Question Technology

Douglas Coupland on Video Games

Douglas Coupland's new novel, JPod, is set in the world of video game developers.  There was an interesting article about him in The Observer this week.  Excerpt:

'I don't play games myself. Never. But I will watch people playing, especially if they're good. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is, of all the games to watch people play, the most fun. It's not like a race; you can take time off to just work for a while as a taxi driver, or visit a hooker. There's something interesting, fascinating actually, about watching someone take time off in a video game to go and visit a hooker. Games I do find interesting,' he says, 'for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.'

Link: The Observer | Magazine | Generation next,

via Bookslut.

Karen Armstrong on Religion and Science

Salon had a great interview yesterday with religious historian Karen Armstrong, who has a new book out called The Great Transformation.  I like what she says about the true point of religion and about dogmatic scientism.  Link: Salon.com Books | Going beyond God.

Honoring Jane Jacobs?

I've noticed that many blogs have commented on the recent death of Jane Jacobs, whose work obviously affected many people, myself included, though I haven't read all of her books.  The latest is a tribute from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology of all places.  After a few sentences describing how an economic theory of hers has some relationship to their nanotech manufacturing ideas, it continues:

Despite her age—nearly 90—we have to wonder whether advanced nanomedicine could have saved her life and given the world many more years of her keen and valuable insights.

Link: Nanotechnology: Latest C-R-Newsletter.

The sentiment is genuine, I'm sure, but this comes across as a very base sort of way to argue for your technology.  Imagine a big pharmaceutical company writing: it's sad that such-and-such celebrity just died; we have to wonder if our new drug might have saved her life, if only the FDA would hurry up and approve it.

Furthermore, I have to wonder if the author of Dark Age Ahead, a book that raised deep questions about the trajectory of our culture and technology, would appreciate being associated with this agenda.

Lee Silver Provokes Again

Molecular biologist Lee Silver has a new book out called Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life.  Like his earlier book, Remaking Eden, this one is likely to raise hackles (it worked for me).  In this book, Silver attacks those opposed to biotech in all forms, from cloning to GM foods.

It looks like name-calling is his main strategy for criticizing supporters of organic foods.  From one of the "bullet points" on the website for the book:

Think Christian fundamentalists and New Age organic food devotees have nothing in common? That's what they think.  But their passionate opposition to biotechnology springs from a common Biblical source, whether they know it or not.

He's argued for GM foods in Newsweek recently ("Why GM Food is Good for us," and a follow-up debate).

Google Your Brain?

Bioethicist Glenn McGee posted some excerpts on his blog from an essay he published in The Scientist called "Search Me Not" (subscription required).  It's a response to "Google Your Brain" by Jack Woodall, which McGee says "seems like a bad idea to me, just on philosophical grounds"

My most disorganized friends, or at least the smart ones, are steadily working their way toward scanning all the paper in their offices onto hard drives, turning piles of nomenclature and unfinished projects into a different kind of pile. Desks get cleaned, computers get filled. But the clutter is still there, it's just hidden more effectively. Those who scan their worlds without clearing out the junk and learning to sort information just make their messes more intimate. I don't need to remember a lot of what is stored around my office or in the corners of my mind.

There is something to be said for forgetting. Nietzsche argued that those who cannot forget are quickly driven to madness.

Link: blog.bioethics.net - Search Me Not

Latest $100 Laptop Prototype

Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project showed the latest working prototype this week (and this one apparently really does work).

Alan Saracevic asks the all-important question that rarely gets asked: "Again: Why does everyone need a laptop?"

Link: The Technology Chronicles : Would you pay $100 for this laptop?.

Books and Stuff

I finally got around to reading that Kevin Kelly article the other day, and started writing up a bunch of comments but lost the energy for it.  I feel like it's already been said perfectly well.  Two books come immediately to mind: The Gutenberg Elegies (Sven Birkerts on the importance of books), and On the Internet (Hubert Dreyfus).  Dreyfus, in 2001, wrote about exactly this universal electronic library hype that Kelly espouses, and contrasted "Hyperlinked Culture" with "Old Library Culture."

It also struck me that Kelly lumped together a bunch of ideas that really don't need to be related.  The orphan copyright issue (which I agree is important) has other solutions besides scanning books and moving everything to digital.  Digital archiving doesn't imply hyperlinked snippets and the death of the book.  I also don't believe that mash-up/remix art as promoted by Cory Doctorow and the Creative Commons crowd will ever produce art of  any lasting importance.  But maybe I'm just grumpy.

John Updike on Kevin Kelly

John Updike spoke at BookExpo America about Kevin Kelly's vision for the future of books:

Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly's notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling "performances" or "access to the creator." ("Now as I read it, this is a pretty grisly scenario.")

Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of "information" on the Web, he said, "books traditionally have edges." But "the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.

"So, booksellers," he concluded, "defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."

Link: Washington Post: Explosive Words.

See also this recent article by Jonathan Weber in the Times UK: Why books resist the rise of novel technologies.

Previously: Discussion of Kevin Kelly's article.

Robot Performs Heart Surgery

Techdirt reports on an Italian news story, which looks suspiciously like a press release, about the world's first heart surgery performed completely by robot.  The story says it was guided remotely by a surgeon in the U.S., and is low on other details.  Techdirt, who seem to have a grudge against doctors, are ready to be guinea pigs:

Though doctors are among the biggest costs in healthcare, and technology like this could certainly help save money, we can expect surgeons to fight tooth and nail from letting robots encroach on their territory. They'll claim, much like top chess players do, that surgery is part art and that a robot could never match the performance of a human. Of course, robots don't get tired after a long day, stressed out, lose concentration, or have any of the other human traits that affect the quality of surgery. And while doctors make mistakes all the time, robots will be held to a higher standard; after one mistake, there will be calls to curtail their use in medicine. With all due respect, many surgeons are like plumbers who work on an extremely complicated system of pumps and valves -- in both cases, technology is reducing the value of their labor.

I count a half-dozen or so fallacies in that paragraph (or at least highly debatable points).  Pretty impressive!

Link: Techdirt: Robot Performs Heart Surgery, Will Surgeons' Union Go On Strike?.

Synthetic Biology Conference

The "Synthetic Biology 2.0" conference is happening this weekend at Berkeley.  Synthetic biology is defined by researchers as:

A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and
B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

A coalition of groups has issued an open letter calling for open public debate about regulating this technology.  The letter begins:

We are writing to express our deep concerns about the rapidly developing field of Synthetic Biology that is attempting to create novel life forms and artificial living systems. We believe that this potentially powerful technology is being developed without proper societal debate concerning socio-economic, security, health, environmental and human rights implications. We are alarmed that synthetic biologists meeting this weekend intend to vote on a scheme of voluntary self-regulation without consulting or involving broader social groups. We urge you to withdraw these self-governance proposals and participate in a process of open and inclusive oversight of this technology.

More links at The Technology Chronicles : Caution urged on "synthetic biology" research.

Discussions of Kevin Kelly library article

If:book quotes from a discussion on the NYT site about Kevin Kelly's utopian universal digital library article:

...what I find particularly problematic is the way that Kelly’s “analysis”—as well as most of the discussion of it—omits any serious mention of what is actually at stake in the utopian scheme of a universal library (which Borges, by the way, does not promote, but debunks). It has little to do with enabling creativity, but rather, with enabling greater corporate profits. Kelly is actually most close to the mark when [he] characterizes the conflict over digital books as a conflict between two business models. Of course, one gets the impression from some of Kelly’s writings that for him business and creativity are more or less the same thing....

....A more serious consideration of these issues would move away from the “old” binary antagonisms that Kelly outlines (surely, these are a relic of a pre-digital age) and think seriously about how society at large is changed by digital technologies and techniques. Who has the right to copy or to make use of data and who does not? In a world of such vast informational clutter, doesn’t power accrue to those who can afford to advertise? It is worth remembering, too, that searching is not, after all, a value-free operation. Who ultimately will control the searching and indexing of digital information? Should the government—or private corporations—be allowed to data mine the searches that people make? In short, who benefits and who loses from these technological changes? Where, precisely, is power consolidated?

Kelly does not even begin to deal with these sorts of serious social issues.

Link: if:book: good discussion(s) of kevin kelly article.

There's also a discussion thread here at the if:book site.

Previously: Two Views of the Future of Books and Libraries.

Our gentle descent toward eugenics

William Saletan writes in Slate:

We've just taken another step down the slippery slope toward eugenics.

The step involves "preimplantation genetic diagnosis," in which clinics take sperm and eggs, make embryos in lab dishes, and screen them for genetic flaws. Embryos without flaws are implanted in the mother's womb. Those with flaws are frozen or discarded.

The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority regulates PGD in Britain. Previously, it had approved PGD only to weed out genes that were nearly certain to cause a grave childhood disease or were certain to cause a grave adult disease. Last week, the HFEA stepped across that line. You can now chuck embryos in Britain for diseases that are more treatable, less likely to strike early in life, and less likely ever to occur in the person whom the embryo would become.

Link: Our gentle descent toward eugenics. By William Saletan.

Check out the comments as well.  It's astonishing how ignorant Americans are of the history of eugenics outside of Nazi Germany.

Bioethics: Liberals and Their Ill-Liberal Policies

Excerpt from a column by Daniel Callahan at Bioethics Forum:

I am sometimes baffled by my fellow liberals in their social priorities. Why, for instance, does stem cell research receive such political support, and money, while many more pressing needs exist in this country? At the same time that the ballot initiative in California won $3 billion in state bonds to initiate a stem cell research program, the media there was reporting that there are 2.5 million illiterate adults in that state. There is plenty of experience on successfully teaching adults to read, plenty of evidence that an adult illiterate has an almost hopeless economic future in this country, and plenty of evidence that a literate citizenry makes a far greater economic and social contribution than an illiterate one. The best that can be said for stem cell research is that it is “promising.” In New Jersey, the aim is to raise $300 million for a stem cell project. New Jersey is home to the city of Camden, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden cities in the country. It could make better use of that kind of money.

I can only offer some hypotheses. [... One] is that many liberals have embraced the medicalization of everything in sight, advocate an endless war on death and disease, and support ever-increasing research budgets, far more enthusiastically than a few decades ago. In the 1960s and at least part of the 1970s, liberals tended to be in the vanguard of critical thinking about medical progress, willing to ask the hard questions and, if necessary, to hold up alleged progress. That was the role of Science for the People, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and of many of the scientists who brought about the moratorium on recombinant-DNA in the mid-1970s. That was considered the proper liberal stance.

Link: Bioethics Forum - Liberals and Their Ill-Liberal Policies.

via Center for Genetics and Society

Post-Singularity Fun and Games

Clive Thompson writes on his blog about "Plasma Pong: A game of pong played in a plasma field."  This reminds me of a short story by Greg Egan in a sci-fi collection called Beyond Singularity.  I bought that book recently to try to learn more about this whole singularity thing from the sci-fi enthusiast point of view.  Most of the stories are optimistic, and purport to tell us how humans might live in the distant future when they're immortal and no longer constrained to physical bodies.

In Egan's story, "Border Guards," multi-million-year-olds play a game called "quantum soccer," in which they run around and try to score points by manipulating electrical fields.  I imagine it would look something like plasma pong.  When they're not playing pong, they obsess over relationships like sulky teenagers until a day comes when they've had enough and they simply disappear to another place in the universe to start over.

I've only read about half the stories in this book, but based on this and various other readings from books and from poking around the Singularity Summit's website, I have to wonder: is this the best we can come up with?  We would change our species to be adolescent video gamers forever?  Other utopian visions don't seem much more compelling.

I'm probably being a unfair to Egan's story -- I'm sure it and the others have merits that I'm not appreciating -- but where are the really compelling stories about why we're doing this?

(My wife recommends Charles Stross's novels, and I plan to check them out too.)

Technology Risks

The NY Times has an interesting article today about technology risks, in particular nuclear, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.  Link: Technology's Future: A Look at the Dark Side - New York Times.