Light of Other Days read

Rather than review this book formally, now that I've read it, I'll just ramble on various thoughts I have until they become coherent to me.

Arthur Clarke and co-author, more than a novel, seem to have sketched a kind of Utopian vision - where technology and circumstance conspire to result in a radically altered World, free of crime, violence and treachery in the face of impending doom. The basic precept can be summed up by the clamly phrase thus "Good information = Increased crime... Perfect information = No crime".

Although I have reservations about the simplicity of this concept, evidence about the effects of good information on crime and war are encouraging. The rise of the internet and video phones everywhere has considerable curtailed certain types of crime/war. New crimes that rely on this new technology have risen as well, but arguably, these new crimes have less scope to be as organised to be destructive to society as the old ones were.

My two objections existing from before I read the novel remain even given the assumptions of possibility within the book:
1) Perfect information is impossible. At the margin the limit of the speed of light will mean that one person will be able to know and react to something before another, and "first-mover advantage" will always be relevant and a source of moral hazard. Even the amazing technology of perfect vision of past and current events evident in the novel doesn't meet, say, the perfection of knowledge attributable to a higher being. The utopian vision, however, makes this point moot, as the available information becomes as good as it needs to be.
2) Both commerce and organised crime rely on an imbalance of information to some extent. If a customer knows as much as a supplier of a product, suppliers will not be able to make a reliable profit. At the margins, this could be considered criminal exploitation, but practically all profitable commerce relies heavily on trade secrets if not outright intellectual property. Not to mention the issue of electronic commerce if secure keys cannot be kept secure enough for people to trust it as a store of value.

Light of other days 2

Just a few quick notes as I pass the half way stage of the book....

- Clarke is still a genius both as a visionary and a writer. Predictions such as a financial meltdown in London at the end of this decade, and the prediction that the model of journalism would be almost completely compromised by citizen journalism over the internet - have come true pretty well as described in the novel written in 2000.

- There is a lot of liberal use of what I would call "cliched predictions" regarding catastrophic results of global warming for instance and wars labelled as "resource wars". I am giving Clarke the benefit of the doubt with these as pretty much any and all conceivable future weather disasters, and wars will be tenably describable as results of global warming and resource disputes respectively. Being that a complete lack of wars and weather disasters is extremely unlikely, the cliches are likely to stick anyway regardless of other probable causes.

- I keep comparing the scale and timing of technology predictions in this novel to those of the Colour Mars series of Kim Stanley Robinson. Interestingly, Mars becomes Terra-formed in the colour-mars series in a timescale in which put to the "light of other days"(LOOD) would allow humanity to have large scale migration in time to escape Armageddon of the Wormwood - something which is ruled out as a possibility in LOOD's. I have to read and see if this changes by the end of the book.

- On the one hand I fear that the wormhole technology as described with seeming easy extensibility in distance, time, minitiuarization, resolution, cost effectiveness, verifiability and unfakeability is unrealistic as all good technologies have limitations or meet up with diminishing returns in some of these directions due to one or another inconvenient law of physics/economics.

- On the other hand my basic beliefs about information and its relation to crime game theory leads me to believe that even at the most complete imaginable level of information accessibility (as is approaching in this book) by anyone, there will be moral hazard ie. potential for damaging/serious crime.

- I cannot adequately demonstrate this.

Light of Other Days

Have started to read this book by Arthur C Clarke and some other guy. Like with "The God Delusion", I had some preconceived ideas regarding its main gist, as outlined by reviews on Wikipedia etc.

For instance this assertion: "Crime would cease to exist with the availability of "worm-cams", because no-one could avoid being watched"
is one which I would like to poke holes through.

But I must admit, Clarke, unlike Dawkins, is a visionary even in my strictest Marconomic sense, and his assertions are unfalsifiable in the way they are laid out as part of a science fiction novel anyway; so as much as I am preparing arguments that demonstrate the holes in his, I am being swayed in equal measure by other aspects of the novel.