Accountability sinks

When I was a grad student in STS I was considering doing a project on how software can function as an "agency adjuster" where individuals come to bear the risks of something (generally an economic transaction) and the majority of the profits go to the owner of the software. In many ways Uber & related services are about allowing individuals to take on very low-probability high-acuity downside risk for a small fee.

Hmm, the analysis with respect to FOSS could also interesting. might make less sense to consider profit/compensation. Might be more useful to think of responsibility flows.. (or sources as well as sinks)

I think this sort of analysis is valid and fruitful in a very general sense. Software as a recently adopted vehicle in a long tradition of liability displacement / diffusion of responsibility / agency modification

Yah - I think there's value there too. I am a huge fan of FOSS ofc - and also it's good to look at how FOSS allows companies to avoid hiring developers because they can use FOSS products. The first benefit I think of is trying to come up with FOSS approaches that would convince or coerce companies to contribute back to the projects they use at least a little.

Yah - it lies outside of the narrowly technical (though technical systems come up a lot) and part of what I would talk about would have been: how much is this a trick and how much of this is real? Like, is software doing slight of hand and really Uber (or whoever) should be taxed on an externality / risk? Or does this electronic machine of software genuinely create a new arrangement of responsibility? My unhelpful understanding is "it depends" and even in the Uber case it's a bit mixed, though on balance I think Uber is more of a scam than a truly new thing (even though there's some new there).

My intuition is similar; software can distribute responsibility in ways no previous vehicle could, by virtue of speed, scale, and mode of interaction (in a McLuhan-ish "medium as message" sense). But it's still an evolution of long pre-existing social dynamics, not (or relatively rarely) an absolute novelty. Scamming is an ancient art which we did not invent, I suspect, but rather discovered ourselves doing already. Only painstakingly (and still only partially) have we dragged the concept into the light of consciousness.

I feel the same way about artificial intelligence: it's not new, it's all around us, digital computation merely crystallizes the concept. But shiny objects should not distract us from the much more general phenomenon.

I’d seen situations where companies were forced to debug FOSS that caused problems in their proprietary setups.. that counts as persuasion, I presume?