Another step sideways for electronic cash
In his contribution to the September 2012 issue of IEEE Computer Magazine, Neal Leavitt asks Are Mobile [Computer] Payments Ready to Cash In Yet?
A few years ago, I participated in a workshop on future technologies during which my discussion group was asked to answer the question "When will cash be replaced by electronic payments?" I, and a fellow group member whose name I forget, quickly gave the answer "Never". Of course "never" is a long time, and history is well-supplied with infamous statements that heavier-than-air vehicles would never fly, that the world had a market for about five computers, and that home users wouldn't need more than 640 kilobytes of memory.
Nonetheless, I think Leavitt (probably unconsciously) tells us something in his summary of why mobile payments have not yet superseded cash. According to his "industry observers", such payments are hampered by "inadequate security, a lack of standards, and limited interoperability between systems".
I'm sure these are all genuine difficulties with mobile payments, but the industry observers seem to have forgotten to ask: in what way do mobile payments improve upon cash? Why switch to payment by mobile computer when cash, EFTPOS and credit cards already provide effective and convenient methods of portable payment? (The mobile computing industry presumably considers getting a cut of the payments to be reason enough.)
Towards the end of the article, Leavitt summarises the thoughts of a market analyst by the name of John Shuster. Shuster, as paraphrased by Leavitt, conjectures that users "may see no compelling reason to adopt them", and I think this might actually be the most significant reason for limited interest in payment by mobile computer.
Electronic cash looks to me to be one of those science fiction ideas that futuristic writers always assumed would come about, but somehow never did. Like videophones, flying cars and talking computers, it's not that electronic cash is necessarily beyond us, it's just that it isn't particularly useful compared to the established alternative. This is why we haven't replaced our telephones with Skype, our cars with helicopters, or keyboards with microphones. And why I think few outside the mobile computing industry are rushing to replace cash with gadgets.
On the value of doom-saying
Still thinking about Future Imperfect, Friedman appears to be broadly optimistic about our chances of successfully negotiating all of the technologies that he discusses. He clearly believes in the power of the market to resolve resource shortages, for example, and he happily points out the unfulfilled predictions of The Population Bomb and Limits to Growth.
Technological optimists might well feel justified by a history of "so far, so good". Despite the creation of potentially catastrophic technology like nuclear weapons, and numerous localised mishaps like oil spills and factory explosions, the human race is still here. And, while occasional shortages of commodities might cause temporary price spikes and the world is right out of dodos, our material wealth continues to increase.
"So far, so good" is a fairly shallow analysis, though. I recently read a joke about an economist falling from an aeroplane without a parachute. The economist has no fear because "the market will provide a solution". Perhaps it will, given that markets have provided solutions in the past, but does this tell us much about who, specifically, is going to realise that a parachute is necessary, and by what mechanism the parachute is to be created and delivered in time to save the economist from an abrupt end on the ground?
Here, perhaps, is a job for pessimists. Predictions of doom can fail to materialise because, being made aware of the danger, we can change our behaviour. Why haven't nuclear weapons made the world uninhabitable? Because we saw how much destruction they could cause and refrained from using them. Why hasn't the global ecology collapsed? Because we realised that cutting down every tree and eating every fish means there won't be any trees or fish left.
Predictions of global catastrophes and collapses of civilisation no doubt gain much more attention than sober and careful examination of the dangers that attend some technology. Perhaps doom-sayers have a bad reputation as a result. Yet I think few people would say that blind optimism alone ensured that so far, so good.
Opening gambit
I sat on this blog for a very long time before writing this, its first entry. I drafted the "About the Blog" page back in April, when I first had a bit of time and thought the time might have come to start a blog. But I didn't have any immediate idea for things to write about, and my teaching load shortly increased so that I didn't have so much spare time to fill. So the blog was still-born.
It's a new semester now, and this weekend I happened to read David D. Friedman's Future Imperfect. The recent paperback edition happened to be on display at my local library, and there are few enough books on this topic at the library that I feel I might as well read them all.
I gather that the book is intended as a discussion-starter for a university course in the legal implications of technology. I've read enough literature in this area to have seen all the same topics before, so the essays didn't hold much new for me. Nonetheless, it seemed like an opportune time to start on the blog.
When I read futurological discussions like those in Future Imperfect, I often ask myself: is there any point in speculating about this stuff? Aside from the science fiction fun to be had, is it really possible to form a meaningful view of how society or the law should treat technologies that we not only don't know how to build, but don't even know what their precise capabilities and limitations might be? Imagine engineers and lawyers of the Victorian era speculating about the appropriate setting of speed limits for motorised vehicles, without any knowledge of how a car is operated, how it functions, or what it is capable of!
Of course some technologies are more predictable than others: the cryptographic technologies discussed in the first few chapters of Future Imperfect already exist (and Friedman's discussion is arguably already a bit dated), and we're probably near enough to genetic screening to be able to -- and, arguably, ought to -- have a meaningful discussion about it. But why even ask what rights should be accorded to human-like artificial intelligences when we don't even have a meaningful definition of "intelligence", let alone any machines that even vaguely approach human capabilities of speech, creativity and emotion?
If you get your speculation right, you might be hailed as visionary in fifty or a hundred years' time. If not, you can disappear amongst the plentiful ranks of those who thought that heavier-than-air flight would never work, that we'd now be working just 15 hours per week, or that we'd be living in underwater cities. Either way, it won't make any immediate difference to you or anyone else.
Of course, some speculative questions generate more immediate questions, like "what is intelligence?" and "what is the purpose of creating human-like artificial intelligence when we have seven thousand million human intelligences already?". (Curiously, perhaps, I don't think I've ever heard the latter question asked.)
I don't suppose there's any hard-and-fast way of determining what's a meaningful and important question that needs answering in order for us to be adequately prepared for technological developments, and what's idle (if potentially amusing) speculation about the unknowable. So I won't tell Friedman's students to stop wasting their time. If nothing else, they're probably getting some good philosophical exercise.
