exelius

> This is false. Bridges are large and have failure cases that managers and government officials understand.

They only think they understand.

> Software is invisible and has failure cases that are completely incomprehensible.

Which are becoming increasingly comprehensible with better tooling and data collection.

> Hiring a bridge designer from another country who is really keen on avoiding the background check will raise some eyebrows.

It does in software too; at least with serious companies.

> Hiring a nearly anonymous software engineer from who knows where is business as usual for many large companies.

These typically come through staffing companies because most large companies are awful at hiring technical talent. They have a long-term relationship with the staffing company and expect the staffing company to ensure the competency of the workers. I actually think licensing software developers would put an end to this; as it would give HR departments a relatively high-fidelity signal to sort the professionals from the hobbyists (by far the hardest thing for a non-technical person to do in hiring developers IMO).

> Maybe shift gears and become a process consultant. Losing a license in software is not a deterrent.

"Processes" are rapidly converging into off-the-shelf SaaS products, and the industry is actually starting to slow down quite a bit. Trust me, the Big 4 and similar management consulting firms are in for a world of hurt over the next 5 years as AWS, GCP and Azure start to hone in on the ERP systems and reference process space. Companies today would rather spend $1M and 2 months to implement a non-customized, off-the-shelf solution that can be maintained by cheap offshore resources than spend $30M and 2 years to build something custom that requires a dedicated support and maintenance team. Maybe there's some vendor selection and strategy up front, but all those companies that used to do process consulting just become system integrators (for guess what -- software!)

I don't think emotion on its own is bad or good; but it's not something that a computer can emulate. You may get better decisions in some scenarios with certain stakeholders, and worse decisions in other scenarios.

When we talk about "programmed bias", we need to be careful because different subsets of the population hold different bias -- so the bias programmed in is reflective of the experiences of the team that developed the software rather than the population of users it affects.

You're really telling me that because you can't become a bazillionaire, you'll have no motivation to make money? You can structure a progressive tax such that the 83% rate only kicks in for income above $10M. Maybe you pay 60% from $1M-$10M. I think that's fair; it leaves plenty of money in your pocket to live a comfortable life well above the means of most people.

Furthermore, your ability to make millions is only possible because of the services provided by government (education, infrastructure, security, financial regulation).

Plenty of people are motivated by much smaller numbers. The average take-home of the top 1% is between $400k and $700k. We're talking about a bigger tax on the 0.1% (>$1M/yr), and a huge tax on the 0.01% (>8M/yr). Again, those brackets are only able to achieve outsized returns because they have educated workers and a stable legal/regulatory system. Because they achieve outsized benefit, they should pay a proportionally higher share.

If those amounts are enough to incentivize 99.99% of the country, and you're still making more than they are, I'm sure you'll survive. If not, someone else will take your place.

For better or worse, our economy is based on utter selfishness.

Absolutely agree — a computer algorithm can never capture the complex motivations behind human decisions. Two humans can have exactly opposite reactions to the same situation.

Any algorithm under which decisions are not random can be deceived — see also Google’s search results which are full of garbage for any topic outside popular keywords. The history of law is effectively the history of humans trying to game the rules of whatever systems are in place; and I fail to see how AI would function any differently.

Huh? Not sure what you’re trying to say, but privilege isn’t something to shame someone over.

In my mind, understanding my privilege simply means that if I want to live in accordance with my own values, I have to recognize the biases that come with my privilege and try to move past them.

Social justice shouldn’t be enforced by the law — it should be a personal, moral imperative rather than a legally enforced one. That doesn’t mean there are no social consequences for being a selfish jerk, but anyone calling for the “pronoun police” is in a very small minority.

I mean, excuse me for wanting to dismantle social security because I’ll never see a dime from it.

I’m not necessarily against a for-profit pharmaceutical industry... but I certainly am when the entire cost burden falls on us because the pharmaceutical companies band together to prevent our government from negotiating drug prices at the national level like pretty much every other wealthy nation...

A citizen science model — which is what we de-facto have for anything that isn’t cancer — is more efficient and cost effective.

As it is, if someone finds a new life-saving use for an 80 year old drug, there are suddenly shortages of the old drug while a new, patented analog is sent through clinical trials. See also ketamine and depression.

The biggest problem with “human intelligence” is that our memory is so short and influenced by emotion. Though judging by the amount of data created and lost over the last decade, that’s probably true of computers too.

I have a feeling that without the US market capable of paying a hundred thousand dollars a patient, many of those cost-ineffective treatments never get developed. People could still pay for them out of pocket, but without the guarantee of insurance payments the drug companies likely won’t take the risk.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing — if a drug costs $500,000 and keeps my cancer at bay for 6 more months, it provides a high personal benefit from my selfish point of view; but at a high cost to society without much societal benefit. I think you’re right that Americans do lack the realism, but it may become easier if those treatments aren’t developed in the first place.

I wouldn’t say it’s “just” a benefit of their business model; it’s the entire point. I don’t see Samsung making any of these moves.

Any good product organization (and Apple is one of the best) focuses on their customer. We all know that. But Apple goes further and takes their customers’ side — the iTunes Music Store was an absolute disaster for the recording industry but a huge boon for the consumer (and, of course, iPod sales).

Apple is only in a position to do this effectively because they have such a large and loyal customer base. They have a large and loyal customer base because they have consistently driven innovation in personal computing while making high-quality devices that people are willing to pay a premium for. Why would they betray that loyalty?

Apple’s business model is simple and easy to understand. I look at their balance sheet and see where the money comes from: hardware sales to consumers. You can do the same with Amazon and Google too — which shows you why their definition of “customer focus” is so different from Apple’s.

That’s why I think whatever trust solution we come up with will have a heavy audit component to it. I know everyone here hates SOX compliance, but the entire goal of SOX was to increase investors’ trust in financial reporting in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal. And it worked.

SaaS companies already make ridiculous margins. Applying a sensible regulatory framework around privacy and data usage auditing would add overhead to be sure, but I’m also sure software margins will cover it.

Yeah, Apple had the foresight to see the next big thing in tech was going to be privacy. But I think it’s reflective of a larger societal problem: we don’t know who to trust anymore. It seems like every company is trying to scam its users, so Apple is betting that there is a valuable segment of the market willing to pay a premium to do business with a brand that has no ulterior motives past selling you a device at a high markup, and maybe some value-add services.

To be fair, this has always been a problem — I think the recent failings of the historical trust model are due to better information rather than any increase in exploitative behavior. But prior to the smartphone era, trust was a fuzzy, emotional problem where a customer’s trust in a brand could be influenced by marketing alone. Today it is an explicit, quantifiable problem where users are willing to vote with their feet.

What companies are we bestowing authority upon? Do those companies’ business models truly have our best interests at heart? What guarantees do users have that their trust won’t be violated? I firmly believe that whoever can solve these questions to the market’s satisfaction will own the future.