week 3/17

One of this week's articles talks about politic are all deceptions. Politicians always tell the public about what they will do for the public during the campaign, and during the politicians' serves, they turn to the interest of the rich people. The article proposes a simple and direct solution, which is building a public website where everyone can use it to find out what has been promised and what it is. The article also explained that when such website is setup, people will automatically start to use it, either truth tellers or liars. My attitude towards such solution is highly conservative. I think that the article has idealize the problem, which should not be easily solved. 

Whenever I examine a question, I tend to start from the very fundamental causes. What are the fundamental causes?  

First of all, technically, politicians do not lie. Lying will absolutely terminate politicians' career. To the public, some politicians seem not fulfilling their promises. This is because they do not make clear promise. Politicians are so so so good at throwing nebulous words. During campaign, they address to the public that they will run certain programs, and during their serves, they do propose "promised" programs, but many times they do not finish it and leave it to their successors. The ability of giving nebulous talk is actually very important to survive even thrive in this world. For example, "do you know how fast you were driving?" "I do not know." "Do you know when you can finish your part? "I probably have some time to work on it tonight." Well, the purpose of this post is not to teach readers how to be tricky. 

The second question is that why politician "lie" to the public. I think the major one is to balance the benefit of different social classes. Throughout this world, there are more poor people and less rich people. Poor people have more votes, and rich people have more resources. If a politician only follows the vote, the interests of the rich people will never be satisfied, plus that A.I would be able to follow whatever decision is voted. "Politicians must be the card dealers to balance all the players on the table."

"Is is possible that rich people and poor people share the same interests so that politicians can satisfy everyone?" No. From a widely believed theory -- Maslow's hierarchy of needs, rich people are on the top of the pyramid, they are looking for self-actualization, whereas some poor people are looking for safety, for love, or for esteem. With different fundamental goals, how would one expect the rich and the poor share the same interests. 

As a matter of fact, such struggles between two different social classes are on-going for millenniums, on every continent, among every races, and under every governmental structure. Anyway, it is always worthy to try to solve this struggle by all efforts. The proposed website is absolutely good, but I am afraid things are not as easy as the article suggests.

week 3/2

Are We in Control of Our Decisions?

During the guest lecture, a topic covered was drone killing innocent people. The situation, the feeling, and the decision making process vary with respect to different people, and thousands of debating topics can be dug out from this. The lady (I forgot her name) started from a victim’s perspective, which makes the story full of sorrow. I have to admit that I feel very sad about those people, but remorse cannot help solving or settling down the problem. I would like to start from the commander’s perspective to ravel out the decision making process.

The biggest question is that “are we in control of our decision?” This is a study proposed by Professor Dan Ariely, and after years of research, he gave a conclusion that under most situation, people are not in control of their decision for unfamiliar issues, regardless of their gender, age, education level, or cultural background.  Here is an example provided by Prof. Ariely to support his study (which is the best to demonstrate the commander’s situation), which he refers as cognitive illusion. In figure 1, it shows the percentage people who would donate their organ in different country in Europe. Obviously, the countries on the right side seem to be willing to give a lot, whereas the countries in the left seems giving little or much less. The question is what causes such difference. Taken for granted, some people think this is likely to be caused by culture difference, or possibly, religion based factor. Typically, how much do you care about other people? However, if we dig into the plot, we can see that some countries with very similar cultural background are exhibit strikingly different interest.  Austria and Germany, Belgium and Netherland would be examples. Then, what did the countries on the right do? The trick is on the DMV form that needs to be filled upon renewing driver’s license.

For the country on the left, the form has a question as “check the box if you want to participate in organ donor program,” for the country on the right, the question is “check the box if you don’t want to participate.” The interesting part is that when left countries’ people receive the form, they do not check the box, so they do not donate; when right countries’ people get the form, they do not check as well, and they join the donor program.

                                    Figure 1: Percentage people who would give donate their organ

Now let’s think about this interesting phenomenon. Most people agrees that they have full control of their decisions, such as deciding what to eat for lunch. This is not true. Decisions are easily manipulated, even though, intuitively, it is hard to accept that an illusion decision has been made while facing designed form like above. The fact is that when a question is so complex that people do not know what to do, people tend to pick whatever is given ( I guess this is probably because humans’ innate laziness).

Return to the scenario where a commander who is controlling a drone, and the drone has detected several suspicious targets. This must be discussed in two different directions:

1.     If it is the commander who discovered the suspicious targets through the image/sound or other information provided by the drone, then the drone is not the right one to blame, and neither the commander in my opinion. The commander must make a decision of firing or not because in the next few minutes the targets will be gone. This was a really complex question, and the decision must be made within a short time. From different points of view, the judgments about the commander are different. The decision made by the commander might seems irrational: “He killed innocent people” or “he let criminals go and innocent people were killed by those ‘should-be-dead-criminals.’” It is hard to judge the commander, but one thing is clear that due to the complexity of the situation, it is extremely difficult for the commander to make a perfect decision within limited amount of time.

2.      If it is the drone reported suspicious targets due to algorithm by A.I, then the commander probably made an illusion decision by picking whatever is given; that is, killing the suspicious targets. Moreover, if the A.I. is wrong about the targets, the commander is unlikely to find out because the complex situation has deceived the commander (referring to Figure 1, almost 100% people were choosing the given option, some of these people are possibly commanders).

Week 2/23

                                                                        Steering Business
Chapter 7 conveys an opinion that a relative handful of (mostly) men -- mostly white, upper class, highly educated men -- influence whatever is to be produced. With such premise, a major question raised is that how might these small group of business executives innovate in more public-regarding ways? Prof. Woodhouse thinks that business is in a privileged position that public can not effectively influence which direction technologies are developing towards. However, I do not completely agree with such statement.

In fact, there are many ways that public can influence on business decision. First of all, legislation is the most powerful weapon. Typically in democratic country, public has the right to choose leader based on his/her politic interests. Designated leader (who shares the same view with the majority) raises laws or amendments in order to regulate/direct business developing direction. For example, laws can set up limit of the production of certain chemical or raises the tax rate of certain industry. Alternatively, laws can encourage investments into certain public favored industry. Some people may argue that politicians rely on business executives' funding to run their election, so politicians' interests are, nevertheless, still the interests of the small group of executives. That is true. Politicians advertise a lot with the funding and deceive the public with sweet words. Some politicians even fail to fulfill their promises. Such phenomenon is a defect of modern democratic system, and this "tag-of-war" between two different social classes has been on-going for thousands of years throughout the world. What I am actually trying to say is that public definitely is able to choose the right politician who represents public benefits and guide business/technology developing direction.

On the other hand, from an economical point of view, businesses are affected by and tightly bounded to the stock market. To understand this idea, one needs to understand stocks. It seems that a small group of rich people owns most of the fortune on this world, and public does not have enough money to affect the stock price. That is, however, not exactly true because stock value is counted as part of the riches' fortune, which is not estate or substances. In fact, stock is expectation, is how the public think one company worth. The mechanism beneath is: a company starts its initial public offering (IPO) -- their stocks are trading in the stock market (with a price). If the public thinks this company has potential, in other words, the public likes the business that this company is doing, the stock price will go up. The company sells its stock to the market to gather cash. Also, the company is able to get more loan from the bank. Now with all this cash, the company is able to buy new machines, hire more engineers, and invest more money into researches. In such way, the business/technology starts to developing faster. Let's return to the beginning(IPO). What if the public does not like the company's business? Quite straightforward, the stock price is low, and the company cannot get all the cash for further developing. For example, in the past decade, IT and IT-related industry, such as Google, Amazon, social networks, smart device company, were booming. This is because the public loves these business and invests money into these companies. Therefore, I think public is capable of deciding what types of technology receive more resources and thus develop faster.

Although the above two methods demonstrate how public steers business, these two methods are very limited. Choosing politicians to support policy that represents public's attitude is feasible only in political stable, and especially, democratic country. Only handful countries meet such category -- highly developed western country. In Africa, some countries are not politically stable. In Asia, some countries have severe corruption among the politicians. In China, people cannot decide where the party invests the taxes into. With respect to the "stock" method, there are countless poor people who do not have the money to invest at all.

In conclusion, what I am trying to point out is that there are methods for public to steer business, and by utilizing these methods properly, more people can get involved into steering business, at least more than Prof. Woodhouse mentions in the book. However, majority of the world population are still troubled by poverty and almost have no politic influence. Those are the people who really need help. Their benefit are compromised. Their will are neglected, and it is not just necessary but also urgent to develop methods to speak for them .