Return-Path: micj@earlham.edu Delivery-Date: Thu Oct 5 11:31:27 2000 Return-Path: Received: from localhost (IDENT:jrogers@localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by kleene.cs.earlham.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA18522 for ; Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:31:26 -0500 Received: from quark.cs.earlham.edu by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.3.1) for jrogers@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 05 Oct 2000 11:31:26 -0500 (EST) Received: from earlham.edu (IDENT:root@yang.earlham.edu [159.28.1.1]) by cs.earlham.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA30757; Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:34:14 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from micj@earlham.edu) Received: from cs.earlham.edu (cs.earlham.edu [159.28.230.3]) by earlham.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA18078; Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:36:20 -0500 Received: from cs.earlham.edu (cs.earlham.edu [159.28.230.3]) by cs.earlham.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA30753; Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:34:14 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from micj@earlham.edu) Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 11:34:14 -0500 (EST) From: Mic Jackson To: Earlham Mathematics Department -- Jennifer Ziebarth , Tim McLarnan , Charlie Peck , Jim Rogers Subject: NetFuture #112 (fwd) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mic Jackson, Ph.D. "Being a click or two Professor of Mathematics away from everywhere Director of Environmental Programs is disconcertingly like Earlham College being nowhere at all." 701 National Road West Stephen Talbott, in Richmond, IN 47374-4095 NetFuture #101 micj@earlham.edu www.cs.earlham.edu/~micj ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 12:21:58 -0400 From: Stephen Talbott Reply-To: stevet@OREILLY.COM To: NETFUTURE@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU Subject: NetFuture #112 NETFUTURE Technology and Human Responsibility ========================================================================== Issue #112 A Publication of The Nature Institute October 5, 2000 ========================================================================== Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com) On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/ You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. NetFuture is a reader-supported publication. CONTENTS: --------- The Trouble with Ubiquitous Technology Pushers (Part 3) (Steve Talbott) To automate, or re-enflesh? DEPARTMENTS Correspondence The Emergency Room as an Electronic Game (Valdemar Setzer) The Intimate Relationship between Good and Evil (Simon Baddeley) An Author's Visit to the Mumford House (Gray Brechin) Jacques Ellul's Place: Also Worth Saving (David W. Gill) Images That Preclude Thought (Irv Thomas) Announcements and Resources New Home for "Confronting Technology" Web Site About this newsletter ========================================================================== THE TROUBLE WITH UBIQUITOUS TECHNOLOGY PUSHERS (PART 3) To Automate, or Re-enflesh? Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com) Some while back a reader urged upon me this principle: "Anything we do that can be automated should be automated". It's a principle that appeals to the common sense of many people today, and complements the notion that machines can unburden us of the more tedious and mechanized work, leaving us free to occupy ourselves with "higher" and more "human" tasks. Appealing as the reader's suggestion is, I'm convinced that it readily promotes an unhealthy relation to technology. Here's why: First, it obscures the truth that nothing we do can be automated. Sure, I know that a computer can "add two plus two", but what it does is not what we do. It does not bring consciousness to the act. It is not exercising and therefore strengthening certain skills and cognitive capacities. It requires no attention, no will power, no motivation, no supportive metabolism, no memory, no imagination, and no sympathetic muscle movements. Nor is it engaged in any larger purpose when it carries out the computation -- or any purpose at all. It is amazing to see how readily we forget these things today and equate a computer's action with human performance. When a machine "does" what we do, we typically mean that something about the structure of the machine's activity can be mapped (by us) to a narrow set of formal features abstracted from our own activity. For example, a pattern of electrical pulses can be seen as analogous to the formal structure of a problem in arithmetic addition. This sort of mapping happens to be very useful, but no worthwhile effort to assess the usefulness can begin with the false notion that the machine is doing what we do. Actually, the more relevant fact is that the machine displaces and eliminates from the situation much that we do, leaving us to consider (1) how we might compensate for the disuse of our own capacities, and (2) how the entire context and significance of the work has been altered by its reduction to those few formal features. It's all too easy for the facile calculations of the spreadsheet software to begin narrowing a business' conception of its own work, even though the business may have begun with a richly meaningful and idealistic set of intentions. Intention doesn't enter into the software's calculations, and as that software plays an ever greater role in the business, the question is, "Where will the guiding intentions come from -- or will we simply allow them to disappear as we yield to the machine's empty guidance?" There Is No Stopping Place -------------------------- If the first problem with our reader's formulation is that nothing we do can be automated, the second problem is that everything can be automated. That is, once you equate the kind of reduction I've been talking about with "automating human activity", there's no line separating things that can be automated from those that cannot. So "automate whatever can be automated" provides no guidance whatever. In the reduced sense that applies, everything can be automated. As many have pointed out, you can abstract some sort of formal structure from any activity you can describe (the description itself embodies a syntactic structure) and this structure can be impressed upon a machine. So as soon as you are convinced you have automated the simplest human activity, you are climbing a ladder possessing no special rung to mark a stopping place. If a calculator "does what we do", then a computer can in one sense or another do what a judge or composer or physicist does. If we do not pay attention to the difference between the computational abstraction and the human reality in the simple cases, nothing will require our attention to those differences in the "higher" cases. Further, the more you automate, the more you tend to reduce the affected contexts to the terms of your automation, so that the next "higher" activity looks more and more like an automatic one that should be handed over to a machine. When, finally, the supervisor is supervising only machines, there's no reason for the supervisor himself not to become a machine. So the idea that automation relieves us from grunt work in order to concentrate on higher things looks rather like the opposite of the truth. Automation tends continually to reduce the higher work to mechanical and computational terms. At least, it does this when we lose sight of the full reality of the work, reconceiving it as if its entire significance lay in the few decontextualized structural features we can analogize in a machine. (In a machine-driven world, we are always pressured toward this reconceptualization.) But if, on the other hand, we do *not* lose sight of the full reality of the work, then the "lower-level" stuff may look just as much worth doing ourselves as the "higher" -- in which case we have to ask, "What, really, is the rationale for automating it?" This is not to say that, for example, endless hours spent manually adding columns of numbers would prove rewarding to most people. But where we typically run into such tasks is precisely where reductive technologies (such as those involved in the machinery of bookkeeping and accounting) have already shaped the work to be done. In general, the grunt work we want to get rid of is the result of automation, and while additional automation may relieve us of that particular work, it also recasts a yet wider sphere of work in terms seemingly fit only for automation. After all, the ever more sophisticated accounting software requires ever more extensive inputs, so more and more people in the organization find themselves caught up in paper-shuffling (or electronic file-shuffling). It's where automation has not already destroyed the meaningfulness of the low-level work that we discover how high-level it can really be. The farmer may choose not to abandon his occasional manual hoeing -- not because he is a hopeless romantic, but because there is satisfaction in the simple rhythms, good health in the exercise, and essential knowledge of soil and crop conditions in the observations made along the way. What will provide these benefits when he resides in a sealed, air-conditioned cab fifteen feet off the ground? A Strengthened Inner Activity ----------------------------- You may ask, then, "Should nothing be automated?" I didn't say that! I've only suggested that we avoid deluding ourselves about automation freeing us for higher things. Have we in fact been enjoying such a release? Any investigation of the matter will reveal that the machine's pull is most naturally downward. It's hard to relate to a machine except by becoming machine-like in some part of ourselves. When we yield ourselves to automatisms, we become sleepwalkers. But if instead they serve as foils for our own increased wakefulness, then they will have performed a high service. After all, downward forces, too, can be essential to our health. We couldn't walk upright without the force of gravity to work against, and our muscles would atrophy without the effort. It is, I think, inescapable that we should automate many things -- and, of course, there are many pleasures to be had in achieving this. When I said above that an automating mentality will not find any clear stopping place, I did not mean to imply that there should *be* such a stopping place -- certainly not in any absolute sense. In fact, I think it's wrong to imagine a stopping place defined in terms of the "objective" nature of the work. Everything *is* potentially automatable in the restricted sense I have indicated, and pretending there is a natural stopping place only encourages the kind of mindless automation that is the real problem. What is crucial is for us to be aware of what we're doing and to find within ourselves the necessary compensations. We have to struggle ever more determinedly to hold on to the realities and meanings our automated abstractions were originally derived from. That is, we must learn to bring the abstractions alive again through a strengthened inner activity -- a tough challenge when the machine continually invites us to let go of our own activity and accept the task in reduced terms! The limits of our compensatory capacities will always suggest wise stopping places, if we are willing to attend to those limits. But not absolute stopping places; they will shift as our capacities grow. Are we currently setting the bounds of automation wisely? You tell me. Has the accounting software and the remarkable automation of global financial transactions been countered by our resolve to impose our own conscious meanings upon those transactions? Or, rather, does the entire financial system function more and more like a machine, merely computing an abstract bottom line? Well, if you're looking at the dominant institutions, I imagine your answer will be pessimistic. But perhaps the most important developments for the future are the less conspicuous ones -- for example, the alternative food and health systems, the growing interest in product labeling, the investing-with-a-conscience movement. What's essential in these is the determination to restore the automated abstraction -- for example, the nutrient in the processed food, the number in the accountant's spreadsheet -- to the meaningful context it was originally ripped out of. Holding the Balance ------------------- I guess the sum of the matter is that the restoration entails a gesture exactly opposite to the one expressed in, "if it can be automated, it should be". It's more like, "if it can be re-enfleshed, it should be". As long as these two movements are held in balance, we're probably okay. We should automate only where we can, out of our inner resources, re- enliven. For example, we should substitute written notes and email for face-to-face-exchanges only so far as we have learned the higher and more demanding art of revivifying the written word so that it reveals the other person as deeply as possible and gives us something of his "presence". Of course, this is not the way most of us relate to email -- not even when the frenetic, email-influenced pace of work would allow it. I suppose few would quarrel with the proposition that our society is much more gripped by the imperative to automate than the imperative to re- enflesh. Certainly this is ground for worry, given that the push for automation alone is a push to eradicate the human being. The threat of eradication was Bill Joy's concern in his notorious *Wired* article. I share his concern, but it seems to me that the effort to define a fixed stopping place is inherently untenable; it just can't be done with any consistency. Nor would we expect that it could be done if we had grown accustomed to think organically and imaginatively, in terms of movement, balance, tension, polarity (exactly what our machines train us away from!). It seems to me that some such awareness as I have tried to adumbrate here is the prerequisite for our avoiding the eventual loss of ourselves. It must be an awareness of our own, machine-transcending capacities. We must exercise these in a living, tensive balance as we counter the pull of all the mechanisms around us. This is exactly the awareness that many of Joy's critics have refused. It seems obvious to Ray Kurzweil (author of *The Age of Spiritual Machines*) that digital technologies will transform human consciousness, and not at all obvious that a transformed human consciousness is the only thing that can sustain future technologies -- just as transformations of human consciousness have been required to generate and sustain all earlier technologies. There's something self-fulfilling in Kurzweil's prophecies; when you lose sight of the machine-transcending qualities of your own mind, it is not surprising that you find yourself increasingly susceptible to machine-like influences. In other words, one way for us to transform our powers of consciousness is to abdicate them. Then it really does become reasonable to see ourselves in a competition, perhaps even a desperate competition, with our machines. This is the inevitable conclusion of the single-minded drive to automate everything. Joy's alarm is justified. But our core response, while it will certainly touch policy domains, must arise first of all in that place within ourselves where we are inspired to re-enflesh whatever can be re- enfleshed. To focus instead merely on stopping automation is already to have accepted that the machine, rather than our own journey of self- transformation, is the decisive shaper of our future. Yes, we urgently need to find the right place for our machines, but we can do so only by finding the right place for ourselves. Related articles: ** Part 1 of this series is in NF #100: http://www.netfuture.org/2000/Jan0600_100.html ** Part 2 of this series is in NF #101: http://www.netfuture.org/2000/Jan2700_101.html ========================================================================== CORRESPONDENCE The Emergency Room as an Electronic Game ---------------------------------------- Response to: "Death and the Single Cause" (NF-110) From: Valdemar Setzer I would like to tell you a personal story. In 1998, my father-in-law, then 83 years old, had acute health problems, was interned into a hospital Intensive Care Unit, and his physiologic functions deteriorated. He was unconscious, firstly due to strong sedatives, because he needed artificial breathing. Then on the third day my wife, who is an M.D., noticed that his eye pupils were of different sizes. She realized that he certainly had bad damage in his brain nervous functions. She then told the doctors that they should stop giving him medicine and let him die in peace. Her brother and sister were perfectly in agreement with her position. The next day his doctor came to her and told her all the various procedures they were planning to take, like dialysis, etc. "But we don't want this suffering for him anymore! Please let him go in peace." The doctor confessed that his chief said the drugs should continue. When the doctor saw that she was enraged he said: "But we managed to keep a patient this way for over five months!" She answered: "As doctors, it is our duty to extend the patient's life, not to extend his death!" consulted with her brothers, proceeded to the chief's office, and ordered him to disconnect the equipment. He protested, said that he gave orders there, etc., but finally agreed. The room was prepared, another patient was removed, and when the equipment was disconnected, her father slowly breathed less and less, and calmly died in the presence of his children. When she told me this story (I was abroad at that time), I had the clear impression that some (many?) doctors play with death as if it were an electronic game. They want to feel their power of preventing it, as long as possible. The condition of the patient (and the family) does not matter. It is a game not for life, but against death. It is interesting to note that in this case there were no financial interests involved: my father-in-law was under state medical care, so the doctors and hospital were receiving peanuts for their work and service. With love, Val. Valdemar W. Setzer - Dept. of Computer Science, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil - vwsetzer@ime.usp.br - www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer The Intimate Relationship between Good and Evil ----------------------------------------------- Response to: "Death and the Single Cause" (NF-110) From: Simon Baddeley I wanted to venture a quick comment on your thoughtful piece. I think it is not at all surprising that good and bad are seen by you as a hair's breadth apart. It was always understood by Christian theologians that the devil seeks to get as close as possible to the greatest good. I am very interested in the nature of trust in government and I know that it is a vital element of the working relationship between politicians and professionals -- but one of the greatest moments of trust is that occasion when one person accepts a brown envelope full of cash from another. Such people have a crystal clear grasp of their intimacy and the trust upon which it is based. Good and evil by this account are not polar but proximate. This can be confusing and makes it all the more impressive that you have been able to venture into an area of such moral importance and interest without losing your moral touch (a bit like defusing a very dangerous explosive device!). You balance on a tightrope of reflective moderation while dealing with issues that tempt people to extremes. I'm not saying you are woolly or ambivalent by the way. Quite the contrary. I was reminded though of the observation of a fine academic social psychologist I knew years ago who said the best shrinks are those who stay close enough to madness to understand and appreciate it without being drawn into its compelling logic. Simon Baddeley University of Birmingham An Author's Visit to the Mumford House -------------------------------------- Response to: "Hot Property in Leedsville" (NF-109) From: Gray Brechin (Gray Brechin originally sent this note to Langdon Winner, the author of "Hot Property in Leedsville". Brechin graciously agreed to its publication here in slightly revised form. SLT) Thank you so much for the notice about Mumford's house and the beautiful summation of his thought. Last summer, just before my book *Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin* was published by University of California Press, I visited Yale to look at the papers of Senator Francis Griffith Newlands -- papers that Berkeley's Bancroft Library does not have. I then drove into the Hudson Valley to visit a friend at Tivoli, but planned the trip to make a pilgrimage to Leedsville, since I designed *Imperial San Francisco* to be at least partly a tribute to Mumford's thought. Not knowing where the house was, I stopped at the Carnegie Library in Amenia to ask the librarian for directions. She at first did not understand my question and referred me to a section of the library containing all of Mumford's works, apparently donated by Sophia. When I'd made myself clearer, she remarked that people come from all over the world to see The House, and told me how to get there. I couldn't miss it, she said: there was a "For Sale" sign outside. I drove to the house and parked, and then had an experience that I can only liken to my first visit to a Gothic cathedral. There was no one there, and as you said, the house was altogether unremarkable. I walked around it, thinking of the decades they had spent there and the work done both inside and out. I then stood for half an hour, just looking at it, intensely moved to be at the site of someone who had such a profound impact upon my own life and thinking. Finally, I picked up a stone from the gravel driveway, and left for Tivoli. When I returned to California, I told Michael Black and Iain Boal about the sale, and we all agreed that the house should be preserved, but had no means to do so, and bowed to fate. So I am amazed to hear that it is still on the market. If some sort of campaign can be organized to save the house, count me in. I can't contribute much, but I would give something. When I was a teenager and heard that Frederick Church's house "Olana" in the Hudson Valley was in danger, I sent a few dollars, and when I visit that house now and look down that splendid valley (which, as you note, is in renewed danger), I feel proud that I had some little role in the effort to save it. Surely there must be people around the world who would contribute to saving the property there to perpetuate Mumford's memory. I'd hoped that *Imperial San Francisco* would get people to reread Mumford. My book *did* make it to the *San Francisco Chronicle's* best- seller list for fifteen weeks. I am delighted when those who know Mumford's work tell me that it would have made him proud. Unfortunately, the book was not reviewed in the east coast press. I am told that its supertitle leads eastern critics to think that it is of only local interest to those in the Bay Area, when it is, on the deeper level which I hoped to convey with the subtitle, about the dynamic pathology of urban metastasis, and of how the demands and wastes of megacities are so rapidly rendering the earth unable to support life. I also wanted to show why urban growth must be made to seem inevitable and ineluctable, and who most benefits from that growth (there is more class analysis than Mumford was wont to do.) I found that even at the recent convention of the Association of American Geographers in Pittsburgh, no one seemed to be talking about these critical issues. In fact, among the trendiest theoretical geographers, Mumford is not only unread but often unknown. I believe the reason for that is that his writings are so un-au courant, as well as so accessibly written. As one of his disciples, I feel somewhat like a Gnostic amidst the Christians, and I'm sure that many others who know Mumford's lasting value feel the same. Sincerely, Gray Brechin Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow U.C. Department of Geography gbrechin@uclink4.berkeley.edu Jacques Ellul's Place: Also Worth Saving ---------------------------------------- Response to: "Hot Property in Leedsville" (NF-109) From: David W. Gill (This letter, too, began as a private note to Langdon Winner. SLT) Thanks Langdon ... for a beautiful reflection. Five years ago I made a brief but intense effort to find some $$ to buy and preserve Jacques Ellul's house in Bordeaux. Most of the fifty or sixty people I contacted responded that it was a great idea but that they were overcommitted already and couldn't contribute. Only one person on my contact list attacked my effort, charging me with opportunism! In the end we raised about $5k (rather than the $100k necessary to really get the ball rolling). Ten people, by no means the wealthiest, each gave $500 to the cause. We decided to put the $5k in a fund to support efforts to transcribe and publish Ellul's unpublished manuscripts. I'm afraid we just couldn't make the dream of buying the house come true. We had to yield to financial reality. But as I re-visited the old property three or four times this past few months while on sabbatical in Bordeaux, I found it incredibly sad to see condos and other buildings going up on parts of Ellul's former property, now subdivided for "development." Alas, Ellul's house -- for so many years a unique place of gracious welcome to friend and stranger alike, a place of warmth and humor, a place of animated conversation and stunning insight into truth and reality, a place where great books were written and great ideas discussed -- has suffered the fate now befalling Mumford's place. Wouldn't it have been wonderful if both of these houses had been preserved for retreats, study conferences and the like? The memories and the impact remain for many of us but one still has to say: What a shame! Fraternally yours, DWG David W. Gill Carl I. Lindberg Professor of Applied Ethics North Park University 3225 W. Foster Avenue, Chicago IL 60625 Tel: 773-244-5662 Fax: 773-583-0858 Images That Preclude Thought ---------------------------- Response to: "Image Ascendent, or Descendent?" (NF-109) From: Irv Thomas Hi, Steve... Just got around to reading your observations on the image thing, and it brought to mind something that has been galling me for some time ... at least partly because I can't seem to get any confirmation on it, and wonder hence if it is just my own perception slowing down because of age. It seems to me, Steve, that something has changed in the image production -- maybe sometime within the past decade. Images are being sliced, timewise to a precise relationship with the pace at which the mind absorbs images, but before we can actually think about them. I see it as a refinement that makes dumb receptors out of us, very much in the way that subliminal images were once supposed to do. In doing so, it also sets up an internal tension that is never released by explication of what has just been seen -- a steady state of tension that actually does something to our mind. Is this so? And if it is, why isn't there anything being said about it? Irv ========================================================================== ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES New Home for "Confronting Technology" Web Site ---------------------------------------------- Lowell Monke's "Confronting Technology" web site, an affiliate of NetFuture, has changed its location. As always, you can click through to it from the NetFuture main page, but you can also reach it directly at www.gemair.com/~lmonke . Modest in scale, this web site will not overwhelm you, but provides an excellent guide to selected resources in technology criticism. Not only that, but it *looks* a lot better than the NetFuture web site! ========================================================================== ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER NetFuture is a freely distributed newsletter dealing with technology and human responsibility. It is published by The Nature Institute, 169 Route 21C, Ghent NY 12075 (tel: 518-672-0116). Postings occur roughly every couple of weeks. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of *The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst*. Copyright 2000 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may also redistribute individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this paragraph are attached. NetFuture is supported by freely given user contributions, and could not survive without them. For details and special offers, see http://www.netfuture.org/support.html . Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/ To subscribe to NetFuture send the message, "subscribe netfuture yourfirstname yourlastname", to listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu . No subject line is needed. To unsubscribe, send the message, "signoff netfuture". Send comments or material for publication to Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com). If you have problems subscribing or unsubscribing, send mail to: netfuture-request@maelstrom.stjohns.edu .