Now that I’ve been home a few days, back from Chicago, I ask myself, “How does it all work?” And I keep coming back to self-ordering and the institutionalizing of individuality. Chicago works one human encounter at a time, one negotiated transaction at a time. Mises would be happy to know that the molecules of this economy behaved according to the natural laws of human action.
Author: Kilgore Forelle
Words Poorly Used #134 — Convergence
People in the technology trades these days are insisting that we are experiencing “convergence.” At TechTarget.com, the following definition is offered: DEFINITION technological convergence … –ComputerWeekly.com In general, convergence is a coming together of two or more distinct entities or phenomena. Technological convergence is increasingly prevalent in the information technology world; in this context, the…
Words Poorly Used #133 — Invention/Intervention
Intervention is taking that which belongs to someone else. Invention is sharing a new idea for the good of its beneficiaries. You cannot coerce people to adopt an invention, since to do so makes it an intervention.
Education vs Schooling
I was writing a memoir yesterday of our trip to Chicago with our two youngest granddaughters, who are 13 and 11 respectively. In part of the memoir I began to consider, why the trip itself was educational as opposed to the daily regimentation of schooling (which the girls would be getting if not for Spring Break).
Building Walls
We can’t keep up with our infrastructure needs, yet we are committed to building thousand of miles of walls on highways and along borders. Your tax dollars at work.
If You Build It They Won’t Come
This morning we ate breakfast at a McDonald’s restaurant in Lafayette, Indiana. You had to put your order in at an automated kiosk. But to take care of the people who were confused by these kiosks there was one cashier on duty to take manual orders. There were no people ordering at the kiosks. There were lines of people ordering from the cashier.
Equal and Independent
As regards the matter of independence, no human is naturally dependent on another human from similar or different origins. Person A lives her own life, maintains her own health, enjoys her own liberty, and lays claim to her own possessions. These are separate and distinct from those of person B. Since no law of nature gives A advantage over B, there is no enabling of A to exercise dominion over B.
Debts and Debtors
The government has made massive debtors of each and every one of us. Do we, thereby, have massive enemies? Are these enemies ones whom we have chosen, or has our own government made these enemies for us?
Hand Waving
My field is computer science, the home of the uncanny valley. There is much hand waving devoted to the navigation of the uncanny valley. There are far too many dabblers in robotics and virtual reality who want artificial general intelligence (AGI) to be a thing. As a matter of confirmation bias, they want AGI to be true — they are doing wishful thinking about it.
Whither Self-Driving Cars?
I don’t want to be too quick to say last rites over self-driving cars, but fallibility is the Achilles’ heel of the illusion of infallibility. And ideas are far more dependent on popular acceptance than they are upon usefulness.