I care a lot about free (and open source) software.
In particular, I learned programming so I could make some changes to a tablet note-taking app I was using at school. Open source is the reason why I got into software professionally, and causally connected to a bunch of things in my life.
Some points I have in favor of this:
I think having the ability to change tools you use makes using those tools better for thinking
In general I’m more excited about a community of ‘tool-builders’ rather than ‘tool-users’ (this goes for cognitive tools, too, which the rationality community is great at)
Feedback from how people use/modify things (like software) is a big ingredient in making it better and creating more value.
With that said, I think we’re still in better need of analogies and thought experiments on what to do with compute, and how to deal with risk.
It’s much easier to share the source code to a program than to provide everyone the compute to run it on. Compute is pretty heterogenous, too, which makes the problem harder. It’s possible that some sort of ‘universal basic compute’ is the future, but I am not optimistic about that coming before things like food/water/shelter/etc.
The second point is that I think it is important to consider technological downsides when deploying things like this (and sharing open source software / free software counts as deployment). In general its easier to think of the benefits than the harms, and a bunch of the harms come from tail risks that are hard to predict, but I think this is also worth doing.
I agree that a computing resources to run code on would be a more complex proposition to make available to all my point is more that if you purchase compute you should be free to use it to perform whatever computations you wish and arbitrary barriers should not be erected to prevent you from using it in whatever way you see fit (cough Apple, cough Sony, cough cough).
I care a lot about free (and open source) software.
In particular, I learned programming so I could make some changes to a tablet note-taking app I was using at school. Open source is the reason why I got into software professionally, and causally connected to a bunch of things in my life.
Some points I have in favor of this:
I think having the ability to change tools you use makes using those tools better for thinking
In general I’m more excited about a community of ‘tool-builders’ rather than ‘tool-users’ (this goes for cognitive tools, too, which the rationality community is great at)
Feedback from how people use/modify things (like software) is a big ingredient in making it better and creating more value.
With that said, I think we’re still in better need of analogies and thought experiments on what to do with compute, and how to deal with risk.
It’s much easier to share the source code to a program than to provide everyone the compute to run it on. Compute is pretty heterogenous, too, which makes the problem harder. It’s possible that some sort of ‘universal basic compute’ is the future, but I am not optimistic about that coming before things like food/water/shelter/etc.
The second point is that I think it is important to consider technological downsides when deploying things like this (and sharing open source software / free software counts as deployment). In general its easier to think of the benefits than the harms, and a bunch of the harms come from tail risks that are hard to predict, but I think this is also worth doing.
I agree that a computing resources to run code on would be a more complex proposition to make available to all my point is more that if you purchase compute you should be free to use it to perform whatever computations you wish and arbitrary barriers should not be erected to prevent you from using it in whatever way you see fit (cough Apple, cough Sony, cough cough).