Hoisted from the Archives: Information Technology and the Future of Society: My CITRIS Kickoff Speech

My CITRIS kickoff speech: Information Technology and the Future of Society (Hoisted from the Archives)

Information Technology and the Future of Society: For perhaps 9000 years after the beginnings of agriculture the overwhelming proportion of human work lives were spent making things: growing crops, shearing sheep, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, throwing pots, cutting down trees, copying books, and so on, and so forth. Technology did improve enormously over those 9000 years: contrast the clothes-making technology at the disposal of Henry VIII of England with that of Rameses II of Egypt three thousand years before; contrast the triple-crop paddy-irrigated rice- and water-control-based agriculture of the Yangtze Delta in eighteenth-century China with the scratch-the-soil-with-a-hoe agriculture of two thousand years before. But as Thomas Robert Malthus first wrote in the 1790s, rising populations had put enough pressure on scarce natural resources to offset the benefits of better technology and keep living standards nearly constant for the people if not for the elite: American President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 A.D. certainly enjoyed a higher standard of living than Roman Consul Marcus Tullius Cicero in 63 B.C. But did Jefferson's slaves enjoy a higher standard of living than Cicero's? A large amount of archeological evidence has not yet found significant differences.

For the past two hundred and fifty years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the productivity of those workers who make things has exploded. Hand-spinners in the eighteenth century took 50,000 hours--20 full work-years--to spin 100 lbs of cotton into thread (Freeman and Louca (2001), and spinning of one sort or another took up perhaps 5% of total labor-time. Today it takes 40 work hours to spin 100 lbs. of cotton: a more than thousand-fold amplification of productivity in this one task.

As our productivity at growing crops and making things has exploded, demand for the things we make has grown too, but not fast enough to keep the crop-growing, food-cooking, mineral-extracting, clothes-making, box-carrying, and other goods-producing share of our economy's labor force from falling. Today those who in any earlier age would be classified as "production workers"--and would have been the overwhelming majority of the labor force--are perhaps 20% of our economy, and the bulk of them are better characterized as machine-watchers and machine-fixers. According to Stanford's Robert Hall, as early as 1980 there were twice as many salesmen in Ford-selling auto dealerships as there were assembly-line workers employed by Ford Motor Company.

So what are the rest of us--the other 80%--doing? In a sense, we all--from U.C. professors to chief technical officers to xerox operators, Ford Salesmen, cashiers, and parking-lot attendants--are and have long been information workers: people whose jobs are, if we examine them closely, largely concerned with determining what exactly the goods-producing sectors should make, how it should be made, where it should go, and to whom it should be distributed--and that is leaving aside the large chunk of our economy that is symbolic communication as an end in itself.

Today we see--not yet sharply, not yet clearly, but no longer dimly--the prospect that the ongoing technological revolutions in data processing and data communications will do for the "information" sectors of the economy something like what the Industrial Revolution did for goods-producing sectors like cotton spinning. As Steve Cohen over in the City Planning department here likes to say, you are now building the equivalent of the industrial-age tools for shaping and handling matter, but you are building tools for thought (Cohen, DeLong, and Zysman (2001)). And if we can figure out how to make these tools for thought fulfill their promise, they should produce a quantum jump in our technological power, economic productivity, and--we hope--quality of life of as many energy levels as the jump of the Industrial Revolution itself.

But there are major problems of social engineering and organizational design that stand in our way. A century or so ago, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the market economy turned out to have an extraordinarily good fit with the developing industrial technologies of goods-making. It provided a framework of social organization that was extraordinarily effective in providing people with incentives to carry on activities that generated rapid technological development, capital accumulation, and economic growth.

An effective form of social organization faces decision makers with incentives that mirror the impacts of their actions on society as a whole. Because the goods produced by industrial technologies were rival--that is, could only be of use to one person at one time--each person's use of such a good diminished the supply available to the rest of society. Thus it made sense from the viewpoint of efficient distribution to require that users pay a price--diminish their ability to acquire and use other resources--for commodities. And those prices paid then gave producing organizations the resources to carry on and expand their activities. Because the goods produced were excludable--that is, it was by-and-large straightforward to limit control over use to those authorized--it was easy and straightforward to push decision-making outward from the clueless bureaucratic center to the periphery where people on the ground might actually have a good sense of the situation, and of what should be done.

These three advantages--earmarking additional resources for successful and efficient production organizations, providing users with incentives for economically-efficient distribution, and decentralization of decision-making to where the knowledge was likely to be--were delivered by accident by the trade-and-market economic structure of Adam Smith.

But now as we try to realize the technological promise of information technologies, the old forms of economic organization no longer have a natural fit with the requirements of technological development and economic growth. Once an "information good" has been produced, sharing it with another person doesn't reduce the rest of society's resources and opportunities. So there is no efficient-distribution reason to charge a price for it. But where then does the flow of signals to assess which production organizations are efficient come from? In an earlier age we would be more inclined to rely on government funding, but these days we have a keen awareness of the advantages in applied development at least of semi-Darwinian competitive mechanisms, where investigators are responsible to investors seeking profits and not to committees seeking whatever committees seek.

Moreover, it is only with difficulty that information goods are excludable. But if their use can't be restricted to authorized users, then the entire market-as-a-social-calculating-and-signalling mechanism simply breaks down. Unfortunately, attempts to make information goods "excludable" by various forms of use protection waste valuable time and energy: I shudder at the memory of having spent two hours on hold during three phone calls, and having spent another two hours of my time rebooting and reading installation error messages the last time I tried to upgrade one of the Adobe programs--GoLive--on this laptop. I doubt I'll ever be able to face the prospect of buying another Adobe program again.

Two things, however, are clear. First, caught between "government failures" in applied research and the ever-larger "market failures" that will be created as the characteristics of information-age goods clash with the requirements for market efficiency, intermediate forms of organization--like large publicly-funded research universities--need to play an even larger role in research and development in the future than they have in the past. Projects like CITRIS promise the benefits of government research--the wide distribution of knowledge and the acceleration of cumulative research--and the benefits of private entrepreneurship--the willingness to take risks and investigate large numbers of potential development projects rather than just those that have won the stamp of approval of a single central committee. It is the task of chancellors and deans, of course, to make sure that projects like CITRIS don't wind up producing the drawbacks of both forms of organization: the strangulation by bureaucratic red-tape and committee infighting of government, combined with the restrictions on the distribution of information and the use of products that make a large share of private-sector development work duplicative of what has already been done.

Second, realizing the promise of the Societal-Scale Information Systems that are the Holy Grails of this quest will turn out to be a problem of social engineering as well as computer science. I have long wondered just why it was that the first half of the 1980s were the era of the IBM PC rather than of the DEC VAX--when the hardware cost of a VAX was, as best as I can guess, no more than 1/5 that of the equivalent number of 8086 machines, and when thanks largely to Berkeley UNIX there was no comparison at all in software. The answer lies somewhere in social engineering--that somehow paying out five times as much for inferior software was worth not having to wrestle with established MIS bureaucracies. But what the answer is I am not sure.

So let me turn this into a sales pitch for the social scientists at Berkeley interested in information technology--from Manuel Castells in sociology to Pam Samuelson and Mark Lemley at the law school to John Zysman and Steve Weber in political science to Hal Varian and his simians to Suzanne Scotchmer at public policy to the industrial organization and antitrust barons of the business school and the economics department--Glenn Woroch, Rich Gilbert, Dan Rubinfeld, Mike Katz, Carl Shapiro--and a host of others. I do not know of a place with a more vibrant and smarter community of scholars interested in the social engineering aspects of information technology.

And I do not know of a better place than this to assemble the resources to build the Societal-Scale Information Systems that can make information technologies realize their promise.

Comments

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Of course we already know the name of the Societal-Scale Information System. It will be called Skynet.

[Gavin Kenendy]

The fact that technology improved yields greatly in food production raised gross output over millennia since the age of agriculture from about 9,000-11,000 years ago.

That is consistent with per capita food consumption being roughly the same when increases in population being taken into account.

That there were 'blips' in per capita living standards up and down is also consistent with roughly steady per capita consumption for long periods.

There were also chnages in consumption per head with manufactures (from technology) adding to consumption over time periods longer than fresh food lasted. Clothing, shelter, artifacts (including weapons and stone buildings) were 'consumed' over longer time periods so that the 'possessions' of people in different time periods could show different inventories in different periods.

Hence, Adam Smith pointed to the artifacts of common labourers in Scotland having many more of such compared to 'Indian' or African 'princes' (North American) at the head of '10,000 naked savages' (Wealth of Nations).

Following the fall of Rome in the 5th century, per capita living standards dropped back to the pre-Roman levels, but with higher populations (except in plague decades).

With the post-15th-century Western European experience of both gross farming and 'rude' manufactures out put rising and growing populations a new unprecedented era began where both pross and per capita consumption rose and continued to rise.

Smith tracked the causes of these changes in Wealth OF Nations, 1776,(and earlier in his Lectures In Jurisprudence, 1762-3) and correctly spotted its scope and potential, whether Perfect Liberty was achieved or not - the progress towards opulence was inevitable as long as spendthrift government and gullible legislators did not reverse it (Book IV of Wealth of Nations).

[Gerard MacDonell]

Dr. Delong: How do you feel about Matthew Dowd as contestant in your stupidest man alive contest?

His application appears on the front page of today's NYT. He claims to have discovered a disappointment in Bush after he got Bush re-elected in 2004. Airing his anguish over misjudging the Iraq adventure, he mans up and concedes that Kerry was probably right. He even goes so far as to say he wrote an op-ed piece to this effect but chose against getting it published. In other words, he wrote for the war before he wrote against it, but he didn't inhale. He sounds a bit like Kerry himself. The difference is that Kerry was and is stupid sounding. This dude is stupid being.

Related, check this passage from NYT. "Mr. Dowd’s journey from true believer to critic in some ways tracks the public arc of Mr. Bush's political fortunes." Yeah, in some ways, this is a rat leaving a sinking ship, spouting lame philosophy as it tries to save its own fetid hide.

AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 — In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush’s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.

A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.

Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.

In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,” he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.”

In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush’s inner circle to break so publicly with him.

He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.

Mr. Dowd, a crucial part of a team that cast Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper who could not be trusted with national security during wartime, said he had even written but never submitted an op-ed article titled “Kerry Was Right,” arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq.

“I’m a big believer that in part what we’re called to do — to me, by God; other people call it karma — is to restore balance when things didn’t turn out the way they should have,” Mr. Dowd said. “Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.”

Mr. Dowd’s journey from true believer to critic in some ways tracks the public arc of Mr. Bush’s political fortunes. But it is also an intensely personal story of a political operative who at times, by his account, suppressed his doubts about his professional role but then confronted them as he dealt with loss and sorrow in his own life.

In the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd’s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic. Mr. Dowd said he had become so disillusioned with the war that he had considered joining street demonstrations against it, but that his continued personal affection for the president had kept him from joining protests whose anti-Bush fervor is so central.

Mr. Dowd, 45, said he hoped in part that by coming forward he would be able to get a message through to a presidential inner sanctum that he views as increasingly isolated. But, he said, he holds out no great hope. He acknowledges that he has not had a conversation with the president.

Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Mr. Dowd’s criticism is reflective of the national debate over the war.

“It’s an issue that divides people,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Even people that supported the president aren’t immune from having their own feelings and emotions.”

He said he disagreed with Mr. Dowd’s description of the president as isolated and with his position on withdrawal. He said Mr. Dowd, a friend, has “sometimes expressed these sentiments” in private conversation, though “not in such detail.”

During the interview with Mr. Dowd on a slightly overcast afternoon in downtown Austin, he was a far quieter man than the cigar-chomping general that he was during Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign.

Soft-spoken and somewhat melancholy, he wore jeans, a T-shirt and sandals in an office devoid of Bush memorabilia save for a campaign coffee mug and a photograph of the first couple with his oldest son, Daniel. The photograph was taken one week before the 2004 election, and one day before Daniel was to go to boot camp.

[bigTom]

I wouldn't call Mathew Dowd a proper contestant for Stupidest man alive. At least he was able to recognize
his (serious) mistake. Of course knowing of this boner, we are not likely to give a lot of credibility to other pronouncements he might make.

It is interesting that Brads post discusses the conflict in knowledge areas like software, between for profit legally protected products, and public OpenSource knowledge. The later can be thought of as invaluable world infrastructure. The real problem is how to reward and incentivize it's creation.

[Jon Fernquest]

IMHO In the wake of the Iraq "Green Zone" policy mindset disaster, the US has to get more creative, and the place where that is going to happen is universities, not "think tanks" like AEI, that are really just mutual adulation societies, places to build unquestioning conformity to a certain policy line, i.e. not "think" tanks at all.

US policy with respect to trade is ham-fisted and not nuanced. After they pull a country off foreign aid (like Thailand where I work) that's it. They throw you to big Pharma:

http://www.readbangkokpost.com/business/
intellectual_property/
intellectual_property_or_savin.php

In my neighborhood in rural Thailand, there's a couple whose continued existence on planet earth depends on AIDS/HIV drugs, so I can understand how the Thai government has recently just skipped the negotiating step with Big Pharma and immediately issued a compulsory licence.

The CITRIS project sounds like Google.org's idea to foster university-like scientific research projects in a for-profit corporate setting:

http://www.readbangkokpost.com/business/
entrepreneurship/
for_profit_charity.php

Business types eventually wear myopic blinders as part of their enculturation, greater incorporation of universities would inject long-term viability into policy.

[Jon Fernquest]

Chomsky commented yesterday on the current lack of sophistication in America's Asia policy:

Beware of state power
Perspective: Sunday April 01, 2007

"...McLeod: Turning to China, you mentioned that China is becoming a major competitor to US power in Asia, and even that the US is "frightened by China." How does China pose a threat to US interests in Asia?

Chomsky: China does not pose a military threat. In fact, of all the major powers, China has probably been the most restrained in building up its military forces. China poses a very serious threat to US power because it cannot be intimidated by the US.

Take for example Iran and Iraq. The US wants the world to boycott Iran in pursuit of US policies. Europe sort of shakes its fist, but then Europe pretty much backs off. So when the US warns countries not to invest in Iran, European investors - banks and so on - tend to pull out.

China on the other hand doesn't pay attention. They just go ahead and do what they want to do... The idea that there is a potentially powerful state that cannot easily be intimidated is very threatening to people who want to rule the world.

(The US) is a little bit like the mafia. The Godfather does not tolerate disobedience, even in a small storekeeper, let alone somebody that matters, so that's a threat.

However the US-China relationship is also very ambivalent. On one hand, from the point of view of state power, China is threatening because it follows its own course.

On the other hand, powerful US business interests are highly influential in determining state policy. These businesses have a real stake in China - it is a wonderful platform for cheap exports and a potential market. They want relations with China to be strong, so there is an internal conflict in the US.

Remember that China has enormous financial reserves that surpass Japan - it is keeping the US economy afloat. So it's a pretty tricky, complex relationship.

McLeod: Does Asia have much to worry about from China's rising power and influence?

Chomsky: Anytime a big power is developing, everybody has to worry, including the Chinese people.

Concentrations of power are dangerous. There is plenty of history about that.

How much does it have to worry? Well, that depends on how things develop, so closer relations between India and China, which are now developing, could be beneficial to Asia. It's much better than having them muscle their neighbours.

McLeod: In your writings and speeches, you have said that the Asian Energy Security Grid is a very important issue, even though it hasn't received much attention in the media. Could you describe what the energy grid is and how it is important?

Chomsky: There are actually two parallel organisations. One is the Asian Energy Security Grid, and the other is the Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCC). Both are pretty much based in China.

The US applied for observer status to the SCC and was turned down, which was a blow. The central Asian states are part of it, Iran has observer status, India and Pakistan will probably join and Russia is a part of it.

The SCC is taking the form of a counterpart to NATO, and this is a large part of the conflict in the Middle East. And you are right that it is not discussed much here. (US Vice President Dick) Cheney, not long ago, gave a speech in Lithuania where he said that control over energy resources and pipelines can't be used as tools of intimidation and bribery - I think that was his phrase. Now he was referring to control of resources in the hands of others. Remember that others see exactly the same with the energy resources that are in the hands of the US...

Control of energy is a major problem. China and Russia and India understand very well that if there is going to be anything like what some people call an Asian century, they are going to have to control their energy resources.

But the North Korean problem is part of this too... North Korea has no economic resources to speak of, but it is the natural place for pipelines to go from the Siberian energy resources into South Korea and through to Japan. Also the trans-Siberian railroad might extend through there, so there is some geo-strategic significance as part of this very dynamic northeast Asian economic group.

McLeod: Do you believe that the Asian Energy Security Grid is a major factor in the conflict with Iran?

Chomsky: There are two basic issues with Iran. One is simply that, like Iraq, Iran is at the core of the energy producing system. However, there is another factor and that's the mafia factor that I mentioned. Iran was successful and defiant of the US in 1979 when it overthrew the US-installed tyrant, and it has to be punished for that.

You take a look at US policies ever since 1979. First under the Carter administration, the US tried to instigate a military coup in Iran, but that didn't work. So under Regan, they turned to supporting Saddam Hussein and his aggression against Iran, which was not a small thing....."

http://www.bangkokpost.com/
010407_Perspective/
01Apr2007_pers02.php

[Slocum]

"I have long wondered just why it was that the first half of the 1980s were the era of the IBM PC rather than of the DEC VAX--when the hardware cost of a VAX was, as best as I can guess, no more than 1/5 that of the equivalent number of 8086 machines, and when thanks largely to Berkeley UNIX there was no comparison at all in software."

"The answer lies somewhere in social engineering--that somehow paying out five times as much for inferior software was worth not having to wrestle with established MIS bureaucracies"

Well, I'm sure the lack of bureaucracy played some role, but your university-centric world view shows, I think. PCs were (and are) usable by people who are not part of, did not live and work in, a large organization that could support even a minimal IT dept or make use of a VAX and a bunch of VT-100 terminals.

And communication was a serious problem, too -- there was no really effective way to distribute the power of a VAX widely. The slowness of phone-line communications limited remote users to primitive TTY interfaces--whereas if one had the keyboard, CPU, and video system tightly coupled (as in a PC), one could do much, much more.

This is still, true, in fact. Even as fast as networking is now, one still does not edit digital images or video with web-based applications.