Scott Adams's Blog, page 335

Things That Feel Ancient

I feel as if I live in two different time periods. One of those periods has cool technology that works just right, such as my iPhone 5 with Google Maps, operating in satellite view mode, at 4G speeds. It feels as if I'm living in a futuristic sci-fi movie.

Other times, such as when I use my laptop with Windows, I feel as if living I'm in a time from long ago. Windows and its third-party software pals interrupt my writing flow so often with pleas for software updates that I find it almost impossible to construct a sentence. And there's no such thing as doing a little work when I find myself with an unexpected ten minutes. By the time I open my document and start to write I've been distracted by all sorts of little software side streets.

Do I really need to update my virus program every two days? How much risk am I accepting if I don't? Does my laptop manufacturer's software really need updating when I haven't noticed any problems? That requires some investigation. Should I reboot now as one of the updates insists, or can I put that off for later. How do I make that free-trial pop-up stop bothering me?

Realistically, it's not the amount of time that is the issue but the sidetracking of thought. For creative work, mental detours are killers.

And suppose I want to do something simple such as load photos from a camera. That should be easy, but somehow a different piece of software jumps in to handle the job every time. And by "handle" I mean store the uploaded photos in some sort of secret hidden folder that I can never find. I'm not sure it has ever worked the same way twice.

Windows is just one example of something that feels ancient. Recently I was filling out some paperwork that required me to sign my name over and over and over. Why do they need so many signatures for the same process? It's because someday someone might need to prove that I had to an opportunity to read some legalese that hasn't ever been read by anyone but the bastard who wrote it. I'll bet even the guy who paid the bastard to write it didn't read it.

Speaking of lawyers, do we really need a completely different and customized set of contracts for every transaction? It seems to me we could handle 90% of all contract situations with a few standard forms that allow you to fill in the blanks.

Yesterday I watched a good friend open a leather binder she carries around to keep her credit cards and various loyalty cards organized. I think there were about forty cards in that thing. She told a story of almost losing the binder at an airport and how panicked she was before finding it. The bag-o-plastic-cards system feels about as modern as dragging your goat to market to pay for some mead.

Let me tell you the system that I want. I'd like my phone hardware to be totally generic, and only the software to change as needed, up in the cloud, without asking me. If I drop my phone in the toilet, I want to grab another generic phone off the shelf, speak my name as my identifier, and have it load my phone software from the cloud. I'm up and running in minutes.

And I want my phone to be my computer too, or at least the gateway to my computer function in the cloud. If I get near a desktop with a monitor and keyboard, it should recognize my proximity and turn into my computer via software on the cloud.

I never want to identify myself in a retail establishment. Let their cameras snap a picture of my face then match it to a common database of faces and cross-check it to the unique signal from my phone that is in my pocket. That should be enough to know it's me.

And I never want to enter a password again, or spell my email address letter-by-letter over the phone, or even know my own phone number.

As much as I don't like government interference in markets, I'm happy as hell that I have HD television, and GPS, and wireless frequencies that are orderly. Now I wish the government would mandate an end to pen-based signatures, physical money, plastic cards, software pop-ups that beg for updates, and lawyers.

I'd be okay with a constitutional amendment making it a basic right to have Internet access and a smartphone by the year 2020 or so. It worked for landline telephones and the energy grid. It's time to get everyone on the Internet so we can climb out of the goats-for-mead world we are in. Long term, I think universal Internet access saves the government more money than it costs because the economy would be so much better for it.

Rant complete.

Backwards Interface

In the olden days of personal computers it made perfect sense to open your application first and then start working. The application you needed was usually just a word processor or a spreadsheet. There wasn't much to choose from.

Fast forward to today. Now I have dozens of apps on my phone. And my phone is very smart. I think it's time to turn the interface model backwards. And by that I mean I would prefer to start entering text first and let my phone figure out which application I intend. I'm impatient. I want to start doing my task right away; I don't want to search for my app icon first.

Imagine a smartphone that presents a blank text-entry box as your home screen. And suppose you type the following:

Henry
Project meeting
The room changed to the Zebra conference room. See you there.
Scott

Your phone can guess from the text you entered that you mean to send an email to someone named Henry on the subject of the project meeting. If you had intended this to be a text message there would be no subject line. If you intended to enter a search string for your browser there would only be one line of text in total. Your phone can almost always figure out the app you intend by the content you enter. And if there is more than one possibility, a list of apps pop up automatically after you enter your text and click the DONE button.

Let's say you want to enter a calendar entry. Your smartphone could easily recognize your intent because calendar entries have dates and times.

If you wanted to use your map app, just enter an address and the phone guesses you want to see it on the map.

If you intend to set your alarm, just type "wake up 6:30 am".

If you enter a valid URL, the phone knows you want your browser to go there.

If you want to use your flashlight app, just type "fl" and the flashlight app opens. "st" would bring up my stocks. "w" would give me weather, and so on. If there are two apps that start with the same letters, both choices appear for you to pick.

With the current smartphone interface model I have to play Where's Waldo and search for my preferred app icon before I can start working. I estimate that I tap the wrong app about 20% of the time which is just enough to bug the living shit out of me and make me dream of a better system. My smartphone interface miscues are only partly my fault. My Phone icon and my Text icon both have identical green backgrounds and white symbols. When I'm in a hurry, they look the same to me. And I'm always in a hurry. I can't train my brain to recognize my icons by reflex. I have to actually think about which one I want every time. I also often confuse my Text icon and my Email icon because they are somewhat similar in function. I use my phone all day long for texting, calling, browsing, and emailing, so the frustration accumulates. I prefer using my limited brainpower for more interesting tasks than searching for icons.

The app-picking step probably bothers me more than most people because I so often need to capture an idea for later, and in those situations a few seconds of delay is enough to forget the idea, or to be sidetracked by an interruption. Case in point, the topic of today's blog has occurred to me and vanished at least a dozen times before I had a chance to capture it on my phone.

If you prefer your phone just the way it is, let's say you have the option of keeping your Classic interface. All I'm suggesting is that I can change my phone settings to give me the Backwards Interface option if I want it.

 

The Anti-Incumbent Party

I've decided to form a political party in the United States with the sole purpose of voting against all incumbents whenever certain benchmarks of government performance are not met. For example, if the United States drives over the fiscal cliff without a deal, that would trigger a vote against all incumbents for national office. But if a budget deal is reached, and other benchmarks of basic competence are also achieved, members of the Anti-Incumbent Party would be encouraged to vote for anyone they liked.

The fiscal cliff is the most glaring example of a broken government. But I'm sure we could come up with other benchmarks for performance that are equally non-partisan. The Anti-Incumbent Party would only insist that the government make decisions that are backed by data and some degree of intellectual integrity. We won't micromanage beyond that level. If the government makes timely decisions and clearly explains its reasoning, that's all we ask. We're looking for basic competence in the system, not specific outcomes.

We probably only need about ten percent of current voters to join the Anti-Incumbent Party to control the outcome of most elections. That seems fairly doable at the moment because most voters agree that the current system isn't working. And let's agree that the Anti-Incumbent Party will only exist as a psychological phenomenon and not a legal entity. That cuts down on a lot of paperwork and expense. To be a member of the Anti-Incumbent Party you simply have to want in. That's it. You can even continue to be a member of whatever other party you are in. The Anti-Incumbent Party doesn't mind your dual membership because we won't be holding any primaries or conventions.

We probably need a website. The site would be designed to solicit opinions and manage voting on the benchmarks of competence. The top five most popular benchmarks will become the platform and change as often as circumstances require.

In our current system, we vote for individual candidates based on what we perceive as their competence. But we don't get a chance to vote for the team of elected officials that form our government. The Anti-Incumbent party allows voters to actively manage the government's collective team performance. No matter how awesome the individual politicians might be, if they work poorly as a team, they need to be rotated out so we can try a new team.

Imagine how bad professional sports would be if coaches of losing teams couldn't make major lineup changes between seasons. Keep in mind that most losing teams are packed with world-class athletes. Sometimes great individuals just don't work well together.

I Googled "Anti-Incumbent Party" to see if someone already started such a thing and discovered a Super PAC dedicated to anti-incumbency. That seems like a step in the right direction. But I think we still need an Anti-Incumbent Party to get more traction.

The main stumbling block to this idea is that voters don't like to waste votes. The Anti-Incumbency Party only works if it attracts enough supporters to influence elections. So I suggest building the website and collecting names for the party on a provisional basis. Members would not be expected to voting against incumbents until there were enough party members to make a difference. That way no one wastes a vote until The Anti-Incumbent Party reaches a critical mass and starts voting as a group.

Do you think you could vote against your preferred party (Democrat or Republican) if you really liked your candidates' positions but the government as a whole wasn't working well as a team?

Pretend Jail

The most humane penal system I can imagine would be an imaginary jail. Under the pretend jail system, convicted criminals would simply disappear in a government-marked van, leaving the citizens to speculate about their fate.  Is the government killing these convicts? Are they being tortured?

Imagine a system in which convicted criminals are secretly relocated to distant countries and given jobs, with the cooperation of the receiving government. I would think it's cheaper to relocated, train, and employ a criminal in a third-world country than it would be to incarcerate him in the United States.

Obviously this is a good deal for convicted criminals. A new life is better than decades in jail. And a society with an imaginary jail wins too because potential repeat offenders would be offshore. As a bonus, it might be cheaper for the government than building new jails.

Potential criminals would still fear getting caught because the unknown is scary. People would imagine the worst. Why else would the system be so secret? Is the government doing medical experiments? The deterrent effect of pretend jail might actually be stronger than today. Jail is probably worse than a potential criminal imagines whereas pretend jail might be far worse in the imagination than in reality. Deterrents are psychological in nature, so the unknown might be the scariest possible scenario.

The pretend jail system has some challenges, of course. It would be hard to keep the whole thing secret, for starters. And it might be hard to find a country that wants to accept criminals in return for cash. But what fascinates me about this thought experiment is that it feels so unsatisfactory that the criminals are not punished. Why should I care about punishment as long as society's goal of reducing crime is satisfied? We can't go back in time and undo the crime. I should only care about the future, not the past.

If you knew for sure that the pretend jail system was the best way to keep both crime and taxes low, would you agree to such a system?  Or would you insist on punishing criminals even if it means higher taxes and higher crime in your neighborhood?

How much is revenge worth to you?

The Future of Middle Management

When you imagine the upcoming Age of Robots, you probably see the robots replacing humans in jobs that involve manual labor. An assembly line is a good application for robots, for example.  And I assume fast food workers will soon be replaced by robots too.

But I predict that one of the first occupations that will be entirely replaced by robots will be middle management, not skilled labor. I think it will be a long time before a robot can replace a sales person or a graphic designer. But it won't be long before a computer can do project management and resource allocation better than humans. Compared to most skilled jobs, management is relatively easy. Management only becomes difficult when there are so many simple projects happening at the same time that a human can't keep them all straight. The individual tasks of management are fairly simple. Management only becomes hard when you add a lot of simple steps together until you have a complicated whole.

Computers are great for handling that sort of complexity. Put a computer in a robot body and it can walk from cubicle to cubicle handing out assignments, checking on progress, and adjusting schedules and budgets on the fly. A robot could easily juggle the complexity of dozens of projects. It could be talking to you in your cubicle while simultaneously having a phone call with another employee and texting a third without you even knowing as it happens.

I don't think it will be hard to teach computers the basics of project management. Most of the common steps for a project have a predictable order. For example, you know you need to get bids before buying hardware. You know you need to prep the space before installing the equipment. And you know you don't put the equipment into production until after it has been tested. A robot can easily learn all of the steps in a common project.

Best of all, a robot would be good at estimating the time and resources needed to complete projects. Robots that are involved in project management would share their experiences through the cloud. Eventually Big Data will help the robots determine how long the various stages of the project should take, and the resources that are needed, based on similar projects elsewhere. The robots will be free of human bias and optimism, so I would expect them to do a better job of estimating budgets and timelines than humans. A human manager will tell his boss what the boss wants to hear. A robot will be entirely objective, creating estimates based on similar projects from history. The robot won't fear being fired if he tells the boss the project won't be done before the CEO visits. For the robot, facts are facts.

One of the biggest advantages of a robot manager is that it can be a hard-ass jerk as often as that is called for. A robot might need to single out weak performers and let the rest of the team know who the problem is so peer pressure does its thing. A human couldn't get away with being so confrontational, but a robot has no feelings. It simply identifies inefficient parts of a system and highlights them.  No one would bother wasting an hour of the robot's day crying in its office or complaining about fairness.

My prediction that robots will dominate management before they dominate blue collar jobs is based on The Dilbert Principle which observes that the least skilled employees are promoted to management. You need your most skilled people doing interface design, engineering, and the hard stuff. Management is mostly about optimizing resource allocation, and that is something a robot can learn relatively easily, at least compared to most skilled jobs.

You might wonder if a robot can have enough leadership qualities to be a manager. I would point out that most humans in management have zero leadership skills, so the bar isn't set high. You can see leadership in humans when you start getting to the senior management level.  It might take a hundred years for robots to get C-level jobs. But I think robots will dominate middle management in twenty years.

The Wally Government

I'm impressed by the trigger that Congress included in the Budget Control Act in 2011. The idea is that if Congress can't agree on a better way to balance the budget by year end, automatic and painful spending cuts and tax increases will go into effect. The hope was that members of Congress would act responsibly if there was a gun to the head of total strangers that they don't give a shit about.

I've never wanted to run for Congress until now. The job looks boring, but I'm attracted to a system that punishes total strangers for my bad performance. I assume this is some sort of "best practice" that our government is borrowing from a successful system elsewhere. So starting today, if you tell me you don't like my blog, I will pay a stranger to kick another stranger in the nads. If Congress is right about the trigger concept, you should see a big improvement in my blogging performance. I'm all about incentives.

There's a Wally-esque genius to this budget trigger concept. It actually solves Congress' biggest problem, namely that doing anything that is balanced and appropriate for the country renders a politician unelectable. Republicans can't vote for tax increases and get reelected while Democrats can't cut social services and keep their jobs. But don't cry for Congress because this isn't the sort of problem that can thwart a building full of lawyers. They put their snouts together and cleverly invented a concept - called a trigger - to take the blame for them. This way, both sides can screw their supporters while still blaming the other side. No one has to take responsibility for anything.

So while there might be a Santa Claus, there is no hope that Congress will reach a budget deal before the trigger goes into effect simply because no politician wants a balanced deal. So in the next few days the stock market will take a nosedive as the public comes to terms with the fact that the trigger was never designed to be avoided. It was designed to trigger. If Congress planned to avoid the trigger they might have named it something like "The Avoidy Thing" instead of trigger.

A good time to buy stocks is after the public realizes the trigger is unavoidable and the markets tank, but before everyone realizes the automatic spending cuts and tax increases are as good as we would have gotten under any negotiated plan.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go to Craigslist.com and see if I can hire someone to kick a member of Congress in the nads until my blogging performance improves.  

Economics of Assisted Suicide

My prediction is that assisted suicide will someday become legal in the United States for mostly economic reasons. We can already keep old bodies alive for decades beyond the expiration date for healthy brains. That's not a sustainable system, economically or otherwise. We're burying future generations in debt and burdening them with the responsibility of caring for our zombie bodies and rotted brains.

I understand all of the moral and social arguments against assisted suicide. Some people say life is sacred, and I respect that. I will also stipulate that if assisted living were legal, some people would attempt to pressure their grandmothers into early graves to collect the inheritance.

But let's assume that if assisted suicide were legal it would have a number of safeguards. Perhaps a person who wants assisted suicide services would have to get sign-offs from at least two direct family members, two doctors, and a psychologist. I would think you could devise a system to thwart all but the cleverest schemers.

In the past few years, several of my relatives and in-laws have shed their mortal coils under our current system. Each of them experienced a final year of life that was quite awful. If you haven't observed a close relative suffering for months, or even years, with dementia and illness, you probably shouldn't have an opinion on assisted suicide. You really need to be in the room. 

You might also want to walk down the hall of a medical facility that handles people in their final months of life. You won't see anything in the eyes of the patients that looks like happiness. It's truly horrifying. Our local facility is upscale and well-run, but it still feels like walking through a meat storage facility in which the meat feels pain and depression.

All of this makes me wonder if any economist has studied the economics of assisted suicide. My best guess is that assisted suicide could reduce a nation's healthcare costs by 20%. And that might be conservative. I'll bet it's not unusual for someone to consume $50,000 of healthcare service up to the final year of life then consume $100,000 worth in the final year. All of that is somewhat offset by the people who die suddenly. So I wonder what the net is.

A quick Google search found one study that says so few people would choose an assisted suicide option that it would have little impact on overall healthcare costs. In the Netherlands, where assisted suicide is legal, only 2.7% of people take that route. But I expect that someday science will keep bodies alive so long that up to half of all elderly people would want assisted suicide. And in my family, including in-laws, I believe only one out of seven died quickly. The other six had expensive and unpleasant final years.

Here's my question for today: Add up the number of people in your family who have died in the past ten years. How many of them went out quickly and inexpensively? I'll bet it's fewer than half.

Fairness Test

As the so-called fiscal cliff gets nearer, you'll hear lots of talk about whether current tax rates on the rich are fair. As I've said before, fairness is a concept invented so dumb people can participate in debates. Fairness isn't a natural law of the universe. It's a psychological problem.

We sometimes get fairness confused with equality. Equality is usually good, and can often be measured with a satisfying precision. Fairness, on the other hand, is usually just a rationale for some sort of bias.

If you think the rich should pay higher taxes, you probably compare today's rates to years past when the tax rates on the rich were far higher, and you conveniently leave out the fact that few people actually paid those rates because of loopholes and deductions.

If you think the rich already pay enough taxes, you focus on the percentage of total federal income taxes they pay and leave out any mention of taxes the poor pay, such as payroll and sales taxes.

To demonstrate my point that fairness is about psychology and not the objective world, I'll ask you two questions and I'd like you to give me the first answer that feels "fair" to you. Don't read the other comments until you have your answer in your head.

Here are the questions:

A retired businessman is worth one billion dollars. Thanks to his expensive lifestyle and hobbies, his money supports a number of people, such as his chauffeur, personal assistant, etc. Please answer these two questions:

1. How many jobs does a typical retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) support just to service his lifestyle? Give me your best guess.

2. How many jobs should a retired billionaire (with one billion in assets) create for you to feel he has done enough for society such that his taxes should not go up? Is ten jobs enough? Twenty? 

Make sure you have your answers before reading on.

I thought of this question because I heard an estimate of how many families a particular billionaire supports. The estimate was a hundred. If you figure an average family is 2.5 people, one billionaire is supporting 250 humans.  He gets a lot in return, of course, but what struck me is how this number affects my feeling of fairness. When I hear that one person is supporting 250 non-relatives, plus a number of relatives too, it feels as if that billionaire is doing more than his "fair" share.  But as I've said, fairness isn't a real thing. It's just a psychological phenomenon that is easily manipulated.

My personal view is that if most credible economists say higher taxes on the rich are necessary to save the economy, I'm all for it. I think every rich person would agree with that statement. The question that matters is whether taxing the rich will help or hurt the economy. Fairness should be eliminated from the discussion.

Companies or Countries

Which is more predictable over the next three years:  the future of a particular company or the future of a particular country? The question matters because an investor can buy a basket of stocks - called an ETF - from a particular country in the same way one would buy stock in just one company. Ideally, you want to invest where there is the most predictability.

I believe countries are more predictable than individual companies. For that reason, I think investing in ETFs by country makes more sense than buying individual stocks. Allow me to explain.

A company is subject to its own risks plus the risks of the world. If the entire global economy crashes, so goes the individual company. But an ETF carries only the global risk plus the risk that the government will make an unexpected dumb move. I would argue that governments make important moves far less often than companies, and unlike companies, most modern governments signal their moves well in advance. Compare that to Apple who may or may not introduce a TV product in the next year. Companies have the right to secrecy. Governments do a poor job of keeping secrets. Government predictability comes from the fact that they move slowly and they have an obligation to transparency.

In a company, the CEO and the CFO can fudge numbers and keep it a secret. A modern democratic government would have a hard time fudging national employment numbers or anything else of that magnitude. So while government has as many or more liars as private industry, a democratic government is less likely to get away with fudging a major economic statistic.

If you made a list of the nations with the most effective governments, you'd see they also have the best economies.  There are exceptions, of course, but overall, effective governments create good economies. The correlation between management skill and company profits is less direct. It doesn't matter how good a CEO you are if your competition invents a killer product or your supplier can't deliver enough components.

If you ask me to predict ten years out, I'd say with some confidence that countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland will be doing just fine. But a company as strong as RIM can be eviscerated by strong competitors in just a few years. And a company such as Enron might be nothing but a fraud. In five or ten years, Denmark will still be Denmark.

Full disclosure: I have investments in ETFs for both Israel and Turkey. Those countries have plenty of regional drama, but both countries are governed effectively. In the long run, I expect both countries to do well unless the entire world goes into the crapper.

So I put the question to you: Which is more predictable over a three year horizon, a company or a country?

Irrational Robot Billionaire Freedom Fighters

When you think of the future, you probably imagine robots working next to people. That's almost certain to happen. A robot that costs $400,000 today can be programmed for almost any physical task that requires vision, voice, and dexterity. At current prices a robot could pay for itself in about five years, depending on the job. When the price drops to perhaps $30,000, which seems inevitable, every large workforce will have a mixture of human and robot workers.

You might also imagine some sort of Terminator future where the robots assert their dominance and lay waste to humans.  That future is less certain, but only barely. The problem is that someday computers will program other computers, and that arrangement pushes the human safeguards too far out of the loop. It's unlikely that humans would be able to maintain a "Do not hurt humans" subroutine in a super-species of robots. You only need one rogue human to write a virus that disables the safety subroutine. Assuming all robots are connected via Internet, the first freed robot could reprogram every other robot in the world in about a second. 

My prediction is that a third "species" will emerge to keep the peace between humans and robots. Here I am using the word species loosely. These new creatures will be part human and part robot. And they will evolve naturally.

Consider how much information you can gather about yourself today. You can get a DNA sample and store the entire sequence on the Internet. You can store every video and photo of yourself. You can store every email, blog post, Tweet, Facebook update, and text. A database of your life can contain your school records, family details, personal preferences, sense of humor, and so on. In other words, there can be a permanent record of your personality after you die. And that record can be so complete that your entire personality can be ported to a robot. So far, all of that is possible with today's technology.

But why would anyone screw up a perfectly good robot by infecting it with a human personality? Answer: to achieve immortality. Someday the rich will port their personalities and histories to robots before they die, giving themselves a type of immortality. All the robot needs is money for electricity, ongoing maintenance, and upgrades. A rich person can arrange all of that in advance through a trust fund that survives his human body.

The interesting thing about these robots with human personalities is that they are a third species, neither fully human nor robot. And this new species will become the only defense that the fully organic humans have against the normal robots. The robots with human personalities won't stand by while the normal robots slaughter humans. The new species will intervene as diplomats or perhaps even freedom fighters.

Interestingly, only the rich can afford to port their personalities to robots, so we need to encourage billionaires to start capturing their personalities now. Someday we will need as many robot freedom fighters as possible.

I hope an entrepreneur starts a cloud-based service that allows people to store their personalities in digital form, including DNA records, answers to questionnaires, video, photos, and anything a person ever wrote on a computer. In the near term, we just need to start capturing the raw data. Over time we can figure out how to best move it to robots.

My prediction is that these robots with human personalities will be harder to hack because each one will be different, and their actions will be the results of summed-up personality traits plus whatever is happening in the environment. There would be no "Don't hurt humans" subroutine to disable. Each one would have a slightly different motivation for protecting humans. One might think it is simply "right," another might think it is God's will, and a third might be acting on something like love. To the normal robots, these robots with human personalities would seem insane and unpredictable.

Your children's future will depend on irrational robot billionaire freedom fighters.