Question Technology

The Gospel of Consumption

It probably won't shock anyone to find an article called "The Gospel of Consumption" in (environmentalist) magazine Orion, but this piece by Jeffrey Kaplan is better than your average anti-consumption rant, I think. 

He talks about the forces that created American consumer society in the last century.  In the 1920s the abundance brought about by "labor-saving" machinery could have led to short workdays and a more active citizenship (as championed by people such as W.K. Kellogg).  Instead, industrialists and politicians put economic growth at the forefront, leading to the wonders of advertising to manufacture need in consumers, thus leading to more production and even more work.

Jeffrey Kaplan is an activist and has an agenda, to be sure (see Take Back Your Time for more work along these lines).  I believe his history here to be fairly accurate, though.  It's an interesting contrast to Clay Shirky's story.

Link: The Gospel of Consumption (the sidebar has some interesting links to check out as well, such as the introduction to Kellogg's Six-Hour Day by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt).

Oh, and happy May Day (Wikipedia, Britannica).

P.D. Smith on Scientists and Superweapons

Peter D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, has a good article up at 3 Quarks Daily about mad scientists and related topics.  An excerpt:

The physicist [Freeman Dyson], who worked on weapons projects as well as the Project Orion atomic spaceship in the 1950s, thinks there’s more than a grain of truth in the Strangelove stereotype. "The mad scientist is not just a figure of speech," says Dyson, "there really are such people, and they love to play around with crazy schemes. Some of them may even be dangerous, so one is not altogether wrong in being scared of such people."

Recently, I was powerfully reminded of Dyson’s comment while reviewing the reissue of Dan O’Neill’s classic nuclear history The Firecracker Boys (1994). In 1958, physicist Edward Teller, the self-styled father of the H-bomb, turned up in Juneau, Alaska, and held an impromptu news conference. He was there to unveil Project Chariot, a plan to create a deep-water harbour at Cape Thompson in northwest Alaska using thermonuclear bombs. Seventy million cubic yards of earth would be shifted instantly using nuclear explosions equivalent to 2.4 million tons of TNT. That’s 40% of all the explosive energy expended in World War II. Some firecracker.

Locals said they didn’t need a harbour. They also raised understandable concerns about radioactivity. After all, the year before, Nevil Shute had published On the Beach, one of the best-selling of all nuclear fictions (four million copies by 1980), in which the world dies a lingering death caused by fallout from a nuclear war fought with cobalt bombs. Teller was unfazed by the criticisms. That year he had defended atmospheric nuclear tests, claiming such fallout was no more dangerous than “being an ounce overweight”. He tried to reassure the Alaskans: “We have learned to use these powers with safety”. He even promised them a harbour in the shape of a polar bear.

Link: Someday this crazy world will have to end.

AI Panic!

AI Panic! is a smart and funny blog by AI researcher and PhD student Robin Baumgarten:

What's AI Panic?

This site is dedicated to research and unveil the perils, imminence and probabilities of a hostile takeover of the world through artificial intelligence. I will stay on the lookout for you and post articles, research papers and break-throughs of everything that could affect this danger.

Who's panicing?

Not me. Not yet, at least. And you probably shouldn't, either. But staying alert and informed doesn't hurt.

Link: aipanic.com

Indra Sinha: Animal's People

Animal's People by Indra Sinha is set among survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal.  Sinha writes on his blog that it "is a story about poor people coping with tragedy and injustice. The book could have been set anywhere where the chemical industry has destroyed people's lives. I had considered calling the city Receio and setting it in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in central or south America, west Africa or the Philippines.  In the end it was Khaufpur and India."

Animal's People recently won the Commonwealth writer's prize and it was shortlisted for the Man Booker.

Link: Indra Sinha's website and blog.

I learned of Sinha through an older book of his called The Cybergypsies (available in a new edition at Amazon UK).  I picked it up in Italy to read on the flight home.  It's a novelistic retelling of early pre-web life on the net in the late 80s and 90s.  Sinha was an active member of these addictive online communities, explored through means of dial-up BBS's and text-based roleplaying adventures.  Sinha tells of infiltrating a hacker board and other adventurers with activists, roleplayers, and other online pioneers that he calls cybergypsies.  It's absorbing and strange reading.

Cellphone health risks

Okay, maybe I'm naive to argue that the wifi-resisters deserve a hearing.  But how about cellphones?  Questioning whether cellphones might cause cancer will also get you ridiculed in many circles, yet studies keep coming out that say there's a risk, particularly for children.  Studies that don't find increased cancer risk also keep coming out, so the issue is far from decided.

The best source I've found for following news of cell phone health risks is textually.org: archive of health risk posts.

Genetic Dystopia Movie News

A new movie version of Brave New World is planned, with Leonardo DiCaprio starring and Ridley Scott directing: Times (London), LA Times.

Last week Gattaca was rereleased as a special edition DVD.  Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society writes about it at Alternet:

But what about the real-life prospects of the horrors portrayed in Gattaca? In 1997, fertility clinics weren't advertising delivery of a boy or a girl -- you choose -- using the embryo screening technique portrayed in the film. The world didn't yet know about Dolly the cloned sheep. Far fewer genes had been mapped to far fewer traits. Genetic scientists hadn't yet created the monkey or the bunny engineered with a jellyfish gene to glow in the dark, or the goats and sheep that lactate spider silk, or the mice that run mazes faster than their nonengineered counterparts yet also display increased sensitivity to pain.

These technical feats are not the only portents of a future in which genetic engineers take it upon themselves to create designer babies and "enhanced" humans. Perhaps even more troubling is the small but disturbing number of prognosticators who predict this future with eagerness rather than caution; they just can't wait for Gattaca and Brave New World to transcend fiction and become real life.

Who are these promoters of human redesign? A few are researchers for whom the "sweetness" of the science eclipses its social consequences. A few more -- most notably Princeton's former mouse biologist, Lee Silver -- have shifted their careers from the lab to the talk show in order to push scenarios of a "GenRich" ruling class and a hoi polloi composed of "Naturals."

Then there's the coterie of bioethicists who can't say no to anything that any scientist dreams up, and another crew of libertarians who can't say no to anything that the market might wish to offer. And there's the whacky band of futurists who call themselves "transhumanists" and natter about "homo perfectus" and the "Singularity" -- the messianic moment when human technology will suddenly cause superhuman, superintelligent "entities" to appear among us.

Nearly all these crystal-ball gazers acknowledge that Gattaca-like inequalities would be part of their longed-for picture. But this does not seem to dampen their enthusiasm. From their perspective, it seems, self-evident truths about human equality are way outdated, and dreams of social justice and the common good are so 20th century.

Link: Are we headed for a sci-fi dystopia?

Google's Energy Addiction

Harper's has a little piece about Google's energy habits: Keyword: Evil -- Google's addiction to cheap electricity.

Fake Steve Jobs gives us a summary:

I was gratified to see this article in Harper's which describes the obscene amount of energy Google eats up with its data centers ("a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier") and the slick trickery that Google employed in Oregon so it could keep getting us taxpayers to pay part of their electric bills. The Bush administration wanted to privatize a utility. Google and a friendly congressman persuaded Bush not to do it so they could keep getting below-market-rate electricity -- ie, electricity subsidized by us, the taxpayers.

Starting to see the pattern here? We subsidize Google's electric bills so they can run their giant data centers. But those data centers cause global warming. So Google and the VCs create new companies to solve global warming. We subsidize those companies too. Google and the VCs get rich. We get a nice card at Christmas, and a free Gmail account. Right on, dudes. Don't be evil.

Link: Larry Page, friend of the environment.

How to address fear about WiFi health risks?

Dale Dougherty writes at O'Reilly Radar about supposed health hazards of wifi, and how a small number of residents used this fear to force Sebastopol, CA to stop a plan to permit city-wide public wifi.  An excerpt:

One can see the fear spreading. Science should be a way to dispel such fears but it is clear with this group of people that science cannot be trusted. They put forth the idea that science should be able to prove that there is no harm and therefore eliminate any risk, and without such proof, we should not move forward. They use this logic to recommend a "precautionary" approach, which is their keyword for a "know-nothing, do-nothing" approach.

[...]

Now, I don't know that wireless (or electricity) is without harm. I can read the research that does exist and learn more -- if I have the time and reason to do so. However, I do not like the smell of fear, and when people justify actions based on their own fears, I become suspicious that the concern is unwarranted. If it wasn't wifi, it would be flouride. Something is needed to affix to their anxiety. I can only be glad that they weren't alive when the city decided on electrification a century ago.

Link: Hazards of Wifi - O'Reilly Radar.

Like Dougherty, I'm willing to bet that wifi isn't dangerous, but I still have problems with what he says.  For example: "it is clear with this group of people that science cannot be trusted."  Well, we do have examples where scientists has been wrong in similar situations and should not have been trusted as quickly -- think pesticides and radiation fallout from nuclear tests and accidents.  How do scientists earn trust?  By having a good track record and by providing evidence.  Have they provided enough evidence that wifi is harmless?  I don't know, but what I've read seems to suggest that more studies could be done.  The precautionary approach does not (I think) call for absolute proof, but only for strong evidence -- I think Dougherty's characterization of it is simplistic.

Dougherty doesn't like people basing their decisions on emotion, but how different is it when he bases his decision on blind faith in the scientists' word?  It's right to be suspicious when the critics offer nothing but blind fear, but I think it's also right to be suspicious when the advocates offer nothing but blind faith.

The Continuing Rise of the Intermobs

Internet-enabled mass juvenilia is our future.  Some recent signs:

• At SXSW, where the tech hipsterati are gathered, audiences make fun of speakers live in chat rooms and on Twitter (story 1, story 2).
  
• "Digg users revolt" is a bit redundant.  Mob rule is basically Digg's MO.  So it's no surprise Digg users are doing their best to kill an acquisition.
• Forget laser pointers, personal portable projectors are the wave of future "visual pollution" (BBC, Engadget).
• Anonymous is a group of hackers organizing on-line and off to take down The Church of Scientology through various measures, legal, illegal, and juvenile.

Previously: The Power of the Intermobs.

How to Think About Science

(Post updated below with more on later shows and a response to a comment.)

I've been listening to the excellent "How to think about science" series from CBC Radio's Ideas show.  The basic premise of the show:

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

Link: How To Think About Science.  (That link has the shows in Real Audio format.  For MP3 format go to the podcast archive.  It's also listed on the iTunes store.)

I've listened to the first six shows so far.  The first two, featuring interviews with Simon Schaffer and Lorraine Daston, are particularly good.  What strikes me about this series (and, to a lesser extent, anything I read from historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science) is, first, how old-hat this stuff is to specialists -- to them the "science wars" are over and we're now living with a more realistic, less mystical understanding of how science really happens, thanks to the sociologists and others who hashed it out in the 80s and 90s.

The second thing that strikes me is that, from an everyday person's point of view, this stuff is still completely new.  Most people (and scientists) know nothing of the fabled science wars, and still think of science as "received truth" and scientists as infallible.  Furthermore, many people are still threatened by any effort to simply describe scientific practice and are quick to label it as "anti-science." 

The response to this radio series itself gives an indication of how threatening this type of discussion still is.  A discussion at the "Center for Inquiry," some sort of online forum about science, labels the series "anti-science," "pseudo-intellectual BS," and one commenter calls for a letter writing campaign against the CBC!  One only needs to listen to the show to realize how bizarre and ironic this reaction is.

A frequent refrain in these interviews is the difficulty these thinkers have had in trying to make it clear that they do not intend to undermine or debunk science, but merely to understand how it works, and in some sense to apply the principles of scientific scrutiny to science itself.  What's also apparent in this show is that there is no monolithic sociological critique of science, and how these thinkers themselves have been fallible and mistaken.  What emerges is a picture of the variety of approaches to understanding science and the need for dialog.

Update, March 31 -- I'm now caught up with the series (the first 15 episodes anyway) and I think I can understand now where the hostile reactions are coming from, though I still disagree with them.  Jim Royal writes in the comments:

If you're only six episodes into the series so far, you've heard the reasonable parts of the series. Starting around episodes 7, 8 and 9, things start getting weird. I think my favorite bit is where the host asserts without a shred of evidence that many scientists "feel they know when they are being looked at, think their dogs are telepathic, experience premonitions, doubt the world is all in their heads."

This is episode 9 with Rupert Sheldrake.  He has done controversial research, to be sure, but I think the point of the show was mostly to tell his story and not to push his theories.  According to him the "sense of being stared at" is real (among everyday people -- I don't believe he tested scientists) and can be reliably measured.  I'm skeptical but I don't have any problem with scientists doing and publishing that research.  He claimed that he couldn't get it published, despite the fact that others repeated and validated his experiments.  I think that's an interesting situation -- why are others so unwilling to permit that kind of research?  The Ideas show dug into this issue and, while it was sympathetic to Sheldrake, I don't think it was trying to present his theories as truth.  Surely this issue crops up elsewhere in scientific practice, though maybe not to such extremes.

Again from Jim:

That particular episode ended with the assertion that scientific results are all the same everywhere in the world, regardless of local customs, cultures, or religions because scientists collude with each other to keep out ideas that would upset their world view.

The series moved from examining the boundaries of science to entertaining crackpots to outright paranoia.

I don't remember that assertion, or at least not stated in quite that way, but I agree that it's an caricature.

Some of the other episodes didn't do much for me:  I like some of Wendell Berry's writing but I thought a whole episode about farming and local knowledge seemed like too much (similarly with the Dean Bavington episode about cod fisheries).  Sajay Samuel said some interesting things but his approach is a bit too abstract for me.  David Abram was rather disappointing: repetitive and a bit too new-agey for my taste.

On the other hand, I'm glad that they're going for diverse viewpoints and I don't expect to agree with or appreciate all of them equally.  And I don't think the trajectory is strictly downhill -- the last two episodes, with Evelyn Fox Keller in the first and Barbara Duden and Silya Samerski in the second, were very good.

Book (and TV) Notes

Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is about the power of the social web or web 2.0 or whatever you like to call it.  It's getting a lot of positive coverage.  I just received a review copy and I'll post some notes once I've read it.

Book series about philosophy and pop culture seem to be multiplying.  Open Court was the first publisher to take up the idea, I believe, followed by Blackwell.  I've yet to actually read any of these books, but that may change.  The forthcoming iPod and Philosophy (Fall '08) looks very good.  I may also check out The Office and Philosophy too, just because I like the show and I'm baffled as to where they're finding philosophy in it.  Both publishers are releasing books on Battlestar Gallactica and Philosophy (Blackwell, OpenCourt), which seems like overkill.  It's a good show but not quite as deep as all the hype suggests, in my humble opinion.

Another publisher that puts out similar books is Benbella.  Their titles include The Science of Dune and The Science of Michael Crichton.

A show that none of these publishers has yet tackled is the SciFi channel's Eureka.  It may not be popular enough (though surely it's more current than Dune) and it is far from deep, but it rehashes just about every cliche about science and scientists you can imagine.  I'm slightly  embarrassed to admit I watch it.  The back story of the show is here: A (Confidential) Town History.  They also have a page of futuristic gadgets that exist only in this fictional town: Made in Eureka.

James Howard Kunstler's New Novel: World Made by Hand

Orion magazine has a review by John Galvin of James Howard Kunstler's new novel, World Made by Hand.  An excerpt:

Islamic Fundamentalists have blown up Los Angeles and DC. That puts the global economy into a smoking tailspin. A flu pandemic has wiped out a good third of the population, maybe more. Oil, or access to what’s left of it anyway, is as good as gone. The Chinese have reportedly landed a man on the moon, but that’s probably more legend than fact in these paranoid times. The federal government has retreated to Minnesota, of all places (because who would attack them up there?), and with resources limited, race wars have erupted across the South. The globe is no longer flat (sorry, Tom Friedman!). It’s as round and as large as it’s ever been.

Such is the fictionalized world envisioned by James Howard Kunstler in his new book, World Made by Hand. This isn’t a sci-fi view into a future one hundred or fifty years away. It’s anti–sci-fi, set maybe ten to twenty years out.

Link: World Made by Hand.

Kunstler is best known for his non-fiction.  His most recent is The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

"Sperm Bank Love" and other Repro-Tech Tunes

In response to the previous post, reader Mark sent in a link to his entertaining songs about reproductive technology and other issues: Sperm Bank Love.

Podcast: Brave New Family

The CBC Radio show Ideas posts some of its shows as (limited-time) free podcasts.  I've been listening to a new two-part series called Brave New Family that's an excellent exploration of the consequences of sperm donation.  The summary:

Sperm donation has proven to be a Pandora's Box. The vast majority of donor dads do not want to be found. In rare cases some children are seeking and finding dad and half-siblings in the process. Science journalist Alison Motluk explores the complex portrait of the brave new family.

Links: Brave New Family (a short article and list of references), Podcasts.

Note that these podcasts are only available for a few weeks.

Ideas is the show that broadcasts the Massey Lectures.  I just noticed they've got a new series called How to Think About Science that looks very interesting too.

Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation

Daniel Solove's recent book The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet is now available for free online.  I learned this via Danah Boyd's blog -- she is apparently the one to thank for this, and she offers kudos to Yale University Press.

As someone who has been aware of this book since it appeared, I'm happy that I can now read a chapter or two for free, but I'll probably still wait to get it from the library.  I'm not likely to buy it in hardcover or to read the whole thing online.  If the publisher had put it out as a $20-or-cheaper paperback in the first place I'd have snapped it up quick.