NETFUTURE

                   Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #37      Copyright 1997 O'Reilly & Associates        January 8, 1997
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            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                     On the Web: http://netfuture.org
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

CONTENTS:
*** Quotes and Provocations
      Dreams of a Global Village
      The Mystical Properties of Zero
      Radio Cyberdays
      Do Computers Kill People?
*** Things That Bite Back: Tenner on Productivity (Stephen L. Talbott)
      That computer is costing you way more than you think
*** About this newsletter

Dreams of a Global Village

But maybe the futurist Alvin Toffler was just a few years behind the curve. Next time around, let's try dropping Internet computers along with certificates granting free access to the obedient playmates of the Virtual Dreams site. That might do it. There'd be little time for distractions like killing your neighbors. And, just to exercise those futurist genes, we can look forward a bit further to full-immersion virtual reality. Presumably our air drops will then play their role in finally implementing a Global Feelage.

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The Mystical Properties of Zero

may be the first mass disillusionment faced by those who up until that point have accepted the blind optimism of those who promote technology. A lot of "ordinary people" are going to be inconvenienced. Add this to the expected millennial madness -- apocalyptic prophets, a surge in New Age spiritualism, and the urge to introspection that the sight of a "0" seems to invoke in us -- and you have the potential for a considerable shift in public attitudes towards technology.

Beyond that, however, I fear the potential of anti-technology fads fully as much as pro-technology fads. Neither is a matter of wakefulness. Mastering the machines in our lives is as different from smashing them as it is from yielding passively to them. The smashing, after all, will provoke its own backlash in turn, and amid our rudderless thrashing about we will find ourselves more and more in thrall to the intelligent machinery around us (which, in its own way, does seem to know where it wants to go).

Once we have imposed proper discipline upon our hapless digits, we will still face the enduring Year 2001 problem: how do we subordinate the digital flood to our own purposes?

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Radio Cyberdays

That anything man can imagine he can do in the ethereal realm of radio will probably be an actual accomplishment some day. Perhaps radio, or something akin to radio, will one day give us mortals telepathic or occult senses!

Another commentator, Rudolf Arnheim, wrote a book in 1936 in which he said:

Wireless without prejudice serves everything that implies dissemination and community of feeling and works against separateness and isolation.

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Do Computers Kill People?

happens on the Internet too, but everything that happens on the Internet is news, and when something bad happens on the Internet, the "line" instantly arises that the bad thing in question is a property of the Internet.

Let's not let anyone essentialize the Internet and say "the Internet does this" and "the Internet does that" and "the Internet spreads rumors" and "the Internet causes social hierarchies to collapse and brings an era of peaceableness and decentralization to the world forever and ever amen," because those are not things that the Internet itself is capable of doing. Those are things that people do, or don't do, as they collectively see fit.

The argument that "guns don't kill people; people do" is unassailably correct--and comes down nicely on the side of human freedom to use technology as we choose. The theme of freedom--along with its correlate, responsibility--is one I've pressed repeatedly in NETFUTURE.

But there's another side to the story. Every technology already embodies certain human choices. It expresses meanings and intentions. A gun, after all, was pretty much designed to kill living organisms at a distance, which gives it an "essentially" different nature from, say, a pair of binoculars.

If all technology bears human meanings and intentions, the networked computer carries the game to an entirely different level. Its whole purpose is to carry our meanings and intentions with a degree of explicitness, subtlety, intricacy, and completeness unimaginable in earlier machines. Every executing program is a condensation of certain human thinking processes. At a more general level, the computer embodies our resolve to approach much of life with a programmatic or recipe-like (algorithmic) mindset. That resolve, expressed in the machinery, is far from innocent or neutral when, for example, we begin to adapt group behavior to programmed constraints.

Putting it in slightly different terms: Yes, our choices individually and collectively are the central thing. But a long history of choices is already built into the technology. We meet ourselves--our deepest tendencies, whether savory or unsavory, conscious or unconscious--in the things we have made. And, as always, the weight of accumulated choices begins to bind us. Our freedom is never absolute, but is conditioned by what we have made of ourselves and our world so far. The toxic materials I spread over my yard yesterday restrict my options today.

It is true, then, that everything comes down to human freedom and responsibility. But the results of many free choices--above all today--find their way into technology, where they gain a life and staying power of their own. We need, on the one hand, to recognize ourselves--pat, formulaic, uncreative--in our machines even as, on the other hand, we allow that recognition to spur us toward mastery of the machine.

It is not, incidentally, that the effort to develop the latest software and hardware was necessarily "pat and formulaic." It may have been extremely creative. But once the machine is running and doing its job, it represents only that past, creative act. Now it all too readily stifles the new, creative approaches that might arise among its users. Every past choice, so far as it pushes forward purely on the strength of its old impetus, so far as it remains automatically operative and thereby displaces new choices--so far, that is, as it discourages us from creatively embracing all the potentials of the current moment--diminishes the human being. And the computer is designed precisely to remain operative--to keep running by itself--as an automaton dutifully carrying out its program.

The only way to keep our balance is to recognize what we have built into the computer and continually assert ourselves against it, just as you and I must continually assert ourselves against the limitations imposed by our pasts and expressed in our current natures.

It is not my primary purpose here to comment on the Internet as a rumor mill, but it is worth pointing out that there is a certain built-in Net bias to worry about. It may not be an "essential" bias, but it is a bias of the Net we happen to have built. For in the Net--from our design of its underlying structures to the deep grooves cut by our habits of use--we have nearly perfected the tendency, already partially expressed in printing technology, radio, and television, to decontextualize the word. More and more the Net presents us with words detached from any known speaker and from any very profound meeting of persons. At the same time, the Net offers us a wonderfully privatized blank screen against which to project our fantasies, personas, wishes.

Obviously, there is much more to say. But not even the whole of it would be to argue that rumor must triumph over truth on the Net. It would only be to acknowledge that the Net has been constructed in accordance with certain tendencies of ours--not many of them wakeful, and therefore not many of them safe to hand ourselves over to without full alertness. The Net does have a given nature, even if that nature is, finally, our own. Not all things our own can easily be waved away upon a moment's new resolve, even if the will is there. "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is week"--and the programs are hard to change.

I need only add that Phil Agre, whose remarks stimulated this harangue, is shouldering more than his share of responsibility for cultivating a proper alertness among Net users.

Finally, in the spirit of provocation I challenge anyone out there who is bumping up against the question of technological neutrality: rumor mills aside, demonstrate how the analysis I have offered is fundamentally inadequate as a first-order breakdown of the question.

SLT

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     Notes concerning the book, Why Things Bite Back: Technology
     and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, by Edward Tenner
     (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).  Hardcover, 341 pages, $26.

Yet the cost reductions, combined with soaring investment, apparently yielded only the most paltry return:

According to one study by the economist Stephen Roach, investment in advanced technology in the service sector grew by over 116 percent per worker between 1980 and 1989, while output increased by only 0.3 percent to 1985 and 2.2 percent to 1989. Two other economists, Daniel E. Sichel of the Brookings Institution and Stephen D. Oliner of the Federal Reserve, have calculated the contribution of computers and peripherals as no more than 0.2 percent of real growth in business output between 1987 and 1993.

• One of "the great cultural inversions of our time" is that we have come to "love planned obsolescence." While older equipment can still do a lot, its inability to handle new releases of software quickly renders it unacceptable. At the same time, "the revenge effect of the explosion in computer performance is...an implosion in value." Tenner cites figures showing that a Compaq computer retains only seventeen percent of its value after two years, and six percent (three percent wholesale) after three years.

  He likens the situation to that of a salesman who, forced to work a steadily growing territory, buys a faster and more powerful vehicle every year, but receives an ever smaller trade-in for his previous vehicle.

• Tenner dismisses hardware--which he says has gotten more and more reliable with time--as a major contributor to the productivity problem. Hackers ("a chronic nuisance and from time to time the source of local disasters") also cannot be blamed, and neither can viruses, which are "less menacing now than they at first appeared to be." The problem, he says, is in the software.

• "Computers tend to replace one category of worker with another." Modernized bookkeeping in the 1950s meant fewer accountants, but more newly hired programmers than expected. Automatic tellers, too, require programmers and technicians, and their salaries are four times what bank tellers receive. "If things go well, banks need less than a quarter of the staff, and they come out ahead. But it is notoriously difficult to predict all problems, or their levels of difficulty, in advance."

• Newer technology runs cheap in routine operation, but is expensive to correct and modify. Tenner discusses the hidden productivity costs he has experienced as an editor working with "inexpensive" TEX manuscripts. The TEX software can produce beautiful manuscripts, but "making small changes, alterations that might require dropping in a metal slug or pasting in a new line in traditional systems, can sometimes take costly programmers' time." Further, "minor incompatibilities between authors' TEX programs and publishers' typesetting equipment can delay book-length manuscripts for weeks and run up costs well beyond those of conventional typesetting.

  Similarly, graphic user interfaces, while not simplifying underlying programs, add a new level of complexity behind the scenes. When all goes well, fine; but when problems arise, "the sheer number of elements and the unforeseeable ways in which they interact means that a high price may have to be paid for the seeming ease of everyday use."

• Increases in processor speed and storage capacity are matched by code inflation in operating systems and applications. "As swiftly as resources grow, the demands of software tend to expand even faster....Meanwhile the planned obsolescence of software means that earlier versions of major programs may no longer be supported. Computer managers are moving users to Windows without always giving them the processor power, memory, or disk space to work effectively."

• Complementing the inability of old systems to run new software, new systems may fail to run older software. Tenner, citing the failure of a new release of Windows to support old applications, suggests that operating systems may be "reaching a point of rapidly diminishing returns."

• The flourishing landscape of endlessly multiplying icons has proven more complicated to navigate than expected. Does a magnifying glass mean "enlarge the typeface" or "search for something"? Microsoft gave up after trying a hundred different icons for the Undo command. Increasingly, software makers are adding text to icons, "sometimes in the form of pop-up balloons that appear when the cursor is moved over the icon--a recomplicating effect if ever there was one."

• Color, too, is problematic, not only because its shades can be harder to distinguish than a gray scale, but also because it can bias the interpretation of information. "Even professionals may focus on the wrong data because, like the rest of us, they attach special importance to certain colors that are coded for urgency in our culture: red traffic signals and yellow highlighting, for example. Nevertheless, color-capable equipment, with its higher cost, is steadily taking hold. (This, I think, is a good example of the American lust for the latest technology, regardless of business justification.)

• Software bugs can quickly destroy productivity gains in any given system. "This need not happen, of course, but the triumphs of computing are understandably reported more frequently than disasters....The problem is usually not catastrophic but...gradual. What occurs is a slow leakage of staff time that does not show up in most statistics."

• Computer games can also drain productivity. Perhaps related to the attraction of games is the compulsion felt by many conscientious employees, who "struggle for hours to get columns to align on their printers." Likewise, huge amounts of time go into fancy effects for slides, handouts, and newsletters.

• "According to the 3M Company, thirty percent of business users lose data every year, costing an estimated twenty-four million business days to replace."

• Technical support by manufacturers has not kept pace with the growth of the industry. The gap is filled by "the person down the hall who becomes a resource without any amendments to the job description." Not infrequently, this peer support comes from highly paid professionals or executives, who are thereby deflected from their primary tasks. One study showed that the real cost of having a PC in the workplace was $20,000 per year, with peer support amounting to between $6000 and $15,000 of the total.

• Networking may distribute not only information, but also responsibility for cables, interface cards, and networking software. "Managers think that because local area networks are cheaper than mainframes they should cost less to maintain." But Tenner quotes a consultant to the effect that "for client/server, ongoing support is much more costly than a mainframe." How much more? According to the consultant, "no one will ever know how expensive it is to support networks throughout a corporation."

• The more powerful and flexible the hardware and software, the more time it takes to master them--all the more because one is not just doing the same old things. "There are always new things to be done." Where almost anyone could produce documents and graphics using the early Macintosh software, now many organizations must hire specialists to deal with the sophisticated capabilities of the software.

• Tenner cites "growing evidence that software doesn't necessarily improve decision-making." For example, some studies suggest that, when given computers to carry out various "what-if" simulations and explorations, users were highly deceived about imagined productivity gains. This has been attributed by some to the "illusion of control" afforded by the computer.

• Researchers have found that low user error rates at the cell level of spreadsheets (0.9 to 2.4 percent) cascade into high rates at the bottom line (53 to 80 percent). "As the logical intricacy of spreadsheets increases, the error rate also grows." This propagation of error is, according to Tenner, a chronic problem of technology. Since the numbers get crunched out of sight, without user involvement, the opportunity to notice something out of whack is reduced.

A few notes of my own:

Computerization has, according to a wide consensus, increased productivity in manufacturing and distribution. The contrast, then, is between the domain where we work primarily upon materials and the flow of materials, and the rapidly growing service domain where interaction with other people in the context of human needs, purposes, and cognitive processes is primary. This is hardly a revolutionary insight, but it does encourage us to stop and consider the "productivity problem" in conjunction with the broad attempt over the past several centuries to bring the science and technology of materials and mechanisms to bear upon the living world, the social sciences, and the human being. This attempt has given us, among many other things,

• the blind quest for manipulative power through industrialized agriculture and genetic engineering, without any deep grasp of the organisms we are manipulating;

• the farce played out in the great bulk of all quantitative "social scientific research," where inattention to the subtleties of meaning hidden behind the numbers results in grown researchers making claims unworthy of high schoolers. (See the chapter on "Scientism" in Neil Postman's Technopoly if you would like some examples of this. Or look at any of the journals now carrying research about the uses of technology in education.)

• the misguided assurance on the part of early artificial intelligence researchers (as soon as they had programmable logic machines) that they would now quickly produce a mechanical intelligence superior to their own.

Behind all of these developments there lay a certain simplistic mindset born of the success and mental habits of a science triumphant over the material world, but stumbling badly when confronting life. What some of these habits are and how they might be mended is something we can at least begin talking about today, and one wishes that Tenner had been inclined to take up the conversation.

For the record, Tenner does not oppose computer use, and is not anti- technology in general. But one of his central messages is that "a labor- saving technology needs a surprising amount of time-consuming vigilance to work properly." He believes we'd be better off if we recognized this fact and planned around it.

His book covers a wide range of technologies, from agriculture to sports to medicine. As an encyclopedic compendium and guide to the literature, it is extremely valuable. I was somewhat disturbed, however, by the haphazard way in which the material was collated--and even more by his failure to seek out any deeper ground for understanding the vast array of "effects" he chronicles. His classification scheme, based on "revenge effects," "recomplication effects," and so on, is merely formal; it remains largely unrooted in history and disconnected from any serious effort to understand the human being who develops and uses all these tools.

Nevertheless, Tenner does attempt to frame a few relatively general and systematic insights. I will summarize the three that seem most central:

• Where, earlier, "even a large, bureaucratically supervised enterprise like an arsenal or print shop was a complex of craftsmen rather than a factory in the nineteenth- or twentieth-century sense," during the past two centuries we have increasingly found ourselves managing systems-- sets of "matched, standardized, interacting components" of great intricacy and without definitive, identifiable chains of cause and effect. "Anything can break. Only a system can have a bug."

  Systems are not only complex, but also tightly coupled. Changes in one part of the system can produce ramifying (and often unexpected) effects through other parts of the system, as when "an airline coffeemaker heats concealed wires and turns a routine short circuit into a forced landing and near-crash." So, "instead of the malice of the isolated object, we face ever more complicated possible linkages among systems of objects."

• At the same time, we have witnessed a shift in the balance between acute and chronic problems. Actually, Tenner points, out, chronic problems only came to our attention fairly recently, as our ability to measure previously imperceptible effects and detect previously obscure patterns was refined. He cites the knowledge of the build-up of strontium 90 in milk during the era of atomic testing as a turning point. We are now accustomed to tracing such gradual effects in numerous guises, from acid rain to global warming to pesticide residues.

  The catastrophic risks of the nineteenth century at least had visible outcomes. A train completed its run unless it derailed. A steamship arrived safely unless a collision, a storm, or a boiler explosion sank it. The hazards of steady, long-term, repeated exposure are usually statistical: more sickness or death than would have happened in the absence of the risk factor....Late-twentieth-century disasters are expressed as deviations from a baseline of "normal" background tragedy.

  Many revenge effects, Tenner points out, "amount to a conversion of sudden impacts that we perceive immediately into long-term problems far more difficult to remedy." X-rays, used for diagnosing and treating acute conditions--and now also for protecting against airline hijackers--can slowly contribute to new ailments. While, on balance, X-rays currently save lives, "one cumulative side effect of medical X-rays is thought to be a small but significant number of new cases of cancer each year."

• Finally, Tenner suggests that "revenge has turned out to be the flip side of intensity." From our intensive use of earth's resources to our high- powered, frontal attack upon diseases, we have often found ourselves up against unforeseen consequences:

  Intensive antibiotic therapy has removed the horror of some of the nineteenth century's most feared infections, yet it has also promoted the spread of even more virulent bacteria. Massive shielding of beaches from the energy of waves has deflected their intensity to other shores or robbed these beaches of replenishing sand. Smoke jumpers have suppressed small forest fires but have thereby helped build reservoirs of flammable materials in the understory for more intense ones. Towering smokestacks have propelled particulates at great velocity higher into the atmosphere than ever before--to the dismay of residents over an ever wider radius.

Complex systems, chronic effects, and the backlash of intensity: Tenner seems content with such abstract categories. To pursue them further, I think, one would have to follow them into the historically rooted human being--and then the categories would probably change. After all, to say that X-rays and smokestacks both present us with risks of a chronic sort is not to speak very revealingly about what X-rays and smokestacks have in common as symptoms of modern society--or about how they differ. But they are both products of human cognition and behavior, and upon the background of that commonality we might be able to trace more intimate connections between them. Jacques Ellul, in his equally far-ranging survey, The Technological Bluff, takes exactly such an approach.

Nevertheless, Tenner's book may have particular value precisely because he he is content dispassionately to catalog a wide range of technologies and effects, without additional fuss. While any further analysis will probably require reworking the catalog along different lines, he has performed a large service by marshalling such a massive literature in a form readily usable by others.

Stephen L. Talbott

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