A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

My feeling is not that we are moving towards a complete collapse of civilisation, but instead move closer and closer to the distopian world of of Gibson and cyberpunk.

W. Gibson, N. Stephenson or David Brin (his earth is a highly recommended read) are certainly people I would never bet against in a long bet. The predictive power of some science fiction is fascinating. I always wondered if it is the books that predict the future or if they are the shaping it, by becoming part of culture.

Spoiler alert.

> Kelly wrote to Sale on New Year’s Day, instructing him to direct the $1,000 to Heifer International, a nonprofit that gives away breeding pairs of animals. Sale puzzled him by replying, “I didn’t lose the bet.” Kelly assumed he hadn’t seen Patrick’s decision, and he had the editor resend it.

> But Sale had read it—and rejected it.

> “I cannot accept that I lost,” he wrote to Patrick. “The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.”

> Like the raging denialist in the White House, the cantankerous anarchocommunalist has quit the game after the final score left him short. Sale says he is seeking some sort of appellate relief, if only by public opinion, when in fact the rules included no such reconsideration. Kelly is infuriated. “This was a gentleman’s bet, and he can only be classified as a cad,” he says.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this Sale fellow sounds like an asshole.

Here are some of Ada Lovelace's notes on Menebrea's paper on Babbage's Analytical Engine: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-lovelace-notes.ht...

> Again, it [the Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine . . . Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

Some AI generated music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA03iyI3yEA

> It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with. This it is calculated to effect primarily and chiefly of course, through its executive faculties; but it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself in another manner. For, in so distributing and combining the truths and the formula of analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.

The second quote in particular was important for Turing later on: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/05/lovelace-the-programmer-who-s...

Back to your comment,

I believe Steve Jobs was a buisnessperson with a focus on design and Steve Wozniak provided most of quality engineering on the early years. I also like to bash Apple for a lot of stuff and I have never bought nor owned a single Apple product but recognize their early products as great and not snake oil.

So that is "anything but a snake oil salesman with a decent understanding of typography" and by modus tollens I am _not_ the "type of person to think she had anything important to add to computer science". Contradiction.

Also, it is no coincidence that the first programmer was working with the person building the first general computer (albeit neither digital nor electronic)

How can there even be ‘significant warfare between rich and poor’? Some kind of communist revolution? By definition the poor don’t have the resources to significantly attack the rich.

> Lovelace is a perfect mirror for our society: a vapid socialite with shallow understanding of the problems and a willingness to make grandiose claims without the ability to back them up.

Can you provide some more context to this? Given that I'm viewing everything related to heroism as problematic(and that includes Claude Shannon) I'd be curious to know more about the context of this statement.

EDIT: I have personally seen/witnessed and experienced plenty of environments where credit was given to those that brought solutions into writing rather than the ones who did all the work to bring things to fruition. So this is always of interest to me (it's also tightly related to the German saying: Wer schreibt, der bleibt/roughly: Only written proof counts)