unintended consequences

1 Comment Posted on by haley_beard2 Uncategorized

Man vs. Machine

For many years there has been a debate regarding being on “Team Human” or being on “Team Machine”. It is an issue that questions whether we need to stick to doing things the way humans have been acting or have an unfair advantage over others by using and inventing new technology. An article that helped me gain more information over this subject is “Business Does Not Need the Humanities – But Humans Do” by Gianpiero Petriglieri.

The article talks about how a few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. Zuckerberg decided to write a computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could see and choose from all the letter combinations before he played a second game with her. After the game, the teenage daughter of Zuckerberg’s friend talked about how“during the game in which [she] was play[ed] the program, everyone around [them] was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine” (Petriglieri). This brings in the main topic of discussion within the article which is whether the machines are doing more good than harm and if it is really the machines people are rallying against.

Image result for man vs machine

image from sysomos.com

An unintended consequence of this assumption of there being teams for humanity and machine is that people believe we are up against the physical machine itself. In actuality, we are up against the people who create them. Petriglieri claims that the truth is there is no “Team Machine.” The contest is always between humans. Some humans havemachines, but those machines are not always a gift. The concerns about what technology will do to humanity cover up the problem of what powerful humans will do to the rest. If there is a “Team Machine,” it is not on the side of machines, instead it is just humans who have machines on their side. The main issue is what the machines do for leaders and to leaders, because soon enough they will be doing it for and to the rest of the population.

The complexity of the fight between people who are against machines and those who are for it, makes people wonder if any solution could be met. A solution proposed to help settle the score in the Scrabble match against the algorithm is to counter the corruption of “consciousness, community, and cosmopolitanism by a blind faith in instrumentality” (Petriglieri). By establishing the case that consciousness is more than a state of mindful composure in the present, there is consideration of the consequences of a person’s work whether that be in a private setting or in a broad space. Countering the belief of some people that a community is not just a tribe that reinforces our performances, it can be said that it is a group of people who are committed to our well-being and learning. Lastly, laying down the groundwork that cosmopolitanism is not an elite identity, introduces an attitude of curiosity regarding what lies beyond the boundaries of our territories, cultures, and faiths.

What is feared in regards to fearing the machines is that the fight might become uneven. We fear the loss of emotions humans have whether that be doubt or the feeling that there is more to humans than being productive, rational, objective, and effective. People fear losing the paradox that comprises humanity. Humans want to live and try to control the future, yet to feel alive they must be free to imagine it. By siding with machines, that paradox and all emotions associated with humans are thrown out the window. People need to keep in mind all of the gains and losses that goes with team machine, rather than think being progressive is always good.

1 Comment Posted on by katie_shore1 20th century

Let There Be Light!

Katie Shore

Light bulb

(Image of a Light Bulb from BBC News)

Since the beginning of time, light has been a human necessity. While natural light is nice and all, it wasn’t always available when humans needed it. When the sun went down, the day was over, but new and efficient forms of light fixed this problem. Now, I can study in my well-lit room as late into the night as I want rather than sleeping as I should.

It took a long time to develop the accessible electricity that I use today for my late night studying. NPR’s “Planet Money” podcast titled “The History of Light” goes as far back as four thousand years ago to the time of the Babylonians to analyze the difficulties of creating and using light. Bill Nordhaus, an Economics professor at Yale, conducted his own experiments to emulate how the ancient Babylonians produced light. He determined that to generate a mere ten minutes of light during this time, a person would need to spend an entire day’s worth of wages.

One would expect that as the years went on, innovations would allow people to spend less money on light and get more of it. On the contrary, Nordhaus explains that improvements generally didn’t do much: “From Babylonian times to around 1800, there were – even though there were improvements as best we can tell, they were very modest.”

Creating light was a process involving a great deal of complexity. For example, some people made candles out of beef fat. This process involved raising, feeding, and then killing a cow to extract and melt its fat. Wicks then needed to be dipped in the fat and dried. Only after lots of work would you have some candles that would produce a minimal amount of light. One of the narrators of the podcast tried this technique and spent several hours making candles, which are pictured below.

(Images of Beef Fat Candles from Jacob Goldstein of NPR)

If you didn’t want to make candles out of beef fat, then you had a few other options. Some killed whales for their fat and burned whale oil to generate light. This tactic created about an hour of light for a day’s worth of wages. Likewise, the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest would catch salmon and turn them into candles. The petrel, an oily seabird, was turned into a candle by putting a wick down its throat and lighting it. Still, there had to be an easier way to get light that didn’t involve killing animals…

Finally, in the 1800s, scientists began experimenting to try to produce better, more efficient forms of light. In 1850, a man named Abraham Gesner developed kerosene, which provided more light and was cheaper than other light sources at the time. It also didn’t require any animals to be killed and produced five hours of light for a day’s worth of wages.

The most significant breakthrough was Edison’s invention of the light bulb and cheaper electricity. Banker J.P. Morgan funded Edison, which allowed him to build a power plant that would illuminate his lightbulbs. In 1882, the plant was completed in Lower Manhattan, and it was able to power part of the area. Edison’s power plant involved a great deal of complexity as well. He had patents to protect his innovative ideas, and investors gave him a lot of money to support his efforts. Ultimately, Edison created a safe, inexpensive, and efficient source of light that was revolutionary at the time.

Now, one day’s worth of wages can purchase 20,000 hours of light. We have sure come a long way from the ten minutes of light a day’s wages could buy in the Babylonian times.

The creation of a new source of light created some unintended consequences. Edison’s power plant burnt a great deal of coal, which caused a lot of pollution. Additionally, this new technology provided humans with opportunities far beyond just light, as the podcast’s host notes: “This one little story, it explains why we are where we are today, why billions of people don’t have to worry about starving today, why we aren’t all subsistence farmers, why we can afford to have artists and massage therapists and plumbers and, yes, radio reporters doing stories about the history of light.” Who would have thought at the time that more accessible lighting solutions would have such a significant impact on humanity? Now, almost everything that we do somehow involves electricity or a source of light.

Today, we have lots and lots of light, and the quest for even better light sources continues. Companies such as John Edmond’s Cree continue to create better, more efficient lighting solutions such as LED light bulbs. From street lights to desk lamps to car headlights, we live in a well-lit world.

The future is bright for humanity, and it’s because of light.

 

 

2 Comments Posted on by haley_beard2 20th century

Big Government Cheese

When reading about President Trump’s promise to the farmers, the article kept mentioning how it will bring back the “government cheese” event from Jimmy Carter’s campaign. Prior to reading this article, I had not even heard of the term “government cheese”. To hear about more on the subject, I listened to the Planet Money podcast on Big Government Cheese.

Within this podcast, I was informed about how in 1976, Jimmy Carter was running for president and proposed to give farmers an equal break. He planned to do this by raising milk prices by 6 cents per gallon every 6 months. Carter followed through on his promise to the farmers and tried to figure out a way the government can step into the market to make it happen. They figured out they can either make demand greater or lower supply. USDA decided to go down supply the chain one step to find milk products that could store well. They came to the conclusion of cheese, specifically cheddar cheese. The government sent out sheet of paper to farmers that states they will buy as much butter, cheese or nonfat dry milk they are willing to sell at certain prices. By the government buying more cheese, cheesemakers buy more milk which in turn drives milk prices up.

Consequently, the government had an issue with storing cheese and had to store cheese in caves in Kansas because they had no other place to store the cheese. By early 1980s, the dairy support plan for cheese was costing tax payers around 2 billion and the government was buying 1 in every 4 pounds of the country’s cheddar cheese. This dilemma reached the point where the Agricultural Secretary held up hunk of cheese in a press conference and talked about the mold deteriorating cheese and how there wasn’t a market for it. A new program was created to give cheese away through food banks so that the market for cheese wouldn’t take a huge hit.

Government cheese became a symbol of crappy government handout as well as a parable in how government intervention in markets can have a butterfly effect, Jimmy Carter makes an innocuous announcement to help farmers and then the government ends up spending billions of dollars filling caves with cheese they couldn’t get rid of fast enough. The most prominent “Big Idea” for this course that is brought to our attention within this podcast is unintended consequences. Failing to acknowledge what might happen to the markets or the fact there will eventually be a large surplus for cheese came come back to bite the government. After finding the solution of food banks, the caves slowly emptied and the price for milk automatically froze every 6 months. The government did not foresee that price controls would be hard to unwind once they are started. Because of this, the government pondered how to get out of cheese business without harming the farmers too much. They ended up paying money to the farmers to encourage them to stop producing milk.

Due to the argument that our country has to be able to produce its own food because if our farmers go out of business, then we become reliant on other countries for food which is a security risk. It’s one thing for the government to provide stability and it is another to step into the market in a big way and possibly the wrong time because playing with price controls is like playing with fire.

 

(image on the left from twitter and image on the right from the podcast)

1 Comment Posted on by katie_shore1 20th century, business, state, and society

It Ain’t Easy Being Cheesy

Katie Shore

(Image from NPR: “Uncle Cheese”)

Who would have thought that the government cared about cheese? Believe it or not, they did. The government and cheese have interacted in the past and affected our country’s economy and society.

Let’s go back to when it all started: Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise to give farmers what he called “an equal break.” It makes sense that Carter would want to help the farmers because he knew what it was like to be a struggling farmer: in 1954, his farm’s net profits were a mere $187. After winning the election, Carter went to work trying to fulfill his promise. First, he raised the price of a gallon of milk by six cents. The interaction here between business, state, and society is quite remarkable. The government came into the dairy industry and raised prices by using a price floor. I wonder how other businesses felt about this decision by the government. They must have been asking why the dairy industry was getting bailed out; surely, the dairy industry wasn’t the only struggling industry at the time. The state’s involvement in the pricing of dairy clearly shows Carter’s bias towards the farmers. While these dairy farmers and their businesses might have benefited from the government’s help, the rest of society was stuck paying more for their milk.

Let me pull out my notes from my Economics class (thank you, Dr. North). Because of the government-instituted price floor, dairy farmers were ramping up production; at a higher price, producers wanted to make and sell more goods to earn more money. Consumers, however, didn’t want to pay this higher price and demanded less than the producers were producing. This led to a surplus, which led to more government intervention.

The government started buying and trying to store lots of milk, but milk has a short shelf life. The solution then was to turn this milk into products that didn’t expire as quickly, such as powdered milk, butter, and cheese. Next, the government told dairy farmers that it would set a price and purchase as much as the farmers were willing to sell. Unfortunately, farmers took advantage of the situation and tried to sell the government their worst cheese. That’s where cheese graders – not graters – came into play. These people traveled the country evaluating cheese based on specific criteria including its flavor, acidity, fruitiness, and so on. The government bought cheese that met all of the grading requirements and then stored it in caves.

This whole cheese-buying extravaganza was costing billions of dollars, and the government needed to find a way to get rid of its cheese. Rather than flood the market with the cheese, destroy it, or send it overseas, the government decided that it would process the cheese, package it, and then give it away. These blocks of government cheese – pictured below – were given to schools and food banks to try to provide for the hungry.

(Image of a Block of Government Cheese from a magazine titled Rolling Out)

Government cheese often gets a bad rap, primarily because of its unintended consequences. First, the government’s efforts to help the farmers led to very expensive cheese for consumers. Second, the government’s supposedly beneficial price controls were actually harmful and very difficult to undo. Third, the government had to start paying farmers to stop producing milk while simultaneously instituting campaigns to convince people to buy milk. Got milk? Today, instead of directly buying farmers’ products, strategies such as direct subsidies work much better – and don’t require the government to store billions of dollars worth of cheese in caves.

You would think that we had learned our lesson from the past, but it appears the government is going back to its old ways. As of August 31, there are plans to purchase $85 million worth of dairy for schools and food banks. I’ll leave you with a quote by philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If you have time to listen to the NPR episode of “Planet Money” about the history of government cheese, I would recommend that you do so. Who knows? We might have another cheesy situation on our hands very soon…