Posts I wish I had the vocabulary to write

I’ve had a few recurring thoughts this year that I haven’t been able to materialize into ideas and write about. I’m posting introductions to each in the hopes that I will be able to write more concretely about each in the coming year.

• A societal need for religion— I firmly believe it is important for a society to have a number of anchors that oppose each other to maintain the right amount of societal tension necessary for growth and to hedge against extreme thoughts. In this worldview, organizations that no longer appear beneficial to society perform key functions and are necessary to hold the collective together. We should hold unions, children’s clubs, and organized religions in far greater esteem than we do. Once an anchor is dislodged, it is much harder to reestablish and crucial elements of society will be destabilized.
  • What’s holding me back:
    • I can’t identify the production function that argues for trade unions and organized religion at the expense of secular neoliberal policies and improves outcomes.
    • Viewing organized religion as a pacifying and necessary force is a hard position to defend currently. I have true ideas on how a move toward spiritualism destabilized the religious anchor, but those deserve their own post.
    • What are the links and harms? Destabilization captures the essence of my concern, but it isn’t a tangible fear. How do we get to the bad place?

      The Bad Place

• Data Privacy falls far too low on the societal priority stack–We lost the war for our data with big corporations; trying to live without Google or Amazon would be lunacy. However, we are lucky that the corporations currently mining data have been relatively responsible to date. Even the instances where companies have faced public outcry for data privacy violations (e.g.Cambridge Analytica) have been relatively minor compared to the potential data privacy violations that are possible. A mix of policy updates, public behavior changes, corporate incentive shifts, and technological advancements are needed to usher in a safer connected world.
  • What’s holding me back:
    • Links to harms. It’s really easy to look at health data companies like 23andMe and identify risks that come from selling health and consumer data. I can imagine a snake oil company targeting populations at increased risk of cancer with high mortality rates based on data purchased from a company like 23andMe. It’s much harder to identify a likely harm to the average healthy 25-year-old that could come from her Facebook data without inventing a terrible conspiracy.
    • Policies have too many unintended consequences. Sound policies like GDPR might not be so sound in practice. Without a good sense for a better path forward, its hard to formulate an idea for why the status quo isn’t good.

• We shouldn’t conflate self-driving and alternative fuel cars– Okay, so this one has an idea, but I can’ t vocalize why it matters. There are a few items that are clear:
  • Alternative fuels are a net benefit and should be pursued.
    • It isn’t clear that electricity will be the best source, but it is probably the most flexible alternative source.
    • Combustion engines will be the most flexible fuel option for a long time to come.
    • There is probably a link between alternative fuel and aggressive copywrite legislation that prevents home and mechanic repair (similar to the farming industry’s relationship with new tech).
  • Self-driving cars will benefit society when adoption is high. Self driving technology should be pursued.
    • The link between self-driving cars and car ownership rates is not obvious (deserves its own post).
    • Self-driving technology will see widespread adoption much faster in commercial fleets than with the public-at-large.
    • The implementation requires as much policy change as it does technological change. Not enough attention is paid to the policy implications.
    •  Self-driving cars may increase congestion and urban sprawl in the short to medium term. Self-driving technology is not, at its core, green technology.
  • Wide adoption of self-driving technology in new cars that use internal combustion energy presents a worse ecological future.
  • What’s holding me back:
    • Too many competing thoughts–There is, somewhere in my thoughts, a unifying theory of the suburbs, automotive advancement, and societal good. I haven’t found it.
    • Competing visions of self-driving cars–In a world where every car is self-driving are there a greater or fewer number of cars on the road? If there are many more, do the efficiency gains outweigh the additional cars? Are parking lots an orderly place? What is the role of public transit? What do the cars do during the workday?
    • Timeline–If pervasive green technology is 25 years away, and self-driving tech is 5 years away, then its likely that green tech and self-driving policy will be in sync. It isn’t clear to me where we are in the development of either technology; it is clear that we have not started on the necessary policy changes.