel low tech or even no tech, but that are still high tech on the inside.  There are markets for designs that feel like sci-fi advanced tech as well as designs that feel mystical or ancient.  There are even markets for designs that feel like products of nature.  Tech aesthetic does not have to be all about hiding the technology.  It can be about making the technology appear to be more or less than it actually is.  There is a place for purely practical designs, but in a world with billions of people, there are many that want more than just practical utilitarian devices.

A friend of a friend once used the term "fashion device" to refer to a potentially useful electronic device designed to fit into a specific aesthetic.  Themed aesthetics does not have to stop at hand held or wearable devices though.  Even a laptop or desktop computer, an LCD TV, or a computer printer could be designed to have decorative value in addition to practical value (in fact, parts of the steampunk community have altered laptop and desktop computers to look like something straight out of Victorian England; these are currently the ultimate in useful decorations, but the potential is practically infinite).  Instead of hiding technology, we could be disguising it as other things.  We could be making technology look and feel like something entirely different, and we could do it without sacrificing utility.  Instead of ugly blocky speakers and screens framed in mundane black plastic, we could devices that are both works of art as well as useful tools.  Our houses could look like art galleries instead of collections of ugly but necessary blocks of multi-colored plastic and painted metal.  Long ago, aesthetics was considered more important in household devices.  In antique shops, it is sometimes possible to find sewing machines, radios, and even old television sets framed in high quality wood with artistic embellishments.  Modern technology has opened up many more aesthetic possibilities.  Now it is time to take advantage of them and beautify our tech culture.