The Future of Computing

This link came my way a few days ago; it is titled simply Final Exam. And I warn readers that visiting it could easily suck up the next half hour of your life in unproductive thought, and quite possibly more. It was written by a science fiction writer, and the point of reading it isn't the answers, but the questions and the predicates they are founded upon. Will we see this world? Why or why not?

Oh, I'm going to get a -1 flamebait for this..

Frankly, I have to say I'm tired of hearing things like this. Yes, there is hunger, war, and other problems in the world, and yes, we should try to do something about it. However, don't be insinuating that I'm an evil person because I'm not devoting my life to helping that starving peasant in Korea and instead I'm helping to move technology forward. It's a logical fallacy to be saying that because there are bigger problems in the world we shouldn't be trying to fix the smaller ones. Like the animal rights activist who is accused of not caring about people because she's trying to prevent cruelty to animals.

I'm sorry, I guess this test doesn't seem as "deep" to me.. it's main purpose is to try to make those of us who use technology feel guilty /because/ we use technology.

Not the most ethical of professors...

Hmmm... If you write answers supporting my political agenda, you pass the course.

Geez, I would have gone berzerk if one of my professors tried to force his views down my throat in this manner.

Not that I don't agree that new laws aren't the answer...

Link question 11 to China Makes Linux Official OS

I find these extremely interesting questions, especially the last one. It reminds me of the Linux to be Official OS of People's Republic of China [slashdot.org] story. Granted, China is not quite as repressive as North Korea, but I think there's a connection to these two stories posted here on Slashdot, as well as the "Father of the Web" [zdnet.com] story being posted on ZDNet. That story basically details Tim Berners-Lee unhappiness with the Web being "merely" a place to access information, rather than sharing ideas.

My point is this: Both question 11 on the Final Exam and the Berners-Lee story point to the capacity for the Web/Internet/Computers to be more than just tools to shop online, download porn, or even really cool things like collaborate on amazing Open Source projects like Linux itself. I say more important because, in conjuction with the (sometimes disparate) philosophies of Open Source / Free Software, we as a community have the chance to really make a difference by applying these philosophies outside not only the domain of software, but also outside the world of business itself. As both a Linux geek and a scholar of things Chinese (BA in Chinese, extensive study of PRC politics, modern and ancient history, and ancient philosophy), it is exciting to think that we just barely might be able to influence on a wide scale an authoritarian regieme through the application of thoughts and ideals that we use to write our software. Gives the phrase "World Domination" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?

So does this make any sense, or am I just rambling?

You failed the exam!

It seems to me that the answer to question 11 is that you can use the device to have Free Speech among your fellow countrymen for the first time in your entire life. You also get to tell the outside world about the soldiers who keep robbing you. You can also arrange for drop shipments of arms without the thugs being able to intercept it.

The internet can be used to aid a real world physical revolution.

Your grade for thinking that the question is supposed to make you feel guilty: F.

---

Possible answer to the starving child question.

11) You live in North Korea. Three days ago the soldiers came to your tiny patch of farmland and took the few scraps of food they hadn't taken the week before. You have just boiled the last of your shoes and fed the softened leather to your 3-year-old child. She coughs, a sickly sound that cannot last much longer. Overhead you hear the drone of massive engines. You look into the sky, and thousands of tiny packages float down. You pick one up. It is made of plastic; you cannot feed it to your daughter. But the device talks to you, is solar powered, and teaches you how to use it to link to the Web. You have all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips; you can talk to thousands of others who share your desperate fate. The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter.

Well, in light of some of the recent stories on Slashdot, here is my answer:
Using the ibm patent database as an aid, think of a common sense technology (ie one click shopping, yahoo's dynamic page generation) that hasn't been patented and grab it. Make millions. :P

Anyway, anyone else find it funny how this "final exam" is about the future of computing but most of the questions (1-4,8-10) were about, well, mostly money and the commercialization (sp?) of the internet? Is that all the internet is good for these days? *sigh* Granted there were some privacy questions in there, but 8/11 about money?

I read it differently.

I don't think the author of this exam is insinuating that you're not helping the world because you don't dedicate your resources to third-world issues. I think he's trying to get those who have become enthralled by the opportunities that technology provides to think "outside of the box."

If he were, as you say, claiming that you're an evil person for moving technology forward, then what would his motivation be for giving this course? Why would he spend a semester teaching some college students about escrow agents and strong encryption? Clearly, he finds these technologies interesting -- but he knows that most don't consider the practical applications of that technology outside of their own lifestyles.

You shouldn't feel guilty because you use technology. But it's important to think about how your technology can be used to help people who don't lead a lifestyle identical to your own, even just as an intellectual exercise. I think that Mr. Stiegler's exam intended just the opposite -- that you should feel proud that you're helping advance a technology that some day might help that Korean woman feed her starving daughter, and that (Goddess forbid!) you might actually think about that image once or twice while coding your next GPL project.

Re:Oh, I'm going to get a -1 flamebait for this..

I'm quite sure you didn't understand the exam. Particularly Question 11, which is apparently the one that got your dander up.

Did you stop to think about the "fundamental" problem this North Korean peasant faces? It is tyranny. Tyranny of the body, and more critically, tyranny of the mind. North Koreans (and people the world over) are kept ignorant of the world-context they live in, since ignorance breeds docility and quashes ambition. If you don't know that there -is- something better, you can't aspire to it, and if you can't aspire to it, you accept your lot. You accept being pushed around by men with guns. You accept having to eat bark and having to feed your child boiled shoe. You accept hopelessness and helplessness as facts of life. Your world-view narrows until you can only see the day, and the day's toil and pain. This is tyranny of the mind, and millions of people live under its oppression.

What you and I fail to appreciate daily is that we have the Tyrant-Slayer in our scabbard.

Granted, we are under no contractual obligation to make the world a better place, but whatever compassion is born of understanding is better than no compassion at all. Once you understand and see beyond your own tiny little mindscape, your own conscience will tell you what is demanded of you to give, and what is fair of you to ask in return.

Third World online

Hmm, I read it completely differently! It didn't make me feel guilty for using technology, it prompted me to think (not for the first time) if and how technology could be used to help with these deep problems.

It is entirely possible that is can't, and that it's hubris to think that technology can really improve the human condition [slashdot.org]; but in some instances (like the last question in the test) circumstances are so bad it would be really hard for us to make them worse. So with your indulgence, I will speculate...

What could a solar-powered, wireless, tap-proof web terminal do for that oppressed peasant in North Korea? Perhaps the first and most important thing is to help him understand that there is another way of life. People who have been beaten down all their lives come to accept it; the first step towards radical change is to understand that change is possible.

Now, while one person may be a leader and inspire change, it takes many people to make that change happen. That web terminal would let our peasant organize and coordinate not only with others in his own country, but with action groups all over the world. It would be a lot harder for the U.S. Congress to ignore the problems of the third world poor if they were talking to us, one-to-one, over the net.

Our peasant needs to make the most of his meager resources. How can I build a warmer, drier hut? How can I dig a better well? How can I irrigate my fields? How can I take care of my sick kids when there's no doctor in a hundred miles? There might not be a lot of web pages dedicated to these topics now, but if the "third world" gets online you can bet they'll be tops.

Finally, what happens when the time comes for direct action? Whether you need the writings of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, or plans for building bombs and blowing up government facilities, the web has it.

Are the answers mutually exclusive?

I don't have the several hours of time available right now to work through a complete analysis, but I suspect that you could make a pretty good argument that all the problems cannot be solved simultaneously .

For example, how can you be accountable for your lies about a product, but at the same time anonymous enough to speak out against a totalitarian regime? One requires untraceability, one requires traceability.

I suspect you could answer each question pretty well, but that your answers would be mutually exclusive. How interesting.

Bill Kilgallon

Some observations

A few comments on a most thought-provoking exam:


1. Look at the list of enhanced capabilities that were listed.

Unforgeable pseudonymous identities
Bidirectional, typed, filterable links
Arbitrage agents
Bonding agents
Escrow agents
Digital Cash
Capability Based Security w/ S. Encryption

Looking at thie list, you should realize that all of these capabilities, save the last, depand on the first. Without unforgeable identities you can't really perform any kind of commerce. Even more important is the realization that an unforgeable identity is itself dependent on encryption.

Let me repeat that - all higher level models of information exchange are fundamentally based on only _two_ cryptographic primitives, encryption and hashing. In the "Ask Slashdot" interview with Bruce Schneier, Bruce said,

"It's true that I described all sorts of interesting protocols in _Applied Cryptography_. The reality is that none of them is actually useful. What is useful are the few simple primitives -- signatures, encryption, authentication -- and the different ways to mirror real-life trust models using them. These protocols are simpler, easier to understand, and more useful."

This is why encryption is important and it's what encryption is really all about. As a community we should support strong crypto not because it will let us send privete naughty email, but because it is the foundation out of which is constructed digital cash, digital signatures, trusted arbitrage, and a host of other useful goodies.


2. Despite it's Katz-esque nature, question #11 is really rather profound. For the sake of argument let's remove the specificity and replace North Korea with "Oppressive Bastards", or OB for short.

My initial reaction to the question was "Why drop net appliances on these poor people? Send some food instead for the love of (insert deity here)." But then I thought hey, if you dropped them food they would eat, become hungry again, and you are right back where they started. Hmm, maybe air-dropping massive amounts of information is the right way to go. After all, to defeat the Oppressive Bastards you don't really need food or weapons, you need a collective will and the ability to organize. Both of these things can be done with the net, and you need _none_ of the advanced features listed at the start of the exam.

Profound, eh?

-Shane

Oh yeah, it probably wouldn't hurt to also send along Bobby Shaftoe to display some adaptability.

Re:Possible answer to the starving child question.

Anyway, anyone else find it funny how this "final exam" is about the future of computing but most of the questions (1-4,8-10) were about, well, mostly money and the commercialization (sp?) of the internet? Is that all the internet is good for these days? *sigh* Granted there were some privacy questions in there, but 8/11 about money?

Even granting your ratio -- a couple of those were only peripherally "about money" -- I think it's a sign that there's some realism behind the questions. A lot of issues are about money, even if it's in terms of "How do we support things like peace and justice and freedom when so many people are willing to sell chunks of those things away (especially other folks' peace and justice and freedom) for some ready cash?"

Question #11

I think most people are missing the point with question #11. Giving poor, oppressed people access to the Internet isn't going to help them much.

What is going to help them is the ability to communicate securely and anonymously. The point isn't to contact the outside world for help, it's to organize a revolution.

Outside the box, DAMMIT!

Dude, you are so totally off-base.

"however atleast half the questions posed aren't relevant to today's 'net."

Ummm, one of the postulates of the exam is the 'net of the future.

"Provided it did occur, there would be precious little time to spend making pleas on usenet or elsewhere."

Ok. Let's think about this for a minute. Anyone dropping shiny boxes that talk and allow you to connect to the internet would (logically) be dropped by someone sympathetic to your plight. How hard would it be to make your home site the default homepage of the box? How tough would it be to build a GPS into the box? How about 512 bit encryption?

Here's my take on the scenario:
"The time has come to solve your problem in the most fundamental sense, and save the life of your daughter." So, you read the instructions (in Korean) and fire up the box. You are immediately connected via ssl to the homepage for Free Korea(tm). They ask for your first name and if you are in any danger. You reply (speaking, of course, since you are illiterate) that your daughter is sick and that your family is starving. This is translated via voice recognition software into plain text (Uniocode), encrypted, and sent along with your exact coordinates (remember the GPS?) to Free Korea's site. The data is correlated, flight plans are made, and the next day another aircraft flys over. This time, it drops c-rats (icky, but they will get you by), medicine for your daughter, and instructions to call back in ASAP. So you eat the first real food you've had in days and your daughter's coughing lessens enough for her to sleep. When you call back in, you are told that you will have to move someplace and to start packing.

Meanwhile, back at Free Korea, your plight has been posted to the homepage in several languages along with stories from hundreds or thousands of other people. Free Korea, working with the G7 nations, have been putting pressure on North Korea to improve it's human rights practices; now they have hard evidence.

So you wake up the next morning to the sound of the aircraft again and eagerly check the package left in it's wake. This time, it's maps of the area (topo and symbol), water purification tablets, more food, more medicine, instructions, and something even more important: hope. You learn that millions of people are aware of your situation and that the superpowers are working to help you (gee, I didn't know they cared ;-). The instructions direct you to some clear land close by; a refugee center with food, water, doctors, shelter, etc. By this time, you are too amazed by the help you have received to not go. Your daughter is actually up and moving around. The severity of the coughing has lessened and you feel ready to make this trip.

I'll stop now, but that's the point of the excercize. I believe you failed for failing to read the directions...

" It probably won't get an 'A', but atleast it'll get moderated up a point, maybe even two."

That's not very funny.

Re:Third World online

I think the choice of a starving mother and daughter was deliberately chosen to illustrate a point. These people are dying, they have no food, period. Giving them a webpad isn't going to change that (a couple pounds of rice and powered milk would be infinitely more useful).

One way of looking at the question (and there are several (damn that's a good question)) is as a cautionary tale. The moral being something like, "sometimes technology isn't enough".

Now, in a less dire situation, as you point out, a solar-powered webpad might be more useful. In question 11, as stated, it's useless.

Re:Third World online

Unless the cause of the lack of food is something acute (a drought, a short-term political unrest), a food drop will be useless; they'll be hungry again a few days later. They need something that will changer their circumstances - they need tools. Knowledge is the most powerful tool. Of course, dropping some well-crafted farm implements, crop seeds, solar stills, and photovoltaic-powered water pumps (and depending on the circumstances, some small arms) along with the web terminals wouldn't hurt - but without the information to use these tools effectively, they're useless.

It's the old saw about give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

No need to theorize

Let me adapt question 11 to something that I know is occurring today in the USA, and which is of grave concern to me.

12) You live in Black Mesa, Arizona. For the last 25 years or so the US government and agents thereof, as well as the Hopi Tribal Council and its agents, have been destroying your way of life. You live in an arid land, and recently they capped your well. Then they came and took away all your livestock. The strip mine next to your home is filling the air with poisons, and the pristine aquifer under the sacred mountain is drained to carry coal to massive power plants. On February 1st 2000 they will permanently expel you from your sacred home. They want to move you to land polluted with uranium tailings. A person learns of your plight via the Internet. How does this person help?

For more information see:

http://www.magiccookie.com/activism/ black-mesa [magiccookie.com]
http://www.theofficenet.com/~redorman/welcome.html [theofficenet.com]
http://www.solcommunications.com/ [solcommunications.com]
http://www.migrations.com [migrations.com]

I can provide more information to assist in answering this question to those interested. (My home page is at http://www.magiccookie.com [magiccookie.com].)