> Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music.
from the article:
Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence of what it tries to transmit. Take music.
One of the foundations is a general process, and music is used as an example for that process. Which is so far from what you turned it into, I'd really suggest reading it all again.
> Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending.
What he actually says:
[With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.
The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less. His argument isn't "it's bad because it's cheaper" -- rather your counterargument seems to be "that [criticism I kinda missed] is made up for because it's cheaper".
And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.
> Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece?
Critical, yeah. Self-critical (big difference) in the sense of "why I didn't succeed or how I could succeed harder", yeah. But in the sense of "wtf am I doing, why, and should I really be doing it?" -- not so much. You say every second non-technical article? Can you link me ten from the last 7 days? Not because I don't believe you, but because I want to read them, and at the very least I want to know what kind of article you think qualifies for this. Also, if the consensus here is that criticism is given too much attention (which doesn't even mean there's a lot going on, just that what of it is going on is already too much for some people - logic!) kinda confirms is point instead of refuting it.
But it's not about criticism anyway, it's about being self-critical. Plus, HN isn't the whole industry. So how would that even be a valid counterargument if it was true? (which also makes me asking for those self-critical articles kinda moot; I just like to be throrough)
That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why this doesn't do any harm).
Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times. That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those 999,999 translations.
What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and humans doing identical translations?
Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100% rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity of translations in both cases.
>You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less.
The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid already.
>And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.
Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new seller.
Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price.
Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles.
In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running.
edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job wise for now.
Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.
So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used of each individual translator, and then start haggling.
And "heh" to "all technology and process costs jobs." How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea? It's such a mindless thing to say. It's a mantra, it's a goal, but far from the truth.
Why do you think they haven't done that? Or rather they paid the entity that owns the rights who at some point in the past paid those translators. Generally speaking the translators gave up their rights in exchange for money long ago.
Specifically google uses, for example, UN documents which translators were paid to translate and which are publicly usable.
If I write some code for a company, get paid for that code and then the company sells that code why should I get paid again?
Or do you think google is the first automated translation service? This has been done successfully for 30+ years commercially and academically. Nothing different just because it's on the web and not on some guys PC.
>How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea?
Actually, I'm sure there were all sort of quack solutions to infections and whole industries making them which went out of business as a result of doctor's realizing washing hands did the trick.
Edit: Not to mention the loss of jobs for morticians (in the short term), makers of amputation implements (and other tools to deal with all those infections), nurses specializing in dealing with infections, traditional healers (as doctors were now an even better choice) and so on. Lowering infections would have impacted every single person and industry that was built around the previous high-infection status quo.
Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.
It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.
That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.
You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.
Music is like many other sorts of human information systems (natural languages, laws, business practices) in that there are various forces both for and against standardization. Standards in music are much older than MIDI; the equal-tempered tuning of the Western scale is exactly a somewhat unsatisfactory compromise forced by standardization.
More here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/02/review-you-are-no...
Regardless, there wasn't a single argument in the article that I would call cogent. That doesn't mean Lanier doesn't have cogent arguments (I really don't know); just that they didn't come through in this piece.
Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music. Was that really such an important part of the interview that it deserves space in what's clearly a short summary of a long interview? It sounds more like an aside that's been taken out of context.
Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending. But that's precisely why technology has been the primary driver of economic growth since the industrial revolution. You can make a case that it hurts some people while helping people in the aggregate, but, read as written, his criticism is an attack on pretty much any technology, ever.
And then there's all the straw men, like the idea that "Web 2.0 intellectuals" think that "we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible." Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece? If anything, the consensus here seems to be that criticism is given too much attention (e.g., the most upvoted comment in many HN threads is a comment telling people not to be so harsh, the criticism of 'middlebrow dismassal' [1], etc.)
[1] If my comment qualifies, I apologize. I'm writing this because I literally don't understand why Jaron Lanier believes what he does or what this article is trying to convey. The article is full of logical fallacies and contradictions that are so absurd that they're surely not his real views. Other people around here seem to be familiar with Lanier; perhaps someone with more background can make sense of this article.
EDIT: his wikipedia page is decent, although it's a bit light on content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier. I don't agree, but, unlike the article, wikipedia presents his opinions in a reasonable light.
EDIT2: Just as an aside, one of the biggest anti-features I find when I read HN is that there are often many comments expressing variants of the same opinion. They're not exactly redundant, because each presents a unique viewpoint, but it makes comment sections overly long.
I'll often delete my comments after other, similar, comments pop up, to reduce the reading load. I'd delete this, because there are now six other comments expressing the opinion that either Lanier's opinions aren't cogent or that the article isn't representative of Lanier's opinions (and only one dissenter), but it's bad form to delete a comment after someone's quoted it, so I'll leave it here for posterity.