Proving claims of greed and gluttony in digital media
ABC Arts recently produced a short documentary The Golden Age of Piracy examining illegal downloads of films and television programmes Australia. As I've seen on The Conversation and elsewhere, those seeking to explain or defend copyright infringement in Australia emphasise the high prices and late releases of film and television programmes in Australia compared to the rest of the world.
Of course there's not much for film-goers to like about high prices and late releases, and those who think prices are too high or releases too late are free to express this opinion. In resorting to copyright infringement to cure this perceived ill, however, I wondered if the infringers and their apologists might actually be undermining the complainants' campaign for lower prices and earlier releases.
In resorting copyright infringement to satisfy their desires, infringers allow copyright owners to make a plausible claim that copyright owners are suffering from the lawlessness of copyright users, to which the logical remedy is to enforce the law. In order to prove that the real problem is unreasonable pricing and poor service, the complainants need to both refuse to pay the price and refuse to take the product, just as they would if they believed that the price of a cake, say, was too high, and the cake stale.
I suppose that infringement apologists could also challenge copyright owners to lower their prices. Critics of copyright enforcement assert that such an action would stop or at least significantly reduce infringement, as Mark Pesce does in another recent ABC article. If infringement were to continue under these conditions, therefore, copyright owners could disprove the apologists' case (except insofar as apologists could simply insist on even lower prices — but establishing such a moving target would render their claim unprovable).
I'm not holding my breath for either side to take up such a challenge. For their part, the media industry seems content to back its claims with absurd exaggerations of how much revenue is lost to infringement. Meanwhile, infringement apologists seem content to assert their claim without any evidence whatsoever. (Mark Pesce even goes so far as to cite a study arguing that infringement does reduce cinema revenues, just not enough for Pesce to care about.) And even if a few brave infringers gave up downloading in order to prove their point, could they convince other infringers to do the same?
Jane C. Ginsburg identified the problem in a single word: greed. Neither side wants a functioning market by which they might come to a reasonable price for the exchange of artistics works. Each side instead wants a system in which it can dictate prices to the other side, thereby accumulating all of the benefits to itself at everyone else's expense.
Why talk to a computer?
I recently caught the movie Her (2013), whose story of a man falling in love with an "operating system" (actually what is more commonly called an "artificial intelligence") seemed like it should provide plenty of material for commentators upon humans' relationships with technology. But apart from the prevalence of pastel shirts and bad moustaches in this imagined future, I was most forcefully struck by the constant use of voice interfaces. The main character makes his living by dictating letters to a computer that prints them out in faux handwriting, and, once his new operating system is installed, constantly chats away to it without any apparent regard to what might be overheard by the people around him. Nor do the people around him pay him any regard.
I've long suspected that talking computers are part of The Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived. Not because they don't work — though my limited personal contact with them suggests that voice recognition is still not particularly good — but because they aren't nearly as useful as many a science fiction writer has supposed them to be. Is it really so hard for an able-bodied person to push a button or touch an icon on a screen? Can't writers, well, write? And would any real writer (or anyone else needing to concentrate) want to work in an office where everyone was babbling at their computers all day?
A week after seeing Her, I happened to read a quote from one John R. Pierce in the August 2014 edition of IEEE Spectrum: "Many early computer enthusiasts thought that computers should resemble human beings and be good at exactly the tasks that human beings are good at" (p. 8). He goes on to describe the pursuit of human-like computers as "facing the future with one's back squarely towards it", that is, looking at the past and assuming that the future will be a technologised version of the same.
I take Pierce to be making a point similar to one I've already discussed a couple of times in this blog: what use would a human have for a computer that did something that he or she is already good at? Computers are so useful precisely because they're good at things at which humans are not — most fundamentally, the rapid and reliable carrying out of minute instructions.
When I was (much) younger, I think I supposed that we'd one day be able to program our computers using English instead of the difficult-to-learn formal languages that we use now. Or at least I assumed that everyone else was pining for that day, as evidenced by depictions like Her. But greater experience tells me that the reason that we don't use English to program computers isn't that they can't understand it (though they can't), it's that English isn't actually a particularly good tool for describing data or issuing instructions. That's why lawyers and philosophers spend so much time debating the precise intepretation of observations and phrases, and why scientists and others resort to mathematics when they want their meaning to be indisputable.
I'm not sure where the idea that computers should or would be like humans came from. They neither look nor act anything like humans, and I'm pretty sure that most psychologists would laugh at the idea that humans behave like neat information-processing machines. And humans have plenty of trouble talking to each other — Her illustrates this itself — so why expect talking to a computer to be any better?
Do engineers need worship?
The July 2014 issue of IEEE Spectrum (pp. 36-40) has G. Pascal Zachary arguing that engineering needs more heroes. "We live in a hero-worshipping society," he says (p. 38). And so "serious fields that lack serious heroes are seriously disadvantaged."
There is an implicit assumption in this logic that society is right to worship heroes, or at least that it can never be dissuaded from doing so and that engineers therefore have no choice but to play along with it. Zachary doesn't seem to consider the possibility that popular hero-worship might, in fact, be misguided nonsense and that engineers are steering a wiser course in eschewing it.
What might pass for engineering heroes in the popular mind illustrates the potential dangers of hero-worship. I'm pretty sure that most people think of characters like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs when they think of the champions of computing technology, for example. But, as Zachary himself observes, these people are really famous for having built up large companies, not for any engineering achievements. The technology itself was built by large teams of anonymous engineers doing work that most people care little or nothing about, and anyone entering an engineering degree thinking that they're going to spend most of their time making big business decisions is going to be sorely disappointed.
Zachary instead wants engineering heroes that attract people to the profession by allowing potential engineers to believe that "individuals matter in the course of technological history" (p. 39). Of course individuals do matter: but there are millions of them, all mattering in different ways to different people and different projects, and all contributing to advances in technology, knowledge and wealth without any single one of them acquiring a body of worshippers. One might as well be motivated by winning the lottery as be motivated by hero status. Indeed, does any profession really want to attract a bunch of narcissists expecting fame and glory for their efforts?
It may be that Zachary is looking for "exemplars" rather than "heroes"; some of his characters — Louis Pouzin, for example — aren't particularly famous despite the contributions they made to technology. I can see how an exemplar might usefully illustrate the life and work of an engineer without requiring any special heroism or worship. I and other teachers sometimes use personal experience for this purpose, since we have a much more intimate understanding of what happened in the projects we've worked on than of anything that might have been done by Nobel Prize winners or big-name megacorporations.
In fact, I've previously observed that what Spectrum describes as "dream jobs" might not really be so different from what I and and a lot of other teachers and engineers do to very few public accolades. Even the holders of Spectrum's dream jobs aren't famous, however fantastic their work may be. So who needs a hero?
Following MOOCs on the Gartner Hype Cycle
I was little surprised this week to find The Conversation's David Glance writing of the MOOC [Massive Open Online Courseware] revolution that never happened. Firstly, I've previously associated Glance with revolutionary views of MOOCs. Secondly, the term "MOOC" has only been around a short while and it seems premature to declare the whole thing over, as Alan W. Shorter's comment points out. It seems that Glance has moved from Gartner's Peak of Inflated Expectations through to the Trough of Disillusionment during the two years or so that MOOCs have existed. Radio National's Antony Funnell also reported a sobering of rhetoric from MOOC enthusiasts including Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX.
One supposes that wild-eyed enthusiasts who scale the Peak of Inflated Expectations are setting themselves up for a fall into the Trough of Disillusionment when the technology fails to deliver on those expectations, as the names suggest. More sober commentators, such as those who appeared on Radio National, strive to go straight to what Gartner calls the Slope of Enlightenment, leading to the Plateau of Productivity. Gartner's Hype Cycle doesn't seem to account for technologies for which such a plateau might not exist at all — electronic cash, flying cars and videophones come to mind — but even identifying a technology as having limited value is enlightenment of sorts. It remains to be seen what sort of Plateau of Productivity arises from MOOCs, if one arises at all.
The commentary in both the Conversation and Radio National pieces identify two key points that seem to have been well-known to sober commentators from the beginning of MOOCs, but overlooked by revolutionaries. Firstly, as Gavin Moodie frequently points out, very few university entrants have the intellectual independence required to master a topic without the guidance of a teacher. I suspect that this also contributes to findings reported on Radio National that 83% of MOOC participants are already highly educated — presumably, these people have already become the "independent learners" who Moodie argues to be the only ones likely to benefit from MOOCs. Secondly, what MOOCs provide isn't actually all that new, as experienced on-line educators like David White (on Radio National) and Sorel Reisman can tell you.
None of this is to say that MOOCs are necessarily useless, or that they'll never arrive at some Plateau of Productivity in a niche for which they are suited. I found the course that I tried interesting and informative — but, having already gained a PhD, I'm hardly the kind of fresh new-model student that MOOC enthusiasts expect to abandon universities. MOOC developers and users just need a bit more toiling on the Slope of Enlightenment instead of admiring the scenery on the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
Is it vulgar to resource art?
Not long after writing about the cost of feeling free last week, I happened to read that "managing money [is] a big problem for those who prefer to think of themselves above such vulgarities" in the Sydney Morning Herald's review (21 June 2014, Spectrum p. 36) of Justin Heazlewood's Funemployed: Life as an Artist in Australia (2014). A few pages later, the same paper reported on some of the artistic businesses behind this year's Vivid Sydney (Vivid breaks all records, p. 27).
Whatever the artists themselves think, I thought, there seem to be plenty of others who think artists ought to be above such vulgarities, as I've previously commented upon regarding free services supported by data collection, user-centric justification of copyright infringement, free content supported by advertising and Google's scanning of books.
Maybe I'd like to be above such vulgarities myself and, come to think of it, maybe everyone else would too except perhaps for the cynical types that Oscar Wilde described as knowing "the price of everything and the value of nothing". But I know that doing things requires resources and that many useful resources are not infinitely available. As noble as it might seem for my local fruiterer to give away apples to anyone who wanted them, for example, he won't be able to do it for long unless he obtains the resources to keep his orchard in bloom.
I think most people understand this reasonably well when it comes to physical goods like apples. Yet naïve free content advocates seem to at once think artistic goods so important as to have some sort of open access right attached to them, yet think that paying for them (that is, resourcing them) would be crass.
I think few people would doubt that commercial enterprises have contributed plenty of less-than-noble art to the world in pursuit of money. In fact, they've probably contributed plenty of less-than-noble products all of sorts. Yet nor does anyone produce great art without a significant input of time, labour and materials — and these cost money. (Sure, an artist can donate time and labour, but only so much as is left over after providing for his or her needs with some other source of money.)
Probably, both sides need to remind themselves that money is, at heart, a convenient proxy for providing and exchanging resources. Those who pursue it for its own sake (such those less-than-noble commercial enterprises) have been pilloried throughout history as superficial, greedy, and ultimately unsatisfied because money is, in itself, not particularly useful or interesting. On the other hand, those who think they (or someone else) can do without it might need to consider how much they could achieve without any resources.
