Scott Adams' Blog

Virtual People

Posted May 30th, 2013 @ 1:35pm in #General Nonsense

Let’s say in ten years you have digital glasses such as Google’s Glass. Now let’s say the glasses are Internet connected at high speed and have access to facial recognition software. And let’s say the glasses allow you to replace whatever is in your field of vision with a computer generated image.

See where I’m going with this?

The implication of this technology is that you could make love to your spouse while wearing the glasses and replacing his/her face with the face of a preferred lover in real time. And I don’t know if you can buy stock in blow-up sex doll companies but this would be a good time to get in on the ground floor. The manufacturer simply needs to color the dolls blue so the glasses can digitally create whoever you would like it to be.

Or the glasses could digitally airbrush real people who are standing in front of you. Perhaps software could add a tan or even subtract a few pounds. I would imagine software could find the midpoint of a human and digitally distort the stomach area to make the person’s proportions just right.

I can imagine an old-folks care facility in which everyone wears blue clothing and digital glasses that make the residents look like their 20-year old selves. You’d be surrounded by old people but it would look like spring break.

Clothing fashion might stop being a thing in the real world because it is easier to change your outfit digitally. You simply transmit your wardrobe code to the observer and that person sees a CGI image of your clothing choice instead of the blue jump suit you are actually wearing. You could have dozens of virtual wardrobe changes in a day. Or you could appear with tattoos and a tongue ring to your young friends while appearing professionally dressed to business associates and family, all at the same time.

In the future, a television set might be nothing but a blue rectangle on a wall that has a bar code. Your glasses read the bar code and start transmitting images to you while keeping the images framed as if in the virtual TV on the wall. That way you can look around and not have your entire field of vision blocked by the TV image.

One of the worries about Google’s Glass product is that people will hate talking in person to someone who is wearing them. But that is only a problem if one of you has the product and the other doesn’t. In other words, 50% penetration of this product will be a nightmare whereas 100% penetration is fun for all.

Therefore, I predict that Google and other big tech companies will give away digital glasses for free someday, so they can skip the 50% nightmare penetration level and go straight to 100%, or near it, where they need to be. The business model will involve selling subscription connections to the Internet and having access to all of the apps and services. And I assume there will be an advertising model. In any case, I would expect digital glasses to go from a novelty item for geeks to a nearly 100% adoption rate within five years of the technology reaching some minimum level of functionality. And that will happen because the glasses will be free.

I would imagine that even people with no money could use digital glasses in WiFi hot spots and still have access to the most basic functions without a subscription. So money won’t be much of an obstacle.

By the way, I realized yesterday that my generation is the last of the pure humans. Most people my age were raised with no personal technology. Someday historians will mark the smartphone era as the beginning of the Cyborg Age. From this day on, most kids in developed countries will be part human and part machine. As technology improves, we will keep adding it to our bodies.

And if that isn’t scary enough, check out the folks trying to design new life forms at the DNA level.

 

Hiring Versus Firing

Posted May 28th, 2013 @ 1:45pm in #General Nonsense

Imagine a manager who is excellent at identifying and hiring talent but not so good at firing the people who need it. Compare that situation to a manager who does an average job of hiring but is spectacular at weeding out the bad apples in the group. All other things being equal, which manager will do better?

Here’s the summary:

Manager 1: Great at hiring, average at firing

Manager 2: Great at firing, average at hiring

I’m going to cast my vote for the manager who does a better job of firing than hiring. My reasoning is that one can never know for sure who will be a good hire because people are skilled at concealing their personality flaws during interviews. Once hired, people feel free to let their inner assholes out. So hiring is an extraordinarily imprecise process.

Firing, on the other hand, is far more objective. Ask any group of employees who among them needs to be fired and most people will turn and point to the same guy. While it’s hard to know who you should hire, it can be easy to know who to fire. The manager who is good at firing only needs the cold-hearted resolve to do it in a timely manner. There generally isn’t much doubt about who should be fired.

I also wonder if one person can have the skill to be good at hiring and also good at firing. I would think that knowing who to hire requires a high degree of social empathy. The skilled interviewer makes a connection through conversation and eye contact and “feels” the other person. A manager who is socially talented might pick up little clues from an applicant that others would miss, such as arrogance or deceptiveness or moral flexibility.

On the other hand, a manager who is good at firing might be high on the sociopath scale. Where the socially talented manager would find it intolerably painful to look someone in the eye and fire them, the sociopath sees it as just another Tuesday. Common sense tells us the sociopath would pull the trigger sooner and get rid of the bad apples.

In my corporate experience, which included perhaps a dozen or more work groups, I never thought to myself that we could do better if only we could hire some superstars. Instead, I always thought we needed to get rid of a few obvious duds and trouble-makers and everything would flow smoothly after that.

Keep in mind that I never worked in a group that was inventing the next smartphone or doing anything sexy. We didn’t need geniuses. We just needed to get the work done.

Over time, the manager who fires best will end up with top talent through a survival-of-the-fittest process.

Obviously I’ve oversimplified things. But if you accept that firing is more critical than hiring, I will move on to my point.

Given that firing might be more important than hiring, and given that employees are well-aware of who among them needs to be fired, it suggests a better system. As with most of my ideas, it is entirely impractical but fun to think about.

Imagine that instead of managers making firing decisions, only the employees themselves make those decisions as a group. And let’s say the job of managers is to set targets for the number of people in the group who need to be fired by what deadline. For example, if you have a hundred employees in a group, and the group hasn’t performed well, the manager might say 10% have to be voted out of the group by year end. If the group is performing well, the manager might set the target at 5%.

In my corporate days I learned that coworkers don’t have much reason to be nice to one another. But you would be nice to anyone who had a vote on your future. You might even be proactive in doing well by your coworkers because that’s the sort of thing that gets remembered at voting time.

I realize that managers already take input from employees on what they think of coworkers, but that turns into a lot of he-said, she-said. And coworkers generally don’t say a coworker is toxic even if that is the only word that describes it. Instead, you tell your manager that Bob is spreading rumors, or not returning phone calls, or whatever is the specific crime, and your boss treats it as isolated cases that can surely be managed. A manager will usually give both sides the benefit of the doubt. But if employees make their own collective firing decisions, no manager would be involved to water-down, distort, or delay the process. You simply vote the toxic guy out.

There are already a number of companies who set firing targets. But managers are still in charge of execution. And those systems tend to be draconian because the level of firing is independent of the group’s performance.

Under my proposed system, in which the manager sets firing targets based on performance, and employees make firing decisions, you create an interesting new dynamic. Under the old system, if my coworker does bad work it is mostly his problem so long as my manager sees me as a good worker. I’ll get my raise even if the other guy doesn’t. Under my system, the group has a collective goal of convincing the manager that the firing level should be set as zero. Employees have a common enemy of sorts in the manager. I would think that would be good for teamwork.

What do you think of a system in which managers set firing targets and employees decide who goes?

Man Cave Rentals and Stuff

Posted May 23rd, 2013 @ 3:57pm in #General Nonsense

I wonder if there will ever be a business that rents “man caves” for guys who just need to get away from the house. I imagine these man caves to be about the size of a small storage unit and infinitely customizable. You’d have your big screen TV and Internet connections, of course. Beyond that, you can customize it with beer on tap, video games, moose heads, and whatever else your guy-brain desires. The basic items, such as seating and the large screen TV, would be directly provided and installed by the operators. But you could bring in your own furniture and finishes too.

I would think $200 per month would be the right price for this little paradise away from home.

Along a similar vein, I wonder if there will ever be a business that offers “artist condos” in a large shared space. I’m seeing this as a large open space with plenty of sunlight and views, with each rented area delineated by short walls. Each renter would have a storage locker for valuables, but items such as easels would stay in place. Security cameras and a security guard at the door would keep things safe.

I can imagine a coffee shop in the middle of the chaos. Everyone would be doing their own art thing - from quilting to sculpting to painting to whatever - and meeting near the coffee shop for social time.

While I’m at it, I also have in mind the perfect bedroom design for a young boy. Imagine a rectangle with the door on one short side and a bed on the far end. The bed would be raised like the top of a bunk bed, with a desk area below.

On the two longer walls, I’d put ground-level car seats (or booth seats) facing each other. Directly above both seats would be flat screen TVs. While gaming, you would be facing your friend(s) and looking at the screen above their heads. They would be doing the same. I see a two-seat bench on each side. The TVs might need to be slightly angled down to make the viewing work.

I’d also add accent lights along the ceiling because small spaces benefit a great deal from the right lighting. And of course you’d have a good speaker system in the room.

I’d also build into the room some way for the lights and music to be controlled from the kitchen, so mom and dad can summon the kid away from his distractions. Just push a button and the lights blink and the music stops, so the kid knows it is time for dinner.

Those are my random ideas for today.

Ultimate Kitchen

Posted May 20th, 2013 @ 12:48pm in #General Nonsense

Imagine if most of your kitchen surfaces were covered with thin panel TV technology. The front door of your refrigerator would be a TV. Each cabinet door would be a TV. The microwave door would be a TV.

This idea would be impractical with current technology. But I imagine we aren’t far from having some sort of bendable screen material we can glue to any surface. It might be something like this.

Let’s say the kitchen knows who you are by the phone in your pocket that is communicating via Bluetooth. Imagine that you walk into the kitchen and all the TVs come alive. Perhaps the starting channel is nothing but scenery. Or perhaps each member of the family has a default channel that comes up when they are the only ones in the kitchen. If you have a home security system, perhaps it shows all of your camera views.

You can control everything in the kitchen by hand signals. Point to one monitor and “toss” a TV show to it. Pull up a recipe on another screen, a shopping list on another, and the family calendar on the fourth.

You’d have speakers in the ceiling, of course, so if you play music videos the kitchen will become a concert hall. If a Skype call comes in, it pops up on screen and the music cuts off automatically. Emails and texts would pop up on separate screens. Just face the screen to which you plan to respond and use voice commands.

Now mom or dad can prepare dinner while catching up on some TV shows, answering texts and emails, and organizing the family schedule.

I can also see the kitchen screens being synchronized to dinner plans. When it is time for something to go into the microwave, for example, the screen on the microwave door would turn into a picture of that item. When it’s time to chop some vegetables, a screen would show you the size of the cubes you want. I can imagine every step of the menu being visual and interactive. No more reading wordy recipes. Just watch the pictures and follow along.

The kitchen might need some sort of sound-proof doors to keep the rest of the house quiet while the kitchen is rocking.

Making a shopping list would be as simple as speaking the items you want. A picture of the item would pop up on screen for confirmation. When you’re happy with your list, just send it to the cloud and your groceries will be delivered to your door.

When you need to check on the kids doing homework just make a video call from the kitchen. By then all homework will be done on a tablet or device with a camera. If your kid takes longer than five seconds to answer the call, he wasn’t doing homework.

When it is time for dinner, call up a map that shows the location of all family members by their phones. You can see your spouse is only halfway home on the commute and your kid is still at soccer practice, so you time dinner accordingly. (Here I’m assuming privacy is a relic of the past.)

When it’s time to eat, tell the kitchen to automatically text each family member and show any replies on the screen.

You should also have cameras on the stove top so you can walk away and still keep an eye on whatever is boiling via your smartphone. Better yet, the smartkitchen should keep an eye on boiling pots on its own and adjust the heat as needed.

The kitchen is already the fun place to be in the house. But we’re nowhere near the limit of how cool the kitchen can become. And I didn’t even mention robots.

Larry Page’s Voice Update

Posted May 15th, 2013 @ 1:36pm in #General Nonsense

A number of you forwarded links to a story in which Larry Page describes for the first time his voice problems.

In prior posts I had guessed his voice problem was caused by spasmodic dysphonia, a condition I once had. Evidently I was wrong. (For the first time.) But what Page does have is similar in a few ways.

With spasmadic dysphonia, the vocal chords clench shut involuntarily. Page seems to have the opposite, in that his vocal cords are partly paralyzed. There is a version of spasmodic dysphonia in which the vocal cords open involuntarily, and that might sound very similar to how his voice sounds – breathy and weak. What makes Page’s situation different, and also indicates to me that the problem isn’t spasmodic dysphonia, is that his two vocal cords went bad in different years. I’ve never heard of that.

Interstingly, my voice problem was fixed by a surgery that clipped my existing nerve connection from brain to vocal cords and spliced in a new route. Page’s problem also seems to involve nerve damage from brain to vocal cords. So his voice problem and my ex-problem are entirely different, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the solution was similar: Nerve rewiring by surgery.

Interestingly, Page’s voice problem was triggered the same way spasmodic dysphonia gets triggered, by a common cold or respiratory illness that causes laryngitis and simply never improves. I’m surprised there are two conditions with that same trigger.

Anyway, if Larry hasn’t yet spoken to Dr. Gerald Berke at UCLA, he hasn’t finished investigating his options. I’d be happy to make an introduction.

Common Sense and Complexity

Posted May 14th, 2013 @ 1:35pm in #General Nonsense

Sequestration refers to the automatic spending cuts that the government of the United States passed into law in 2011, and which went into effect March 1^st of this year.  The original idea was that the impending meat cleaver approach to the budget would force a contentious Congress to reach agreement on smarter and more targeted cuts for the good of the country. Common sense might tell you that making intelligent budget cuts would be better than reductions across the board. Most people held that view.

But my common sense argues the opposite. I say dumb cuts are every bit as good as intelligent cuts, at least for cuts of the size we are discussing. I’ll explain.

For starters, consider how often common sense is wrong. My most-used example is that common sense tells you that investing in individual superstar stocks would give you a better return than buying the market average. But we know from studies that buying individual stocks is a sucker’s game unless you have insider or special knowledge. Common sense often steers you toward calamity.

The thing we call common sense is in reality some mixture of bias, fear, self-interest, ignorance, misjudgment, emotion, and about a dozen other psychological malfunctions. Common sense only operates well in simple situations, and the budget of the United States is far from simple.

When the sequestration was originally contemplated, the hope was that by 2012 Congress could get past partisan politics and agree on intelligent, common sense cuts. The flaw in that plan is that intelligence and common sense aren’t real things when it comes to the budget. If you fired everyone in Congress today and replaced them with new folks, you would end up right back where we are. In the context of massive complexity, common sense and intelligence are nothing more than the soothing sensations our brains provide so we’ll feel less frustrated and confused. Our tiny brains prefer simple statements such as:

Cut that defense budget!

Stop giving those freeloaders my money!

Yay for solar power!

I have a bit of insight about across-the-board budget cuts because I was a budget manager for a bank and then a phone company during a portion of my corporate career. My job was to present management with enough information for them to make “intelligent” budget decisions. Management would look at my information, assume it was nothing but a compilation of lies from department heads, and proclaim a 10% budget cut across all departments.

And oh how the department heads squawked about the irrational budget process. But they made the cuts, after much complaining, and life went on. As the budget guy, I got to see how many doom and gloom stories transpired because of the “dumb” cuts. Answer: none. I never saw a real business problem that could be traced back to the budget cuts. People simply adapted to the new constraints.

I would go so far as to say that sometimes the best way to improve a department function is to cut its budget. Constraints generate creativity. People will only try hard to improve if it is necessary. A fully-funded budget removes that creative energy.

Consider this highly simplified example. Let’s say a government-funded medical procedure costs $1,000 per patient, but the budget cuts make it impossible to spend that much for the coming year. Once the constraints are in place, you might see more effort in searching for cheaper solutions across the globe. Before the cuts, there was no reason to even look for a cheaper solution. Now folks might do research and discover that India has a procedure that costs $100 and produces the same result. Or you might do a study that results in a better understanding of which patients will respond to the treatment, so you can skip the people who wouldn’t have been helped. For the best results in the long term, you need a healthy balance of both funding and constraints.

The best way to ruin a good program is to overfund it until everyone involved gets fat and lazy. One could argue that the best way to improve a program - once it has reached a massive national scale - is to cut its budget and force some creative energy into the system.

So while most of the country was worrying that the dumb budget cuts of the sequestration would lead to doom, I was thinking it was a brilliant work-around to a failed Congress. The dumb budget cuts would be no worse than intelligent cuts, and we’d gain some degree of predictability about the fiscal future. The economy loves predictability.

This is another situation in which the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters comes into play. The law states that any looming disaster that the general public recognizes years in advance will be solved. For example, if today the government proclaimed that Social Security would go away in the year 2040, the country would adapt. And the solution would likely have many advantages over Social Security in the long run. For example, perhaps it would trigger a massive wave of home upgrades as people add in-law apartments to their existing homes. The economy would boom, grandma would be close to the grandkids, and you could easily feed her with the money you saved by not paying Social Security every month. When she dies, you have an extra space to rent.

Don’t get too caught up in my examples. I’m just making the case that budget constraints fuel creativity. And that trade-off is sufficiently unpredictable that common sense simply can’t tell you whether to cut a particular large program or not.

So how do you make budget decisions in the face of massive unpredictability? That’s simple: You pick the path that is cheapest. And that is roughly what the sequestration did.

 

 

 

Solving Three Problems at Once

Posted May 13th, 2013 @ 1:17pm in #General Nonsense

Problem 1: Grandparents enjoy watching movies, but they don’t enjoy the hassle of going to the movie theater.

Problem 2: Grandparents want to see more of their families.

Problem 3: You feel obligated to visit your parents/grandparents but it can be mind-numbingly boring. And you don’t want to sit in the living room for hours listening to medical complaints.

Solution: Suppose the AARP (a seniors organization) worked out a deal with the major film studios to allow seniors to stream new movies to their homes on the same day the films are released to studios. And let’s say the price is high, perhaps $100 for a two-day streaming rental.

Now you have a situation in which the grandkids might want to visit the grandparents just to see the new movie that is out. That’s doubly true if the grandparents have a huge screen TV.

A typical grandparent would have twenty-or-so family members and friends who might be interested in a new movie. That brings the cost down to $5 per viewer if everyone wants to pitch in. Or grandpa could pick up the entire tab to sweeten the deal.

Professional movie theaters would still have a huge quality advantage over home theaters, especially for 3D. And some people simply prefer doing things with crowds because it makes the event more exciting. So theaters should continue to do fine. My guess is that the revenue stream from grandparents would more than compensate for lost theater attendance. And the grandparents would be happy to see more of the grandkids.

It would be easy enough to test this plan in a limited market. Pick one theater and draw a circle around it on the map. Market this new streaming service for seniors within the circle and see how the theater performs compared to its peers.

You’d have cheaters of course. Young people might add grandma’s name to their house deeds just to be able to watch new movies at home. But I think the cheating could be in the 10% range.

Would this idea work?

InterFACE

Posted May 9th, 2013 @ 1:14pm in #General Nonsense

I want a computer interface that is built around the idea of actual faces on every file and file folder.

It occurred to me the other day that everything I do has some sort of human associated with it. Some stuff might be for my editor, other stuff for my startup partners, and so on. Everything I do is ultimately for the benefit of at least one human, even if the human is me.

Humans are wired to spot faces quickly. If you open a folder with fifty faces, you can spot the one you are looking for in a second. With our current computer interfaces I have to read all of the file names, or sort by date of creation. It’s doable, but not natural.

The most natural way to sort files in a folder is by “target person,” as in who will be the audience or beneficiary of the file. The second filter would be by date last opened. So if I want to find the document my lawyer sent my last month, I pick his face from the crowd on my desktop, click on it, and view the documents in the order they were last accessed.

This sort of idea wasn’t practical before Facebook, LinkedIN, and smartphones with cameras. In the past, you wouldn’t have access to photos of people to create your filing system. Now you can find a picture of most folks with a Google search, or a Facebook or LinkedIN search. And your family and friends are probably on your smartphone already.

I don’t know about you, but I often lose files on my computer because I can’t remember the file name or the folder I put stuff in. If the application I used to create it has opened too many “recent” files, I have trouble finding my target file that way either. My hypothesis is that humans are so wired for social living that we would remember what “face” we filed something under more easily than we would remember a file name or folder.

In some cases you might need to use fictional faces. Let’s say you pick Shrek as the face for your “miscellaneous” files. Even though the association of Shrek with random files makes no logical sense, I think you would still easily remember what face goes with which files, much the same way you can tell me what kind of car each of your friends drive. We easily remember what objects are associated with different personalities.

Taking it one step further, I imagine my desktop looking like a model of the solar system, except instead of planets you would see floating faces representing various files and folders. Let’s say there are a dozen-or-so face-planets around a sun, and the sun represents you. You can rotate the face-planets around the sun by swiping your screen in any direction. As the face-planets rotate, the ones in the back come to the front and vice versa. You might arrange your personal face-planet solar system by time of day, so the work-related files are nearest you in their natural orbit during the day. At night, from home, on a different computer, you see the same face-planet solar system but by the time you get home, your personal files (face-planets) are nearest you.

The idea is that you would sit down, think of the file you need, immediately associate it with a face, and know instinctively where the planet would be in your interface. Swipe once and it starts spinning until you tap to stop it. Then tap the face-planet to open.

I got this idea from my dog, Snickers. She has herding genes and we can see that she keeps a mental model of who is in which rooms of our house at all times. There’s a lot of coming and going with a busy family, but by her actions we can tell she knows where everyone is at all times. If two people leave by car, but one returns, she always looks for the second person. She is hardwired to think of her world in terms of the humans in it and where they are. I think you and I do the same thing.

I am always acutely aware of the location of my loved ones, although obviously I am sometimes wrong. They have a tendency to move without telling me. But I automatically keep a mental map, accurate or not, of the physical location of everyone I care about. I think that natural brain wiring can be used to keep track of files too. That’s all I’m saying.

Crime and Privacy

Posted May 6th, 2013 @ 2:20pm in #General Nonsense

In 1997 I predicted in my book The Dilbert Future that someday all crimes would be solvable. My thinking was that video surveillance and other technology, such as electronic noses, would make it nearly impossible to get away with anything illegal.

There will always be crimes of passion, and there will always be insane criminals, and criminals who didn’t get the memo that crime doesn’t pay. And a few geniuses will always find a way to stay ahead of technology. Crime itself will never go to zero, but I’m going to double down on my prediction that technology will someday make it nearly impossible to get away with crime.

The Boston bombers were spotted on several security videos. That probably marked the point at which the public came to understand how ubiquitous video recording is. But you probably thought that sort of video surveillance is common only in cities.

Last year some presumed identity thieves went through the garbage cans on the streets in my quiet suburban neighborhood at about 3 AM. A least two neighbors produced home security video of the perps, taken from multiple angles facing the street. At some point, every home that has a security system will have video as a component. Law enforcement will know who comes and goes through nearly every front door.

Now we learn that the government might be recording every phone call, email, and text of every American citizen. At the moment, that information is used to fight terrorism. But one assumes law enforcement will someday use it more generally if they aren’t already.

In twenty years, the government will always know where your car is, the same way they can track your phone. Taxis will someday only take credit cards. Busses and trains will require you to swipe an ID, and so on. If you travel, the government will know where you went and how you got there.

Or suppose someday there are enough people wearing Google Glass that nearly every crime is recorded in real time by observers and loaded to the cloud automatically. I could imagine future versions of Glass keeping a one week running record of everything you see, just in case you ever want to play it back.

Eventually, physical cash will go away, and with it the easy means for criminals to profit. Once all money is digital, how do you buy illegal services? If you’re following the Bitcoin story, you know that Bitcoin technology has potential for illegal transactions, but for that reason I see the government finding a way to clamp down on it.

I can also imagine big improvements in the area of personal identification. Imagine, for example, having a smartphone, an iWatch, and a smart car. When you go to the store, the cashier will someday automatically know that you, your car, your watch, and your phone are all in the same place. That is nearly a 100% identity check. When you approach the cash register, I can imagine your phone automatically identifying itself and pulling up your photo on the register. In the future, when we are part cyborg, we won’t be using driver licenses for ID; we will use our proximity to our personalized hardware. (Someone already has that patent. I checked.)

In the near future, certainly in your lifetime, law enforcement will know every front door you entered and exited, where your car has been, where your phone has been, everything you’ve said by phone, text, or email, and everything you have purchased. You ain’t getting away with shit.

Another interesting phenomenon is that the Facebook generation has an entirely different view of privacy. When I was a kid, I could count on my classmates to keep their mouths shut if they saw me breaking a rule. Today, keeping your mouth shut isn’t even a thing. It went away when privacy did. In today’s world, if a high school kid does anything inappropriate in front of witnesses you can count on it reaching multiple parents in about a day. The filters are off.

On the plus side, I also predicted that a lack of privacy would lead to fewer activities being against the law. The only reason law enforcement can afford to act against drug users, or prostitution, or gambling, for example, is because only 1% of those crimes are detectable. If police could magically know every time someone violated a drug or prostitution law, the volume would be so high they would end up ignoring the entire class of crimes for purely practical reasons. And that’s where we’re heading.

Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can’t stop.

Porn has already moved into the mainstream. More states are making gay marriage legal. Weed is being legalized in various states. Promiscuity has entered the mainstream. And prostitutes with websites no longer try to hide their “escort” business.

I’m reminded of a banking saying: “If you borrow $100,000 from the bank, the bank owns you. But if you borrow $10 billion, you own the bank.” There’s a similar thing happening with privacy and your government. If you give up a little bit of privacy, the government owns you. But if you give up most of your privacy, the government loses its power over you.

Consider the effort to control legal handguns in the United States. Common thinking on this topic is that the more the government knows about your guns, the greater the risk to liberty. But my thinking is that gun sales will go through the roof if the government ever succeeds in tracking them. You don’t want to be on a list that says your house has the least firepower on your block.

I know from past posts on this topic that I’ll get a lot of down votes because you hate any thought of the government reducing your privacy. Let’s agree that we all have the same gut feeling that privacy is a good thing and we want to keep it. All I’m putting forward today is the idea that the less privacy you have, the more freedom you will have at the same time.

Consider the gay rights movement. The genius of the gay rights pioneers is that they increased their freedom by voluntarily reducing their privacy. By coming out in large enough numbers, gays took from the government the ability to vilify gay sex acts and gays in general. There were simply too many gay citizens to ignore or to jail. Society necessarily started to adapt, and continues to evolve.

In general, whenever privacy is lost in a democracy, it creates an opportunity for freedom to increase. The mechanism looks like this:

1.      A loss of privacy reveals how many people are involved in a particular activity and gives the public a chance to get used to it. (gays, weed, porn, etc.).

2.      Law enforcement has no practical way to handle all of the “criminals” who are now exposed. And even trying would look like a bad use of resources.

3.      Laws evolve to reflect what is practical. Formerly illegal activities become legal or tolerated because there is no practical alternative.

In the long run, privacy is toast. But what you will get in return is more personal freedom and less crime. That’s a trade that almost no one would voluntarily make, but I think the net will be good.

Perfect Moment

Posted May 1st, 2013 @ 1:31pm in #General Nonsense