“The king is dead, long live the king” Nick Routley on the replacement of cash by digital payment…
As credit cards and digital wallets (e.g. Apple Pay, Paytm, Alipay) see increasing adoption around the world, the share of cash being used in transactions is plummeting.
The chart above looks at cash as a share of transaction value in selected countries at three time periods (2019, 2023, and 2027P). Highlighted in red is cash’s projected drop from 2019 to 2027. This data showing the death of cash comes from WorldPay’s Global Payments Report 2024.
The prominence of cash for use in transactions is dropping in every country measured. This includes countries where cash was preferential method of payment in POS transactions.
One clear example is Nigeria. In 2019, over 90% of transaction value was still in cash payments. That number has now fallen to 55% today. Cash is still the leading payment method in Nigeria and a handful of other nations, but current trends indicate this may not be the case for much longer. For now, cash also remains the leading method of payment in various South American and East Asian countries…
* Modern saying, summarizing the position in a recession
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As we click, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 THAT The Code Red worm was released onto the Internet. Targeting Microsoft’s IIS web server, Code Red had a significant effect on the Internet via the speed and efficiency of its spread. Much of this was due to the fact that IIS was often enabled by default on many installations of Windows NT and Windows 2000. But Code Red also affected many other systems with web servers, mostly by way of side-effect, exacerbating the overall impact of the worm.
Via Patrick Tanguay and his wonderful newsletter, Sentiers. Tanguay observes, “diagnosing what’s going on in society right now, how our multiple systems function and the issues that emerge from that, is not an easy task. It’s probably unfair then to also expect solutions from one article, but that’s what I was hoping for by the end of this one,” by Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier…
Technology was once simply a tool—and a small one at that—used to amplify human intent and capacity. That was the story of the industrial revolution: we could control nature and build large, complex human societies, and the more we employed and mastered technology, the better things got. We don’t live in that world anymore. Not only has technology become entangled with the structure of society, but we also can no longer see the world around us without it. The separation is gone, and the control we thought we once had has revealed itself as a mirage. We’re in a transitional period of history right now.
We tell ourselves stories about technology and society every day. Those stories shape how we use and develop new technologies as well as the new stories and uses that will come with it. They determine who’s in charge, who benefits, who’s to blame, and what it all means.
Some people are excited about the emerging technologies poised to remake society. Others are hoping for us to see this as folly and adopt simpler, less tech-centric ways of living. And many feel that they have little understanding of what is happening and even less say in the matter.
But we never had total control of technology in the first place, nor is there a pretechnological golden age to which we can return. The truth is that our data-centric way of seeing the world isn’t serving us well. We need to tease out a third option. To do so, we first need to understand how we got here.
When we describe something as being abstract, we mean it is removed from reality: conceptual and not material, distant and not close-up. What happens when we live in a world built entirely of the abstract? A world in which we no longer care for the messy, contingent, nebulous, raw, and ambiguous reality that has defined humanity for most of our species’ existence? We are about to find out, as we begin to see the world through the lens of data structures.
Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State, anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to “improve the human condition.” Scott found that to understand societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized, abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess more “legible” to them. With this legibility came the ability to assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological arrangements from the top down: communities of people became taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town became a regimented industrial city.
This kind of abstraction was seemingly necessary to create the world around us today. It is difficult to manage a large organization, let alone an interconnected global society of eight billion people, without some sort of structure and means to abstract away details. Facility with abstraction, and abstract reasoning, has enabled all sorts of advancements in science, technology, engineering, and math—the very fields we are constantly being told are in highest demand.
The map is not the territory [quoth Alfred Korzybski], and no amount of intellectualization will make it so. Creating abstract representations by necessity leaves out important detail and context. Inevitably, as Scott cataloged, the use of large-scale abstractions fails, leaving leadership bewildered at the failure and ordinary people worse off.
But our desire to abstract never went away, and technology, as always, serves to amplify intent and capacity. Now, we manifest this abstraction with software. Computing supercharges the creative and practical use of abstraction. This is what life is like when we see the world the way a data structure sees the world. These are the same tricks Scott documented. What has changed is their speed and their ubiquity…
… Data structures dominate our world and are a byproduct of the rational, modern era, but they are ushering in an age of chaos. We need to embrace and tame, but not extinguish, this chaos for a better world…
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As [Lewis] Mumford wrote in his classic history of technology, “The essential distinction between a machine and a tool lies in the degree of independence in the operation from the skill and motive power of the operator.” A tool is controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial, contextual sense of the online and physical world around them. As citizens, we can create meaningful organizations that span our communities but without the permanence (and thus overhead) of old-school organizations.
Seeing like a data structure has been both a blessing and a curse. Increasingly, it feels like it is an avalanche, an out-of-control force that will reshape everything in its path. But it’s also a choice, and there is a different path we can take. The job of enabling a new society, one that accepts the complexity and messiness of our current world without being overwhelmed by it, is one all of us can take part it. There is a different future we can build, together…
As we reframe, we might send free birthday greetings to Matthias Ettrich; he was born on this date in 1972. A computer scientist interested in Linux and open source software, he Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 to create (as he put it on Usenet) “consistent, nice looking free desktop environment” for Unix-like systems using Qt as its widget toolkit– to which end, he has developed LyX. A German, operating in Berlin, Ettrich was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to free software.
Well, yes… Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love…
The word “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”, was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, personal doctor to Louis XIII, and later architect of the forty-thousand-volume library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Naudé was a rationalist and an enemy of superstition. In 1625 he published a defense of Scholastic philosophers to whom tradition had ascribed works of magic. He included the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), who, according to legend, had built an artificial man made of bronze.
This story seems to have originated long after Albert’s death with Alfonso de Madrigal (also known as El Tostado), a voluminous commentator of the fifteenth century, who adapted and embellished the tales of moving statues and talking brazen heads in medieval lore. El Tostado said that Albert had worked for thirty years to compose a whole man out of metal. The automaton supplied Albert with the answers to all of his most vexing questions and problems and even, in some versions of the tale, obligingly dictated a large part of Albert’s voluminous writings. The machine had met its fate, according to El Tostado, when Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, smashed it to bits in frustration, having grown tired of “its great babbling and chattering”.
Naudé did not believe in Albert’s talkative statue. He rejected it and other tales of talking automaton heads as “false, absurd and erroneous”. The reason Naudé cited was the statues’ lack of equipment: being altogether without “muscles, lungs, epiglottis, and all that is necessary for a perfect articulation of the voice”, they simply did not have the necessary “parts and instruments” to speak reasonably. Naudé concluded, in light of all the reports, that Albert the Great probably had built an automaton, but never one that could give him intelligible and articulate responses to questions. Instead, Albert’s machine must have been similar to the Egyptian statue of Memnon, much discussed by ancient authors, which murmured agreeably when the sun shone upon it: the heat caused the air inside the statue to “rarefy” so that it was forced out through little pipes, making a murmuring sound.
Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.
But the first actual android of the new, experimental-philosphical variety for which the historical record contains rich information — “android” in Naudé’s root sense, a working human-shaped assemblage of “necessary parts” and instruments — went on display on February 3, 1738…
[There follows a fascinating account of examples from the 18th and 19th centuries…]
Plates depicting the components of artificial and natural speech from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s The Mechanism of Speech (1791) — Source
… In the early part of the twentieth century, designers of artificial speech moved on from mechanical to electrical speech synthesis. The simulation of the organs and process of speaking — of the trembling glottis, the malleable vocal tract, the supple tongue and mouth — was specific to the last decades of the eighteenth century, when philosophers and mechanicians and paying audiences were briefly preoccupied with the idea that articulate language was a bodily function: that Descartes’ divide between mind and body might be bridged in the organs of speech…
* Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
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As we muse on the mechanical, we might spare a thought for a man whose work helped pave the way for androids as we currently conceive them: J. Presper Eckert; he died on this day in 1995. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
Eckert (standing and gesturing) and Mauchy (at the console), demonstrating the UNIVAC to Walter Cronkite (source)
And as it is in the human condition, so it is on the internet. As the Pew Research Center reports: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later…
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…
Happily, the Internet Archive‘s wonderful Wayback Machine, where one can find saved copies of (many, many, if not all) web pages that have disappeared, is a(n at least partial) antidote. Indeed, via a background script, the Wayback Machine supplies the most recent archived version of many Wikipedia links that have gone dead.
(Image above: source— where one can find the origin of “404” as the designator of a broken link…)
As we search for the missing, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to John Cocke; he was born on this date in 1925. A computer engineer, he made numerous important contributions to computer architecture and to optimizing compiler design. Most notably, he is considered by many to be “the father of RISC architecture” (which first appeared in his design of the IBM 801).
… in the process of which, as Ben Brubaker explains, we learn some fascinating things…
If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option — they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property shared by many other tilings: Shift the whole grid over by a fixed amount, and the resulting pattern is indistinguishable from the original. But to many mathematicians, such “periodic” tilings are boring. If you’ve seen one small patch, you’ve seen it all.
In the 1960s, mathematicians began to study “aperiodic” tile sets with far richer behavior. Perhaps the most famous is a pair of diamond-shaped tiles discovered in the 1970s by the polymathic physicist and future Nobel laureate Roger Penrose. Copies of these two tiles can form infinitely many different patterns that go on forever, called Penrose tilings. Yet no matter how you arrange the tiles, you’ll never get a periodic repeating pattern.
“These are tilings that shouldn’t really exist,” said Nikolas Breuckmann, a physicist at the University of Bristol.
For over half a century, aperiodic tilings have fascinated mathematicians, hobbyists and researchers in many other fields. Now, two physicists have discovered a connection between aperiodic tilings and a seemingly unrelated branch of computer science: the study of how future quantum computers can encode information to shield it from errors. In a paper posted to the preprint server arxiv.org in November, the researchers showed how to transform Penrose tilings into an entirely new type of quantum error-correcting code. They also constructed similar codes based on two other kinds of aperiodic tiling.
At the heart of the correspondence is a simple observation: In both aperiodic tilings and quantum error-correcting codes, learning about a small part of a large system reveals nothing about the system as a whole…
* “We couldn’t build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we’re hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We’re hacking into the universe.” –Seth Lloyd
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As we care for qubits, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Herman Hollerith; he was born on this date in 1860. A statistician and inventor, he was a seminal figure in the development of data processing: he invented (for the 1890 U.S. Census) an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information (and, later, for use in accounting). His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, which he patented in 1884, marked the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems– and his approach dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
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