This is another one (of many) viewpoints that would seem to argue against institutionalizing the concept of "intellecutal property".
"The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex", "In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange" and other similar phrases and sentences permeate the article.
Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?
It is an unwarranted assumption that patents actually increase promiscuity of ideas.
Rather, patents probably impedes the progress of industries as varied as steam engines and software.
There is at least two economists in the world who dispute patents and copyright having place in the natural order of the free market:
Examine the evidence and decide for yourself:
It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not neccesary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty. -- Against Intellectual Monopoly
But it is an unwarranted assumption that patents inherently inhibit the promiscuity of ideas.
Through theory and example people have also shown that virtually unregulated capitalism produces the "most prosperous" results. They have done this for Marxism as well.
Properly applied patents and intellectual property protection can aid the rate of innovation and progress.
Now, has it ever been properly applied in this world? Can it ever be applied correctly in this world? How hard is it to apply it properly in this world if it can be applied?
Well, what does it mean "be applied correctly" to you? Proper application may not be particularly palatable. There is no free lunch.
I would argue that the drug development has generally had properly applied patents. Drug prices suck. That poor countries cannot get adequate medical drugs sucks. However that is an entirely different kind of pain than the drugs not existing yet.
It is likely not that hard to apply properly. I think we just don't like how it feels. It reminds me of free speech. We gain so much good from it -- but we also have the Hannity, Beck, Jenny McCarthy types too.
Do trade secrets still exist?* Staff turnover and international travel are such in the modern world is such that ideas get out. Even obviously meant-to-be-secret stuff like codes needed to decrypt DVDs or SMB/CIFS message get out.
Lots of things that do get patented could easily be reverse-engineered were they not published.
You don't have to be able to use an invention
commercially to learn from it, combine it with
other ideas, improve on it, invent around it.
Do companies ask talented engineers to spend time discussing rivals' patents and applications to pick out worthwhile stuff? Does anyone know of any examples of innovation that has come from the study of patent documents?
* I thought of a candidate. I was once told that there was insider knowledge involved in the production of the glass that goes into true glass eyes, held by a community of glassblowers in a town in eastern germany, and that this is key to being able to get the glass dynamic enough to do things like make the veins look right.
"Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?"
I have a different take on it. Patents, copyrights, and intellectual property increases the rate of new technology because people are forced to be creative (companies have to put R&D into something new and different that isn't already protected).
If Google could just copy the iPhone, do you think we would have ever seen anything like the new Android phones?
Open source is another example of this phenomenon. How many Linux distros do we have out there that are just copies of the same thing? Even look at apps like VNC. I've seen so many companies just use VNC as a base for their remote viewing app rather than engineer something new. This results in the same bugs, slowness, and overall bad technology rather than a fresh, new approach.
Everyone complains about Mysql, yet nobody really has an incentive to create something to replace it (because it's easier to just use it).
I haven't yet met any inventor worth a damn that wouldn't invent and innovate for the heck of it. There are really only two things I see patents incentivizing: innovation in otherwise unattractive fields, and development of further innovations due to money won from licensing. I'm not familiar enough with each to comment on how well this works in practice.
One thesis is that using other peoples ideas increases the rate of new technology. Another is that being forced to invent your own would.
The example of the Tasmanians, who were forced to invent their own stuff not only did not progress technologically, they went backward.
So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we have regression.
As for Linux distos, I would argue that they have out innovated windows in many ways, such as 'apt-get', and knoppix.
There are many efforts to replace MySQL, such as CouchDB, Cassandra and MongoDB. Besides MySQL actually works pretty well, its just that SQL apologists try to pretend that other SQL database are significantly different.
"So the article supports the idea that if google could just copy the iPhone and add something we would have progress. But if they just re-invent it badly we have regression."
Why would we want them to re-invent it badly? I want something completely different. If they just copied the iPhone and added a few things, it might be slightly innovative, but not nearly as much as it could be.
It also wouldn't be regression because all of our existing technology wouldn't suddenly degrade.
It might be more economically efficient to put effort into old technologies rather than trying to come up with novel technologies that does the same thing a little bit better. Sorta like how Linux was able to run on anything and everything.
Google chrome, Firefox, and other browsers do not seem to suffer from too much duplications even though they are open source.
"Google chrome, Firefox, and other browsers do not seem to suffer from too much duplications even though they are open source."
We also aren't seeing much development of innovative new browsers (even though we may not need a new browser), aside from the recent chrome browser.
The fact that Internet Explorer is closed source created the need for something new (Firefox). Once all of the browsers are open, it will leave even less of an incentive for a new one to be created. Which might be fine, but browser innovation will stagnate. I hate to see a world where all software was like this.
Even Linux was created as an open alternative to closed, proprietary, Unices of the day. Would you even bother creating your own operating system now? Most people would just take the Linux kernel and branch out from there.
This same principal can also be applied to development jobs. At some point, most businesses won't require engineers any longer (high paying, intelligent software developers) because the difficult parts have already been created, refined, and given out for free. Instead, a code mechanic (low paying, less education) will be all most businesses need. In essence, open source developers are putting themselves out of a future job.
I suppose this is what eventually happens to all industries.
Patents are really just like prostitutes. You can have all the sex you want you just have to pay for it. This doesn't hinder the level of sex it just raises the cost from zero to something a little higher.
One of my favourite books is by Matt Ridley .. it's called 'Nature via Nurture' , and attempts to address the 'genes vs. environment' debate ..
Although recently I came across a brilliant cellular biologist called Bruce Lipton who offers some great insights into human evolution and environment (with a little quantum physics sprinkled in), check him out if you're interested.
Ridley's Origins of Virtue got me into evolutionary computation, albeit indirectly, in 9th grade. I'm starting a masters (although probably PH.D.) program this fall in computational social sciences.
> It's nice to find a something positive among the gloom and doom of human development
so just the fact that humans now dominate the planet is by itself something positive, despite wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ...?
What's wrong with dominating the planet? What wrong with paving over Mother Earth and killing million of species all the while opening new path to evolution?
Indeed, I wonder what's all the hoohas about mass extinction if humans are able to survive it? Moreover, engineer and synthesize biological lifeforms and replicators.
It is a good question, right now it is a problem, because we still need a lot of Nature that is around us to survive.
One problem is that if we head down a path, where we destroy all else, we have no option of changing our minds later if we do the wrong thing, or we find out that we do actually need other animals/plants.
The bigger issue might be that we don't need to keel everything in order to survive and grow. Right now we are doing things the completely wrong way. We clearly do not put a high enough value on our natural environment, and we have little studies of the long term effects of living in our modern world. A lot of problems like asthma may be exascerbated by the world we live in. We just don't know.
You didn't answer the question. What's wrong with it?
For extra bonus points, figure out how to actually answer the question without reference to the utility of the biosphere to humans. (Which includes the classic "But plants and animals being driven extinct might have the cure for cancer!" which manages to be simultaneously ignorant of how modern drug research is done and how evolution works.) For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide. (For quadruple bonus points, explain why every other tool user did come to this conclusion and how this solves the Fermi paradox. But I digress...)
Once you get past the fuzzy-wuzzy "I wuv pwanet Earth!" indoctrination, it turns out to be a surprisingly challenging question. I'm not saying you won't find an answer. But actually taking the time to work it out and encode it into actual words based on actual arguments can be very educational. (And you may be surprised. A lot of otherwise popular axiomatic ethical choices lead to not having a reason to care as long as humans aren't impacted too badly. I'm not endorsing this, just observing that there's a lot of ethical hypocrisy in this area.)
> You didn't answer the question. What's wrong with it?
this thread began with the answer to that question:
"wars, plagues, famines, climate change, terrorism, being stuck in a career you hate, burning to death in a fire, the unending history of exploitative labor practices, etc., ..."
human survival is illegitimate in and of it self, without concern for the ecology we displace. (there is tremendous suffering in the animal world, and i think it would be fantastic if we could turn that off)
> For double-bonus-points, explain why your answer doesn't imply that all tool users anywhere in the universe should immediately commit suicide.
feel free to read through my comment history. that's exactly what i advocate. i am not opposed to extinction - i'm opposed to surviving and struggling, because of the inevitability of suffering.
I'm not sure at all what you're trying to say. While I freely admit that my familiarity with Rawlsian justice now comes from about three minutes spent with Wikipedia, it seems an awful lot like his conception of justice foundationally depend on the involvement of "rational agents", which includes human-class intelligence as a core part of the definition of that term. It would seem to me that stripping away that aspect of the system leaves virtually nothing left, and certainly nothing that trivially obviously extends out to not-even-possibly-rational agents (or, arguably, non-agents according to the usual meanings of the term) with only 17 words of explanation.
(Actually defining justice in a way that covers all life forms is also a rather interesting question to ponder for a while; given the diversity of "life", such as the classic "virus" conundrum, it becomes hard to avoid including non-life in the definition as well. And what do you do with an ethical system that has an opinion about a black hole destroying a star, whatever that opinion may be?)
That said, fully expanding your point would probably blow out the HN comment limit; you could probably get a medium-large essay out of it. But I would be sort of curious if you could sketch out a bit more. I'm actually not interested in attacking it, because I'm not actually trying to push a viewpoint on the question today; the goal of my first paragraph is to more thoroughly explain my confusion about your statement than criticize something too short for me to even understand.
If one were completely divorced from attachment to any one life form (i.e. behind a veil of ignorance), but considered the whole as a family (and all life on this planet, so far as we know, is related), couldn't we be proud of the accomplishments of one of our distant cousins, even if we don't "end up" as them (when the "veil" is lifted)?
As to rational agents etc., let us say that we are rational when we are behind the veil, but we may end up as any kind of life form.
Rawls' theory doesn't necessarily follow from his original position, IMO. Rawls seemed to prefer quite a conservative, fearful, optimizing for the worst kind of case, but I don't think that's the only way to look at it. I don't buy too deeply into the Second Principle in Theory of Justice. But the Original Position, as a thought experiment, has a lot to say for it, particularly because it resolves problems inherent in the golden rule (e.g. a masochist becomes a sadist).
I do think though, that if you're to get to some concept of fairness as it relates to animals etc., that you have to get out of anthropocentrism.
Well, for one, you're encouraging divergent evolution in an environment where you're at a local maximum. Most organizations take the opposite approach, and try to nail things down when they're winning.
This is a meaningful article, but the title / thesis that humans triumphed because of tool making ability does not represent the consensus of archeological findings at the time when Neanderthals disappeared.
Evidence also points towards the cro-mangon ability (vs neanderthal) to predict their environment. Specifically the ability to use the cycles of the moon to predict patterns of large game and organize group hunts allowed the cro-magnon to out-resource their Neanderthal peers. Prediction allowed for expanded social ability - not just tooling - which has a different notion of cognitive capability. One interesting article on the topic: http://www.bionomics-institute.org/text/resource/articles/ar...
"This is a meaningful article, but the title / thesis that humans triumphed because of tool making ability does not represent the consensus of archeological findings at the time when Neanderthals disappeared."
That's not the thesis. The thesis is that humans flourished because they started trading, which led to innovations and also allowed people to tap into the "collective intelligence" of other groups.
While I agree about the great value of exchanging ideas for the humankind progress, there is something wrong about presenting things in such an "easy" way - sex between ideas, rational collective intelligence, etc.
For Galileo, Columbus, J.Bruno, Einstein, and others, it wasn't about nice intellectual discources with their contemporaries about great ideas - it was a struggle for their ideas to survive, though they themselves might perish in it. Although they were right, as we all know for sure now.
"If it's really a good idea, you'd have to hammer it down people's throat" -- Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL (The quote might not be exact, but the idea is ;)
I was reminded of the Qeng Ho, both historic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He) and fictional (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky). Vernor Vinge describes a universe where civilizations rise and fall throughout the galaxy, and a race of space-faring traders ensure that technological advances aren't lost when civilizations die.
Population density increases more than "collective brainpower". It increases free time, as laborers specialize and increase efficiency. The author doesn't seem to credit this at all.
If you're into this article, you might like "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. I'm reading it on the recommendation of my favorite anthropology professor, and it's great.
On a long time span and in general. There is still a lot of danger into sharing everything in smaller localized incidents and one company controlling this sharing is bad to.
This view of intelligence fits well with the view of John Raven, publisher of the Raven Progressive Matrices test, that "intelligence is an emergent property of groups."
Frankly, dinosaurs were much more successful as a species. They were around for about 200 million years. Humans have been around barely 20 million years and time during which civilization existed is even smaller (5000 years?).
Yet there doesn't seem to have been a dinosaur nimble enough to perform intricate tasks like humans can. I guess evolutionary wise anything that could have headed down the path of human like ability would have been destroyed by the larger species before it had a chance to get to the level of out thinking and building them.
Dinosaurs were a superorder, not a species. To make it fair, you'd have to compare dinosaurs with euarchontoglires (rodents, rabbits, shrews, and primates collectively, humans included with primates). And you might even have to include birds with dinosaurs.
This article repeatedly paints Neanderthals as a dead end. It has very recently (like last three months) been proved by genetic sequencing of Neanderthal remains that humans and Neanderthals interbred.
Most interestingly, it is convincingly argued that Neanderthal genetic contributions explain a sudden and profound explosion in technological sophistication of European and Asian cultures. It is very possible that modern humanity is defined by its Neanderthal genes.
> Most interestingly, it is convincingly argued that Neanderthal genetic contributions explain a sudden and profound explosion in technological sophistication of European and Asian cultures
Convincingly argued? Not really. The Neanderthal's genetic imprint on "modern" Europeans and Asians is very limited, and is stated as such in the NYT article you cite. From what we've mapped so far, the DNA man retained from the Neanderthal is superfluous. There is also no anthropological evidence it gave Europeans or Asians any advantage.
Also, wouldn't the distinct lack of Neanderthal-like qualities in modern Europeans and Asians be a strong indication that Neanderthal genetic traits were not very advantageous? If they were the "secret sauce" of the West and the East, one would assume their traits would manifest themselves in locations other than the "junk" portion of our genome.
Thought provoking article but I am not sure -maybe it is true I don't know- that human individual is the "planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies." An alien civilization hoping to buy Earth as a planet would not negotiate with human individuals as the owners of the earth but with global organisms. These organisms own the earth; as a human individual we do not even have the freedom to travel on the planet. If humans owned the earth no doubt we could freely travel without registering with global organisms.
re :
"Self-sufficiency--subsistence--is poverty"
&&
"Given that progress is inexorable, cumulative and collective if human beings exchange and specialize, then globalization and the Internet are bound to ensure furious economic progress in the coming century"
globalization? If you want to further the notion that ideas should have sex with each other, then you want to break down power hierarchies (state, country, global unions) that prevent freedom.
globalization is centralized control whereas internet is decentralized. I wouldn't couple these two things.
The Eloi were not very self-sufficient and had everything they wanted. I'll gladly incur some poverty to escape an Eloi existence.
"The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex", "In the modern world, innovation is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange" and other similar phrases and sentences permeate the article.
Are we lobotomizing current culture, or merely freezing it in place with patents, copyrights and other "intellectual property" conceptions?