Whimsley

Book Review in Winnipeg Free Press

Thanks to MC for letting me know about this. From Sunday's Winnipeg Free Press:

A different take on consumer power

Sunday, July 30th, 2006. Reviewed by Lindsey Wiebe

'WE make choices every day," writes Ontario author Tom Slee. "We choose the clothes we wear, the way we travel, the movies we watch, and the places we shop."

But even with all this choice, Slee says, the rich are getting richer, while the middle class and poor are losing ground.

"What has gone wrong?" he asks in this thought-provoking mix of academic and social critique.

"Why is it that with more choices than any in society in history, we do not get what we want?"

These basic questions form the underpinnings of this first book by the Waterloo software professional and researcher.

In it, Slee explores the pitfalls of a free-market economy; in particular, what he refers to as "MarketThink," the idea that consumers control the market, and can hold corporations accountable.

Slee does his best to debunk this mindset, arguing that even the most reasonable of individual decisions can produce negative results for the general public.

Much of the book revolves around the fictional foibles of Jack and Jill, who live in the made-up town of Whimsley.

Slee uses the characters to illustrate the routine conflicts between personal and public gain.

Should Jack support a downtown department store, or visit a newly opened big-box development? And does it really matter if Jill leaves litter in a public park, when surely others will be more environmentally conscious?

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart also draws on real-world examples of difficult choices, tackling everything from the issue of herd mentality to the problem of "free-riders," those who act in their own best interests while assuming, often mistakenly, that others will work for the public good.

Slee's reasoning is persuasive, and his examples numerous and far-reaching: the contentious subject of international pollution credits, for one, or the perennial public vs. private school debate.

But although No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart is more accessible than the average academic text, it still falls short of mass-market appeal, and those unfamiliar with game theory might find some sections slower than others.

Slee's pacing is often sluggish, and the overall arrangement of material feels unfocused. The sheer number of examples to deconstruct is also a little daunting, an ironic flaw in a book about the dilemmas of choice.

Slee may have been better off focusing on fewer but more detailed examples to plead his case.

On the positive side, Slee's in-text citations are clear and easy to follow, and readers hoping to learn more about the complexities of decision-making will come out with a solid list of followup books.

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart doesn't qualify as light summer reading. However, the book does offer an intriguing critique of dominant ideas on consumer power, and puts forward a valid argument for the benefits of collective decision-making and regulation.

Lindsey Wiebe is a Free Press reporter.

bytech is a discerning individual

Doing one of my periodic googles for the book title, I came across this post by one "bytech" on a webmasters' forum. Obviously a Manitoban of taste and insight.

Quote: Originally Posted by blind2web:

"Nobody forces American or British companies to move to low cost countries; these decisions are made in Britain and America by Britains and Americans. "

bytech says: "While I agree with you, there is a hook to this. I discovered it after reading "No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart". It put a whole new meaning to the word "choice"... I'd recommend the book to almost anyone. You'll see your life from there-on in a whole new way."

Thank you bytech!

Link: Indian Webmasters - Page 2 - Webmaster Forum.

Featured Item

I'm a featured item in the rabble bookstore. Nice.

Inequality II: Consequences

Following on from the previous post, here are two other places where they talk about the consequences of inequality:

Mark Thoma, yet again, brings us a piece from the New York Times which discusses what can happen in a city when the middle ranges of income leaves, so that only the rich and poor are left. Basically, the two become separate cultures.

With a dwindling middle class, rich and poor become more separate. Alan Berube, an author of the Brookings study, said a two-tiered marketplace can develop: Whole Foods for the upper classes, bodegas for the lower, with no competition from stores courting the middle...

“This trend toward living and interacting with people who are like you is intensifying a lot,” said Professor Gyourko, who lives in the affluent suburb of Swarthmore, Pa. “I do not meet the full range of incomes and social classes within my neighborhood. Well, think about what happens if metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco and the like turn into my suburb. You’ll have even less interaction. The most interesting and potentially foreboding implication of this sorting is that it changes the way we view life.”

And Matthew Kahn asks When the rich get richer, what happens to the poor? and answers

It depends. If the super-rich use some of their $ to finance nice musuems and art galleries and Buffett-Gates their money to solve public health challenges then society could be improved along some dimensions.

Alternatively if this crew uses their money to purchase 100,000 square foot homes in desirable areas then the price of land will skyrocket and the middle class will be squeezed out.

Inequality I: Changes

The studies of Piketty and Saez seem to be becoming the standard for the description of inequality within the USA. Every now and then they update their figures, and recently they published an updated set that described what happened to American Inequality in 2004. There has been a rush of comments about the numbers on some economic weblogs. So I'll collect them together here - I don't have anything to add myself: it's fascinating to see this kind of real-world issue being debated among experts in public.

First, the update itself is in an Excel spreadsheet here, at the web site of Emmanual Saez.

Paul Krugman (in the New York Times, but reposted in part by Mark Thoma here) describes the main feature as follows:

Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic ... show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn’t just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. ...

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There’s a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better ... that rising inequality ... is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

Greg Mankiw, another prominent economist who was also high up in the Bush administration until recently, saw things differently here:

Here is what I see: After rising substantially from 1986 to 2000, income inequality is essentially the same in 2004 (the most recent year of data) as it was in 2000.

In a separate post, Mankiw also challenges Krugman's sentence about "a persistent myth, perpetuated by eonomists who should know better...that rising inequality...is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lof of education and those without". While Krugman claims that the big story is the growth of income at the very top of the scale, Mankiw reasserts the role of a more broadly based change:

My understanding is that there is a widespread consensus that the returns to education have risen substantially over the past few decades. But the education wage premium is not the whole story, as wage inequality within education categories has also increased substantially.

...part of the increase in inequality is measurement error, and part of the increase is attributable to the fact that the labor force is older and more educated--characteristics that are associated with higher residual variance.

Brad DeLong takes up the thread, weighing in on Krugman's side:

The big rise in inequality in the U.S. since 1980 has been overwhelmingly concentrated among the top 1% of income earners: their share has risen from 8% in 1980 to 16% in 2004. By contrast, the share of the next 4% of income earners has only risen from 13% to 15%, and the share of the next 5% of income earners has stuck at 12%. The top 1% have gone from 8 to 16 times average income, the next 4% have gone from 3.2 to 3.7 times average income, and the next 5% have been stuck at 3 times average income.

It's hard to attribute this pattern to a rise in the premium salary earned by the well-educated by virtue of the skills their formal education taught them.

But Greg Mankiw is not convinced:

I would guess that the top 1 percent of income earners (those earning more than $276,945) are disproportionately very well educated--doctors, lawyers, MBAs, etc. So the rise in the income of the top 1 percent could well represent in large part a higher education premium.

What might well be true is that the returns to education have become increasingly non-linear: The most educated are now getting a bigger return from a marginal year of education than those with moderate amounts of education. In other words, two years getting an MBA from Harvard Business School may increase a person's income more in percentage terms than does two years getting an Associate Degree from Mass Bay Community College. My understanding from my labor economist friends is that some evidence favors this hypothesis of increasing nonlinearity.

And Mark Thoma adds his two cents:

We can debate what has happened the last few years and whether this year or that year had special circumstances such as the problems Brad notes with using 2000 as a base year. But in doing so, we shouldn't lose sight of the overall upward trend in inequality.

Top Decile Income Share

Top 0.01% Income Share

Average Real Income of bottom 99% and top 1%

The little dip at the end is what the fuss is all about. But even if Greg's claim holds up to the types of qualifications Brad talks about, and there are good reasons to worry about using 2000 as a base year, the upward trend in income inequality since the 1970s is undeniable. And in any case, as the last graph shows, real income for the bottom 99% of the distribution has been flat since the early 1970s despite large gains in productivity.

Meanwhile, in keeping with Thoma's theme of focusing on the bigger picture, Brad Delong reminds us that

Real wages for low-paid workers aren't rising at all. It's not the well-paid benefit "most." It's that only the well-paid are, as a group, benefitting at all.

Design change

I've just changed the design at my nonblog web site.

Why? Well, because it was pretty hideous before, and also because I recently put together a web site for my better half, and I thought my own place deserved a bit of spit and polish. I'm not really sure about the colour scheme, but I'll give it a week or so and see how it looks after that time.

Update: I just made a few more changes so it looks better in Internet Explorer. It still looks best in Firefox, but the differences are now pretty minor.

For anyone who cares about such things, the colour scheme was inspired by the Dark Rose design by Rose Fu at the css Zen Garden, which has lots of great ideas for anyone looking to design a site.

Update 2: I added fancier scrolling behaviour, for Firefox only, so that only the main column moves as you scroll the page (you have to look at one of the longer pages to see it, or have your browser in a small window). There are workarounds that let you simulate this CSS position:fixed behaviour in IE, but that seems like too much work.

Movies: Nobody Knows Anything

Via Brad DeLong, a piece in the LA Times that covers some of the ground I cover  about movies in Chapter 9, although the LA Times has better stories. Here are a few excerpts, but it's worth reading the whole thing:

That no one can know whether a film will hit or miss has been an uncomfortable suspicion in Hollywood at least since novelist and screenwriter William Goldman enunciated it in his classic 1983 book "Adventures in the Screen Trade." If Goldman is right and a future film's performance is unpredictable, then there is no way studio executives or producers, despite all their swagger, can have a better track record at choosing projects than an ape throwing darts at a dartboard.

That's a bold statement, but these days it is hardly conjecture: With each passing year the unpredictability of film revenue is supported by more and more academic research...

What the research shows is that even the most professionally made films are subject to many unpredictable factors that arise during production and marketing, not to mention the inscrutable taste of the audience. It is these unknowns that obliterate the ability to foretell the box-office future.

But if picking films is like randomly tossing darts, why do some people hit the bull's-eye more often than others? For the same reason that in a group of apes tossing darts, some apes will do better than others. The answer has nothing to do with skill. Even random events occur in clusters and streaks.

Imagine this game: We line up 20,000 moviegoers who, one by one, flip a coin. If the coin lands heads, they see "X-Men"; if the coin lands tails, it's "The Da Vinci Code." Since the coin has an equal chance of coming up either way, you might think that in this experimental box-office war each film should be in the lead about 10,000 times. But the mathematics of randomness says otherwise: The most probable number of lead changes is zero, and it is 88 times more probable that one of the two films will lead through all 20,000 customers than that each film leads 10,000 times. The lesson I teach in my course is that the fairness of the goddess of fortune is expressed not in alternations of the lead but in the symmetry of probabilities: Each film is equally likely to be the one that grabs and keeps the lead.

If the mathematics is counterintuitive, reality is even worse, because a funny thing happens when a random process such as the coin-flipping experiment is actually carried out: The symmetry of fairness is broken and one of the films becomes the winner. Even in situations like this, in which we know there is no "reason" that the coin flips should favor one film over the other, psychologists have shown that the temptation to concoct imagined reasons to account for skewed data and other patterns is often overwhelming.

In science, data are not accepted as meaningful if they're the result of chance alone. People in the film industry are diligent about gathering data, but are far less skilled at understanding what the numbers mean. The fact is, financial success or failure in Hollywood is determined less by anyone's skill to pick hits, or lack thereof, than by the random nature of the universe. The typical patterns of randomness—apparent hot or cold streaks, or the bunching of data into clusters—are routinely misinterpreted and, worse, acted upon as if a new trend had been discovered or a new epiphany achieved. And so, despite a growing body of evidence that box-office revenue follows the laws of chaotic systems, meaning that it is inherently unpredictable, the superstructure of Hollywood's culture—that pervasive worship of who's hot and the shunning of who's not—continues to rest on a foundation of misconception and mirage.

Juicy kidneys! Get yer nice fresh kidneys here!

RAD points me to a New York Times article by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt about buying and selling organs. That’s organ as in kidney or liver, not organ as in church or Hammond. It’s an interesting entry to a very topical topic: one that still has shock value but which we are going to hear about more in the future.

My point of view, unsurprisingly, is that I don’t trust market mechanisms to deal with the problem. This essay is a starting point for thinking about it. I hope to follow it up later with a second attempt.

* * *

The reason people are talking about buying and selling kidneys is that organ transplants are safe and cheaper than they used to be, so lots of sick people could benefit from an increase in organ donations, and so that spare kidney you’ve been keeping around is now a very popular kidney, used and second-hand though it be. So why, ask Dubner and Levitt, don’t we let people buy and sell their kidneys? After all, “most people can live safely on one kidney”, they say. They suggest that the main reason we don’t allow buying and selling of kidneys is what they call “the repugnance factor”, and they have a point, even though another reason is that it’s impossible to read that sentence without it looking like this: “most BUT NOT ALL!!! people can live safely on one kidney UNLESS SOMETHING GOES WRONG WITH THE OTHER ONE”.

The Dubner and Levitt article is a bit odd actually. It suggests it’s talking about how paying people for their kidneys may save the lives of people who need a new kidney, while also letting people with spare kidneys earn some cash on the side. But when it comes to the specifics they don’t talk about buying and selling at all. Instead, they talk about a matching program that matches incompatible donor-patient pairs. In these pairs, each potential donor’s kidney is a bad match for the immune systems of their partner—but the system matches them with similarly incompatible pairs and the two matched pairs can basically swap a kidney. No money involved. Then they talk about a potential donor who was going to sell his kidney to a stranger and, when he discovered that accepting payment for organs is illegal, went ahead and donated it anyway. No money exchanged. They don’t really investigate payment for organs at all.

* * *

Still, even if D&L don’t actually talk about trading our internal garbage collectors for money, other people are doing so. Down the hall from Steven Levitt at the University of Chicago is Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize winner who is in favour of markets in everything. Together with graduate student Julio Elias, Becker has talked up the idea for several years now and – Becker being Becker -- he gets a fair amount of press for it.

There are some technical reasons why I’m not convinced by Becker and Elias’s argument (PDF). They aren’t at the centre of my problems with the idea, but effectiveness does matter, so let me pursue these problems here.

First, they maintain that right now the supply curve for kidneys is vertical. That is, a fixed amount of people are prepared to donate kidneys. But the people most likely to donate kidneys are the relatives of those on the operating table, so when the number of operations increases, so the number of those relatives increases, and so the supply of kidneys increases. It looks to me like that line should be sloping. Have I missed something? Hey, it’s been known.

They go on to suggest that the actual number of kidneys needed for transplants, compared to the total renal population of North America, is so small that once you offer a reasonable amount of money you could get as many kidneys as you could possibly want. That is, by offering payment the supply curve goes from vertical to horizontal. And then they go on to calculate how much you’d need to offer to induce people to sell. What they don’t take account of (though in a more recent essay Becker considers and dismisses this argument) is the possibility that offering to pay for kidneys might actually cut down the supply. This would be counter to most economic thinking, of course. The argument goes back to Richard Titmuss, a British academic who wrote a few decades ago about blood donation in a book entitled “The Gift Relationship”. Titmuss argued that offering to pay for blood would actually dissuade some people from donating, because whereas people feel good about themselves for donating blood, they don’t feel good about themselves for selling blood. Recent experiments in Sweden suggest that there is something to Titmuss idea. Becker doesn’t provide a real case against it, he just asserts that the effect would be small.

Put these two things together and the effectiveness of even a perfect market with no cheating or deception is less attractive than Becker suggests. Instead of a dramatic change from a vertical supply curve to a horizontal one, you have a more nuanced change. And that’s if everything else works dine.

* * *

Becker also dismisses the other main arguments about the introduction of payments, which are:

•  that the result will be poor people selling their kidneys in order to supply longer life to the rich, giving yet another twist to the growing gap between rich and poor in the world.
•  that the dangers of malpractice and deception of one form or another are so large – especially for those without the resources to get legal assistance and advice, that poor people in particular will be preyed on.
•  that just about any system you put in place provides incentives for all kinds of nastiness. This applies to presumed consent mechanisms as well. And although this kind of thing can sometimes be dealt with, it’s costly to do so.

Well, I hope to look at some of these in a Part II later.

* * *

There are some countries that have already taken deliberate steps to make it easier for people to get new organs. Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and she has carried out research on organ trading around the world. In a 2003 forum she described these efforts:

There’s the Israeli model: very low donation rates so you export your transplant patients elsewhere and you give them medical insurance to pay for it, even at the cost of their buying kidneys from poor peasants in Eastern Europe. There are the Philippine, Iranian and Iraqi models: government-sponsored payments that allow very poor people to sell their organs for as low as $500, which leads to deep social resentments. The Chinese model: you can use the organs of executed prisoners. The Russian model: in which there’s not such a careful monitoring of confirmatory tests for brain death. The Spanish model: paying the procurers. More humanely, there is the Austrian and Belgian model of presumed consent.

There’s no doubt other countries will be dealing with the issue in the future. But Scheper-Hughes is on the money (so to speak) when she points out that the presumed consent model requires a trust in the fairness of the medical system that certainly doesn’t exist in the US.

“we don’t have the kind of social consensus whereby people feel that their organs will be fairly and equally distributed among the poor as well as the wealthy or well insured, among women as well as men, or that all will have an equal right to get an organ should they need one. So first we have to address the lack of national health care, the 44 million uninsured, and the contradiction in asking poor people in America – who tend by and large to be over-represented in emergency rooms and ICUs – to donate organs when they and their relatives may not even have basic health care.

Canada may not be in quite the same straights as the US in that way, but it’s got some real issues, and they need to be dealt with in order to deal with the issues surrounding organ transplants.

Have Your Robots Talk to My Robots

Here's a draft of something I've been working on over the weekend...

On a hot summer’s day a few years ago I was waiting at a train station in the UK. The train was late. A voice came over the public address system saying “We apologize for the late arrival of the 10:30 to Brighton”. Fair enough. Then ten minutes later, the same voice, in the same intonation, said the same words:  “We apologize for the late arrival of the 10:30 train to Brighton”. Ten minutes more, the same thing. And so on for an hour or so until the train finally arrived.

What stayed with me was not the lateness of the train — the day was so hot that tracks were buckling and we knew on setting off that we were in for delays — it was that announcement. The words themselves sounded like an apology, but, just like “your call is important to us”, the message that came through to me was the exact opposite of what the words themselves said.

* * *

Literature scholars have a notion of something called “performative language”. The idea is that while most utterances simply talk about the world (“That daisy is yellow”) others actually perform an action. “I resign”, when spoken to your boss, is not just a statement, it is an action that changes your status from employed to unemployed. “I do” when said in the right place and in front of the right audience, actually changes the speaker’s status from unmarried to married.

“We apologize” can be a performative utterance. When offered in the correct way, saying you’re sorry is not just a statement about the world, it is an act: the act of apologizing. But it’s not always a performative utterance. It needs two things to make it so.

First, and most obviously, someone needs to say it. Without an apologizer, there can be no apology. An automated system cannot apologize.

It could be argued that on that railway platform, even though there was no human individual speaking, the one making the apology was the company. The recorded voice actually comes from the railway company, and was simply transmitted by the automatic system, just like a letter carrier delivers a letter. But it turns out there is a problem with this too, and the problem is cost.

Apologizing, as we all know, can be a difficult thing to do, and that difficulty is part and parcel of the act of apologizing. Imagine receiving an apology for a deeply painful betrayal delivered casually, in a way that made it clear it carried no more emotional cost than commenting on the weather. You would understand immediately that it was not an apology at all, even if it contained the words “I apologize”. It is “cheap talk”, and while it could be an attempt to get you to be quiet and leave the offender alone, or to postpone the inevitable recriminations, or one of several other things, cheap talk can’t be an apology.

So when an automated system says “we apologize” then there is, in fact, no apology happening, no matter how often it says it. When the only action it takes to deliver the words is pushing a button somewhere, at the most, then the statement is “cheap talk”: cost-free communication that should carry no weight.

* * *

We are getting to understand the business of “speech without a speaker”. When we hear an automated voice saying “Your call is important to us” most of us do receive the real message. We know that if our call was really important then there would be a person there to receive it. The words are not the message; the automated system that delivers it is.

We understand that the letters we get from company CEOs offering us new deals do not, of course, come from the CEO at all. He (or occasionally she) may not even have read it, let alone written it. May not even know of its existence.

“Have a nice day” is a variant on the same theme: the phrase is often said by a real person, so it seems like there is a speaker, but if the hapless individual behind the till is reciting a script, and if delivering that script is a condition of their employment, then they are not really the speaker; they are simply passing on a message from someone else. And that someone else has no interest in the niceness (or otherwise) of your day: it is simply a calculated policy to give the appearance of friendliness.

On occasion, of course, someone behind a till is in a friendly mood, and actually gives the words real meaning. But most of us can tell the difference between such a sincere utterance and someone delivering a programmed script.

But while we are adjusting to the problem of speech without a speaker, we have not really started adjusting to the other changes that cheap communications technology are bringing. We know that our mediums of communication are changing, with new forms of internet-based communications mutating every few years, from e-mail to instant messaging to weblogs and more. What we need to adjust to is the way that the economics of these new media change the meaning of the messages we send and receive.

Many of us do adjust to these changes in meaning in our personal communications. A Christmas letter sent by e-mail to a long list of recipients means less to us than an individually handwritten letter. But our social systems are slower to change. In particular, there are forms of legal communication that have built into them an assumption of cost, but which can now be made very cheaply.

* * *

A new communication mutant was described recently by Mark Rasch, former head of the US Justice Department’s computer crime unit, in The Register, an online journal of technology comment. Rasch writes about “robolawyers” or “lawyerbots”:  programs designed to search the Internet for suspected violations of a company’s copyright or trademark. A lawyerbot can be designed not only to detect possible violations, perhaps by searching for keywords or combinations of words, it can also be designed to send out legal warnings (Rasch calls them “takedown notices”) to the owners and hosts of the sites involved.

The legality of these automated takedown notices has not been tested. But they don’t have to go to court to be effective. Internet Service Providers and other web site hosts such as eBay don’t like the possibility of lawsuits, and their legal liability for the content of the sites that they host is uncertain, so these notices are often enough to persuade them to take down the problematic material, regardless of whether there is anything wrong with it or not.

Rasch writes about Brian Kopp, who wrote a book based on the popular online game “World of Warcraft” and offered it for sale on the eBay auction site. The book was, by all accounts, in the spirit of those “Dummies” guides that tell you how to use Microsoft Word and other software products – an unauthorized third party guide, but not defamatory or illegal. Once Kopp posted his book, however, eBay began receiving a stream of “takedown notices” telling them that the book violated the rights of Blizzard, the company that owns World of Warcraft, and that they should remove it from their site. eBay responded by not only removing the book, but cancelling Kopp’s account so that he could not auction anything else either.

It is impossible to know for sure whether there were any real people involved at any stages of this campaign against Brian Kopp (who is almost certainly real, although not a very good writer). Rasch notes that Kopp’s eBay auction generated “a slew of takedown notices from various parties. As soon as he reposted the auction, it generated a new takedown notice. Human lawyers are generally not that efficient. So these autonomous agents may in fact be the ones generating these takedown notices.” So did any real person at Blizzard know they were sending takedown notices to Mr. Kopp? Quite possibly not. Had anyone (apart from a computer) “read” his book? Probably not. Did an individual at eBay weigh the evidence and decide what action to take, or does eBay have a program to disable accounts if it receives a sufficient number of complaints? Unclear.

The fact that legal letters rarely go to court, and the fact that they can be generated programmatically, means that automated legal notices are likely to increase. We are already subject to automated legal checks whenever we install new software, in those End User License Agreements that we have to say we’ve read even though we obviously haven’t, and even though they are not designed to be read. Increasingly, those agreements include clauses that let software report back to the company that made it about the use we make of it, or details about our computer. Such information can have legitimate uses, enabling better fixing of software problems for example, but it can also have illegitimate uses.

There is an assumption in our legal system that a legal notice follows some kind of investigation, however cursory, on the part of the party that issues it. That is, it is a document to be taken seriously. But auto-generated and widely distributed legal notices are “cheap talk”, and their increasing ease of generation means that, like the apology at the railway station, they should be treated as meaningless.

* * *

It would be easy to dismiss Brian Kopp’s case as absurd if it wasn’t so clearly a harbinger of things to come. As lawyerbots proliferate, companies will find it worthwhile to develop other lawyerbots to handle incoming “letters” and we will have legal communications that nobody writes and nobody reads. If a letter is delivered and nobody reads it, does it carry any meaning? If lawyerbots were just sending meaningless messages back and forth, nothing would be lost except for a bit of Internet bandwidth, but it seems that the legal system has not yet adjusted to this new mutant, and so such communications can be damaging.

Increasing automation means that forms of communications are mutating ever more quickly. Some developments are not difficult to foresee. As with all things computer-related, it is clear that automated communication is going to be more common – a lot more common – in the future than it is now. The near future will bring automated translation software that can provide good enough translation in a wider and wider set of circumstances. It will also bring speech comprehension software, and text-to-speech software of increasing subtlety: no more jerky sentences with those pasted together words – the audio equivalent of the ransom note pasted together from newspapers. Put them all together and programs will soon be carrying out conversations with people around the world, persuading us to part with our money in new and grammatically sophisticated ways, using voices designed to exploit our sympathies and prejudices.

Except they are not voices and not conversations at all, they just sound like they are. We need to be consistently on our guard if we are to avoid becoming confused by these mutant communications. As a first step, we need to acknowledge that machine-delivered apologies are not apologies, no matter how sincere they sound. And we need to decide that lawyerbot-delivered threats and warnings carry as much weight as the cost of delivering them, which is zero.