Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the NDP (Canada’s social democratic party), universal public healthcare (ever heard of Tommy Douglas?), and historically one of the pillars of the labour movement. It’s now the most conservative province, but still has tons of new immigrants, racial and cultural diversity, good education, and well funded government services. The SK NDP ruled almost continuously from 1971 to 2006.

SK is much more like midwestern farm states that were formerly pro-labour pro-union hotbeds but are now more moderate or conservative, like Iowa and Wisconsin.

I don’t think Canada has an Alabama. As conservative as they are, Alberta is wealthy, highly educated, and they frequently vote for women and POC. They like “small government”, but also have some of the highest paid government workers in the country. I just don’t see much similarity.

I think the comparison to Texas is more apt because they’re both conservative petro states with center left suburban sprawl cities.

Yes I noticed that too about the tech layoffs. Especially nowadays, corporations seem extremely uninterested in competing to make newer better products.

I think maybe we mean the same thing when you say “Private sector is very good at operationalizing existing technology”. The Nintendo Switch was never a technological marvel, even when it was first released. It’s an attractively assembled collection of other people’s technology. The Switch is “innovative” in a way, mostly in functional product design, but it’s not science.

Ah I see. Insofar as UI/UX research resembles science, and it certainly often does, I agree that it would be better if it was public not private. But as much as I dislike corporations patting themselves on the back, I just don’t think it’s realistic to say they never innovate anything ever in designing a product.

Here’s an example: every part of the first iPhone in 2007 was already invented before its release. None of the core technology was new. But I think it’s hard to deny that Apple innovated in packaging it together in a useful attractive product.

As you can see from my original comment, I’m no knee-jerk defender of private sector innovation, but I don’t think I agree with this. I love open source software, but the UI is often clunky and unintuitive, like Gimp or LibreOffice. Even when it’s good, it’s often because it mimics the major commercial software.

The heuristic I have is, when the end result benefits from communal information sharing, public is hands down better than private. We have an opioid crisis today because privatized proprietary medical research didn’t receive the same scrutiny from the scientific community as public research. Science and secrecy are incompatible.

But when the end result benefits from a small group of opinionated people getting their way, private can sometimes be better. And good design is more like the latter.

Typically, universities own the patents to any ideas developed using university resources, including the research work one does as a professor. The university can also give a cut to professors.

There is truth but also some corporate myth making here. The main elements of the modern GUI was presented during the so-called Mother of all demos by Douglas Engelbart. Engelbart would later work at Parc to make working prototypes of his ideas he already developed at the Stanford Research Institute. Now the corporate side of the history dominates the story. Same with Ethernet, which was an extension of a researcher’s dissertation work. This sort of corporate historical revisionism is exactly what I’m addressing.

I would go further: the idea that great research comes out of the private sector is a myth perpetuated by self-aggrandizing corporate heads. Even most AI research is the result of decades of academic work on cognitive science coming out of universities. (The big exception is transformer technology coming out of Google.) mRNA vaccines are based on publicly funded university research too. All the tech in smartphones like GPS and wifi comes from publicly funded research. The fact is, science works best when it’s open and publicly accountable, which is why things like peer review exist. Privatized knowledge generation is at a disadvantage compared to everyone openly working together.

The private sector is very good at the consumer facing portion of innovation, like user experience, graphical interfaces, and design. But the core technologies, with rare exception, almost never came out of the Silicon Valley.

The real holy grail would be all this open source. “Free for now” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Conant and Ashby’s good regulator theorem in cybernetics says, “Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”

The AI needs an accurate model of a human to predict how humans move. Predicting the path of a human is different than predicting the path of other objects. Humans can stand totally motionless, pivot, run across the street at a red light, suddenly stop, fall over from a heart attack, be curled up or splayed out drunk, slip backwards on some ice, etc. And it would be computationally costly, inaccurate, and pointless to model non-humans in these ways.

I also think trolley problem considerations come into play, but more like normativity in general. The consequences of driving quickly amongst humans is higher than amongst human height trees. I don’t mind if a car drives at a normal speed on a tree lined street, but it should slow down on a street lined with playing children who could jump out at anytime.

Good idea. Will do.

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn’t address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.