Question Technology

Stewart Brand's Environmental Heresies

John Tierney writes about Stewart Brand in today's New York Times:

[H]e feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he’s been shifting toward the minority.

“My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by,” he says. “I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

Link: Stewart Brand - John Tierney - An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies’ - New York Times.

(More at Tierney's blog, and see also Stewart Brand's May 2005 article from Technology Review: Environmental Heresies.)

I have lots of respect for Stewart Brand, but his simplistic division of environmentalists into "romantics" and "scientists" is grossly unfair.  It's quite possible to make valid, rational -- even scientific -- critiques of science and technology, and there are quite strong ones to be made with respect to GMOs and nuclear power.  Of course there are important economic and political considerations as well.

For examples of good, science-based assessments of GMOs and nuclear power I will cite one of my favorite scientists, David Suzuki: on transgenic crops, on nuclear power.

Shutdown Day

In the tradition of PC Turnoff Week (in June) and TV Turnoff Week (in April) comes Shutdown Day (March 24), a challenge to turn off your computer for the day.  Boy, the calendar is really filling up.  The site is a bit lacking in details on who's behind this, but they do have a blog, a forum, and YouTube promo videos.

The Importance of User-Centered Design

CNET has a story about the growing importance of fields like human-computer interaction, usability, and human factors engineering.  As someone who has done work in this area, I heartily agree.

Wonder why YouTube skyrocketed in popularity in less than two years?

One obvious reason is that the video-sharing Web site has kept it simple. YouTube doesn't require a video player download or a special account just to watch a video. With just a click on a link, a video is up and running in a few seconds. It's a people-friendly design, and that attention to simplicity has paid off.

Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction, however, say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA's Mission Control.

Now companies, universities and even government agencies like NASA are investing time and dollars as they take a hard look at how people interact with technology.

Link: The human factor in gadget, Web design | CNET News.com,

via Usability In The News: The human factor in gadget, Web design.

Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great introduction to the ideas behind HCI.

Teen Blogs and Future Embarrassment

Paul Saffo writes about the downside of having your adolescent writings archived for all time online:

[...] I pity teens today, for in a few decades their sophomoric musings will deliver a vast embarrassment utterly unknown to earlier generations. It is not that their words are any sillier than earlier generations; rather teens today have had the misfortune of being the first generation to record their thoughts in cyberspace where those thoughts will remain perfectly preserved until some wag drags them out at a school reunion or the author’s children discover the IM affections that passed between mom and dad.

[...] the biggest favor you can do for a teen today is to remind them of what is ahead and gently suggest that perhaps they should record their thoughts the old-fashioned way -- on paper. Buy them a Moleskine, or a ream of high sulfur paper that will decompose quickly.
Link: Saffo: journal.

Of course, not everyone agrees.  In the (much blogged about) article "Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll," Emily Nussbaum explores this topic at length, and it's worth reading the whole thing.  An excerpt:

[...] we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.” 

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

Link: Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy (New York Magazine)

Why Are There No Science Critics?

Prosthesis links to an article by philosopher of technology Don Ihde who considers why we don't have science/technology critics and why anyone who attempts it is quickly called a "Luddite" or anti-science/technology.  Ihde takes as his starting point a passage from Langdon Winner's book The Whale and the Reactor (coincidentally the same passage I quoted here a while back).  An excerpt from Ihde:

The contrast between art and literary criticism and what I shall call 'technoscience criticism' is marked. Few would call art or literary critics "anti-art" or "anti-literature" in the working out, however critically, of their products. And while it may indeed be true that given works of art or given texts are excoriated, demeaned, or severely dealt with, one does not usually think of the critic as generically "anti-art" or "anti-literature." Rather, it is precisely because the critic is passionate about his or her subject matter that he or she becomes a 'critic.' That is simply not the case with science or technoscience criticism.

Link: Why Not Science Critics?.

Of course we do now many (relatively new) fields of study that do just this: philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, science and technology studies (STS), sociology of science, etc., but this work doesn't typically get mainstream exposure or respect.

There's an interesting and lengthy discussion related to this happening amongst SEED magazine science bloggers Benjamin Cohen and others (The World's Fair: When Talking About Science is Dangerous), in response to a recent op-ed by Chris Mooney and Alan Sokal (LA Times: Can Washington get smart about science?).  STS professor Cohen takes Mooney and Sokal to task for misquoting Bruno Latour with respect to the "science wars" of the 1990s, which Mooney and Sokal claim has re-emerged as the American right's "Republican war on science."  (That's an extremely rough paraphrase -- I recommend you read Cohen's post.)

Another Useless Account

This is a great little joke site: Useless Account.

Creating and maintaining login accounts has got to be the most frustrating part of using the web.

Vernor Vinge Flip-Flopping on the Singularity?

That's the tease Stewart Brand has given for a talk that sci-fi writer and futurist Vernor Vinge will be giving this Thursday in San Francisco as part of the Long Now Foundation's Seminars:

Technology acceleration is like what happens approaching the singularity in the center of a black hole - everything is transformed utterly and unpredictably. That metaphor was invented by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1980's and has entered standard usage as a way of thinking about the near future. In this talk Vinge challenges his own idea, investigating scenarios of "a human-scaled world with long time horizons," and how that might play out over ten or twenty thousand years.

Link: Long Now > Projects > Seminars About Long Term Thinking.

Previously: Thoughts on the Singularity Summit

 

The Most Popular Video in the Blogosphere!

You've probably already seen that spiffy little video about hypertext, XML, and Web 2.0 and how it's changing the world.  It's by cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch and is called "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us," though the title doesn't appear in the video.  By "using us" he means that the machine (i.e. the web) "learns" when we tell it stuff -- probably the hokiest and least true point he makes in the video.

It's a clever little piece and it makes a few good bullet points about the changing nature of how we experience text, but I'm amazed at the overblown reaction to this thing.  There isn't much substance to it -- basically a bit of information science 101 combined with some trite Web 2.0/user-generated media hype.  But it's got style, which counts for a lot with today's techno/web enthusiasts (Lawrence Lessig's books may be a bore, but boy has he got the hippest posters for his talks of any academic!).

It's not surprising, I guess, that a video cheering on user-generated content is embraced by those same users.  Yay us! (or yay you!)

This article at Inside Higher Ed tells the story of the video and its reception: A lesson in viral video.  I originally spotted the video at Chris Anderson's blog: The Long Tail: This is what I'm talking about, though it's been everywhere else too (BoingBoing, Lessig, even the Transhumanists love it!).

Technoromanticism

I have a Google alert set up for the word "Luddite" so I get email every day with links to new occurrences of that word in news or blogs.  Today it found this blog of student postings for a course on "Technoromanticism".  It's pretty interesting reading.  There's currently a discussion of Frankenstein, with reference to Steven Jones's Against Technology, which is apparently one of the texts for the course.

Link: Technoromanticism.

GM's Robot Suicide Ad

I didn't watch the Super Bowl (the Puppy Bowl is more my style), so I missed the annual ad nonsense and the ensuing minor controversies.  The story of GM's robot suicide ad is interesting, though.  From USA Today:

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has sent a letter to General Motors (GM) criticizing an ad that shows a perfectionist assembly line robot dreaming about jumping off a bridge after dropping a bolt. The group said the spot may encourage people to consider suicide as a solution to their problems. The group demanded that GM apologize, not air the spot again and remove it from its website.

Link: Suicide-prevention group criticizes GM ad - USATODAY.com.

This group has a point, but what's more tasteless, I think, is how the ad insults GM employees.  As Seth Stevenson wrote:

A robot in a GM assembly plant drops a screw. As a result, he's fired. He tries to make do with menial jobs, but he remains miserable. In the end, he jumps off a bridge. Thoughts: Haven't a lot of actual human auto workers been laid off lately? Are they meant to laugh when, at the end of the ad, the robot wakes up to realize this was just a bad dream, and that he still has his job so he doesn't need to commit suicide after all? Whew, thank goodness things worked out for you, robot!

Link: The best and worst Super Bowl ads (Slate)

Mark Graban makes a similar point.  CJR Daily has a roundup of other blogger reactions to the ad: Bloggers Debate GM Robot's Suicide.

The latest news is that GM has agreed to remove the suicide from the ad: GM Changing Robot Suicide Ad (CNN).

Susan Haack's Defending Science

Today I picked up a copy of Defending Science - within Reason: Between Scientism And Cynicism by philosopher of science Susan Haack.  The new paperback edition has a helpful preface that gives a good sense of the position she is staking out (as the subtitle says: between scientism and cynicism) in the form of responses to critics.

From the book description:

Sweeping in scope, penetrating in analysis, and generously illustrated with examples from the history of science, this new and original approach to familiar questions about scientific evidence and method tackles vital questions about science and its place in society. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of scientism and cynicism, noted philosopher Susan Haack argues that, fallible and flawed as they are, the natural sciences have been among the most successful of human enterprises—valuable not only for the vast, interlocking body of knowledge they have discovered, and not only for the technological advances that have improved our lives, but as a manifestation of the human talent for inquiry at its imperfect but sometimes remarkable best.

This wide-ranging, trenchant, and illuminating book explores the complexities of scientific evidence, and the multifarious ways in which the sciences have refined and amplified the methods of everyday empirical inquiry; articulates the ways in which the social sciences are like the natural sciences, and the ways in which they are different; disentangles the confusions of radical rhetoricians and cynical sociologists of science; exposes the evasions of apologists for religious resistance to scientific advances; weighs the benefits and the dangers of technology; tracks the efforts of the legal system to make the best use of scientific testimony; and tackles predictions of the eventual culmination, or annihilation, of the scientific enterprise.

Writing with verve and wry humor, in a witty, direct, and accessible style, Haack takes readers beyond the "Science Wars" to a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise.

Small is Still Beautiful

I recently learned of a new book by Joseph Pearce called Small is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, which is a sequel of sorts to E. F. Schumacher's classic Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  I'm not sure what the "family" angle is, or if this book is different from Pearce's earlier sequel, also called Small Is Still Beautiful but it looks interesting anyway.   He also has a blog.  From the book description:

A third of a century ago, E. F. Schumacher rang out a timely warning against the idolatry of giantism with his book Small Is Beautiful. Since then, millions of copies of Schumacher’s work have been sold in dozens of different languages; few books before or since have spoken so profoundly to urgent economic and social considerations. Schumacher, a highly respected economist and adviser to third-world governments, broke ranks with the accepted wisdom of his peers to warn of impending calamity if rampant consumerism, technological dynamism, and economic expansionism were not checked by human and environmental considerations. Humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, argued Schumacher. Its obsessive pursuit of wealth would not, as so many believed, ultimately lead to utopia but more probably to catastrophe. [...]

Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher’s arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which Schumacher’s ideas themselves still matter. Faced though we are with fearful new technological possibilities and the continued centralization of power in large governmental and economic structures, there is still the possibility of pursuing a saner and more sustainable vision for humanity. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful.

Link: Small is Still Beautiful : About the Book.

60 Minutes on the Geek Industry

60 Minutes recently aired a piece about how complicated technology is creating high demand for the "Geek Squad" and other tech support services.  Mostly the segment is about those businesses, but there's also a bit about why technology is needlessly complicated, featuring usability guru Don Norman and the NPR Car Talk guys.  The video and transcript are online.  From the intro:

It’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but sometime during the past ten years, most of us involuntarily surrendered a big chunk of our lives to computers, and to other networking devices that contain computer chips. We’re talking laptops, desk tops, cell phones, BlackBerrys, PDAs, and remote controls, anything that needs to be programmed, requires technical support, and can crash, die, or merely freeze.

As Steve Kroft reports, that always has a way of happening at the worst possible moment, and for most of us there is only one solution: get me the geeks!

We are becoming slaves to our own technology – addicted to and dependent upon all sorts of beeping, flashing gadgetry that is supposed to make our lives easier.

But it has become so complicated to set up, program and fix, that most of us don’t know how to do it, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar service industry populated by the very people who used to be shunned in the high school cafeteria: geeks, like Robert Stephens.

Link: Get Me The Geeks!, How Tricky Technology Is Giving Rise To The Geeks - CBS News.

(via Don Norman)

Jenny Diski on Second Life

Novelist Jenny Diski tries out Second Life:

I suppose it was my idealist tendencies which caused my difficulty with Second Life. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but was, that this alternative world has a material life and economy uncannily similar to the one we’re already stuck with. If you are looking for another way of being, you’ll be deeply disappointed. But you probably won’t be because you will understand that it couldn’t be otherwise. I was beguiled by the idea of a world apart from the real world which people keep telling me I have to come to terms with. It turns out that there is no second life on Second Life, only more of the same old first and only one, but cartoon-shaped.

Link: LRB | Jenny Diski : Jowls are available.

(via Maud Newton)

Vista's Desktop Images

I like this observation by art critic Edward Rothstein:

What we want is to eliminate the PC altogether, to dismantle that box of green circuit boards and crammed-in wires, to break through even the most glorious flat-screen monitor and open up a new ... vista.

That’s why the operating system has its name, of course, and why the screen images it includes show exotic landscapes with skies lit by sunset or sunrise or aurora borealis displays. These are not glimpses of hackers’ paradises or techie wonderlands. They are the opposite, showing landscapes beyond technology’s reach, offering not the streaming green cryptograms of “The Matrix” but wilderness vistas free of civilization, promising not ones and zeros but pristine water and sky. Windows was once thought of as a virtual “desktop”; now it opens onto untrammeled nature. Escape from technology through technology. That, at least, is the fantasy.

Link: Techie’s Cyber Odyssey: Magic in Bits and Bolts (New York Times)