On the Attractions of (Technological) Disembodiment

What is the fascination so many technophiles seem to have for disembodiment?

Repeatedly those enthralled with the powers of technology have issued grandiloquent pronouncements that the bounds of physicality have been or soon will be overcome. How, exactly, this liberation is achieved isn’t explained. Paradoxically, it’s precisely this disconnection from the tangible that the technophiles believe gives them unprecedented abilities to control and manipulate the physical world. 

The startling advances of the Industrial Revolution inspired many to believe that technology would be the vehicle for fulfilling our long-held dream of corporal escape. Oswald Spengler took note of this in 1923, in “The Machine” chapter of “The Decline of the West.” “The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time,” he wrote. “An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.”

Today these ineffable longings emanate most conspicuously from Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of technological rapture, where they’re grounded (if you’ll pardon the expression) in information theory, which in turn is the cornerstone of the secular religion Jaron Lanier calls “cybernetic totalism."

Andrew McAfee

Most recently – last Thursday, in fact – I heard the disembodiment trope expressed yet again, in a webcast on the Internet of Things, sponsored by MIT Technology Review. One of the participants was Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age. One of the principal consequences of the IoT, McAfee contended, is “dematerialization.” “We are substituting code and data for atoms, for materials out there in the world,” he said, twice.  As evidence he cited energy-efficient buildings and our increasing ability to produce more food using less land. I found this puzzling because buildings and crops are demonstrably physical entities. Surely the end result of efficiency isn’t evaporation. It also seems odd that dematerialization would be envisioned as an outgrowth of an internet of things.

Early testimony to the growing influence of cybernetic totalism (not yet named by Lanier) was offered by the technology enthusiast Kevin Kelly, who said in a 2005 online debate with the technology skeptic Stephen Talbott that we are on “a collective journey toward the belief that the universe is a computer.” Already, he said, the thinking was widespread that thinking itself is a type of computation, that DNA is “software” and evolution “an algorithmic process.” Galaxies, molecules, mathematics, emotions, rain forests and genes can all be described, Kelly continued, in computational terms. “If we keep going we will quietly arrive at the notion that all materials and all processes are actually forms of computation. Our final destination is a view that the atoms of the universe are fundamentally intangible bits.”

Kevin Kelly

Note the huge leap in logic in that last sentence. Suddenly the atoms of the universe become intangible bits. Why intangible? And how intangible? The bits of information passed around by computers, or the strands of DNA in our chromosomes, may seem discarnate, but they’re not. They’re small and impossible to see with the naked eye, but they’re real. Spooky action at a distance is a phenomenon of the subatomic world; in more quotidian realms, cause and effect aren’t that mysterious. Kelly went on to call information theory a “universal metaphor,” but added that whether it’s a metaphor or a reality doesn’t matter: “the metaphor wins.” Most worshippers at the altar of information don’t bother with such distinctions.

An example is the manifesto issued (not so quietly) in 1994 by a group of high-profile, conservative tech pundits, Esther Dyson, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder and George Keyworth, a former science advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Their "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” announced, in its first sentence: "The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter." This fustian rhetoric was more than matched two years later by John Perry Barlow, a hipster cowboy rancher and sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow addressed his "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” to the "Governments of the Industrial World," which he described as "weary giants of flesh and steel."

"On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone," Barlow wrote. "You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here…"

Oliver Wendell Holmes

As I say, the Industrial Revolution inspired a rash of such sentiments. In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly that three technologies would free us from the surly bonds of Earth: the stereoscope, the daguerreotype and the photograph. Their introduction inaugurated, he declared "a new epoch in the history of human progress." In this new epoch the physical world could be reproduced so accurately that before long we might not need it anymore. "Form is henceforth divorced from matter," he wrote. …Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core.” 

It was the railroad that launched Ralph Waldo Emerson into what he called “the panoramic mode,” a transcendental state he’d been trying to achieve for most of his life. “Matter is phenomenal whilst men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary," he wrote of his first train ride. "…The very permanence of matter seems compromised & oaks, fields, hills, hitherto esteemed symbols of stability, do absolutely dance by you.” Philosophers, too, noted a growing disengagement from terra firma as mechanization of the culture accelerated. Nietzsche wrote of the “weightlessness” of the times while Marx articulated what may be the defining perception of the modern era: "All that is solid melts into air."

Emerson, Nietzsche and Marx presumably recognized, if Holmes did not, that our arrival in the weightless, panoramic mode was only a metaphor, that everything solid hadn’t actually melted into air. It’s not clear that today’s cybernetic totalists agree.

During the MIT webcast last Thursday, Andrew McAfee described Uber in glowing terms as a paragon of where the IoT is taking us because it provides a full-service “platform” rather than simply a service or a product. The dematerialization part apparently applies because Uber has established itself as a global transportation company by assembling an app rather than a fleet of cars, because it collects terabytes of data to track every aspect of its business and because you don’t have to pay its drivers in cash. It all adds up to a uniquely satisfying customer “experience.”  Still, I’m not sure this represents a substitution of code and data for atoms. As far as I know the Uber experience still involves asphalt, stop lights, pedestrian crossings and potholes.  

The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy wrote in 1936 that although the “otherworldly” doctrines of the great religious and philosophical teachers have consistently held that there are realities superior to those of everyday existence, when it comes down to how we live, most people “have never been able to deny to the things disclosed by the senses a genuine and imposing and highly important realness.” Those words may not be as true today as they were when Lovejoy wrote them; the readiness of the masses to surrender their grasp on reality seems to have increased roughly in parallel with the eagerness of the digerati to declare it defunct. Nonetheless, I’m sticking with the wisdom of one of our great apostles of embodiment, Madonna. “We are living in a material world,” she said, “and I am a material girl.”

Note: This essay is based in part on my book, "Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology," forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. 

©Doug Hill 2016

Robot Burger Update 2

This isn't a blog devoted exclusively to the issue of technological unemployment (see my previous post), but I thought in fairness I should note that the manufacturers of robots are fighting back against those who argue that rapid advances in automation pose a growing threat to jobs.

A dispatch from the Automate 2013 trade show in Chicago appeared in the New York Times today. It quoted industry representatives as maintaining that nothing has changed: Technology will continue to create jobs rather than eliminate them, as it always has. The Luddite Fallacy, in other words, remains a fallacy.

I remain unconvinced, for three basic reasons:

1) The main purpose of automation is to replace workers, and we're getting much, much better at it.

 2) The roboticists' optimism makes sense only if we follow a path the planet can no longer afford: constant economic growth based on constant increases in the production and consumption of manufactured goods.

 3) The sorts of jobs that automation promises to create are either highly skilled or dehumanizing. Let's not kid ourselves that we'll retrain every factory worker to be an engineer, or an entrepreneur.

The debate will continue, no doubt, but nothing will stop the ongoing development of robotics. The incentives for employers are too powerful to resist, and there's no consensus for restraint.

(And no, the illustration here is not one chosen by the International Federation of Robotics.)

©Doug Hill, 2013

Hello Robots, Goodbye Fry Cooks

Given that we're not in the habit of thinking too much where our technological passions might lead us, I've been heartened over the past year to see an unusual willingness to confront the potentially devastating impact of the robotics revolution on human employment. 

It was a question that was hard to avoid, given the global recession and the widening gap between rich and poor. It's obvious that rapid advances in automation are offering employers ever-increasing opportunities to drive up productivity and profits while keeping ever-fewer employees on the payroll. It's obvious as well that those opportunities will continue to increase in the future.

Some credit for opening up the conversation on the implications of this progression goes to two professors at MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Their book Race Against the Machine, published late in 2011, had a man-bites-dog quality that attracted a lot of attention. We don't necessarily expect experts from the temple of technology to question whether technology might be leading us in directions not entirely favorable to humankind.

"The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair," said the New York Times, "whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology."

A series of similar assessments appeared at intervals through the year, among them an essay by Christopher Mims in MIT's Technology Review in May ("Is Automation the Handmaiden of Inequality?"), an Atlantic.com commentary by Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University, in October ("The Consequences of Machine Intelligence"), and three New York Times pieces in December, two by Paul Krugman ("Rise of the Robots" and "Robots and Robber Barons"), and one by Brynjolfsson and McAfee ("Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling"). 

Also in December, the perennial technological enthusiast Kevin Kelly weighed in with his views on the automation revolution in a Wired cover story ("Better Than Human," published online in December, in print in January). Although Kelly skipped over the short-term challenges that worry Brynjolfsson and McAfee, in the end his conclusion was the same as theirs: The future for workers depends not on competing with machines but on learning to leverage the advantages they offer to get ahead. As Kelly put it, "This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines….Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters."

Probably the oddest recent entry in this discussion, and the one that intrigued me most, came not from an economist or journalist, but from a press release issued by a company hoping to capitalize on the robot revolution. I'd like to dwell a bit on the details of that release here, seeing as how it had some outstanding man-bites-dog qualities of its own. 

  

The release was issued in November by a San Francisco-based startup called Momentum Machines. It announced the arrival of a hamburger-making machine that will revolutionize fast food as we know it. (The robot pictured at the top of this piece is from a different company.)

The surprise isn't that the release promises a product with revolutionary benefits. The surprise is that it acknowledges those benefits might be accompanied by some troubling side effects. In doing so the release embodies with unusual clarity the tension that exists between those two conflicting outcomes.

Momentum Machines claims its hamburger machine can churn out 360 fully prepared and packaged hamburgers an hour. Not just ordinary burgers, but gourmet burgers, expertly cooked and seasoned to order. The quality of the product, however, isn't the principal value the release seeks to promote.

Its headline centers instead on the machine's astonishing economic benefits. "The Restaurant Industry Is The Most Labor Intensive Industry In The Country," it reads. "Our Technology Can Save The QSR [Quick Service Restaurant] Industry $9 Billion/Year In Wages."

The release goes on to promise that Momentum Machine's machine (they've yet to come up with a name for it) "replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better."

The unexpected twist appears in a three-paragraph statement at the release's end.

Apparently recognizing that its earlier promise to replace every line cook in the business carries some unpleasant implications, for line cooks if not their employers, the company expresses a desire to help retrain people displaced by its technology. To help smooth their "transition," it promises to offer opportunities for technical education at a discount. The suggestion is that fry cooks will be transformed into engineers, after which they will participate in further automating the fast food industry.

The release then ventures into territory seldom explored in the annals of public relations: economic theory.

"The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries," it says, "and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment." 

This increase is the result, the release says, of three factors: New employees are hired to build the robots; the robots allow the company to expand its "frontiers of production," which requires more employees; and automation produces savings that can be passed along to customers, thereby stimulating the economy.

"We take these issues very seriously," the release says, "so please feel free to tell us how we can help with this transition."

The release also encourages anyone with questions to get in touch, so I did. I asked for any references the company could provide to support its contention that economists "generally accept" that technologies increase employment, and also for more information on the retraining assistance the company planned to offer displaced employees.

To my surprise, a couple of weeks later I received a response from the Founder and President of Momentum Machines, Alexandros Vardakostas. His note was cordial, but not very enlightening.  It provided no direct answers to my questions, only a link to a Wikipedia article on technological unemployment, aka "the Luddite Fallacy."

"Hi Doug. Hope all is well you," Vardakostas wrote. "Read this to learn more. Warm regards. Alex."

True enough, Wikipedia's article does describe the theories of a number of economists who agree that technological advance ultimately leads to an increase in employment. It can't be considered an unqualified endorsement of that position, however, given that Wikipedia says its "factual accuracy" is disputed, and that it needs "additional citations for verification." The article also pays little attention to whether today's revolutionary advances in automation may be creating changes in the economics of labor that render previous theories, even if they were historically true, obsolete. That's the question asked by most of the articles I've cited above. 

Amazon warehouse (Reuters)

 As we rush toward a super-automated future, plenty of other questions remain unanswered. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, for example, propose innovation through entrepreneurship as a leading solution to employment stagnation, and toward that end recommend various deregulatory measures that will allow new businesses to flourish unencumbered. 

I'm no economist, but it seems fair to ask whether measures of the sort they prescribe might simultaneously open the way for even greater exploitation or elimination of labor. Automation typically puts more power in the hands of management, after all, and there's no guarantee that the vast majority of post-automation jobs will be any more satisfying, economically or spiritually, than the jobs they replace. 

For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee cite as models for the future the thousands of entrepreneurs now exploiting the new opportunities for employment offered by the likes of eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Apple's App Store, and Android Marketplace. Even if we take for granted that such traditional benefits as health insurance, vacation pay, maternity leave, and pensions are off the table, one wonders how many of those entrepreneurs are making what used to be considered a middle-class income.

Not many, at least in the apps market, according to a recent article in the New York Times. The article makes it clear that winning big in that race with the machines is only slightly more likely than hitting it big in the lottery, and that the people who are really cashing in on the app market are the stockholders of Apple and Google. The headline tells the story: "As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living."

That article demonstrates perfectly a phenomenon Brynjolfsson and McAfee do address: The emergence, due to the unprecedented economies of scale offered by various technologies, of a super-star marketplace, one in which a few people become fabulously wealthy while everyone else scrambles desperately to break into their golden circle. Kevin Kelly's vision in this regard is positively Panglossian. Let the machines take over the jobs, he says, while we dream of new work that matters. Take it from one who knows: You don't get paid for dreaming.

Perhaps the most pressing question is whether an economy shaped by super-automated techno-entrepreneurs will be sustainable. We have an abundance of evidence today that another historical truism of economic theory – that growth solves every problem – may also be obsolete. Certainly the environmental disasters we've created suggest that perhaps the time has come to consider a different option: restraint.

Momentum Machines, for example, believes that technologies like its hamburger machine will open new "frontiers of production." Forgive me, but I'm not sure the frontiers of production opened by previous advances in fast food technology have proved entirely salubrious.

These are some of the reasons why I was hoping Momentum Machines might provide more detailed answers to my questions. I've sent Alex Vardakostas a second email, asking for elaboration and passing along links to the aforementioned articles. So far no response, which could mean he's disinterested in further discussion, or simply that he's too busy opening new frontiers of production to entertain quarrelsome emails from bloggers.

(Note: I've posted an update on Momentum Machines' revised press release.)

©Doug Hill, 2013

Losing the Race Against the Machine

There's a new ebook out that's attracting attention, in part because its conclusions are so startling, in part because its conclusions come from an unexpected quarter. The title is Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Its authors, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, are two professors from one of the academic epicenters of tech, MIT.

I haven't read the book, but I have read the three excerpts on The Atlantic magazine's web site (links below). I would definitely recommend them, both because they're clearly written and because they document in a dispassionate way some of most important effects of our ever-increasing social and economic commitments to technology.

(If you do read the excerpts, you might want to do so backwards, starting with the third and ending with the first, because for reasons unknown that's the order in which The Atlantic seems to have edited them. Key points alluded to in the first two excerpts don't get made until the third. The Atlantic also gets the book's title wrong.)

I'll list here a few of the points from Race Against the Machine that jumped out at me, all consistent with arguments I make in my book regarding the nature of technology.

•  The headline of The Atlantic's third excerpt, "Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines," is remarkable in that it appears to acknowledge that there is a war between workers and machines. This is not the story we usually get in the current era of technological enthusiasm. Nonetheless that's the essence of Brynjolfsson and McAfee's argument.

•  The authors say that economists have argued almost since the days of the original Luddites that workers need not fear technology because in the long run fewer jobs will be lost to machines than will be created by them. This assumption ignores what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call "a dirty little secret": Those new jobs don't necessarily provide a sustainable income. Nor, I would add, do many of them provide decent working conditions.

"There is no economic law," Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, "that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress." This is a realization, they add, that regular people seem to understand even when economists do not. Perhaps that's because it's regular people whose jobs are eliminated or degraded thanks to various forms of mechanization.

According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee, losers in the war between workers and machines could ultimately constitute a majority – perhaps more than 90 percent – of the population.

•  Lest anyone discount their findings as the ravings of neo-Luddites, it should be noted that Brynjolfsson and McAfee initially set out to write a book affirming traditional economics wisdom by documenting how "the cornucopia of innovation" of the digital era would produce legions of new jobs and fresh waves of economic prosperity. (The title of their book retains traces of that initial thrust.)

According to an interview with the authors in the New York Times, they were surprised when their research led them to the opposite conclusion. "The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair," the Times reports, "whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology."

•  In The Atlantic's second excerpt the authors say that the positive aspects of technological growth include its encouragement of "efforts toward superstardom" and "capital accumulation." When you get to excerpt #3 you see their more fundamental point: that these same two factors contribute to a radical skewing of the social balance between rich and poor.

Exploitation of modern technological systems enables the expansion of "winner-take-all markets," Brynjolfsson and McAfee write, in which economies of scale squeeze out all but the most dominant players. "Aided by digital technologies, entrepreneurs, CEOs, entertainment stars, and financial executives have been able to leverage their talents across global markets and capture reward that would have been unimaginable in earlier times."

•  Brynjolfsson and McAfee also note that exploitation of modern technological systems enables a radical shift in the balance of power between labor and capital. This is hardly news to the millions of corporate workers who for years have been doing steadily more work for stagnant pay, a ratio typically applauded by investment analysts as "increased productivity."

The authors cite studies suggesting that the wages of unskilled workers in the United States have trended downward for over 30 years. Another study they cite suggests that recent spending on equipment and software has soared by 26% while payrolls have remained essentially flat.

A few concluding remarks:

Would-be tech superstars – aspiring Mark Zuckerbergs –  are fond of saying that they've come up with the next truly "disruptive" technology, one that will profitably overthrow some segment of the social or economic status quo. Race Against the Machine provides a somewhat broader understanding of what technological "disruption" means for those who don't manage to achieve superstar status.

I mentioned above that conclusions in Race Against the Machine are consistent with arguments made in my book regarding the nature of technology. I was thinking there of one point in particular: that it is in the nature of technology to expand its sphere of influence. As the philosopher of technology Langdon Winner has put it, “If there is a distinctive path that modern technological change has followed it is that technology goes where it has never been. Technological development proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up toward that which is still untouched.”

Brynjolfsson and McAfee address some of the reasons this is so, but there are others. For example: their focus is on the direct replacement of human workers by machines. What they don't discuss, at least in The Atlantic excerpts, is the dehumanization of workers so that they conform more readily to the requirements of the machine. Thus transformation of the human being is an aspect of technology's inexorable drive toward (to use Jacques Ellul's word) "completion."

Given the palsied state of labor power in the United States today, it's difficult to foresee any significant resistance emerging to stop management's moves toward automation, despite warnings such as those issued by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. And of course they are far from the first to warn that workers might not emerge victorious in their "war" with technology.

Among those who preceded them was an earlier professor at MIT, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964). For those who don't recognize the name, Wiener was the inventor of cybernetics and thus a founding father of the automation technologies discussed in Race Against the Machine. He was unusual in that he spent almost as much energy worrying about the technologies he helped unleash as he did unleashing them.

Wiener talked often of the potential impact of smart machines on employment. Automation, he wrote in 1950, represents "the precise economic equivalent of slave labor." Thus workers who compete with machines will have to accept the economic conditions of slave labor. As unpleasant as this might be for the slaves, it admirably serves the needs of the slave owners. "Those who suffer from a power complex," Wiener wrote, "find the mechanization of man a simple way to realize their ambitions."

Wiener warned that our traditional attitudes toward business would have to change if catastrophe is to be avoided. Two attitudes he mentioned specifically were our worship of progress and our belief in what he called the "fifth freedom" – the freedom to exploit. Absent those changes, he said, we can expect levels of unemployment that will make the Great Depression "seem a pleasant joke."

The Wiener quotes here are from his book, The Human Use of Human Beings. The Langdon Winner quote is from The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Era of High Technology. For close-to-the-ground documentation of the sorts of economic disruptions discussed in Race Against the Machine, see Barbara Ehrenreich's, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal. Note, too, Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, a dystopian fantasy about the end of meaningful employment as the result of automation. It mentions Wiener by name.

Race Against the Machine, excerpts:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/where-human-workers-can-still-beat-robots-at-least-for-now/247259/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-the-massive-wealth-of-the-1-could-ruin-the-economy/247277/

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/why-workers-are-losing-the-war-against-machines/247278/1/

 Photo: ms.careergirl.com 

©Doug Hill, 2012