Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

I’ve always found it easy to deal with machines, as I expect is true of most computer programmers. The interface to a machine is not always logical, but it is normally consistent in the sense that it always behaves the same way given the same inputs, and it is normally unambiguous in the sense that it either works or it doesn’t, and it is clear which state is which. At lest for me, dealing with machines is simpler than dealing with people when things go wrong—machines may be frustrating but at least they’re frustrating for relatively simple and ultimately comprehensible reasons.

Unfortunately, I’ve started to notice that as programs get smarter and as interface designers get more clever, machines are becoming more like people. Interfaces for web sites and phones are increasingly adjusting based on your past interactions. In many ways this is good, as over time the interaction gets smoother and easier. However, it means that there is a lack of consistency: an input today does not produce the same effect as the same input did yesterday. It also means that there is an increase in ambiguity: it’s difficult to tell the difference between working correctly and being slightly broken.

In effect, the computing world is becoming increasingly tuned for people who prefer dealing with people rather than people who prefer dealing with machines. On average this is of course a good thing, as most of the population seems to find it frustrating to deal with machines. But it’s somewhat ironic considering that the programmers doing most of the work tend to be people who prefer dealing with machines.

I don’t want to give up the advantages I get when things go well, so I guess I’m stuck in an increasingly inconsistent and ambiguous world.

I’m in Stockholm for a few weeks, which is why I haven’t been updating this blog. I’ve been in Sweden many times before, but one thing I’ve noticed particularly this time is the way that old existing buildings have been adapted for modern times. It’s quite common to see stone steps which look positively ancient with two pieces of wood, looking nearly as ancient, laid on top of them for use with strollers and/or wheelchairs.

When life changes for an existing city, you can either adapt the city or you can replace it piece by piece. The U.S. pretty reliably picks replacement. It’s interesting to see a place which tries harder to adapt, a spirit no doubt encouraged by the historical nature of the buildings.

Stockholm is also notable for how easy it is to get around on bike. The bike lanes here are serious alternatives to pedestrian or car traffic, with their own signs and traffic lights. They aren’t universal, but they seem to cover the city and the immediate suburbs pretty well. This too is of course fitted into the existing streets and bridges, somehow. Particularly impressive is a few construction sites I’ve come across where a temporary bike lane was built because the existing one was being built over.

Creating high quality bike lanes may seem like an inefficient use of public funds, but of course it’s really no less efficient than building roads. The U.S. does still mostly agree that roads are a common good, and it seems like, in cities, real bike lanes could be as well.

I don’t have a well thought out view of Afghanistan. But General McChrystal’s counter-insurgency plan never made much sense to me. The plan by definition requires a government which the people can trust. But all reports are that Hamid Karzai is not trusted by the people in Afghanistan. The election last year was a total fiasco. That kind of seems like a big gaping hole in the middle of the counter-insurgency plan. You can’t build trust in a government whose leader stays in power by fraud. McChrystal was reportedly trying to build trust in Karzai by travelling with him and boosting his position, but since frankly I can’t see why the Afghan people would trust McChrystal or the U.S. either, that seems like a flawed plan.

So now McChrystal is out amid reports of bickering and infighting. But we’re still going to follow the same plan under General Petraeus. The basic dynamic of the situation is unchanged. How is this not going to be a disaster?

The U.S. made progress in Iraq, against my expectations, by showing that people had more to gain by participating in politics than they did by staying out. In particular, the Iraqis showed themselves what a civil war would look like, and many of them backed away. Iraq remains a long way from normal, and the former middle class remains largely outside the country, but it’s hugely better than it was four years ago.

Afghanistan is a much bigger country than Iraq with a much smaller population. The political dynamics are by necessity quite different. The political class is much smaller. I don’t see why one would expect the same process to work.

It’s also worth questioning what the U.S. has to gain from Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has relocated into Pakistan. No reasonable person would want to let the Taliban regain control, but there is no U.S. national interest in Afghanistan. There is no oil. The recently trumpeted minerals wealth has little national interest to the U.S., no slouch in mineral wealth itself. What is going to keep us there for the time it takes to turn Afghanistan into a modern society?

At this point I think the military approach is entirely wrong. I think an economic approach would be much more effective. Maybe we should try to make Kabul as secure as we can and as rich as we can, and open its gates to anybody who will enter without weapons. Hand out radios and food. Let the Taliban fight for the rest of the country, but show most of the people that a better way is available. I don’t know if this would work at all, but it would be cheaper in lives and money than the current approach.

Since we’re not going to do that, I just hope that I’m wrong again, and that something useful comes out of this, even if I can’t see what.

I’ve come across a few articles recently about how modern medicine is on the road to conquer death in the next thirty years or so. I find this to be very unlikely, and I feel that people aren’t thinking about the real issues. I’ve seen two general themes. One is that the singularity will come and change everything, which is essentially unanswerable except by rolling your eyes and backing away. The other is that death is essentially a type of disease, and we will learn to cure it.

Unfortunately, death is not a disease to be cured. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. In the competition for food and other resources necessary for life, the most significant competitors of any individual organism are the other members of its own species. They are the ones who seek to occupy exactly the same niche. Complex organisms which do not die will have more size and experience than their descendants, and will therefore tend to outcompete them. It follows that species whose organisms do not die will tend to not evolve. They will over time be outcompeted by other species which do evolve. Thus death is a key evolutionary strategy for any successful species. The fact that individuals may prefer not to die is irrelevant to long term evolutionary history.

What this means is that death is a finely tuned aspect of ourselves, just as finely tuned as our rather remarkable ability to reproduce ourselves. And it’s not just an aspect of ourselves, it’s an aspect of our evolutionary forebears for eons.

It may seem superficially that humans pass through a period of childhood, then enter a phase of stasis, and then decline and die. However, in fact humans change slowly throughout their lives. Arresting the aging process would be just as complex as arresting the growth process during the teenage years. All our bodily systems are shaped by evolution to head in a particular direction. Stopping that means changing all aspects of our bodies. It would mean a person aged 20 who does not turn into a person aged 30. That means changing a hundred different aspects of how the body grows.

The fundamental argument of the people seeking to conquer death is that the body is a machine, and that we can figure out how to fix the machine so that it does not fail. However, the bodily machine was created by an evolutionary process, not by human design. Think of the ugliest least comprehensible computer program you’ve ever seen, code which is uncommented and full of cross dependencies. Think of the hacker who wrote that code–code that works but is unmaintainable. Imagine letting that hacker work on a computer program for a million years, continually micro-optimizing and never doing a comprehensive overhaul or redesign. Now you have to reverse engineer it. That’s what figuring out the human body is like. Every system in the body has deep layers of complexity and is related to other systems in strange and surprising ways. Despite all the near-miraculous advances of modern medicine, we are still only scratching the surface of understanding how the body works. Increasing computer power will help, of course, but we don’t even know the questions to ask. This is going to be a task of many generations, and even as we start to understand it will take far more work before we have any idea how to actually change anything.

Of course I could be entirely wrong, and I do think that research on aging should continue. I just don’t see any reason for optimism. A human who does not age would really be an entirely different species. What reason do we have to think that we can create such a species any time in the foreseeable future? If we could create it, what reason do we have to think that we can somehow convert ourselves?

Apparently the great popularity of Stieg Larsson’s novels have triggered a new interest in Swedish mystery authors. I’d like to plug the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. It’s ten books written in the 60s and 70s.

Actually, other than being Swedish, they are entirely different from Larsson’s novels. Larsson reads like an intelligent Dan Brown with real characterization. The Beck novels are police procedurals, telling the story of solving a crime from the perspective of a policeman, Martin Beck. The novels were also intended to be an examination of Swedish society, which sounds daunting but is quite effective in practice.

The Beck novels have some extremely funny scenes, scenes which are made all the funnier by the fact that nobody in the story considers the amusing at all, and indeed they would not be funny if you were involved in them in real life. For example, the police breaking into what turns out to be a completely empty room in The Terrorists (Terroristerna), resulting through a series of completely plausible mishaps in several shootings and near fatalities.

Henning Mankell, a popular current Swedish mystery writer, is clearly strongly influenced by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Many of Mankell’s novels are quite good, but I prefer the earlier ones.