Winning Slowly

Wrapping up Season 6 by covering the topics we intended to cover before Chris’ experience with burnout broke everything. Show Notes On burnout: Chris’ New Rustacean episode Chris’ blog posts Shannon Vallor and Technology and the Virtues “Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware” Music “Tiananmen Square” by Cameron Blake “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Daniel Ellcey Kurt Klassen Jake Grant Jeremy W. Sherman Marnix Klooster Nathaniel Blaney Spencer Smith If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Regulation as neither bogeyman nor panacea, but a way of protecting out the right spaces for genuine competition to emerge. Show Notes Back in September, we recorded this episode live, both of us in person, at Pikes Peak Brewing Company in Monument, Colorado—as Stephen was out visiting Chris and just hanging out for a weekend. We talk a bit about the history of the beer industry in the 20th and 21st century, with an eye to the way that government intervention can variously make things much worse or much better, when it’s tailored just right. …and then we failed to publish it for almost exactly 2 months, because Chris ended up with a horrible case of burnout. Links Ben Thompson On GDPR On Aggregators Previous episodes: [6.09: Granular Levels of Tomato Tracking][6.09] 5.09: Regulate All the Things! 5.02: Monopoly: Never Okay 4.12: Five Years of Facepalming [4.07: Kickstarting a Hyper-Local Superfarm][4.07] 2.09: Hi, We’re the Internet. 0.01: We Need Some Context! Music “Us” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen

Reflecting on the limits of AI, and the limits we should put on AI. Show Notes AI is coming and it’s going to take all of our jobs! …or, not, depending on who you ask and how optimistic they are or aren’t about the limits of AI as we understand it today. Regardless: how should we think about roboticizing all the jobs? Links A telling quote: OH (from an awesome Lyft driver): “Today has been great. I’ve been blessed by the algorithm.” Immediately had an eerie feeling that this could become an increasingly common way to describe a day. —@kcoleman Hyperion AI – truly independent AI in sci-fi AI in Healthcare Boston Robotics Dog The polar bear problem paper A popular-level discussion of teh generalization problem And the same applied to roadblocks for automated cars The DeepMind papers AirBnB’s machine learning-powered sketching tool Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics Previous episodes reference on the show: 6.10: The Future of Something Like Work 6.06: A Kind of Blindness 3.08: Juice of the Weird Edges of the E

Our 100th episode spectacular – with a look at where we have come from and where we are going. Show Notes It’s been four and a half years and 100 episodes of Winning Slowly! We pause to take a bit to reflect on what we’ve done, what we’re about, and where we hope to go from here. We also reflect on some of our craziest titles along the way. (“Buying Me Off With Warm Fuzzies”? “Juice Up the Weird Edges of the Ecosystem”? These got wild at times.) Links Cameron Morgan Vallor’s book: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting My blog post about it: Good Arguments IBM Has a Watson Dilemma - WSJ Previous episodes I mean, look people: basically it’s just “go look at earlier seasons.” So… quick links to earlier seasons it is! Season 0 Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 Season 5 Season 6 Music “No Haters” from New Life by The Midnight Sons, a.k.a. Stephen. It’s Creative Commons Attribution licensed, just like this website! “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many

The end of work, post-work, universal basic income—and a more hopeful frame than these. Show Notes Economists, guilt-ridden Silicon Valley inventors and investors, and others have been looking at the future of work. One possible conclusion? That it’s going away. We don’t think that’s quite right—and we don’t think it would be good if it did. Not exactly, anyway. Links current US unemployment rate Tolkien on subcreation: see his essay On Fairy-Stories notes on J. S. Bach’s reception over time Previous episodes 3.13: Inevitable? – Self-driving cars, the limits of technology, and the tension between the personal and the communal. 3.07: One Size Does Not Fit All – Amazon’s workplace culture as a view into corporate ethics and responsibility Music “Forever” by The Gray Havens. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Kurt Klassen Jake Grant Jeremy W. Sherman If you’d

Blockchain, the necessity of regulation, and the regulatory challenges posed by truly global technologies. Show Notes Blockchain and the associated currencies and techniques derived from it have been in the news a lot for the last few years. And it’s an incredibly interesting technology, which basically only has benefits for individual users – but has some profoundly distortive effects at scale, on everything from economics to energy consumption. So what do we do about it? Links Cryptokitties Chinese Bitcoin Miners getting relocated to… Canada. ICOs (“initial coin offerings”) explained “Smart Contracts” current regulatory approaches in Europe in South Korea, including the latest as of the show’s publication related: the relationship between trade agreements and regulation Blockchain and triple-entry accounting that’s exactly what it is! that’s not what it is Bitcoin will use 0.5% of the world’s electricity by the end of 2018 Terrorists have (unsurprisingly) already been using cryptocurrencies Bitcoin in

Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and how to argue well with intractable disagreements. Show Notes Sometimes, the rejection of a technology is far less clear cut than in last week’s discussion of Google Glass. With nuclear weapons (and nuclear waste), for example, decades of rejection by many people has not stepped further development and proliferation. What do we do when we face intractable disagreements, especially about things we think represent grave moral evils? Links Hiroshima and Nagasaki Fire bombing of Dresden Nuclear fallout Half-lives Mustard gas 9 countries with nukes Yucca mountain explainer Yellow journalism “The Really Big One: An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.”, on the Pacific Coast Warning System Previous discussion of similar themes on the show: 4.05 – The Price of Democracy: The necessity and the limitations of gradualism, incrementalism, and compromise in politics. 4.10 – The Ancient Wisdom of Usenet: Populism, social media, and w

Google Glass, snap judgments, and how we form ourselves to make those snap judgments well. Show Notes Google Glass failed miserably. Why? Because people sometimes do reject technologies. But why? People’s snap judgments are far from infallible, of course, but in this case they seem to have been correct. How can we train our snap judgments to be correct more often? And how can we interrogate and sharpen our own judgments? Links Google Glass background and commentary: Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity: How the secretive Silicon Valley lab is trying to resurrect the lost art of invention (The Atlantic) – with this important note that Stephen mentioned during the show: First, they said, Glass flopped not because it was a bad consumer product but because it wasn’t a consumer product at all. The engineering team at X had wanted to send Glass prototypes to a few thousand tech nerds to get feedback. But as buzz about Glass grew, Google, led by its gung-ho co-founder Sergey Brin, pushed for a larger pub

Smart cities, “big data”, and the meaninglessness of mere information. Show Notes We attempt to take down the idea that more data is the solution to our problems. Without wisdom, and without an ethical frame, numbers mean nothing. Links The metadata of experience, the experience of metadata – Nick Carr China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech – Rene Chun at The Atlantic “Smart” refigerators DDOS-ing things Massive Dyn DDOS Attack: Experts Blame Smart Fridges, DVRs And Other IoT Devices Why Your Internet Went Down KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Record DDoS The Democratization of Censorship Redlining: Wikipedia Modern-day redlining: How banks block people of color from homeownership See also: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ discussion of redlining in his much-discussed piece in The Atlantic, “The Case For Reparations” Music “Sharalee” by Jamison Isaak, a.k.a. Teen Daze “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s spons

What are the limits on gene editing? Should we be doing it at all? If so, under what circumstances? Who determines where it's okay to use Crispr? Show Notes What are the limits on gene editing? Should we be doing it at all? If so, under what circumstances? Who determines where it’s okay to use Crispr? Links Crispr Makes It Clear: The US Needs a Biology Strategy, and Fast Human Embryo Editing Gets the Ok—But No Superbabies Music “Kept” by Jason Van Wyk “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Kurt Klassen Jake Grant Jeremy W. Sherman If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Why is Silicon Valley so broken? Show Notes We dig into the reasons why so many Silicon Valley companies go so wrong. We talk about Chesterton's fence. We manage to agree with each other by arguing about Apple. We talk about everything from community practices to antitrust. Links Chris’ earlier podcast failure Chesterton’s Fence Biblical notes on greed on the desire to become rich on the love of money #DeleteFacebook Music “Tamu”, by I Am Sonic Rain – used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Kurt Klassen Jake Grant Jeremy W. Sherman If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Bodily modification, from hip replacement to magnets in your fingers. Show Notes How should we think about bodily modification, on the range from replacing a hip joint or a heart valve to enhancing people well beyond normal human capabilities, to adding entirely new capabilities to the human body? Links The Olympics and body modification: Oscar Pistorius is an amputee with artificial legs Tiamat Dragon Lady Cambridge Analytica and #DeleteFacebook On the question of whether we’re already past “peak body hacking” An early prognostication: “6 Extreme Body Enhancements to Expect in the Next 10 Years “I Hacked My Body For a Future That Never Came The Hype Cycle (and its “Trough of Disillusionment) “Cyberpunk Yourself: Body Modification, Augmentation, and Grinders Ear gauges NFC The poll we referenced: “What Americans Think of Human Enhancement Technologies” (Scientific American) Transhumanism – and see also Futurisms, at The New Atlantis, an incisive blog criticizing transhumanism. (This post highlights some of

A Christian view of ethics and technology - or, how we think about everything from Uber and Facebook to dealing with poverty. Show Notes We talk about out explicitly Christian ethics - including our ethics of technology. How do we reason about technologies as individuals and communities? What is human flourishing? Links Our previous discussion of self-driving cars (and note the title we picked two and a half years ago): 3.13: Inevitable Articles on the self-driving car crash: “A self-driving Uber car has killed a pedestrian in Arizona” “Uber ‘likely’ not at fault in deadly self-driving car crash, police chief says” (The Verge) “Can You Sue a Robot?”, Ian Bogost/The Atlantic - a fairly thoughtful argument… which nonetheless ends up with some sweeping judgments of just the sort that we’re not sure are warranted in this specific case. John Gruber representing the “just get us to the future; it’s worth the cost” side of things - Mentioned on the show: Prolegomena Specifically referenced: Kant’s Prolegomena to

Introducing a season focused on one theme: rejecting technology. Show Notes Introducing a season focused on one theme: rejecting technology. Or rather, as you’ll hear us trace out in more detail in the episode: rejecting some technologies at some times, and thinking harder about them in general. Links L. M. Sacasas “Why the Luddites Matter” “What Technology Do We Really Need? A Critique of the 2016 Personal Democracy Forum Music “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Kurt Klassen Jake Grant Jeremy W. Sherman If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

The latest Star Wars movie: the good, the bad, and the astounding. Show Notes You knew this was coming! We talk our likes, dislikes, deep loves, and both hopes and concerns for the future of Star Wars. Links The Incomparable on The Empire Strikes Back Music “Main Title and Escape,” from The Last Jedi by John Williams. Fair use. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month’s sponsors: Andrew Fallows Kurt Klassen Jeremy W. Sherman If you’d like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash. Respond We love to hear your thoughts. Hit us up via Twitter, Facebook, or email!

Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem and the strengths and weaknesses of literature as a window into other cultures. Show Notes We chat about a Chinese novel with an American translation, our love of sci-fi and fantasy, and the ways different cultures tackle the same kinds of underlying problems through fiction. We also talk about the beauty, and the limitations, of thinking about different cultures through their art. (Including what might happen if you tried to understand American culture through its popular art!) Links The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu Season 4: Globalization “genre-savvy” The 1200-page-long Brandon Sanderson novel mentioned: Oathbringer The Incomparable’s discussions of The Three-Body Problem: Ep. 251 Ep. 256 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card Trappist system Ancillary Justice Howl’s Moving Castle and Hayao Miyazaki Music “Warm” by Speakman Sound feat. Frankie Forman. Used by permission. “Winning Slowly Theme” by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this sho

Reflections on what we said in Season 5 and where we're going in Season 6. (Buckle up!) Show Notes Wrapping up Season 5! We take a look at the things that worked well, summarize some of the big things we learned (or learned how to say more clearly), and give a bit of a preview of where we're going in Season 6! Links More __ in your __ Previous episodes we specifically called out during the show: 0.01: We Need Some Context! 2.13: A Disputation of Theses 5.03: It's Not Like Uber 5.04: Stuffy, Boring, Old, Lame 5.05: "Faint Not" (Live at NC State) -- when we talked about civil forfeiture 5.10: Super, Duper, Even Uber Bad 5.11: Fences, Neighbors, etc. Music "International Dreams" by Farm Hand. Used by permission. "Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho. Sponsors Many thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors: Andrew Fallows Kurt Klassen Jeremy W. Sherman If you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at

Positive / Visible / Legal: Vaccinations and the application of forceShow NotesIt's one thing to be pro-vaccination. It's another to mandate vaccinations for everyone on the same schedule without any exceptions.It's one thing to be an anti-vaxxer. It's something else entirely to have reservations about the particular schedule a government mandates.How do we defend great common goods when they pose small, but real, individual risks?Carefully.Links"Measles outbreak grows in L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community despite California's strict new vaccination law" (LA Times)"Volvo dragged into VW emissions scandal"Music"Basement Halloween" by Make Sure. Used by permission."Winning Slowly Theme" by Chris Krycho.SponsorsMany thanks to the people who help us make this show possible by their financial support! This month's sponsors:Andrew FallowsKurt KlassenJeremy W. ShermanIf you'd like to support the show, you can make a pledge at Patreon or give directly via Square Cash.RespondWe lo

Negative / Visible / Social: Sexism in the tech industry Show Notes We look at the tech industry’s persistent habit of treating women badly – both overtly, in terms of sexual harassment, and less overtly, in terms of simply hiring and mentoring fewer women. What can we do to improve matters? What is the responsibility of individuals? Of companies? Of culture at large? Of the government? Links Recent examples of sexism in the tech industry: “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” – Susan J. Fowler, with the piece that plunged Uber into its current, very much deserved, hot mess by explaining just how sexist its internal practices were. “The fall of 500 Startups CEO Dave McClure” – Marisa Kendall, writing for the Mercury News, on Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who was forced to resign after (apparently well-founded) allegations of sexual harassment. Binary Capital “Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment” – Katie Benner, writing for the New York Times, on women harassed by Justin Caldb

Stephen gave his students a change of pace by having Chris deliver a guest lecture on podcasting. This lecture was recorded immediately before delivering 5.07: Books, the Internet, and Homeless People (Live at N.C. State).