Talking Technology!

 

 It's Alfred E. Neuman's world, we just live in it.

A reminder of this fact emerged from some recent readings on nanotechnology.

Every so often a report comes out from one august group or another that we really do need to think more about nanotech's potential hazards, which range from the carcinogenic to the apocalyptic. These suggestions tend to disappear amidst the blizzard of announcements issued daily from nanotech laboratories around the world regarding the latest world-changing applications they've developed. Less often a report appears documenting that nanomaterials have been found to effect human health or the environment in some unexpected fashion.

In other words, the gold rush continues while the various bodies responsible for seeing that the enterprise doesn't go disastrously awry fret that maybe we haven't yet gotten a handle on it. The mainstream press barely notices.

Case in point: The most recent assessment of U.S. progress on nanotechnology development, released on April 27 by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The Council's job is to review, biannually, the work of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NNI is responsible for coordinating the activities of 15 federal agencies that distribute government money for nanotech research and development. So far some $18 billion has been handed out in order to promote, as the Council of Advisors put it, "rapid advancement of nanoscience and technology toward commercialization."

Four years ago, the National Academies of Science unleashed a blistering attack on the NNI, accusing it of failing to adequately investigate whether the nano technologies it was backing posed significant threats to public health and safety. The Academies repeated those criticisms, less harshly, last January, in the process issuing their own proposal for a "research and a scientific infrastructure" that would provide the necessary oversight.

It's clear that the NNI hasn't ignored the tongue-lashing it received from the National Academies. According to the Council of Advisors report, NNI funding for health and safety research has increased from $35 million in 2005 to the $105 million requested for fiscal year 2013. This increase was "appropriate, even necessary,"  the Council says, to correct a "significant imbalance" between research directed toward new applications versus research directed toward assessing and preventing risk.

Nonetheless, the Council's assessment also says it is "concerned" that the NNI's 2013 request for research on health and safety represents only a "modest" increase over the $103 million budgeted for 2012. The Council adds that, in any case, whatever information has been collected on the safety of nanotechnology materials isn't getting to the policy makers responsible for managing potential risks.

What the Council's report doesn't mention is that the $103 million allocated by the NNI for health and safety research in 2012 represents slightly less than 6 per cent of its total budget.

Oh, and the press? Google and individual site searches turn up no mention whatsoever of the Council of Advisors report in any national news organ, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times. Not surprisingly, survey results suggest the public hasn't registered any particular concern about nano tech, either. 

Perhaps in an effort to underscore that it's on the case, the report of the President's Council of Advisors carries an appendix dedicated to "Nanotechnology-Related Environment, Health, and Safety Research." Again, though, what it says, in essence, is that we really should be getting a handle on this thing before it blows up in our faces.

"As new modes of manufacturing are developed and explored," the appendix begins,

the need to address occupational health and safety issues will take on even greater urgency. Efforts to address workplace safety issues are limited by the lack of research, lack of rigorous information about the identity and demographics of the workforce, and by current practices and attitudes of employers towards workplace risk issues.

A recent survey on these issues found, the appendix says, that 59 percent of American nanotechnology companies have ignored government recommendations to monitor their workplaces for nanoparticles. By that I assume it means stray nanoparticles escaping whatever controlled environment they're meant to be contained in. The same survey "revealed a number of other attitudes and practices that demonstrate little progress since the publication of an earlier industry survey performed in 2007."

Given the lack of precautions being exercised by those actively engaged in developing nano technologies, the President's Council suggests it's "critical" that appropriate federal agencies "engage" with companies to "increase their awareness of and ability to use the latest knowledge and guidance being generated on this topic." And how should this engagement proceed? In a "non-regulatory capacity," of course!

That the President's advisors would go out of their way to specify that whatever official oversight is exercised in pursuit of nano tech safety should be conducted in a "non-regulatory capacity" tells you that industry has a free hand, pretty much, to explore and exploit nano tech as it sees fit. Willingly or not, we'll all be going along for the ride. 

©Doug Hill, 2012

Talking Technology!™

A good news/bad news dispatch from Japan:

The bad news: According to the Wall Street Journal, some 75,000 citizens who were forced to evacuate their communities in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns won't be going home any time soon. The government's minister of the environment, Goshi Hosono, said recently that high levels of radiation will likely make their towns uninhabitable for another twenty years, at least.

The good news: Since the evacuated towns aren't being used by human beings at the moment, Hosono thinks they'll make ideal storage facilities for radioactive fuel rods.

Autonomy continued: Technology or Capitalism?

A little over a week ago I posted an entry on technological autonomy. It made the point that a nation's commitment to advanced technologies can result in a situation where its economic well-being is directly counter to the physical or psychological well-being of its people. The point I'd like to make today is that the commitments of corporations to advanced technologies can become similarly antithetical.

The example in that previous post was Japan's commitment to nuclear power. Here I'll consider two examples involving specific consumer products: the international sale of sports utility vehicles and the international sale of snack foods.

Both examples raise an important definitional question: Which is the driving force, technology or capitalism? It's a hard question to answer because at a certain stage of development the two are so closely intertwined that it's often impossible to separate them. On the one hand, the spread of global capitalism would clearly be impossible without mass production technologies. On the other hand, capitalism is clearly the economic model most responsible for the development and exploitation of mass production technologies.

The historian David F. Noble has argued that technology is "the racing heart of corporate capitalism," implying that capitalism directs the enterprise while technology supplies the motive force. I think you could just as successfully argue that the opposite is true. The best solution is probably to say that the relationship between technology and capitalism is dialectical, or symbiotic. Sometimes technology stimulates capitalism, other times capitalism stimulates technology; in advanced technological/capitalist societies neither could exist without the other. From either perspective an expansion of influence becomes a priority that overwhelms every other consideration, which is another way of defining a condition of de facto autonomy. 
  

Here are the two examples that came to my attention recently: 

 

Example 1: Ford to Quadruple SUV Offerings in China Over Next Year

That's the headline on a recent report from Reuters regarding Ford's eagerness to supply millions of Chinese consumers with vehicles that will push global warming past the point of reversibility as quickly as possible.

According to Reuters, 2.1 million SUVs were sold in China last year, an increase of 25 percent over the previous year. That's about half the annual sales of SUVs in the United States, but it's just the beginning for China. Ford is aiming to increase its SUV sales in China by increasing production there and also by importing one of its largest models, the Explorer, from the United States. As it is, Chinese auto dealers can't get enough SUVs to sell.

SUVs are hugely profitable for the auto companies, and huge profits invariably translate into glowing reports in the financial press. Environmentally, the impact isn't so positive. In his book High and Mighty: SUVs: The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way, Keith Bradsher reported that a midsize SUV puts out roughly 50 per cent more carbon dioxide per mile than the typical car. A full-sized SUV may emit twice as much.

No doubt those figures have changed somewhat in the ten years since Bradsher's book came out, but it's safe to say that SUVs aren't the most fuel efficient vehicles on the road. That's why their popularity – in the US, China, or any other country – isn't something to celebrate. In fact, the Chinese government has made it a policy to encourage sales of electric vehicles. Not many consumers are buying them, though, in part because they're absurdly expensive compared to conventional vehicles. 

 Example 2: Snacking for the Sake of Sales

The New York Times recently reported that Kellogg, the cereal company, has launched a major initiative to expand its sales of snack foods. The company is betting on snacks because sales of cereal are declining. More and more these days people are eating breakfast on the run, and a bowl of Frosted Flakes isn't very mobile. On the other hand, Americans seldom fail to take advantage of what food marketers call a "snacking occasion."      

It doesn't take a genius to see that this is an instance where the health of the economy is at odds with the health of the consumers upon whom the economy is built. Obesity is a health crisis of epidemic proportions, not only in the United States but around the world, and an over-abundance of snacking occasions is one good reason why. The fact that providing more opportunities for snacking occasions has become, as the Times put it, a "core mission" for Kellogg essentially means the company hopes to profit by undermining the health of its customers.

Kellogg is especially culpable on this score because, as the Times pointed out, it has long based its marketing campaigns on the lie that foods drenched in sugar are good for you. For example, it sells a breakfast cereal called Smoze (named after the old campfire treat, s'mores) that it advertises as a "good source of Vitamin D." Another cereal, Krave, sports a label reading "Good source of fiber and whole grain.” It's available in chocolate and double-chocolate flavors.

At the moment, Kellogg realizes only about five per cent of its international revenue from snacks, and international sales as well as snack sales are where the company sees its future. Margaret Bath, Kellogg's senior vice president for research, quality and technology, cites projections that the world's population will grow to between seven and nine billion people by 2050. “That’ll be a lot of mouths to feed," she says. "We have people that are undernourished and we have people that are overnourished. It’s the job of a food scientist to serve that whole spectrum.”

Might I suggest that Ms. Bath has an unfortunately narrow conception of what it means "to serve"?

©Doug Hill, 2012

Utopia on a Budget

When you're selling dreams, the trick is to strike a balance between utopian promises and common sense.

A week ago today, a privately funded startup called Planetary Resources announced that it had embarked on a program to mine trillions of dollars' worth of precious metals and other resources from asteroids in space. The project is undeniably ambitious, yet in their press conference the company's executives took pains to emphasize the pragmatism of their approach. 

Exponential advances in technology now make it possible, said co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis, for small companies to accomplish what once required the backing of governments or large corporations. Planetary Resources plans to deploy "swarms" of low-cost telescope satellites to find asteroids that are rich in water, platinum, and other assets, but relatively close to Earth. They will then be mined not by people but by robots.

To be sure, there's nothing modest about the profits Planetary Resources hopes to realize. There were also frequent mentions during the press conference of how the project's success would benefit all of humankind, not only by developing new supplies of diminishing resources but also by keeping alive the dream of space exploration itself. Still, the gee whiz factor was kept to a minimum. Diamandis even claimed at one point that he'd dreamed since he was a teenager of being an asteroid miner, which seemed to be taking pragmatism a bit too far. Surely a teenager can imagine more glamorous things to do in space than that. 

Planetary Resources' Co-founders and Co-chairmen Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson and (center) President and Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki

The press conference's one truly utopian moment came in a comment from Planetary Resource's other co-founder and co-chairman, Eric Anderson. My guess is that he momentarily let his enthusiasm get the best of him when he let slip his vision of where, in the long run, this could be heading. "We see the future of Earth as a garden of Eden," he said, "as a place where we take care of the Earth and protect the environment and we do our heavy industries and our mining and all that sort of stuff in space!"

Ah, the Garden of Eden. In truth that's what we've always been after, although we're less inclined to admit it today than we used to be. In 1833 a German immigrant named John Adolphus Etzler published The Paradise Within Reach of All Men, the first extended work of technological utopianism to appear in the United States. Follow my proposals for harnessing the elements with machines, Etzler declared, and within ten years "everything desirable for human life may be had by every man in superabundance, without labor, and without pay; where the whole face of nature shall be changed into the most beautiful forms, and man may live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury…" He went on.

Etzler predicted that some would greet his proposals with ridicule, and he was right. Among them was Henry David Thoreau, who published, anonymously, a review of Etzler's book that was slyly humorous in parts, openly sarcastic in others. "Let us not succumb to nature," he wrote. "We will marshal the clouds and restrain the tempests; we will bottle up pestilent exhalations, we will probe for earthquakes, grub them up; and give vent to the dangerous gases; we will disembowel the volcano, and extract its poison, take its seed out. We will wash water, and warm fire, and cool ice, and underprop the earth. We will teach birds to fly, and fishes to swim, and ruminants to chew the cud. It is time we had looked into these things."

Gerard O'Neill in 1977

 

A similar exchange occurred in the mid 1970s when a Princeton physics professor named Gerard O'Neill came forward with his own proposal for mining asteroids. O'Neill envisioned a series of permanently inhabited, self-sustaining human colonies orbiting in deep space. Huge inter-connected cylinders, each encompassing a land area as large as 100 square miles, would accommodate, in addition to extensive mining operations, capacious living quarters, gardens, and recreation areas. Settlers would be attracted not only by the promise of employment, O'Neill said, but also by internal climate conditions equivalent to "quite attractive modern communities in the U.S. and in southern France." He added that, because levels of gravity could be varied within the cylinders, a short walk up a hillside could bring a resident to an area where "human-powered flight would be easy" and "sports and ballet could take on a new dimensions."

Government funding was still the way to go at that point, and O'Neill appeared before subcommittees of the House of Representatives and the Senate to present his ideas. Here, too, it seems clear the intention was to portray the project as entirely reasonable. Mentions of southern France and flying ballet dancers were exceptions; charts and graphs were the rule. What we're talking about, O'Neill testified, is "civil engineering on a large scale in a well-understood, highly-predictable environment."

Again, naysayers emerged. Stewart Brand solicited comments on the project for the Spring 1976 edition of CoEvolution Quarterly, a spinoff of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand was an enthusiastic supporter, but many of his readers weren't. The writer, farmer and environmentalist Wendell Berry called O'Neill's proposals "an ideal solution to the moral dilemma of all those in this society who cannot face the necessities of meaningful change." E F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, wrote that he'd be happy to nominate several hundred people to ship into outer space immediately, so that the real work of saving the planet could proceed unimpeded.

Planetary Resources investors Eric Schmidt and James Cameron. Other investors include Larry Page, former Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi, and Ross Perot, Jr.

Failing to find support in Congress, O'Neill's project faded away. Soon after that the personal computer industry began its remarkable rise in Silicon Valley, reinvigorating the idea that technology can change the world overnight, making a lot of people extremely rich in the process. No accident that many of Planetary Resources' investors acquired their fortunes digitally. When you have billions to spend, your dreams don't have to make sense. 

  

©Doug Hill, 2012

Technological Autonomy, continued

In January I wrote an essay for the technology blog Cyborgology on the subject of technological autonomy and its implications for the environment. There's no more important dynamic when it comes to understanding our relationship with machines and where they're taking us.

Technological autonomy is shorthand for the idea that, once advanced technologies pass a certain stage of development, we lose our ability to control them. I generally use the phrase "de facto technological autonomy" to underscore that what's being talked about is a loss of practical rather than literal control. Loss of practical control occurs for a number of reasons, among them the fact that the economies of modern societies have come to depend, completely, on various technologies. Remove those technologies and the economies collapse.

A striking example of this is the dilemma facing Japan as it contemplates whether to resume its dependence on nuclear energy in the wake of the post-tsunami meltdowns at the Fukushima reactors last year.

The Atlantic recently ran an interview with Nobuo Tanaka, the past executive director of the International Energy Agency, who is warning that without nuclear power Japan is rapidly heading toward (as The Atlantic put it) an "energy death spiral."

Since the meltdowns, operations at all but two of the nation's 54 reactors have been suspended. The threat is that without energy sufficient to supply its manufacturing needs, Japan's largest employers will be forced to abandon domestic production, initiating a process of "deindustrialization" that would cripple the economy. These concerns are exacerbated by uncertainties regarding international oil supplies and the prognosis that this coming summer may be unusually hot, prompting a spike in energy demands.

The dilemma is an excruciating one. The nation's citizens are essentially being told that they must welcome back into their midst an industry that's made whole towns uninhabitable and that's undermined confidence in their food supply, not to mention their officials. The alternative is widespread unemployment and poverty. In other words, while it's literally possible to shut down the reactors permanently, practically speaking Japan may have no choice but to turn them back on. That's de facto technological autonomy.

Global warming doubles the bind. Without the reactors, Japan will make up some of its energy deficit with fossil fuels, thereby increasing its emissions of greenhouse gases.

Japan's distinction is that the tsunami has forced it to confront the issue of technological autonomy sooner than other industrialized countries. Their time (our time) will come. 

©Doug Hill, 2012

Augmenting Reality

Earlier this month Google previewed a work in progress: its augmented reality glasses, which promise to layer useful information over the unhelpful every-day reality human beings have experienced for...well, since the beginning of time.

Google produced a video to give us an idea of how incredibly helpful augmented reality could be. Pop culture hacker Jonathan McIntosh soon provided his own augmented version of what that augmented reality would really look like.

Check out Google's original here:

And McIntosh's version here:

Masks of Rage

 

As the trial of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik proceeds in Norway this week, it's worth noting a technology-related anomaly in the press coverage of his crimes.

Breivik is the right-wing terrorist who killed more than 70 people, most of them students attending an island summer camp, in July 2011. At the time, it was widely noted that significant sections of his "European Declaration of Independence" had been lifted verbatim from Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and Its Future," aka "the Unabomber Manifesto." What wasn't noted was how dramatically at odds Breivik's beliefs are from Kaczynski's.

Like Kaczynski, Breivik hates leftists, and it was Kaczynski's passages excoriating those enemies that Breivik copied. But where the Unabomber set out to destroy the Kingdom of Technology, Breivik spoke of using technology – technology in general, that is, in addition to bombs and guns – to further his goals. His agenda was aimed at cleansing European nations of "multicultural" influences. Toward that end, he urged that the technological advantage of European nations be widened, recommending that twenty per cent of their national budgets be reserved "for research and development in relation to science and technology."

For the same reason, he also urged that Western technology be kept out of the hands of Muslim countries. Christian nations should focus their energies solely on their own economic development, the declaration said, "allowing unlimited research and development relating to every aspect of technology and science (including all aspects of biological research, reprogenetics etc.)."

Another significant difference was their respective positions on genetic engineering. Kaczynski specifically warned that using those techniques was a step in the direction of technological totalitarianism, but Breivik specifically endorsed them. "Reproduction clinics" should be established, Breivik said, in order to promote population growth from "pure sources," defined as "non-diluted (95-99% pure) Nordic genotypes." Kaczynski urged that all forms of genetic engineering be outlawed, but predicted that in a technological society they wouldn't be. (See paragraphs 122-124). 

Many of us who have doubts regarding the technological project deeply regretted Kaczynski's discrediting of the issue with his terror campaign. If there's a lesson here it may be that hatred seeks justifications for its slaughters under whatever guise happens to be convenient.