Quoderat

I left this comment on Simon St-Laurent’s interesting and thoughtful post How dare Apple … (which, in turn, was partly a response to Tim Bray’s post Nothing Creative).

I don’t believe that most things, including the iPad, are obviously right or wrong, but I do have serious concerns that go beyond simply not being able to code on an iPad (at least, until there’s an app for that). I’m copying my comment here to give it a more permanent home. If I hadn’t posted this yet, I’d edit it to tone down the emotional language 10% or so, but still, it’s a fair reflection of my thoughts and concerns, not about the iPad itself (it’s just another consumer device), but about the way people are starting to talk and think about issues that are very important to me, like software freedom:

The thing about creativity is that it responds poorly to central planning and central control. I have no problem with the fact that the iPad isn’t developer-friendly — I can buy a Netbook with twice the power for half the price and code on it (and, BTW, that netbook makes just as simple a consumer device).

My problem is the idea that a single Apple politburo controls everything that can appear on the device. Is that the future? Even in the bad old days of TV, before cable, there were 3 1/2 US networks to choose from, not just one - you had to watch TV outside the US to see just how bad things could get with a single, government-controlled broadcaster (I grew up in Canada, but close enough to watch the US stations, thank god).

Apple’s obsession with central control goes beyond software to hardware. There must be some kind of port for the optional keyboard to plug into, but no way it’s going to be USB or Firewire, because that might let someone use an *unplanned* creative device on the iPad, someone creative daring not to give Apple its cut (and veto). If I build something clever for creative people using a USB interface, it will work with desktop towers, notebooks, netbooks, and even some small portable devices, but *not* with the iPad.

Apple has some smart people working there, but they won’t always have the best ideas, and Apple has thrown up too many barriers to other people with smart ideas. The best apps in the future are going to come from a couple of students coding in a dorm room, and they might just be so annoyed by Apple censorship that they defect to a freer platform. It’s sad that things have gotten to the point that even Windows is a freer platform than Apple.

What’s your life worth to you? “Priceless” is the obvious answer, but in reality, you put a price on your life all the time.

Safety vs. money

Here’s a simple example: let’s say that you want to go on a two-hour scheduled flight, and that the odds of you dying on the flight come out to about 1 in 1 million (it’s actually lower, but let’s keep the math simple). Your ticket costs $400 with taxes.

Now, I start an airline that adds all kinds of extra safety features and procedures, and over the years, it proves itself twice as safe as the average, so your odds of dying are only 1 in 2 million. However, your ticket would cost $600 with taxes on my airline.

Will you buy the more expensive ticket? If not, then you’ve decided that your life is worth less than $200 million dollars (for every million people who paid the extra $200, one would be saved from death, in the unlikely event that I managed to get the simple math right) — a big number, still, but no longer “priceless”. Decide how much extra you would pay for the ticket ($5? $10? $50?) and multiply by 1 million — that’s what your life’s worth to you.

Safety vs. time and pleasure

Of course, time is as much of a commodity as money. How much time do you save by flying between cities instead of taking the train, or driving across town instead of taking the bus? How much extra risk of death did you assume by making that choice? Again, you can do the math, and decide what value (in saved time) you put on your life. Ditto for your hobbies — downhill skiing is more dangerous than playing Wii, but you’ve decided that the value of your life is less than the extra enjoyment divided by the extra risk of dying (where risk is < 1.0).

It’s perfectly normal

Risk taking is normal for humans, and most of the time we don’t actually do the math — we just make a snap judgement of the value of our lives and the effects of our choices based on instinct. This matters, though, because we (where “we” = American, Canadian, British, Australian, etc) are now electing governments that promise to spend more money to make us safer, and much of that money ends up going into blowing up central Asian villages, spying on our communications, and groping us at airports.

Valuing lives

Is it helping? If we’d spent the same amount of money building better flu clinics, fast intercity trains or even better-lit intersections, could we have saved more lives in our own countries? If we’d invested even one percent of that money into sewers, clean water or earthquake-resistant hospitals for the developing world, how many lives could we have saved there?

Putting a dollar value on a life isn’t a crass, corporate, conservative thing — it’s a way of deciding where to spend money most effectively. If I could save one life for every $2 million spent on road improvements, and one life for every $200 million spent on improved airport security, where should I spend that money?

Where are people dying?

Let’s end with fatality numbers for the U.S. in 2001, the worst year for terrorism on U.S. soil:

Influenza and pneumonia: 63,730

Traffic accidents: 42,196

Terrorist attacks: 2,973

If you’d had billions of dollars to spend to save lives nine years ago, where would you have spent it first? Where would you spend it now? That depends not only on the overall numbers, of course, but the amount you have to spend to save each life. I’m not sure we know that, but I suspect that it’s much higher for anti-terrorism efforts than for basic road or healthcare improvements.

During my university studies, I first encountered the idea of the Myth of Progress — in 19th and 20th centuries a lot of people assumed that the world generally gets better each generation (aside from occasional blips like depressions or world wars), with less bigotry, better medicine, new technology, etc., but there’s no guarantee that any next generation will build on and improve the accomplishments of the previous one, and history’s movement may be more akin to a random walk.

Case in point: in the information technology world, the greatest accomplishment of the most talented coders and business people in GenX was replacing the Baby Boomers’ nasty old platform-dependent shrink-wrapped computer applications with open web applications that could run anywhere, from a Windows desktop to a Linux cell phone. Write once, run all over the place on any hardware/OS you want. GMail instead of Eudora. Wikipedia instead of Encarta. Cool, eh?

So GenY comes along and says “hey: instead of encouraging people to browse the web with open standards, let’s build proprietary applications that run on only one type of mobile phone. And we’ll allow only one store to sell those applications for each type of phone, and every proprietary, platform-specific app will have to be preapproved and precensored by the phone manufacturer, who will extort^H^H^H^H^H^H be gladly offered a cut of sales.” Even Microsoft in its monopolistic hey-day — before it became the toothless lion it is today — never had the balls to try anything like that with Windows apps.

Who, ten years ago, would have predicted an IT catastrophe like this after so much progress and hope? It’s enough to make a person cry. Let’s encourage those GenY’ers who taken up the torch and continue to work on the dream of an open web.