Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

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I am working on Natural Language Processing.

I am a bad person. My stated goal is to make it so you never have to call a company (like expedia) and talk to someone in a foreign country (Like the Philippines).

I have a very nice demo of doing a Cable modem tech support call where you only talk to a machine. It works well. Is faster than a human can be, and if it got adoption would cost a few Million jobs.

What are those people going to do? I don't know.

Do I think that the savings that Comcast, Cox, or Expedia will have will be passed on to consumer so that they can buy more stuff? Not likely.

Do I think that my tech might end up increasing the divide between the upper and middle class (global not domestic classification [middle class on a global scale include people in call centers in India, Philippines and such who by US standards live at poverty levels])? Yes.

Do I think that it will raise the quality of living for the those living at the poverty level? Yes. The lowering of the cost of things like Internet, Cellphones, and such will help those at the lowest income levels.

So am I a bad guy or a good guy?

-Brandon Wirtz CTO PlexiNLP http://www.PlexiNLP.com

Feel free to tell me why I'm a bad guy as a comment. I do have this discussion in my own head on a regular basis.

You're not a bad guy. I'd go further: you're a hero who is part of a social transition away from the drudgery of work. That's a dream humans have had since time immemorial.

You do have to be wondering how we as a society can adapt to technological change to make sure quality of life improvements are broad based. But given the gist of your comment, I don't think that's an issue, at least in motivation and general inclination.

As for how: that's the big question. I'd suggest you look into basic incomes or job guarantees as two possible approaches (though I lean strongly toward the former).

There's a contradiction in there. It is thought that the savings that Comcast, cox, or Expedia will have will not be passed down to consumers but the quality of life at poverty level will be better because Internet, Cellphones, and such will cost less?

Anyway, that's not enough information to determine if you are a bad guy or good guy. I would say you're just a guy working on something with little idea of what the future holds. Much like the rest of us.

They won't pass 100% of it on in the US, but in Rural America which tends to be served by small ISPs not having technical support could lower the costs such that there would be some margin in a market that larger companies wouldn't serve because the profitability was too low.

Companies like DMCI that provide the Internet at my parents have high costs for support because it is done locally, and by a small team. They could provide more affordable service in underserved areas.

That is a good point. I was thinking in much broader terms than what you describe.

Someones going to push technology forward inevitably, so I think it's not productive (or correct) to point the finger at those working on these innovations as "bad people." Rather, we should direct our energy towards those that oppose the creation of a safety net to support the unemployed affected by such innovations.

Someone will do it, so it does not really matter whether you are a good guy or not.

The question is, if governments can keep up with the companies (read: Google) buying your technology. They need to be taxed properly to invest in education and wealth distribution to keep up with the job losses.

If the technology reaches a point where it cannot be improved but gains characteristics of a natural ressource (e.g. green energy), which should be accessible to the people, governments should restrict and/or take over in some way for example by letting pension funds invest in it.

Everytime I've had a problem with my cable I just say cancellation and it takes me directly to a human. NLP isn't bad but most of my problems are with billing, something that should have been easily solvable by an early 80s mainframe. Yet every few months the cable company managed to screw it up and I'm fairly sure they were doing it on purpose.

You are neither a good nor a bad person, due to working on nlp. You describe how bad entities could use your work (big corp in a given socioeconomic context), and then you assign blame to yourself. I find it strange you feel the need to have this discussion with yourself on a regular basis. It points towards you being good/soft/emotional/conscientious about others/emphatic.

If you don't debate the merits of your work you aren't working on something big enough.

When I worked on h.264 and VC1, I knew what I was doing would do two things. By Making it cheaper and easier to create and distribute video the world would get more content creators.

The two things that all adds up to:

1. Greater Democracy of Content and More freedom of Speech Expression.

2. Dumbing down of content, more exploitation of people through extreme porn, gore, and bully videos.

I only work on things that can change the world, and anything that can change the world can have a negative impact as well, but I won't work on something that only has a negative impact.

And I can't see how working on nlp could possibly have "only negative impact", to say the least. Thus it seems strange your need to keep on thinking about that, and to solicit people to answer a "why am I bad?" q.

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