Research and commentary on digital technologies in public life
This week I participated in Business Week Online’s Debate Room feature, where two people write short essays on opposite sides of a proposition.
The proposition: “Regardless of how hard IT experts work to intercept the trillions of junk e-mails that bombard hapless in-boxes, the spammers will find ways to defeat them.” I argued against, concluding that “We’ll never be totally free of spam, but in the long run it’s a nuisance—not a fundamental threat—to the flourishing of the Internet.”
In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model, where assertions have to be judged based on their plausibility. I claimed that personal experience as a journalist gave me special insight into such matters, and concluded: “the expensive, arguably old fashioned approach of The New Yorker and other magazines still delivers a level of quality I haven’t found, and do not expect to find, in the world of community-created content.”
Apparently, I was wrong. It turns out that EssJay, one of the Wikipedia users described in The New Yorker article, is not the “tenured professor of religion at a private university” that he claimed he was, and that The New Yorker reported him to be. He’s actually a 24-year-old, sans doctorate, named Ryan Jordan.
Jimmy Wales, who is as close to being in charge of Wikipedia as anybody is, has had an intricate progression of thought on the matter, ably chronicled by Seth Finklestein. His ultimate reaction (or at any rate, his current public stance as of this writing) is on his personal page in Wikipedia
I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes… I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people’s trust.
As Seth points out, this is an odd reaction since it seems simultaneously to forgive EssJay for lying to The New Yorker (“something very mild”) and to hold him much more strongly to account for lying to other Wikipedia users. One could argue that lying to The New Yorker—and by extension to its hundreds of thousands of subscribers—was in the aggregate much worse than lying to the Wikipedians. One could also argue that Mr. Jordan’s appeal to institutional authority, which was as successful as it was dishonest, raises profound questions about the Wikipedia model.
But I won’t make either of those arguments. Instead, I’ll return to the issue that has me putting my foot in my mouth: How can a reader decide what to trust? I predicted you could trust The New Yorker, and as it turns out, you couldn’t.
Philip Tetlock, a long-time student of the human penchant for making predictions, has found (in a book whose text I can’t link to, but which I encourage you to read) that people whose predictions are falsified typically react by making excuses. They typically claim that they are off the hook because the conditions based on which they predicted a certain result were actually not as they seemed at the time of the inaccurate prediction. This defense is available to me: The New Yorker fell short of its own standards, and took EssJay at his word without verifying his identity or even learning his name. He had, as all con men do, a plausible-sounding story, related in this case to a putative fear of professional retribution that in hindsight sits rather uneasily with his claim that he had tenure. If the magazine hadn’t broken its own rules, this wouldn’t have gotten into print.
But that response would be too facile, as Tetlock rightly observes of the general case. Granted that perfect fact checking makes for a trustworthy story; how do you know when the fact checking is perfect and when it is not? You don’t. More generally, predictions are only as good as someone’s ability to figure out whether or not the conditions are right to trigger the predicted outcome.
So what about this case: On the one hand, incidents like this are rare and tend to lead the fact checkers to redouble their meticulousness. On the other, the fact claims in a story that are hardest to check are often for the same reason the likeliest ones to be false. Should you trust the sometimes-imperfect fact checking that actually goes on?
My answer is yes. In the wake of this episode The New Yorker looks very bad (and Wikipedia only moderately so) because people regard an error in The New Yorker to be exceptional in a way the exact same error in Wikipedia is not. This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read.
It is a matter of faith among infotech experts that (1) the supply of computing and communications will increase rapidly according to Moore’s Law, and (2) the demand for that capacity will grow roughly as fast. This mutual escalation of supply and demand causes the rapid change we see in the industry.
It seems to be a law of physics that Moore’s Law must terminate eventually – there are fundamental physical limits to how much information can be stored, or how much computing accomplished in a second, within a fixed volume of space. But these hard limits may be a long way off, so it seems safe to assume that Moore’s Law will keep operating for many more cycles, as long as there is demand for ever-greater capacity.
Thus far, whenever more capacity comes along, new applications are invented (or made practical) to use it. But will this go on forever, or is there a point of diminishing returns where more capacity doesn’t improve the user’s happiness?
Consider the broadband link going into a typical home. Certainly today’s homeowner wants more bandwidth, or at least can put more bandwidth to use if it is provided. But at some point there is enough bandwidth to download any reasonable webpage or program in a split second, or to provide real-time ultra-high-def video streams to every member of the household. When that day comes, do home users actually benefit from having fatter pipes?
There is a plausible argument that a limit exists. The human sensory system has limited (though very high) bandwidth, so it doesn’t make sense to direct more than a certain number of bits per second at the user. At some point, your 3-D immersive stereo video has such high resolution that nobody will notice any improvement. The other senses have similar limits, so at some point you have enough bandwidth to saturate the senses of everybody in the home. You might want to send information to devices in the home; but how far can that grow?
Such questions may not matter quite yet, but they will matter a great deal someday. The structure of the technology industries, not to mention technology policies, are built around the idea that people will keep demanding more-more-more and the industry will be kept busy providing it.
My gut feeling is that we’ll eventually hit the point of diminishing returns, but it is a long way off. And I suspect we’ll hit the bandwidth limit before we hit the computation and storage limits. I am far from certain about this. What do you think?
(This post was inspired by a conversation with Tim Brown.)
This year, Alex Halderman, Scott Karlin and I put our heads together to come up with a single list of predictions. Each prediction is supported by at least two of us, except the predictions that turn out to be wrong, which must have slipped in by mistake.
Our predictions for 2007:
(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.
(2) An easy tool for cloning MySpace pages will show up, and young users will educate each other loudly about the evils of plagiarism.
(3) Despite the ascent of Howard Berman (D-Hollywood) to the chair of the House IP subcommittee, copyright issues will remain stalemated in Congress.
(4) Like the Republicans before them, the Democrats’ tech policy will disappoint. Only a few incumbent companies will be happy.
(5) Major record companies will sell a significant number of MP3s, promoting them as compatible with everything. Movie studios won’t be ready to follow suit, persisting in their unsuccessful DRM strategy.
(6) Somebody will figure out the right way to sell and place video ads online, and will get very rich in the process. (We don’t know how they’ll do it. If we did, we wouldn’t be spending our time writing this blog.)
(7) Some mainstream TV shows will be built to facilitate YouTubing, for example by structuring a show as a series of separable nine-minute segments.
(8) AACS, the encryption system for next-gen DVDs, will melt down and become as ineffectual as the CSS system used on ordinary DVDs.
(9) Congress will pass a national law regarding data leaks. It will be a watered-down version of the California law, and will preempt state laws.
(10) A worm infection will spread on game consoles.
(11) There will be less attention to e-voting as the 2008 election seems far away and the public assumes progress is being made. The Holt e-voting bill will pass, ratifying the now-solid public consensus in favor of paper trails.
(12) Bogus airport security procedures will peak and start to decrease.
(13) On cellphones, software products will increasingly compete independent of hardware.
As usual, we’ll start the new year by reviewing the predictions we made for the previous year. After our surprisingly accurate 2005 predictions, we decided to take more risks having more 2006 predictions, and making them more specific. The results, as we’ll see, were … predictable.
Here now, our 2006 predictions, in italics, with hindsight in ordinary type.
(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.
We predict this every year, and it’s always right. This prediction is so obvious that it’s almost unfair to count it.
Verdict: Right.
(2) The RIAA will quietly reduce the number of lawsuits it files against end users.
Verdict: Right.
(3) Copyright owners, realizing that their legal victory over Grokster didn’t solve the P2P problem, will switch back to technical attacks on P2P systems.
They did realize the Grokster case didn’t solve their problem; but they didn’t really emphasize technical countermeasures. They didn’t seem to have a coherent anti-P2P strategy.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(4) Watermarking-based DRM will make an abortive comeback, but will still be fundamentally infeasible.
The comeback was limited to the now-dead analog hole bill, which backed the dead-on-arrival CGMS-A + VEIL technology. Watermarking still looks infeasible for copy protection.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(5) Frustrated with Apple’s market power, the music industry will try to cozy up to Microsoft. Afraid of Microsoft’s market power, the movie industry will try to cozy up to Washington.
The music industry was indeed frustrated by Apple’s market power. But they drove a hard bargain with Microsoft, shackling Zune’s most interesting features. The movie industry did cozy up to Washington, but no more than usual, and probably not due to Microsoft-fear.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(6) The Google Book Search case will settle. Months later, everybody will wonder what all the fuss was about.
No settlement, but excitement about the Book Search case has definitely waned.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(7) A major security and/or privacy vulnerability will be found in at least one more major DRM system.
Verdict: wrong.
(8) Copyright issues will still be stalemated in Congress.
Another easy one.
Verdict: right.
(9) Arguments based on national competitiveness in technology will have increasing power in Washington policy debates.
This didn’t happen. We thought the election would make economic health more salient; but the election focus was elsewhere.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(10) Planned incompatibility will join planned obsolescence in the lexicon of industry critics.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(11) There will be broad consensus on the the need for patent reform, but very little consensus on what reform means.
The main policy division, predictably, was between the infotech and biotech sectors.
Verdict: right.
(12) Attention will shift back to the desktop security problem, and to the role of botnets as a tool of cybercrime.
This should have happened, but commentators mostly missed the growing importance of this issue. Botnets were implicated in the spam renaissance.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(13) It will become trendy to say that the Internet is broken and needs to be redesigned. This meme will be especially popular with those recommending bad public policies.
This trend mostly didn’t materialize, though there were wisps of this argument in the net neutrality debate.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(14) The walls of wireless providers’ “walled gardens” will get increasingly leaky. Providers will eye each other, wondering who will be the first to open their network.
Verdict: mostly right.
(15) Push technology (remember PointCast and the Windows Active Desktop?) will return, this time with multimedia, and probably on portable devices. People won’t like it any better than they did before.
Push tried to bring the TV model to the Net, so it seemed logical that as TV moved onto the Net it would become more push-like. But this didn’t happen, at least not yet.
Verdict: wrong.
(16) Broadcasters will move toward Internet simulcasting of free TV channels. Other efforts to distribute authorized video over the net will disappoint.
Verdict: mostly right.
(17) HD-DVD and Blu-ray, touted as the second coming of the DVD, will look increasingly like the second coming of the Laserdisc.
The jury is still out, but this prediction is looking good so far.
Verdict: mostly right.
(18) “Digital home” products will founder because companies aren’t willing to give customers what they really want, or don’t know what customers really want.
Outside of promotional efforts in the trade press, we didn’t hear much about the digital home.
Verdict: mostly right.
(19) A name-brand database vendor will go bust, unable to compete against open source.
Verdict: wrong.
(20) Two more significant desktop apps will move to an Ajax/server-based design (as email did in moving toward Gmail). Office will not be one of them.
There seemed to be a trend in this direction, but I can’t point to two major apps that moved. But Google did introduce Office-like products in this category.
Verdict: mostly wrong.
(21) Technologies that frustrate discrimination between different types of network traffic will grow in popularity, backed partly by application service providers like Google and Yahoo.
These technologies didn’t develop, perhaps because of the policy stalemate over net neutrality.
Verdict: wrong.
(22) Social networking services will morph into something actually useful.
This one is hard to categorize. The meaning of “social networking” changed during 2006; it now refers to sites like MySpace and Facebook that are primarily webpage hosting services. That’s a useful and popular function; but it’s the term rather than the technology that morphed.
Verdict: mostly right (I guess).
(23) There will be a felony conviction in the U.S. for a crime committed entirely in a virtual world.
Commenters noted at the time that this prediction was poorly specified. Which didn’t matter, because it was wrong no matter how you interpret it.
Verdict: wrong.
Overall scorecard for 2006 predictions: four right, five mostly right, nine mostly wrong, five wrong. That’s more wrong than right, by a narrow margin, showing that our risk-taking strategy worked.
Stay tuned for our 2007 predictions.
