Liberty Alone

Over at Reason its asked Why Don’t We Incapacitate Drunk Drivers?

The usual means to punish drunk drivers is to suspend or revoke their driver’s license. Whilst this will work as a punishment for some others will just continue to drive, often whilst drunk.

This punishment hits the repentant who stop drink driving, but it costs them a lot. To those who continue to flout the law, this has no effect so they continue to put lives at risk.

New Mexico had a severe problem with drink driving, the worst in the US. One measure they adopted was to require all those convicted of drink driving to have a device which does a breath test each time before they drive. This means that repentant drink drivers can keep driving whereas those who try to drink drive will be prevented from driving.
Costs are carried by the driver so this does not cost the tax payer anything.

I see no civil liberties or privacy issues with this, its a perfectly reasonable addition to license requirements. Their status can be noted on their license to prevent them using hire cars without such a device fitted.
It solves the problems of simply removing the license too and given it reduces drink driving it will also reduce insurance premiums for the rest of us.

I wonder if we’ll see anything like this over here?

Having just finished Rainbows End, in which wearable computers, ubiquitous ad-hoc networks and contact lens displays are deeply ingrained in society, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the first contact lens displays have been made. Displays in glasses have been around for a while now, although not good enough for general use. We could be living in an augmented reality soon though.

The other ideas are already coming about too.
Ad-hoc networks are occurring already, some new mobile phones are seeking to take advantage of them, the One Laptop Per Child project is hoping to create one, many handheld consoles make use of ad-hoc networking and Amazon’s Kindle can take advantage of such an infrastructure.

Wearable computing is often talked about, and in a sense we already have such devices in the form of wrist watches. More complex devices are mostly held back by user interface and storage difficulties. Storage is getting smaller and smaller, also, combined with ad-hoc networks you could store information remotely. A usable UI is more challenging and will require a shift away from the desktop GUI model, but will be aided by augmented reality.

Of course, these trends are fairly easy to see as possibilities. Whether they will come about is less certain (where are our jet packs?) and how the world will be changed by them is another matter.

Slashdot points us at the guy who invented the Super Soaker water gun and his latest technological progress - 60% efficient solar energy.

Of course, this could be a dead end, but it could be a breakthrough. It is however another example of how technology is helping us tackle environmental problems.
Cheap solar energy would also solve the political and economic problems associated with oil and gas too.

Technological progress also seems to be outpacing political solutions to these problems and seem to be working better (no idiotic biofuel mandates for starters).

Amazon have apparently finally announced Kindle, their electronic ink based ebook reader. This is not the first ebook reader, there is one actually available in the UK from the Dutch company iRex Technologies and Kindle seems somewhat crippled.

I’m amazed by the number of people who seem to think that this is to replace books. I really don’t think it is, I see ebooks as a compliment to books. Some books are really nice to have physical copies. I would never replace some books with electronic ones. However, for some purposes, which will vary from person to person, ereaders will be useful.

Believe it or not, some people don’t much care for having actual books, in this case ebooks will be great. They take up far less space for starters. For the environmentally minded who read a lot, there’s less paper used and less fuel in creation and delivery of ebooks.

Others (myself included) don’t want to spend as much money as would be necessary to read some books which are freely available online. Reading on a computer screen is far from ideal, as is printing out hard copies. Ebook readers will allow us to use read those books on the move and to cross reference (although that functionality is not there yet).

Delivery of newspapers directly to the device is also a great idea. Saves you having to handle the actual papers on the train, you can keep copies for future reference and of course there is no paper.

Another great thing is that it opens up the market for books even further. It will cost less to get published, it will enable people to buy foreign titles more easily (and think about the ‘book miles’ saved in shipping!). There’s at least one book I cannot easily source in the UK which I really want to read. I’ll be able to buy it for a few dollars and get it immediately.

How long until reading software is available for ebooks? Or brail interpreters? That would be fantastic for blind and partially sighted readers who currently have a far more limited range of books available than the rest of us.

I don’t expect ebooks to replace traditional books completely, but I can see several areas where they will be useful and complement traditional books. Perhaps a hybrid technology will emerge with electronic ink included in the pages of a real book to include animations or video. That technology is coming, and it opens up many possibilities.

Of course, I can’t possibly know. Perhaps ereaders will go the way of mini-discs and not be adopted in any significant numbers.
Personally, I think that like the mp3 player, they will become cheaper and cheaper and more will be available for them. That is unless a new technology surpasses them, which is not impossible.

The possibilities are many, we are being given a choice and a chance. For that we should be thankful, even if we prefer to stick with traditional books.

More efficient internal combustion engines.

The above link tells of advances in the good old internal combustion engine. The change is to allow fine tuning of the air and exhaust valves allowing better fuel mixes to be created, leading to more efficient combustion and therefore less fuel usage and polluting emissions.
This sounds great, and very promising. I can envisage a system being developed which determines the optimal fuel mix for different types and qualities of fuel on the fly.

The BBC is reporting the release of a new privacy report by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

The line Tony Blair and other technocrats should take on board is:

No technology is 100% perfect, and no engineer will tell you that any technology is 100% perfect

Another interesting idea is that the biometric data in new passports could be used to trigger targeted attacks. Since these passports use RFID for contactless reading, they are vulnerable to being read at a distance as has been demonstrated many times now.
This could be used to detonated a bomb when particular people are near it, or when people from a particular country are nearby.
The more data held on passports, or ID cards makes this sort of targeting easier, it also makes tracking of people far easier. Either by government services or by criminals or even private detectives (although such methods may be illegal, that will not stop people).

Privacy and identity have taken on a new importance recently. It used to be understood that the state and others would not pry into your private life, but today the state is seeking more control over our identities (and therefore our lives) and to reduce our privacy. We leave much more information about ourselves and our actions behind, although it is currently difficult to link all this together, new technology is being deployed to make the task of linking up our data and discovering habits and movements much much easier.

This may be of benefit to the state and its organs, but the benefit to individuals is at best hazy, at worst there is a large negative impact.

Liberalism needs to start taking these threats seriously and developing a response to such power grabs by the state. We need to articulate a vision of individual rights and responsibilities only regulated by the state to prevent harm to others to combat the vision of the ‘beneficial state’ which attempts to solve all our problems through technocratic measures and decreased individual freedom.

James Graham left a comment on my previous post on this topic (no need to apologise for it James :) ).

James makes some very good points. Chiefly they boil down to a criticism of technocracy. In this he is absolutely correct.

Technology is a tool, it is not a panacea. That must always be kept in mind. Like every other facet of life it is subject to tradeoffs. Take nuclear power for example- It emits very low levels of greenhouse gasses which is a big plus. However there is the problem of nuclear waste. Personally I consider that problem to be almost taken care of. There are then other factors however- there’s a global security aspect - the waste is very dangerous in the wrong hands - can we ensure this will never happen? (probably not). Is the risk worth the gains?
There are other things where the balance of benefits is not clear. Road pricing for instance. If done correctly (a big if) then it should save millions which currently go to waste due to congestion. Are the costs worth it though? This government would use it as an excuse to spend more of our money on watching us. If that is the case then I believe the benefits are not big enough.

When it comes to technology we should remember that of itself it is neutral, it is neither good nor bad. What changes that is the way we use the technology.
Technology correctly applied will solve many many problems, but it can create many more.

We should not be afraid of technology, we should pursue it and look to it to solve problems, but we should always look at the tradeoffs we must make and decide whether the benefits are worth the costs.

One of the things I really dislike about much of the green movement is its romanticism and aversion of technology.
On Wednesday, Femme de Resistance over at Forceful and Moderate posted on this subject with particular reference to James Lovelock.

Today I’ve come across a New York Times article (registration required - or Bug Me Not for a username and password) about Stewart Brand, one of the founding lights of environmentalism and his dislike of the romanticism which dominates much of the environmental movement.
Like Lovelock he espouses such heresies as advocating nuclear power and GM crops. This advocacy is the result of a long term involvement with technology and the environment. He organised the first hacker’s conference and has been involved in the technological counter culture for a long time. He sees technology not as a threat, but as a great tool which can be used to improve human lives and the environment.
One of his revelatory moments was the failure of the predictions of doom in the 1970s. He was convinced, like many others, that population growth would mean mass shortages of essentials, that commodity prices would soar and we’d see mass starvation across the world. None of this happened, and its a salient lesson for many of today’s doom mongers, humans are amazingly adaptable and we will come up with solutions to problems, often without realising it.

This is an incredibly positive view, we are not perfect, but we have amazing skills which we can use to solve all problems, not simply environmental ones. Technological advance, not romanticism, will be the solution to environmental problems.

Its a message we as LibDems should listen to. If we are serious about the environment we should be looking towards innovation and technology for solutions.