The image that sticks in my mind the most is the Meiji Emperor in a 1870s photo dressed in a saville row suit and bowler hat. For Japan the most incredible social card to play that says “we are going to be like these foreigners and their secrets to wealth”

Nothing accidental there, but that still leaves visible joins on the Japanese soul.

Imagine a option on your iPhone that says “Enable this to allow geo-location tracking for organisations registered under the NOADSJUSTPUBLICGOOD Act” - then any wifi endpoint could locate you as long based on signal strength etc and that data could only be made available to people registered under the act.

Would we see new understanding of how people move around in cities, would we see better traffic information, Inthink so - as long as people believe that there are real teeth to the laws and they enforced loudly and publically.

We should embrace the benefits of a society wide epidemiology experiment - the benefits for public health are incredible. (Add to that supply chain logistics on open ledgers and many of the new things that just were not possible before and the future of open transparent but well regulated democracies is bright.

Let me know if you spot one.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

This might be obvious to everyone but it’s a nice way to me to view it (sort of restating the non-waterfall (agile?) approach to specification discovery)

Ie waterfall design without coding is too under specified, hence the agile waterfall of using code iteratively to find an exact specification

That’s the beauty of OSS - the level we could write code is way less than the level the culture / timescale / management allows. I recently saw OSS as akin to (good) journalism for enterprise - asking why is this hidden part of society not doing the minimum (jails, corruption etc).

Free software does sooo much better compared to much in-house it is like sunlight

I see this as primarily a social issue - OSS projects are frequently free of the WTF bugs enterprise software can suffer from (things that one lone developer with access to their own OS would never do - call it “I can’t install X so no logging at all happens”) and frequently free of the bugs that a lone developer would slowly fix (call it “proof of concept got released because a rewrite would need approval” bugs). That alone removes entire classes of bugs before we it logic bugs and off by one errors.

The social cost of “is that honestly the best you can do” is enormous, and being part of a dysfunctional organisation allows human nature to stick on “in this place, in this culture - yes”

Chnaging that culture in a small team is possible - at scale it’s really costly

Despite many decades of proof that automation simplifies and reveals the illogical in organisations, digitisation has mostly stopped at below the “CXO” level - and so there are not APIs or CLIs available to anyone - but MCP is cutting through

Just consider:

Throughout companies large and small, Agile is what coders do, real project managers still use deadlines and upfront design of what will be in the deadline - so any attempt to convert the whole company to react to the reality of the road is blocked

Reports flow upwards - but through the reporting chain. So those PowerPoints are … massaged to meet to correct story, and the more levels it’s massaged the more it fails to resemble reality. Everyone knows this but managing the transition means potentially losing control …

There are plenty of digitisationmprojects going on - but do they enable full automation or are they another case of an existing political arena building its own political choices in software - “our area in a database to be accessed via an UI by our people” - almost never “our area to be used by others via API and totally replacing our people”.

(I think I need to be more persuasive

I saw a speech by Carl Sagan that might be relevant - he said (sometime in 1990 judging by haircuts) that the US had spent 10 trillion dollars on defending itself from the threat of Soviet attack since 1945, but that the attack was not “certain” - not 100% sure. So if we were willing to spend trillions to prevent an uncertain catastrophe, why does the same logic not apply to climate chnage?

The implication being when gov and big business get together bad things do happen. My point is they can happen yes, but also same players can make good things happen - it depends on the players (and regulatory and reporting and voting and and and )

Government tracking can be good - tracking covid cases good, tracking criminals planning robberies good. It it can also be bad.

This is imo why this is such hard problem - there is no clear answers only something we want sensible courts to (quickly) decide upon based on good laws.

The issue is we want “good” government and “good” corporate behaviour but not the bad. And knowing the difference especially ahead of time requires engaged citizenry, lots of feedback mechanisms that are not overwritten by corruption and noise in the mechanism (ie primaries materringnmore than elections is a feedback mechanism fail in my book)

>>> It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations

I quite agree - but I (hope / think) that the benefits can outweighs the downsides if done well. Those nations that do it well will I believe find a rocket like boost to society and industry perhaps akin to post 1945 world. Those who don’t will fall behind.

Why? (Am not trolling. Genuinely interested)

I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen.

Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.

I am honestly open to debate on this but I do find the “what if Hitler took over government where would we be” to be a problematic argument not a final answer.

I may be missing something of course

/s

;-)

And time takes money

Enough money to pay one’s bills while one tends the growing tree

And if we have a society that ensures everyone is given the dignity of time

We also get a society that reaps what some create with that time

But if we have a society that only rewards pushing money back up the hierarchy

Then we all lose our time and our nest eggs to those who have the most.

Then getting peer reviewed is a harder process but one can see some form of credit on the site coming from doing a decent reviewers job.

I suspect I am missing a lot of nuance …

Nice