[Plura-list] Self-driving cars are bullshit; How to Argue With a Racist; Combat Wheelchairs; Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon

Sun Aug 16 11:38:10 EDT 2020

Today's links

* Self-driving cars are bullshit: Ford CEO: I "overestimated."

* How to Argue With a Racist: Adam Rutherford on "race science."

* Combat Wheelchairs: Homebrew rules for a new kind of D&D; mount.

* Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon: The purpose of "IP" is
controlling competitors, critics and customers.

* This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🩲 Self-driving cars are bullshit

I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about
self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about
data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness.

Sometimes I write fiction about this! Deakin University commissioned
"Car Wars," a short story about the sociotechnological issues raised by
autonomous vehicle thought-experiments.

https://this.deakin.edu.au/self-improvement/car-wars

(they also got a faculty member to write a quiz for it whose correct
answers take a 180' different view to my own!)

And without any spoilers here, I'll say that subverted, lethal
autonomous vehicles are a key plot point in Attack Surface, the third
Little Brother book, coming out in Oct.

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the
difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the
same cannot be said of corporate America.

For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be
profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every
public transit ride in the world with them.

Elon Musk - a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable
thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest
SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist
- makes the same mistake.

Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says
that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial
killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity).

Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry.
Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in
cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we
need road for all those cars, and you run out of space.

It's a trivially modelable Red Queen's Race, in which the more cars you
add, the more road you need, the more spaced out everything gets, the
more cars you need, the more road you need, the more spaced out
everything gets, the more cars you need...

Indeed, these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken
seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American
automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired
by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist.

But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have
brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by
accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy
cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML.

Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even
more people in even less predictable ways than they do now.

This is a lesson that Ford CEO Jim Hackett just learned the hard way.

https://www.engadget.com/2019-04-10-ford-ceo-says-the-company-overestimated-self-driving-cars.html

After investing heavily in the technology and boasting about how Ford's
future was a bet on the imminent arrival of AVs, Hackett has had to
admit that "We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles."

The company has sunk $4b into the technology. But there's gotta be a
pony under there somewhere:

"When we bring this thing to market, it's going to be really powerful."
-Hackett

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🩲 How to Argue With a Racist

Genomist Adam Rutherford is a gifted science communicator; the podcast
he co-hosts, "The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry" is one of the
best popular science programs I've ever heard: charming and informative
at the same time.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07dx75g/episodes/downloads

His 2017 book "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" used a survey
of the state of the art in genomics to present an account of what we
knew about human relatedness.

https://boingboing.net/2017/07/03/the-human-race-without-races.html

The most compelling part of "Brief History" was Rutherford's skewering
of junk DNA sciecne, especially the home ancestry/genetic testing
industry, with its claims of being able to tell you if you're 32% viking
and if so, which red wine you're genetically programmed to enjoy.

These sections are written with Rutherford's characteristic empathy - as
someone who'd dedicated his life to genomics, he understands the impulse
to connect your DNA with your life story - but they also warn about the
harms arising from these false beliefs.

These harms are the subject of his new book, HOW TO ARGUE WITH A RACIST,
a bestseller in the UK, just published in the US with new forematter
updated in light of both the pandemic and the BLM uprising.

https://theexperimentpublishing.com/catalogs/spring-2020/how-to-argue-with-a-racist/

Superficially, the "race science" promulgated by white supremacists -
often repeated by people who should know better, sometimes internalized
by racialized people who are harmed by this pseudoscience - has the ring
of plausibility.

Whether that's the fairy tales about "race" and ability ("Jews are smart
because of medieval money-lending laws" or "Black people perform well in
sports because of the slave trade's selective breeding") or the studies
grouping humanity into races based on genetic divergence.

Chances are you've encountered this stuff and not known what to make of
it but thought it benign or at least neutral. But sociologists have
scraped white nationalist message-boards to document the centrality of
this stuff to the rise of a new movement of would-be genociders.

"How to Argue" is a point-by-point rebuttal to these race realists.
Despite the title, Rutherford doesn't really expect that you'll convince
someone who's obsessed with whether they have "Jewish genes" or who
worships their ability to break down lactose with his arguments.

Those people, after all, are motivated reasoners. They've started from
the end-point - "appearances and life circumstances notwithstanding, I
am superior and deserve better" - and worked their way backwards to
justify that story to themselves.

As Jonathan Swift wrote (and as Rutherford quotes): "It is useless to
attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

But it's not just motivated reasoners who absorb this garbage. There's a
whole business model built on selling people junk DNA science that makes
"race science" regrettably spreadable.

That's where Rutherford is aiming: people who've assumed that 23andme
and its rivals wouldn't be able to make millions selling you diagnoses
of the precise quantity of viking DNA in your blood if there wasn't
something to it.

And here Rutherford shines. He is, after all, a gifted science
communicator. This is one seriously *charming* book, funny and witty and
just flat-out fascinating.

Rutherford doesn't merely want to disabuse you of the fantastical claims
of Junk DNA Science - he wants to excite you about the incredible NEW
things we're learning thanks to the rapid advances in genomics.

Like the fact that Africa is the most genetically diverse place on
Earth, with two members of the Sen tribe from different regions being
more genetically divergent than a Swede and an Australian Aboriginal person.

And the fact that you only need to go back 11 generations before you
reach an ancestor whose DNA is likely completely missing from your own
genome. Or the small number of centuries you have to look back before
you find the first common ancestor of every European.

And the amount of genetic outflow and backflow between seemingly
isolated places - Bronze Age Africa and Europe, say - and the waves of
migration we can trace through genomes that eliminate any claim to
national genetic commonality in any land.

If you've ever wondered what role genomics plays in the dominance of
people from east Africa in footraces, or the number of Jewish Nobelists,
Rutherford's here for you, unpicking what we know about the role of
genes in these attainments (spoiler: they're not that important).

All leavened with gentle and devastating dunks on "race science"
believers and the wit of Douglas Adams in his prime.

It may not help you win arguments with racists - they cannot be reasoned
out of what they weren't reasoned into.

But it a powerful innoculant against the ideas drifting out of their
foetid pits and into the rest of the world.

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🩲 Combat Wheelchairs

The Heroes Without Limits project was created by disability advocate
Sara Thompson, "producing and streaming real play tabletop games with an
all-disabled/chronically ill/neurodivergent cast and crew."

Thompson's work also includes creating homebrew RPG add-ons "roleplay
and address disability" in your own games.

A recent addition is the Combat Wheelchair, rules for integrating
wheelchair using adventurers into your Dungeons and Dragons Fifth
Edition games:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ysDrH2vqKz6NSGkf3_0WX5tV-Ch_t_N_

The chair comes with its own attacks and added capabilities - like being
able to fix a weapon in place on it and ramming/tyre striking your
adversaries, or high-speed descents on sloped terrain.

The docs also come with a new character class, "The Paralympian."

Combat Wheelchairs' obvious, manifest coolness has not prevented
gatekeeping yum-yukkers from raising spurious objections to them, and
these are addressed in the homebrew rules.

But far more interesting than Combat Wheelchairs' detractors are its
boosters, who have unleashed a torrent of delightful and creative new
media building on Thompson's work.

I am most impressed with sculptor Russ Charles and character designer
Thomas Lishman's Combat Wheelchair miniatures for Strata Minis, which
the company has christened "Dungeons and Diversity."

https://strataminiatures.com/shop/?store-page=Dungeons-and-Diversity-c57880798

There are 4 minis in all, available for preorder now as either STL files
(£5/ea) or resin/metal 3D prints (£15/ea) with a ship-date of Sept 21
and 25% of proceeds donated to https://www.ehlers-danlos.org/.

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🩲 Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon

The digital rights movement has a longstanding hostility to the term
"intellectual property," raising two objections to the term:

I. It's incoherent: patents, copyright, trademarks and other "IP" have
little in common with one another in their rubrics or contours.

II. "IP" was deliberately promulgated in the 1960s/70s as an alternative
to the age old term, "author's monopoly," a term that warned us that
lurking beneath any government grant of exclusivity to ideas or
expressions was a monopoly with all its problems.

Now, creators have long bristled at this second objection, pointing out
that getting a copyright didn't make you a monopolist in the sense of
having "market power" - the ability to set prices and terms for your
products.

Creators are largely at the mercy of the investors in their work - the
publishers, studios, labels, distributors, etc who sit between them and
their audiences and provide both capital and access to those audiences.

*Those* companies may be monopolists (5 major publishers, 4 major
studios, 3 major labels, 2 major cable operators, 1 major cinema chain
about to be purchased by the solitary major online bookseller, etc), but
the creators in the supply chains have no market power to speak of.

I recently came to a realization about that first objection, about the
imprecision of "IP": namely, that when those corporate monopolists use
the term IP, it has a very precise meaning, namely:

"IP is any legal rule that I can use to exert control over the conduct
of my critics, competitors, and customers."

That's why we see "trade secrecy" and "noncompetes" and "terms of
service" and "binding arbitration" lumped in with "IP."

DRM (more specifically, the laws against breaking DRM) lets you dictate
how people use the products you make after you sell them.

These laws also let you decide who can reveal technical defects in your
products.

Combined with patents and terms of service, "IP" lets you decide who can
enter your market, and on what terms. It lets "platform operators" lock
out competitors or mine their own customers' sales for competitive intel.

You see "IP" everywhere: not just in Epic's lawsuit against Apple over
the Ios App Store (controlling competitors), but in Goldman Sans, a
"free" font from Goldman Sachs whose license includes a ban on
criticizing Goldman Sachs (controlling critics).

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/6/25/21302831/goldman-sachs-font-sans-criticize-disparage-license

And more recently, Amazon announced that its new podcasting platform,
streaming on Audible and Amazon Music, would come with license terms
banning criticism of Amazon:

https://pitchfork.com/news/amazon-music-adding-podcasts-on-the-condition-that-podcasters-dont-disparage-amazon/

Now, Amazon backed off from its nondisparagement clause pretty quick,
but the existence of that clause tells us an awful lot. It's not like
one of Amazon's lawyers slipped and accidentally wrote a
nondisparagement clause.

The only thing that slipped here is the mask - the pretense that the
goal of business is fair competition that operates in a marketplace
characterized by reliable access to good information.

That's something companies want (for *other* companies, at least) while
they're fighting for dominance: but once they attain it, they want "IP":
the power to control critics, competitors and customers.

And once your monopoly has "IP" in it, it acquires a special durability.
In the absence of IP, competitors who fight your dominance face an
uphill battle, but they get to threaten you with enforcement under the
(weak and attenuated) antitrust laws.

But once you get "IP," you get to sue *them* for having the temerity to
threaten your dominance. Apple can use copyright law - Sec 1201 of the
DMCA - to sue any company that offers Iphone users a rival app store.

Universal Music can sue any musician that creates sample-based music
without first subjecting themselves to Universal's confiscatory
contracts, whereby it adds their "Author's Monopoly" to its actual,
market-power monopoly.

If you're interested in a more thorough unpacking of these ideas, watch
for the next issue of Locus Magazine, where I have a long column about them.

Or if you're feeling impatient, check out my keynote for 2600's
HOPE2020, where I read a draft of that column:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzpbvM7XDGM

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🩲 This day in history

#15yrsago Pratchett on Harry Potter reading ban
https://web.archive.org/web/20050930232313/http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Ansible/a217.html

#10yrsago Heinlein memoir: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of
science fiction https://boingboing.net/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-lear.html

#5yrsago Endless spiralling model-train
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUZVv0nr2rc

#1yrago Major corporations blacklist ads on news stories that include
the words "Trump," "racism," "gun," "Brexit," "suicide" and more
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/advertisers-blacklisting-news-other-stories-with-controversial-words-like-trump.html

#1yrago Penetration tester releases proof-of-concept code for hijacking
smart buttplugs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsQ2VWEfduM

#1yrago The guy who figured out Bernie Madoff's scam now says GE is
about to go bankrupt
https://gallery.mailchimp.com/199a11600490e42b3dcf6d2ee/files/fa29f469-c222-4a94-a324-ccf2cfea50ef/2019_08_15_GE_Whistleblower_Report.pdf

#1yrago Announcement of Tumblr's sale to WordPress classified as
pornography by Tumblr's notorious "adult content" filter
https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/post/187053987273/yeah-that-news-is-looking-mighty-adult-there

#1yrago Judge orders the State of Georgia to be prepared for
pen-and-paper balloting by March 2020
https://apnews.com/abd2949881514e42a50f2025595c9c2a

#1yrago Art Spiegelman pulled his Marvel Folio Society intro after
Disney demanded that he not criticize Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/16/art-spiegelmans-marvel-essay-refused-publication-for-orange-skull-trump-dig

#1yrago In California, the 2020 elections will feature an epic battle to
allow cities to reinstate property taxes
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/2020-property-tax-battle-in-california-could-be-epic.html

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🩲 Colophon

Today's top sources: Super Punch (https://www.superpunch.net/), Naked
Capitalism
(https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/08/03/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-12/

Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote for Law Via the Internet conference, Sept 22,
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/LVI2020/register

* Writing into an Uncertain Future, Afterwords Festival, Oct 1,
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/writing-into-an-uncertain-future-tickets-115378329690

Latest book:

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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