Question Technology

Wired for War

Everything I've read or heard about Wired for War by P.W. Singer has been excellent. Here's a blurb about it from Singer's website for the book:

An amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. This upheaval is already afoot -- remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years.  But it is only the start. Military officers quietly acknowledge that new prototypes will soon make human fighter pilots obsolete, while the Pentagon researches tiny robots the size of flies to carry out reconnaissance work now handled by elite Special Forces troops.

Wired for War takes the reader on a journey to meet all the various players in this strange new world of war: odd-ball roboticists working in latter-day “skunk works” in the midst of suburbia; military pilots flying combat mission from their office cubicles outside Las Vegas; the Iraqi insurgents who are their targets; journalists trying to figure out just how to cover robots at war; and human rights activists wrestling with what is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines. 

Links to some good interviews with Singer last week about the book: Fresh Air, The Daily Show.

Update: Singer has an article in The New Atlantis, adapted from his book: Military Robots and the Laws of War.

Slow-tech by Andrew Price

New book by environmentalist and marine biologist Andrew Price: Slow-tech: Manifesto for an Over-wound World (only out in the UK apparently). From the book description: 

The modern world has put its faith in high-tech processes that has left it weakened and ill-equipped to withstand catastrophe. "Slow-Tech" argues for a world with greater robustness, something that is possible in surprisingly simple ways. A sailor crossing the Atlantic in a small yacht would want to minimize excess baggage. But it would be unthinkable not to carry more fresh water than seemed necessary, to survive unexpected calms or storms. Yet the imperative of profit, especially over the last century, has driven modernity towards 'lean, mean' strategies in every area of life; squeezing waste out of commercial, technological and environmental systems may make money in the short term, but is our highly geared, highly strung way of life sustainable? Andrew Price, sailor, explorer and environmental scientist at the University of Warwick argues that in the long-term, spare capacity actually pays. From the destruction of New Orleans to the loss of the world's fish-stocks and intractable problems such as MRSA, "Slow-Tech" demonstrates how the reckless pursuit of efficiency and cost-effectiveness frequently backfires. It makes the case for robustness as an equally important measure of performance in fields as diverse as healthcare, military operations and engineering.Unexpected and counter-intuitive yet convincing and timely, "Slow-Tech" offers an alternative vision for life in the twenty-first century - a rounded vision of balance and robustness that would be healthier for the planet - and healthier for us.

Bryan Appleyard has a review today in the Times. His verdict is mixed (good idea but too much about boats). I like the title.

Lessig's Prose

Whenever I read something by Lawrence Lessig I feel like my head is filling up with fog. Today I came across a new book by David Post called In Search of Mr. Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, which has the following blurb by Lessig on the back:

"Reading this beautifully written and extraordinarily diverse work today is what it must have been like to know or read Jefferson then. Post has crafted an experience in understanding that allows us to glimpse the genius that Jefferson was, and to leave the book astonished by the talent this extraordinary writer is."

Back in October I read an article of Lessig's that I believe was excerpted from his new book, Remix (Tom Slee has a good review of it at his blog). The article was called In Defense of Piracy, though it never really offered one. I read the article twice with the intention of writing something about it here (but never managed to). One of the points I wanted to make was that for a lawyer, Lessig is surprisingly vague and muddy in his writing.

Is this fair or even relevant? I think so. It means something when the spokesman for a new culture is such a bad writer. And I don't claim to be any kind of prose master, but I don't think that's a prerequisite for criticism.

"How to think about science" now in print

The CBC Ideas series by David Cayley on "How to think about science?" (mentioned previously here and here) is now available to buy as printed transcripts (presumably bound in some format, but I don't know) at the CBC shop.

The audio is still available at the Ideas web site in Real or mp3 format. You can also find it on iTunes.

Aldous Huxley's Island

Jeffrey Kripal on Aldous Huxley:

I find it strange, and more than a little depressing, that, despite all of this well-known biographical and metaphysical material, Aldous Huxley is best known today for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Why is a man who had so much to say about the synthesis of science and spirituality and the deeper dimensions of human consciousness known primarily for a novel about the authoritarian horrors and technological dead-ends of the modern consumer state? Why is this consummate individualist, intrigued by the potential for spiritual ecstasy, still mostly identified with a story of moral despair and fascist political control? Obviously, part of the answer is because Brave New World was so incredibly accurate. But Huxley did more than diagnose the disease; he also provided what he thought of as a realistic treatment in Island.

I interviewed Laura Huxley about Island a few years ago (she died last year at the age of 96). She described the novel to me as "the last will and testament" of her late husband. Island, she suggested, is where he left his most sincere convictions and deepest thoughts about what human beings are capable of at their best. He was very careful, she pointed out, not to include anything in the novel that was not possible, that had not been practiced somewhere before and found useful. So he was quite upset when Island was received as a piece of fantasy rather than a practical program for translating his abstract philosophy of consciousness and existential mysticism into effective social, educational, and contemplative experiments. Island was no fantasy for Aldous Huxley. It was, as Laura said, his "ultimate legacy."

This seems like the right time to entertain the possibility that Aldous Huxley is more relevant now than he ever was, that Island is as important as Brave New World, and that the two novels should be read together. I am particularly struck by Huxley's vibrant critique of religious literalism and the whole psychology of belief in Island. "In religion all words are dirty words," the Old Raja's little green book declared. Hence the novel's ideal of the "Tantrik agnostic" (Aldous's grandfather returns) and its scorn for that "Old Nobodaddy" in the sky (the expression is pure William Blake). Hence the humorous prayer of Pala: "Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief." The scarecrows in the fields were even made to look like a God the Father, so that the children who manipulated them with strings to scare off the birds could learn that "all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours."

Link: Brave New Worldview: The Return of Aldous Huxley (Chronicle of Higher Education)

The full article is much longer and worth reading if you're interested in Huxley and issues of science and religion. I haven't read Island, but I'm tempted to give it a try now, though I think it may still be a wee bit too metaphysical/new-agey for me.

What if the book business collapses?

Hugh McGuire asks "What would happen if, tomorrow, every publisher, and every book store, went out of business? What would you do?"

Link: Hugh McGuire's blog, discussed also at Huffington Post. See also the recent article by David Streitfeld in the NYT: Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It. Related viewing: Paperback Dreams.

I increasingly fear for bookstores. The chains are devoting less and less space to books. Indies I used to visit have closed and the rest are struggling. I confess I still sometimes buy from the chains and Amazon for convenience, but I try to spend more at independent stores or direct from publishers online. Indie publishing will last longer than indie bookstores, I think. They can profit from selling direct or by subscription to the scattered readers who remain (as the excellent Open Letter does). But the physical bookstore, or at least the bookstore that is substantially a bookstore and not a music or video store, won't last much longer. This is not because they cling to an out-of-date "retail experience". The problem is primarily a cultural one -- people aren't reading books. We should be grateful that the Internet will continue to make it easier than ever for those who still read to find books, but we should also be sad that the superior experience of buying books in good bookstores is dying.

See also: Tom Slee's series of stories "Mr. Amazon's Bookshop".

Tech terms push out nature terms in kids' dictionary

Some Canadians are upset that the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, a sort of practice dictionary for seven-year-olds, has dropped several words from nature in favor of tech terms. From the Canadian Press:

VANCOUVER — A B.C. environmental group is flabbergasted that the publisher of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has sent words like “beaver” and “dandelion” the way of the dodo bird.

In the latest version of its dictionary for schoolchildren, Oxford University Press has cut nature terms such as heron, magpie, otter, acorn, clover, ivy, sycamore, willow and blackberry.

In their place, the university publishing house has substituted more modern terms, like the electronic Blackberry, blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband.

Canadian wildlife artist and conservationist Robert Bateman, whose Get to Know Program has been inspiring children to go outdoors and “get to know” their wild neighbours for more than a decade, said the decision is telling kids that nature just isn't that important.

“This is another nail in the coffin of human beings being acquainted with nature,” Mr. Bateman said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

“If you can't name things, how can you love them? And if you don't love them, then you're not going to care a hoot about protecting them or voting for issues that would protect them.”

[...]

“I don't want to sound like an old you-know-what, but I have a feeling that quite a number of decisions are made by 20-somethings or 30-somethings,” he said. “There are a whole bunch of them out there who were raised on Saturday morning cartoons and video games and not out in nature.”

Mr. Bateman plans to fire off a letter to the university press brass in protest.

“I find it frightening what is happening, that people are losing a connection with nature,” he said.

Link: Nature lovers livid as 'blog' replaces 'beaver' in Oxford's junior dictionary.

I think the uproar is a bit silly, but still... broadband? Blackberry?

The photo of blackberries (the old-fashioned kind) is from wildmanstevebrill.com.

Kevin Kelly on Screen Culture

Tech-pontificator Kevin Kelly has a long piece in the NY Times magazine about screens. An excerpt:

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book.

Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen.

Link: Idea Lab - Becoming Screen Literate,
via Kelly's blog The Technium: Screen Fluency.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm skeptical. One of the messages from Naomi Baron's book Always On was that, perhaps surprisingly, today's youth are likely reading and writing more text than their parents did. There are differences in how they use text (and some reasons for concern) but there's little doubt that they're still hooked into a kind of word culture. So I don't buy Kelly's idea here, unless he has some real evidence for it (and Kelly's style seems heavy on opinion and low on evidence).

Kelly has been posting many lengthy articles like this one to his blog recently, which has made me suspect that he has a book forthcoming, and indeed he does according to the blurb at the end of the NYT piece: "Kevin Kelly is senior maverick at Wired and the author of “Out of Control” and a coming book on what technology wants." What technology wants? Interesting...

One of those recent blog posts in particular caught my eye. It's called The Pro-Actionary Principle and in it he rejects the precautionary principle, or at least his interpretation of it, which looks a lot like a straw man to me. He argues instead for his own "pro-actionary principle" based on extropian/futurist Max More's earlier document by the same name. I think Kelly and More's project is flawed from the start because it is based on a faulty premise --  that the precautionary principle means "technology must be proven safe." Perfect proof is almost never possible and the intention is not to hold up progress until it is achieved. Governments that use the precautionary principle seem to understand this without any difficulty.

The Rise of Malcolm Gladwell-ish Anecdote Books

This is a good little rant by Joel Spolsky (of "Joel on Software" fame) about what he sees as a trend in current science books. He starts off by commenting on a review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book...

This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

Friedman and Gladwell's outsized, flat-world success has lead to a huge number of wannabes. I was really looking forward to reading Simplexity, because it sounded like an interesting topic, until I settled down with it tonight and discovered that it was chock-full of all those amusing bedtime stories about the map of the cholera plague in London in 1854, which I've heard a million times, ...

Link: Anecdotes

I haven't read anything by Malcolm Gladwell, but I have read Jeffrey Kluger's Simplexity and I also found it disappointing for similar reasons. I expected Kluger to get around to explaining some actual theory or scientific work going on at Murray Gell-Mann's Santa Fe Institute, but Kluger never got beyond anecdotes and simplistic "storifying," if that's a word.

Update: After more thought, and after reading some comments on Joel's post and a good counterpoint by Dan Saffer, I feel like clarifying my opinion on this...  I think there is great value in pop science books, in articles written by non-experts, and in anecdotes. I read Joel's piece not as a rant against all those things but against those things badly done. Where you draw the line on that is probably a personal thing -- it depends on the reader. I was probably not the intended type of reader for Kluger's book (I think this is partially the fault of the publisher for marketing that book in the science category instead of business).

My point in quoting Joel's article here is not to bash non-experts or "soft" science writing. I think he's probably right that there are more and more "big think" books out there that are not very original or substantive.

Jonathan Franzen doesn't want to hear your cellphone conversation

Novelist Jonathan Franzen has a good essay in the current issue of Technology Review. It's a complaint about cellphones, though it meanders into personal memoir about 9/11 and his parents (kind of an odd article to see in Technology Review). It begins:

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I'm still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw--this is just the way life is now.

I'm not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late 20th century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise ("pink noise") that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor's television set: I love them. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinema-goers, so many open-mouthed crunchers of popcorn: yes.

Link: "I Just Called to Say I Love You": Cellphones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space (free registration required)

Also in this issue, and also a little unusual, is a book review by Emily Gould of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and a new collection of Walter Benjamin writings, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. The gist of her article is: Shirky is a cheerleader, Walter Benjamin was a pessimist (and complicated). Link: "It's Not a Revolution if Nobody Loses": A new age of "technological reproducibility" is here. Ugh.

The picture at right is from a forthcoming Penguin Great Ideas edition of Benjamin's essay.

The New Nuclear Danger

I've been reading Jonathan Schell's excellent book The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (new in paperback), so I found this moment from last night's debate interesting:

IFILL: What should be the trigger, or should there be a trigger, when nuclear weapons use is ever put into play?

PALIN: Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be all, end all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet, so those dangerous regimes, again, cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, period.

Her next utterance was a bit more coherent but didn't answer the question either: "Our nuclear weaponry here in the U.S. is used as a deterrent. And that's a safe, stable way to use nuclear weaponry."

I imagine that Palin agrees with the Bush doctrine, regardless of whether she knows what it is.  That doctrine in fact puts US use of nuclear weapons on the table as a pre-emptive measure against states that are acquiring weapons of mass destruction. This is a far cry from cold-war era "no first strike" deterrence postures.

The world has changed a lot since the end of the cold war.  In his book, Schell does an excellent job of describing what's changed, why the end of the cold war did not lead to disarmament, why rogue states acquiring nukes is a tremendous threat, and why Bush's doctrine of US global dominance and pre-emptive war to prevent proliferation is not a solution.  Something needs to be done -- nobody can feel comfortable with states like Iran and North Korea wielding nukes -- but in Schell's opinion the only rational answer is global nuclear disarmament.  Surprisingly, the world came closest to enacting such a plan during the Reagan/Gorbachev summits in the late 80s.  Reagan was a hawk but he also believed in abolishing nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately nuclear disarmament treaties are all but defunct now. Neoconservatives, on the contrary, have pushed for new types of nukes and new protocols that allow for US first-use (see "global strike" doctrine).

I hope Barack Obama reads this book or has someone like Schell advising him.

Regarding Sarah Palin, I found a post at a foreign policy blog called Democracy Arsenal that describes better than I can why it's so scary that a vice-presidential candidate can't speak intelligently about the decision to launch a nuclear strike: Palin on Nuclear Weapons.

On a related note, check out PD Smith's recent article Faust and the Physicists.

Rapture for the geeks

A new book about the singularity, this one by novelist Richard Dooling: Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ. From the publisher description:

In this fascinating, entertaining, and illuminating book, Dooling looks at what some of the greatest minds have to say about our role in a future in which technology rapidly leaves us in the dust. As Dooling writes, comparing human evolution to technological evolution is “worse than apples and oranges: It’s appliances versus orangutans.” Is the era of Singularity, when machines outthink humans, almost upon us? Will we be enslaved by our supercomputer overlords, as many a sci-fi writer has wondered? Or will humans live lives of leisure with computers doing all the heavy lifting?

With antic wit, fearless prescience, and common sense, Dooling provocatively examines nothing less than what it means to be human in what he playfully calls the age of b.s. (before Singularity)—and what life will be like when we are no longer alone with Mother Nature at Darwin’s card table. Are computers thinking and feeling if they can mimic human speech and emotions? Does processing capability equal consciousness? What happens to our quaint beliefs about God when we’re all worshipping technology? What if the human compulsion to create ever more capable machines ultimately leads to our own extinction? Will human ingenuity and faith ultimately prevail over our technological obsessions? Dooling hopes so, and his cautionary glimpses into the future are the best medicine to restore our humanity.

Dooling has a website and blog.

Jeff Jarvis to address internet complaints once and for all

In a post called "Sigh," Jeff Jarvis complains about the whiners:

I’m thinking of writing my Guardian column this week responding to some because I’m tired of having to answer the same complaints over and over. I sometimes despair at being able to advance the discussion about the opportunities of the connected age, as someone in the room will inevitably say: “Yes, but there are inaccuracies on the internet.” Or: “Most people watch junk.” Or: “There are no standards.”

[...]

And then I got email for a panel discussion at NYU on Oct. 21 called Crossing the Line, which asks these questions: “Are there any ethics on the web?” “Should bloggers be held to journalistic standards?” “Who makes the rules — the media, the courts or YOU?”

Sigh.

The implied answers, of course: The web has no ethics… Bloggers have no standards…. The wrong people are making the rules (if there are any).

To hash over these weightless questions they have nothing but the products of big, old media: David Carr of the NY Times, Liz Smith of the NY Post, Jim Kelley of Time, Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, and Sherrese Smith, counsel for WPNI.

Mind you, just across campus, NYU has at least two of the country’s greatest thinkers on the internet and its implications for society, Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky. But they’re not on that panel. New York is thick with great practitioners of new ways on the internet, but they’re not there.

Same old questions/objections/complaints/fears. Where is the talk of new opportunities in our new reality?

Link: Sigh.

Here is the comment I posted over there.  I confess my mood was a little cranky, but I still stand by this...

Sighing over the questions and calling them “weightless” doesn’t answer them. Maybe they keep getting asked because the pat answers people give (on either side) aren’t good enough and some people are hungering for deeper analysis.

For example, asking the question “Are there any ethics on the web?” does not imply the questioner is assuming “the web has no ethics,” just as I assume your response is not simply “the web has ethics.” (And the other common response, which I’ve heard Shirky give — that the web has the best and the worst — doesn’t cut it either.)

I get your point in the first part of the post and agree with you — it’s a disservice to you as a speaker when people don’t hear you because they can’t think past simple/closed-minded objections. My problem is with you dismissing the NYU panel for the same reasons. I don’t know anything about those speakers’ qualifications, but on the face of it the panel sounds worthwhile.

Jarvis's sigh reminds me of danah boyd's similar post a while back called feeding quasi-"legitimate" trolls in an attention economy, which I wrote about in a previous post: The Tender Ears of the Blogosphere.

By the way, I finally read The Dumbest Generation (one of those troll books) and I think Boyd is wrong -- it's a serious critique that deserves attention, though I certainly don't agree 100% with Bauerlein, and I think the book's title is ridiculous.

One of the points that Bauerlein makes is that there's no funding to study really fundamental questions about technology in education like "does it work?"  Danah boyd, Clay Shirky and the Berkman Center are all doing fine and important work but a lot of it presupposes that the internet and technology are beneficial, wherever they're applied.  It bypasses fundamentals and goes straight to studying what kids are doing with the technologies, how it's empowering them, and what else technology could do for them. (For example, see this talk abstract danah boyd posted Thursday.)  It's no surprise that a lot of funding for these researchers comes from industry.  Again, I'm not saying this isn't important work, but it's not the whole story.

Update: Jarvis's promised Guardian column is now up (and is mostly straw-man silliness): Once and for all.

Nick Carr's sources for "Is Google making us stupid?"

Nick Carr has posted a comprehensive list of sources and related readings for his Atlantic piece "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" This is excellent and worth digging into: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?": sources and notes.

As I wrote before, I think the key question is whether there is scientific evidence for these effects or not -- and Carr references one study and a book (Proust and the Squid) that claim such evidence. That's the most powerful part of Carr's article, in my opinion, and I haven't seen a rebuttal that doesn't ignore it (and thus fail as a rebuttal) -- to wit, the bloviating, er, debate about this article that continues at The Edge and other such forums.

Jeff Jarvis on being a hypocrite

Jeff Jarvis, media commentator and apologist for Web 2.0 and all things new and shiny, asks his readers to forgive him for publishing his forthcoming love letter to Google in an old media format -- a book (gasp). He quotes a few "graphs" from the end of the book:

I confess: I’m a hypocrite. If I had followed my own rules – if I had eaten my own dogfood – you wouldn’t be reading this book right now, at least not as a book. You’d be reading it online, for free. You’d have discovered it via links and search. You’d be entering into a conversation around any point in the book. You’d be able to correct me and I’d be able to update the book with the latest amazing stats from Google. This would be even more of a collaboration than it already is. We might form a society of Googlethinkers on Facebook and you’d offer better advice and newer ways to look at the world than I have been able to. I might make money from speaking and consulting instead of a publisher’s advance.

But instead, I made money from a publisher’s advance. That is why you are reading this as a book. Sorry. Dog’s gotta eat.

And the truth is, I already do most everything I describe above – on my blog. I believe the two forms may come together eventually. But in the meantime, I’m no fool; I couldn’t pass up a nice check from Collins, my publisher, and all sorts of services from Harper-Collins, its parent, including editing, design, publicity, sales, a speaker’s bureau, and online help. That’s why publishing is still publishing. The question is, how long can it stay that way?

I say not so fast. If cheerleaders like Jarvis really believe print is dead and that we all need to get in line with the "new business models" then they should be the first to try it. We're no fools either.

Link: Apologizing for the book (warning: not exactly work safe now that Jarvis is running American Apparel ads)