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.

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.

Slow Blog Manifesto

A movement I could get behind: Slow Blog.

(via Tom Slee)

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.

Techno Tuesday: Life

Techno Tuesday is by Andy Rementer.

Voting Machine Problems

The US is once again demonstrating its supremacy when it comes to screwing up elections (with technology). Kim Zetter at Wired's Threat Level blog is tracking problems with electronic voting machines in early voting. That blog is a good jumping-off point for lots of other coverage. Regarding touchscreens in particular I posted more at my other blog.

More on those CNN debate graphs

I found this article at the American Prospect by Sam Boyd to be very informative: What Are Those Squiggly Lines on CNN Telling You? He digs into the history of "dial-testing" and the criticisms of it.

Previously: Graphing the debates (live!)

Computers and the financial crisis

Richard Dooling (whose new book is Rapture for the Geeks) has an op-ed in today's New York Times about computers and the financial crisis. Excerpt:

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that all of that imaginary wealth is locked up somewhere inside the computers, and that we humans, led by the silverback males of the financial world, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, are frantically beseeching the monolith for answers. Or maybe we are lost in space, with Dave the astronaut pleading, “Open the bank vault doors, Hal.”

As the current financial crisis spreads (like a computer virus) on the earth’s nervous system (the Internet), it’s worth asking if we have somehow managed to colossally outsmart ourselves using computers. After all, the Wall Street titans loved swaps and derivatives because they were totally unregulated by humans. That left nobody but the machines in charge.

Link: The Rise of the Machines.

Dooling points to a related essay by science historian George Dyson at Edge: Economic dis-equilibrium.

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.

Convergence 08

I just learned about Convergence 08, a two-day event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA featuring a bunch of futurists and other thinkers on technology. From their buzzword-heavy blurb:

On November 15-16, 2008, the world's most dangerous ideas will collide in Mountain View, California. Convergence⁰⁸ examines the world-changing possibilities of Nanotech and the life-changing promises of Biotech. It is the premier forum for debate and exploration of Cogtech ethics, and ground zero of the past and future Infotech revolution. Convergence⁰⁸ is an innovative, lively unconference, the first and only forum dedicated to NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies.

Link: Convergence08.org.

The speaker list includes some heavyweight futurists/technologists like Paul Saffo, Aubrey de Grey and Peter Norvig, and at least one critic, Denise Caruso.

I'm not sure I get the idea of an "unconference" as the main event, though. I thought those were typically free, alternative forums that took place outside big conferences.

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.

Graphing the debates (live!)

My wife and I watched last Friday's presidential debate on PBS and I'm glad.  It was only later that I heard about the graphical extravaganza that I missed by not watching CNN:

(Image from WSJ's Numbers Guy blog by Carl Bialik: Scoring the Debate Live on CNN.)

This screenshot is the HD version.  I gather that non-HD viewers saw the bottom part but not the analyst scorecards on the sides.  The "audience reaction" lines along the bottom represents data from 32 focus group viewers.

Carl Bialik at the WSJ compares it to a sporting match and says he and friends "were alternately distracted, bemused and befuddled by all the data."  But apparently CNN didn't think it was distracting enough -- regarding the audience lines, Bialik says, "The audience rarely went sharply positive or negative, so he [CNN's executive producer for elections] plans to zoom in on the center of the scale."  So basically the idea is not to indicate any kind of accurate measure. They just want to show pretty lines going up and down.

The CNN graph is a distraction, of course, and yet another manifestation of the triumph of surface/sensationalist crap over reflection and substance, but it's more than that too.  People's perceptions will be shaped by it, both directly, in the sense that the scores guide them in their thinking, and indirectly by what they cause people to miss by not paying closer attention to the candidates.  Can CNN not leave the viewers alone for 90 minutes to think for themselves?

I was surprised to learn via Google that real-time polling data was presented during debates way back in 1992. This article at a site called the Museum for Broadcast Communications claims that the experiment was a success: The Debate Pulse.

Silicon valley techies have a way of taking this sort of thing to a new level, and they didn't disappoint.  Via Valleywag comes this plot of Twitter activity during the debate, created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (see The Debate: A Twitter Play-by-Play). Feast your eyes on this colorful monstrosity:

 

(click to enlarge)

I challenge anyone to point to something meaningful in that mess.  Okay, lots of purple means lots of people twittered about Iraq after McCain said something provocative about Iraq.  Big surprise!

Twitter even has an election site where you can watch live election-related brain farts as they arrive from the quick fingers of the Twitterati: Twitter Election 2008.  I get that people chat about the debate, online and off, but I object to the suggestion that any of this real-time data is meaningful.  I likely muttered a few things during the debate myself, but I'm sure none of it was worth remembering.

Technology and the financial meltdown

James Howard Kunstler makes an interesting point: 

What we're seeing in this fiasco, among other things, is a lesson in the diminishing returns of technology. This is a train wreck of investment vehicles so complex that they could only be created with the aid of computers. The result is that hardly anyone -- perhaps even nobody in or out of Wall Street -- really understands what they represent. In fact, this alphabet soup of engineered securities -- CDOs, CDSs, MBSs, SIVs, etc -- was cooked up from a recipe of Ponzi algorithms. They were designed to be mathematically indecipherable, except by computers, in an alternative universe of model-making that bore only a superficial relation to the real world. That was their dirty secret. And the dirty secret of the Great Bail-out is that, in the real world, we will never be able to discover the actual trading value of these things at any number above zero. This is why they are called "toxic."

Link: The Ponzi-Plus Plan.

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.

Considering long-term ramifications of technologies

The New York Times has a good article today by Cornelia Dean about our growing need (and ill-preparedness) to consider the long-term impact of new technologies, particularly geoengineering and nanotechnology.  Excerpt:

Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.

Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.

Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.

Link: Handle With Care