Mind Drugs

For some years, I have had a book manuscript dealing with the consequences of possible technological changes over the next few decades up on the web collecting comments. I now have a publisher for it and am working on a revision for publication.

Most of the book is written, but there is still one missing chapter–on mind drugs. I expect it to divide into three categories:

1. Recreational drugs. These have a long history; the issues they raise are not new. Presumably progress in the relevant technologies, including understanding of how the mind works, will produce improved versions, drugs that give more pleasure with fewer risks.

2. Enhancement drugs. A few of these have existed in the past, with coffee and Coca leaves obvious examples. Currently some drugs, including Ritalin, are used by students taking exams to temporarily enhance their performance. I gather that modafinil drastically reduces the need for sleep and is said to be used by the military for that purpose. Physical enhancement drugs–steroids–have gotten quite a lot of negative attention, although I have not seen any thoughtful discussions of what, if anything, is wrong with using them.

It seems likely that over the next decade or two better such drugs will become available, for temporary and (perhaps) permanent improvement of mental performance. What interesting consequences are likely to result?

3. Control drugs. This is the interesting and scary category, so far mostly limited to fiction. What happens if there is a drug you can feed someone, perhaps without his knowledge, that will make him temporarily credulous, willing to believe what you tell him? A drug that will make him obedient? A drug that will make her fall in love with you or him feel loyal to you? All of these are real behavior patterns, presumably connected in part to brain chemistry–and we are becoming better chemists.

There are a few hints of such things already. Ecstasy is said to make users temporarily empathetic; empathy might make you more willing to believe someone's story of why he needs help, and provide it. Oxytocin seems to have some effects on trust, sexual bonding, maternal behavior; perhaps an engineered drug could provide similar results of a stronger and more controllable sort. Insects respond sexually to pheromones and there is now a little evidence of similar effects in humans; what perfume manufacturers have long claimed might turn out to be true. And of course knockout drugs from chloral hydrate to rohypnol–a very crude sort of behavior control—have a long and dishonorable history in fiction and fact.

The purpose of this post is to ask for help with my unwritten chapter. What facts don't I know that I should that are relevant to the development of mind drugs over the next few decades? What non-obvious consequences are worth thinking about and how might they be dealt with? Will we, for instance, expand the "absence of duress" requirement in contracts to make a contract unenforceable unless both parties submitted to suitable blood tests immediately before signing, to make sure that neither was acting under undue chemical influence?

Gift Economy x 2

No man is so wealthy that he objects to receiving
A gift in exchange for his gift

(Havamal)

I was thinking recently about the idea of a gift economy, an idea that sometimes shows up in discussions of open source software, and it occurred to me that there are really two quite different things covered by the term, both familiar to most of us in our ordinary life.

You invite a friend and his wife over for dinner, enjoy their company, invite them again. Pretty soon they will feel an obligation to reciprocate, to invite you over for dinner or, if that isn't convenient, invite you to a restaurant and insist on paying the bill. It will never occur to them that they might balance the account by offering you twenty dollars instead, and you would be shocked and, probably, offended if they did.

That is a gift economy of just the sort described in the bit of Havamal quoted above, composed somewhat over a thousand years ago. The transactions are exchanges, value for value, but they take the form of nominally voluntary gifts rather than the bargained exchanges of ordinary trade. As an economist I do not have a satisfactory theory of why we do things that way—and would like to—but as a participant in such an economy I at least know how it feels from the inside.

The second kind of gift economy occurred to me in a discussion with a friend whose interests include the history of fencing and 19th century dancing. He routinely spends a week each year teaching the latter at Newport and has just been making arrangements to make his very extensive collection of source material on the former, distributed in past decades as photocopies, available on the web.

He does not expect to get any gifts directly in exchange. What he does get, in addition to his own enjoyment and the feeling of a useful job done, is status. People sharing his interest recognize his name, treat him as an important person. That too is a gift economy, but of a rather different sort—probably closer to the gift economy of open source software. You pour your gifts out to the world and the world, if you are lucky, repays you in a variety of indirect ways.

That second kind of gift economy is more relevant than the first to one of the interesting issues of the next few decades: How to get intellectual property produced if copyright law becomes, for technological reasons, unenforceable. If I can not prevent you from copying my book, I not only can not charge you for it, I also can not make my giving it to you implicitly conditional on your giving a voluntary gift to me. But I can still get credit for writing it and may be able to find ways of turning the resulting status into other things of value to me.

Some Folk Are Never Satisfied

Back when I was a college student, one of the world's great problems was third world poverty. According to the conventional wisdom, countries such as India could never develop by their own efforts within a market system, as the currently developed countries had done. The only alternatives were central planning plus massive foreign aid—the recommended course for India—or still more central planning ferociously enforced, the course that was supposedly turning the Soviet Union, and would turn China, into modern economies.

Time passed, a handful of small poor countries in Asia became not-poor countries through market processes—further from laissez-faire than I would have recommended, but further still from the prescriptions of the conventional wisdom—and it was noticed that the Soviet Union, despite all its forced sacrifices, was still, for most of its population, a third world country. India and China got the message, shifted away from centralized planning in the direction of markets, and began to get less poor.

Problem solved? Not exactly.

As poor and hungry people get less poor, they get less hungry. With enough food to survive no longer a problem, some of them get fat. Voila—the growth of global obesity. It was brought to my attention by a radio interview with an expert who attributed the problem to increased consumption of vegetable oils and sugars. For some reason he didn't mention the obvious relation between increasing real income and increasing consumption, or that some of the increased calories whose consumption he deplored were being consumed by people who needed them.

Nor is that the only problem. As the Chinese get richer they, naturally enough, want more stuff—consume more raw materials, oil, power. Voila—new worries for those who are afraid we are about to run out of everything, either just before or just after we roast or drown. I have not yet heard any of them wishing aloud that the Chinese and Indians would go back to poverty and starvation, but that seems at least a muted subtext to the complaints.

Some of the concern may be legitimate, although it requires a serious effort to see the problems of too much food as comparable to those of too little. More can be attributed to ideological hostility to capitalism—people unwilling to recognize its striking success in dealing with old problems and so eager to focus on new problems created by that success.

And some is just the human taste for gloom.

Commitment Strategies vs Highjacking

I've just been doing a good deal of travel by air—one reason I haven't posted recently—and so have been thinking a bit about security issues.

On the face of it, almost all of the precautions to keep passsengers from highjacking an airplane are unnecessary—all it takes is a reasonably sturdy locked door between pilots and passengers. One possible response is that highjackers might persuade pilots to open such a door by threatening to kill off crew and passengers one by one until they do. In the post 9/11 world I'm not sure that would work—but suppose it would.

There is a simple solution: Provide the pilots with a second lock that can only be unlocked by someone on the ground. At the first sign of a highjacking they lock it and are now immune to threats. It would be prudent to make sure that potential highjackers know about the second lock, and perhaps to have a lighted sign or prerecorded announcement to signal that it has been activated.

Visual Processing and the Immortality of the Soul

Life after death is a very implausible idea, yet many people, in many different cultures, believe in it. For those of us who do not share that belief and are puzzled by all the reasonable and intelligent people who do, the obvious explanation is wishful thinking. But many of the same people also believe in some version of Hell—and, however useful that may be for threatening misbehaving children, it is not what wishful thinking would suggest as a possible future fate for oneself. I have an entirely different explanation to offer. I propose that the belief in the immortality of the soul is a consequence of the way in which our visual system processes information.

Looking around me, what I see is a collection of recognizable objects—a computer screen, a plastic cup half full of diet coke, a telephone and, in my very messy office, a lot of other things. But none of that is in the information feeding from my retinas to my optic nerves. That information consists of a visual field--a flat plane of various colored regions (actually two, one for each eye). Somehow the software in my brain is converting that very uninformative body of data into a reasonably accurate model of the bit of the world I am looking at.

As with many other things the brain does, it only became clear how hard it was when people started trying to write software to duplicate it and discovered that they couldn't—the information coming in was not adequate to generate the information going out. The explanation they came up with was that the brain cheats. In addition to using the information coming in through the retina, it also uses a body of information, generated by some combination of evolution and experience, about what the world is like, information that lets it discard most of the possible explanations of what it gets from the retina in favor of a small number of likely ones.

One such piece of information is persistance of objects. Having recognized the oddly shaped green region to the right of my visual field as the top half of a plastic cup (the bottom half is dark because of the diet coke showing through), my software does not have to redo the analysis three seconds later—even though the region is no longer in the same part of the visual field, my head having turned a little in the meanwhile. Part of the hardwired information is that if the cup was there recently, it is probably still there, or close. Being a rigid object, it is probably still about the same shape, even if a change in the angle at which I am observing it makes it look different.

Some things violate the rules—soap bubbles, for example. That is one of the reasons why soap bubbles seem like odd, almost magical, objects. And there are optical illusions that take advantage of the rules to trick us into seeing what isn't there. But, on the whole, our image processing rules and the software containing them work very well, much better than any software we can ourselves write.

Things persist. People are things, but things of a special sort; when you talk with a friend over the phone it is not his body you are aware of but the person inside. When he dies the body is still there but the person is not—which is intuitively impossible, since the knowledge of the persistence of things is hardwired into your brain.

Which might explain why so many people believe in life after death.

The Origin of a Novel

I published my first novel—Harald, from Baen Books—a few months ago. It occurred to me that some of you might be interested in how it came to be written.

It started, oddly enough, as an insomnia cure. I found that when I had trouble falling asleep, daydreaming didn't work—because I am the hero of my own daydreams, and so too closely involved with them. It occurred to me that if instead I plotted out a novel, I would have sufficient distance from my characters to be able to drift off.

It worked. Over a period of many months I plotted out parts of several novels and, eventually, all of one. House rules at the time required me, when putting one of our children to bed, to make up and tell three stories. I mentioned to my daughter that I had written a novel in my head and she suggested I tell her that instead.

The problem with telling my daughter stories is that she remembers them better than I do. The result in the past, when I was doing a long series of linked fantasy stories, was that just when I thought I had the characters in an almost impossible situation she would point out that the magic item they obtained three months earlier was precisely the thing to get them out of it. So this time, every evening after putting her to bed, I wrote an outline of what I had told her. As I got near the end I started thinking seriously of turning it into a novel. I wrote the final scene, liked it, and went back and wrote the whole first draft in a month or two. It was so much fun that, during that time, I played almost no computer games.

Illegal vs Unconstitutional: NSA, FISA, and all that

As many of you know, a federal judge has found the NSA warrantless surveillance program to be both illegal—in violation of FISA and various other things—and unconstitutional.

The discussions I have seen so far ignore the important distinction between those two conclusions. The fact that the surveillance violates FISA means that what has so far been done is illegal—and, incidentally, that Bush is a felon, as are lots of people at NSA. But FISA is legislation; Congress can repeal or alter it, and presumably will do so if the appeals court supports the ruling and a majority in both houses believe the current surveillance program is desirable.

Congress cannot so easily repeal or alter the Constitution. So if the surveillance is unconstitutional, that means the surveillance will have to stop.

I should add that, in my view, the illegality of the surveillance has been obvious from the beginning, as I said some time back. FISA was written to control precisely the sort of activity NSA has been engaged in—intercepting communications between suspected terrorists abroad and people in the U.S. It set up procedures for doing so and made it a felony to intercept without following those procedures, or to knowingly use information obtained by such warrantless interceptions.

The only arguments I have seen on the other side are either that Congress repealed FISA without knowing it was doing so when it authorized the use of force or that the President is entitled to break the law in matters of national security. Neither strikes me as plausible. The constitutionality, on the other hand, is a more complicated question, and one that I don't think I have sufficient expertise to answer.

Oddly enough, if Bush believed that what he was doing was unconstitutional that may explain why he did it. FISA provides a two week window after the beginning of a war during which its provisions are suspended—presumably to permit Congress to amend its provisions if necessary. Under the circumstances of the 9/11 attack, it is hard to believe that Congress would have refused to go along with an administration request to make legal the sort of interceptions NSA has been engaged in. But one likely consequence of such an amendment would be a lawsuit claiming that the activity it was authorising was unconstitutional—and if the courts agreed, that would leave Bush unable to engage in surveillance that he, presumably, saw as an important tool for preventing another attack.

I'm back

As you can see, I'm posting again. In part that is because I am back home after a month of travelling, in part because I have solved the problem that was keeping me from posting--although I still don't entirely understand it.

Drug Delivery

Nicotine patches are currently marketed as a cure for smoking. What they actually are, so far as I can tell, is an alternative delivery system for the same drug. Insofar as what smokers really want is the effect of nicotine the patches may well succeed in getting smokers to quit, but they cure an addiction to cigarettes only in the sense that whiskey cures for an addiction to wine.

Considered as a substitute, they have two big advantages over cigarettes. Since they get nicotine to the blood stream without going through the lungs, they should have fewer adverse health effects; there is no obvious reason why the use of nicotine patches would cause lung cancer. And they eliminate both the (somewhat controversial) medical effect of second hand smoke and the unpleasantness that nonsmokers experience from the smell of tobacco. The user of a nicotine patch may perhaps harm his own health, but he should have very little effect on those around him.

This may be an early and interesting example of an alternative approach to the problems associated with both legal and illegal drugs. The conventional solution is to stop people from using drugs. The alternative is to find ways of providing the effects drug users want while minimizing undesirable side effects, on themselves and others.

What an Electric Vehicle Costs

In an earlier post I mentioned the controversy over GM's EV1 sparked by a new film, with some people arguing that the all electric vehicle was a viable design scrapped by GM for vague but sinister reasons. In my view, the best evidence against that comes not from GM's experience—the facts about the EV1's performance are disputed and it's hard for an outsider to distinguish between startup costs and production costs in order to figure out what a commercial version of the car would have cost—but from the behavior of other auto firms. If a commercially viable electric car could have been produced, it is hard to see why some auto firm wouldn't have produced it—and none did.

We now have a little more evidence. Tesla Motors, a Bay Area startup, has announced that they will be bringing a fully electric vehicle to market in about a year. The relevant facts:

1. Range: 250 miles per charge.
2. Recharge time: 3 1/2 hours with a 240 volt/70 ampere source, longer with ordinary house current.
3. Configuration: Sports car.
4. Price: $85,000-$100,000.
5. Operating cost: 2.6 cents/mile if electricity is 13 cents/kwh.

If gas costs $3/gallon, the per mile cost for a vehicle averaging 25 mpg is 12 cents, so the electric vehicle saves less than ten cents per mile. If we assume a 100,000 mile lifetime, that's less than ten thousand dollars, which doesn't make up for much of the cost difference between the electric car and a conventional vehicle.

The range is sufficient for many people's needs, although not all. But a sports car does not have to carry many passengers or much luggage, leaving more space for batteries. That suggests that a sedan would either be much heavier and more expensive or have a substantially shorter range.

So the evidence suggests that the electric car is not yet viable as a mass market vehicle, although it may be competitive in the expensive sports car niche.

Readers interested in the EV1 controversy may want to revisit the thread I linked to earlier, with particular attention to the posts by Phil Karn, who joined the discussion after my original post. Phil—known to some of us as a party in an important encryption lawsuit—actually owned an EV1, and so was able to provide some first hand evidence from his own experience. He also has an interesting web page on the subject.

What Matters and Why?

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, offers an interesting hypothetical; I don't have a copy of the book ready to hand so will give you my version:

Someone invents an experience machine; get into it and you will have a fully convincing illusion of experience. Somehow, the inventor figures out about what your life is going to be like and makes you the following offer:

Get into my experience machine, spend the rest of your life there, and I will give you the illusion of a life slightly better than the one you would otherwise live. Your average income in the illusion will be a few thousand dollars higher than it would have been in reality, your wife a little prettier, your children slightly better behaved, your promotions just a little prompter. Your illusory summers won't be quite as hot, or winters quite as cold.

Assume you believe his offer. Do you accept it? If not, why not?

The answer, it seems to me, depends on what things you value. It's tempting to think that what ultimately matters to you about the world is only how it impinges on you, what effect it has on your sensations—and if that were true, you would accept the offer.

But it is not true, at least for me and I suspect for many other people. I don't merely want the illusion of having written an interesting, enjoyable and original book, I want to have actually done it. I don't just want to think people read my books and are affected by the ideas in them, I want them to actually read and be affected. I don't want just the illusion of wonderful children, I want my wonderful children to actually exist. I wouldn't touch that machine with a ten foot pole.

Having said that, it is worth seeing how far the argument applies to things more realistic than Nozick's hypothetical. Consider recreational drugs. A lot of us have a gut level feeling that the pleasure from being high on a drug is somehow less valid, less real, than the pleasure from accomplishing something—even if it is only winning a game of tennis or climbing a mountain. Feeling that you are a wonderful person because you are drunk is somehow less valid than feeling you are a wonderful person because you have just saved someone's life at risk of your own or solved an important problem.

Or consider virtual reality, which gets us closer to Nozick's experience machine—and to one reason I have been thinking of these issues of late. Why do I feel better about making a bunch of germanic lyres in my basement than about making a bunch of Whitesoul Helms online in World of Warcraft? Why do I feel less comfortable about consuming many hours online fighting computer generated monsters than about consuming a similar amount of time, also online, arguing with people about subjects of interest to me?

The problem is older than World of Warcraft. I know some very smart people who put substantial amounts of time and effort into playing games--chess, bridge, poker. As long as one views it as recreation, there is no problem. But what about a really able person who treats the game as his real life and whatever he does to earn money for food and rent as merely an annoying distraction? Something about that feels wrong—feels as though he would in some sense be leading a better life if he put the same talent and passion into building better houses or writing better computer programs. Why?

The other reason I have been thinking about this is that it looks as though I will be revising my Future Imperfect manuscript for publication, assuming my agents' negotiations with a publisher finally produce a contract. The puzzle of what matters and why shows up repeatedly there. If improved understanding of how the mind works results in a really good recreational drug and most people spend most of their waking hours enjoying it, is that a problem? Would it be better if the drug was never invented? If we end up with full sense VR and people spend most of their lives in a delightful illusion while their bodies occupy tiny cubicles and consume yeast paste—tasting, of course, through the marvels of VR, like sushi and sirloin—is that a consummation devoutly to be feared, or hoped for?

I expect to continue this in another post, and in particular to distinguish between what things in VR ought to count as real and what not and in what ways World of Warcraft might be seen as a useful part of real life, but this post is, I think, long enough.

Why Do We Tip?

A while back, I got into an interesting online discussion of tipping, in particular restaurant tipping, a practice that some people approve of and others don't. I offered what I think of as the standard economic explanation--that it was a way of rewarding waiters for good service (with high tips) and penalizing bad service (with low tips). It depends on social norms or repeat custom to work, but takes advantage of the fact that the customer has information about the quality of the service that the employer does not have.

The problem with that explanation, as a number of people argued, is that it depends on customers substantially varying the amount of their tip—and many, perhaps most, don't. If you almost always tip 15% and occasionally raise it to 20% for good service or lower to 10% for poor, that isn't much of an incentive to the waiter.

It occurred to me that there was another possible explanation, having to do with the customer rather than the waiter. People like to feel generous. Giving a tip when you know you don't have to makes you feel better than paying the same amount on the bill. People like to feel honest and honorable. Abiding by the implied contract to tip if you get reasonable service, when you know you could have stiffed the waiter and saved the money (provided you don't plan to come back to that restaurant), gives you a chance to prove to yourself and your table companions that you are an honest and honorable sort.

Talk Radio Ads

I often listen to political talk shows on my car's satellite radio. When I get fed up with a right wing show I switch to a left wing show, when I get fed up with that I look for another right show, or give up. One thing I notice is the sort of ads that go with the shows. While some are probably for worthwhile products, a lot are get rich quick schemes, instructions on how to get credit by incorporating in Nevada, and the like.

What is interesting is that, so far as I can tell, the same ads run on left wing and right wing shows. That suggests that many of the people who listen to such shows, left and right, have something in common.

Perhaps credulity.