Tim Wu

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“The Idea Will Always Be Around”

February 24, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Tim Wu, the Columbia law professor who coined the term “network neutrality” and recent candidate for New York State Lieutenant Governor, just conducted a predictably intelligent and engaging Reddit Ask Me Anything.

Net neutrality, which was supported by the FCC during the Obama Administration, is likely on the chopping block with all three branches of the government in the hands of Republicans, and often extremely conservative ones at that.

Regardless of what happens in the immediate future, it’s still an idea that makes sense if we are to be a democracy with equal opportunities for all. Just imagine if there were two national highway systems, one that allowed 55 mph for those that can pay more and another that permitted 25 mph for those who were poor. While airlines offer different options–first class, business class, coach–everyone arrives at the same time. If we’re not all permitted a roughly similar ETA at reasonable cost, the inequality we’re now experiencing will only grow.

A few exchanges follow.

Question:

Do you have (in your mind’s eye) a moment when American society reached it’s proverbial “fork in the road” leading us on this dark path?

Tim Wu:

That is an interesting question. There is a danger in always thinking that previous times were “golden” and now is dark. Nonetheless I do think now has an objective sense of darkness, where fear and loathing seem to be the currency of daily life.

On the question of whether America took a fork in the road. Here are a few candidates, one public one private:

In the 1990s, when progressives (myself included) were too sanguine about the effects of trade, various forms of deregulation and other policies on the middle and working classes. It was predicted and well known that inequality would result, but the argument that we needed a bigger pie that could then be redistributed. The redistribution never came. And led to the election of a demagogue.

Private: The 1980s – 90s, when corporate leadership at large lost any sense of noblese oblige — a duty to the country and began to feel that their only real duties were to shareholders and maximization of executive compensation. I think this also led us to mass inequality, which I see as the root cause of most of what ails us today.

Question:

With a Republican in the White House, one would assume antitrust enforcement is dead, but Trump seems to be far more interventionist (starting trade wars, threatening private enterprises who cut jobs, etc) than traditional hands-off-the-market, laissez faire Republicans. Meanwhile, Obama’s own Council of Economic Advisors conceded the US economy became more concentrated under his watch. Do you think antitrust could actually improve under Trump? If possible, please break out your prognosis for both the US economy at large vs the internet economy.

Tim Wu:

It is hard to predict anything related to Trump. My main fear is that if there is more enforcement, that it is arbitrary and capricious, based on the beefs the administration has with its perceived enemies.

There is some sense, already, that Trump wants to use the Time – AT&T proposed merger to “punish” CNN — have it sold to someone who will do what he says. This is not the kind of antitrust policy that I support.

Question:

Do you think net neutrality can be reinstated if it’s lost or will it be near impossible to reinstate?

Tim Wu:

The idea will always be around.

Question:

Do you also want to make it illegal for UPS and Amazon to offer priority mail at a premium?

Tim Wu:

As it stands, premium delivery is a user-selected option that does not strike me as a major factor in competition among the vendors of goods

I would be concerned if…

(1) If there were evidence of limited bandwidth capacity in the delivery system, and evidence that UPS wanted to slow down mail generally to promote their “premium product” (2) If UPS and Amazon charged vendors, not consumers, to have things delivered faster (i.e., charged Fischer Price to deliver toys faster than its rivals) (3) If there was a sense that Amazon / UPS were likely to use premium mailing to entrench a monopoly incumbent (4) If premium mailing had a discernible effect on the quality of the product once it arrived.•

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“If The Computer Thinks It’s You, Then Maybe It Really Is”

February 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “How to Live Forever,” a lively New Yorker blog post, Tim Wu considers whether the self would continue should we eventually be able to upload our consciousness into a computer. No, we certainly wouldn’t remain in the same sense. Of course, we never remain the same. If we were somehow able to live indefinitely, we’d be markedly different as time went by. Even within our current relatively puny lifespans, great changes occur within us and the through line we tell ourselves exists may be just a narrative trick. But I grant that some sort of container-based consciousness makes for a more radical departure than merely the depredations of time. From the second the changeover occurs, life, or something like it, is altered. From Wu:

Some people don’t consider that a problem. After all, if a copy thinks it is you, perhaps that would be good enough. David Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, points out that we lose consciousness every night when we go to sleep. When we regain it, we think nothing of it. “Each waking is really like a new dawn that’s a bit like the commencement of a new person,” Chalmers has said. “That’s good enough…. And if that’s so, then reconstructive uploading will also be good enough.”

If the self has no meaning, its death has less significance; if the computer thinks it’s you, then maybe it really is. The philosopher Derek Parfit captures this idea when he says that “my death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me.”

I suspect, however, that most people seeking immortality rather strongly believe that they have a self, which is why they are willing to spend so much money to keep it alive. They wouldn’t be satisfied knowing that their brains keep on living without them, like a clone. This is the self-preserving, or selfish, version of everlasting life, in which we seek to be absolutely sure that immortality preserves a sense of ourselves, operating from a particular point of view.

The fact that we cannot agree on whether our sense of self would survive copying is a reminder that our general understanding of consciousness and self-awareness is incredibly weak and limited. Scientists can’t define it, and philosophers struggle, too. Giulio Tononi, a theorist based at the University of Wisconsin, defines consciousness simply as “what fades when we fall into dreamless sleep.” In recent years, he and other scientists, like Christof Koch, at Caltech, have made progress in understanding when consciousness arises, namely from massive complexity and linkages between different parts of the brain. “To be conscious,” Koch has written, “you need to be a single, integrated entity with a large repertoire of highly differentiated states.” That is pretty abstract. And it still gives us little to no sense of what it would mean to transfer ourselves to some other vessel.

With just an uploaded brain and no body, would you even be conscious in a meaningful sense?•

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“Our Time Traveller Would Conclude That, In The Past Century, The Human Race Achieved A New Level Of Superintelligence”

January 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In debating whether smartphones and other recent technologies, with their “prosthetic” effect on intelligence, are good or bad for us (Editor’s note: They are good for us), Tim Wu of the New Yorker sets up a fictional scenario to explain the power stashed in our shirt pockets:

“A well-educated time traveller from 1914 enters a room divided in half by a curtain. A scientist tells him that his task is to ascertain the intelligence of whoever is on the other side of the curtain by asking whatever questions he pleases.

The traveller’s queries are answered by a voice with an accent that he does not recognize (twenty-first-century American English). The woman on the other side of the curtain has an extraordinary memory. She can, without much delay, recite any passage from the Bible or Shakespeare. Her arithmetic skills are astonishing—difficult problems are solved in seconds. She is also able to speak many foreign languages, though her pronunciation is odd. Most impressive, perhaps, is her ability to describe almost any part of the Earth in great detail, as though she is viewing it from the sky. She is also proficient at connecting seemingly random concepts, and when the traveller asks her a question like ‘How can God be both good and omnipotent?’ she can provide complex theoretical answers.

Based on this modified Turing test, our time traveller would conclude that, in the past century, the human race achieved a new level of superintelligence. Using lingo unavailable in 1914, (it was coined later by John von Neumann) he might conclude that the human race had reached a ‘singularity’—a point where it had gained an intelligence beyond the understanding of the 1914 mind.

The woman behind the curtain, is, of course, just one of us. That is to say, she is a regular human who has augmented her brain using two tools: her mobile phone and a connection to the Internet and, thus, to Web sites like Wikipedia, Google Maps, and Quora.”

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