Has Morality Become a Skeuomorph?

An early strategy for making new technology feel familiar

I was thinking this morning about two subjects that don't usually go together, skeuomorphs and morality.

A skeuomorph is a design element applied to a product that looks as if it's functional but really isn't. Its real purpose is to evoke a sense of familiarity and comfort. The literary critic N. Katherine Hayles cites as an example the dashboard of her Toyota Camry, which is made of synthetic plastic molded to look as if it's stitched fabric. 

Software designers use lots of skeuomorphs for their user interfaces; examples include the "pages" that seem to "turn" in e-readers and word processing programs. Hayles calls skeuomorphs “threshold devices." They "stitch together past and future," she says, "reassuring us that even as some things change, others persist."

For a few months last year Apple Computer took a lot of flack from the design cognoscenti for its dedication to skeuomorphs; the linen texture that appears as background on the iPod and the wooden bookshelf used for the iBook display were frequently cited examples. The company's skeuomorph aesthetic was said to be a legacy of Steve Jobs, who was convinced people needed recognizable touchstones to ease them through the uncharted expanses of cyberspace. 

Enough! cried the cognoscenti. The time for such reassurance has long since ended! So it was that cheers greeted the firing in October of Apple's software leader, Scott Forstall, carrier of the skeuomorphic torch, as well as the introduction of Microsoft's sleek new Metro Design, which doesn't pretend to be anything other than pixels on a screen. 

Apple's iBooks display

Although I'm pretty sensitive to the look and feel of things, my thoughts about skeuomorphs this morning had nothing to do with user interfaces. Rather I was thinking that perhaps the idea of a skeuomorph might be applied outside the domain of design, specifically to the realm of ethics. 

It seems likely that in an era of mass-market technology morality has become – not always, but often – a skeuomorph: a feature that's retained for the sake of appearances rather than any practical function. Any function, that is, other than that of reassuring people that even as some things change, others persist.

These admittedly dark thoughts were prompted by reading the cover story in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food." Reporter Michael Moss describes in brilliant detail the lengths to which America's biggest food and beverage conglomerates have gone to design products we can't get enough of, literally. Their profits and our waistlines get fatter. They prosper, we don't.

Moss opens the piece by telling the story of an extraordinary summit meeting of food industry leaders, convened in Minneapolis in 1999 by a Pillsbury executive named James Behnke. Among those in attendance were the presidents or CEOs of Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Mars, and Coca-Cola. 

Behnke called the meeting to discuss the implications for their businesses of the nation's skyrocketing rates of obesity. Health officials and physicians' groups were sounding alarms: Obesity was a health-care catastrophe in the making, especially among children, and the products sold by the men at Behnke's meeting were a major cause of the problem.

Behnke, a chemist with a doctorate in food science, believed it was time the industry addressed the obesity issue, not only because it was threatening to become a public relations liability, but also because the health officials and physician's groups were right: the industry did bear some responsibility for undermining the health of its customers. His feelings were shared by a vice president from Nabisco named Michael Mudd, who presented to the assembled executives an obesity primer, describing with the help of some 114 slides the scale of the epidemic and the threat it posed to the packaged food industry. 

 

Mudd then offered a series of recommendations. First, he said, the industry should acknowledge that its products were more fattening than they needed to be. Second, the industry should vow to do something about it. He suggested a three-step course of remedial action that began with a program of scientific research to determine what was causing people to eat more than was good for them. Once that was determined, the industry could reformulate its products to reduce their harmful ingredients and devise a nutritional code for its marketing and advertising campaigns.

It would be lovely to report that Mudd's presentation was greeted with a standing ovation and an impassioned, consensual vow to go forth and reform America's packaged foods marketplace for the sake of the people. That didn't happen. According to Moss, the next person to speak was Stephen Sanger, who at the time was leading General Mills to record profits by selling just the sort of fat-, sugar-, and salt-filled products being blamed for the obesity explosion. 

 

A General Mills success story: a "health food" with twice the sugar per serving as the children's cereal, Lucky Charms

Sanger wanted no part of Mudd's remedial program, or, for that matter, his guilt. General Mills had always acted perfectly responsibly, he said, not only toward its customers but also toward its shareholders. Consumers buy what they like, and they like products that taste good. General Mills was in the business of selling products that satisfy those tastes and had no intention of doing anything else. His competitors, Sanger suggested, should do the same. On that note, Moss reports, the summit meeting ended.

That these captains of industry would proceed, with endless creativity and ambition, to fill the shelves of American supermarkets with mountains of unhealthy, wasteful, dishonest products, knowing the pernicious effects those products would likely have on the well-being of millions of consumers, was the source of my dark thoughts this morning. 

It's hard not to conclude from examples such as these – and there are many others – that in the pursuit of corporate power moral restraint becomes – not always, but often – a  skeuomorph, a decorative element that pretends, for reassurance's sake, to be functional, but really isn't. There's nothing new about greed, of course. The difference is the scale of mendacity advanced technologies put at our disposal, and the ease with which checks on mendacity are discarded. The only justifications required: consumers will buy it and stockholders will profit.

The divorce of technology from morality is a theme that was sounded repeatedly by the philosopher who has most influenced my thinking on matters such as these, Jacques Ellul.

As I've explained elsewhere, Ellul pictured technology as a unified entity that relentlessly and aggressively expands its range of influence. Ellul used the term "technique" to underscore his conviction that technology must be seen as a way of thinking as well as an ensemble of machines and machine systems. Technique includes the methods and strategies that drive those systems, as well as the quantitative mentality that drives those methods and strategies. The invention, production, distribution, and marketing of addictive junk foods are all manifestations of technique. 

Jacques Ellul

The single overriding value of technique, Ellul repeatedly said, is efficiency. Worries about morality are obstacles in the attainment of efficiency, except where the brutality of efficiency's pursuit causes concerns that might produce resistance, and interference. "It is a principle characteristic of technique that it refuses to tolerate moral judgments," Ellul wrote in 1954. "It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain." 

Moral "flourishes" remain, he added, but only for the sake of appearances. In reality, "None of that has any more importance than the ruffled sunshade of McCormick's first reaper. When these moral flourishes overly encumber technical progress, they are discarded – more or less speedily, with more or less ceremony, but with determination nonetheless. This is the state we are in today."

At the time of the food summit in Minneapolis, it's clear James Behnke hadn't fully acclimated himself to those conditions. Stephen Sanger apparently had. 

(For a related post, see Autonomy continued: Technology or Capitalism?)

©Doug Hill, 2013

 

Thomas Nagel, Samuel Butler, and the Question of Consciousness

Samuel Butler

  
(Note: This essay was originally published three days ago on theAtlantic.com. Thanks to Alexis Madrigal and Rebecca Rosen for opening the door.)
 
We live in an era of scientific triumphalism, when leading researchers in any number of fields claim they are supremely qualified to explain not only how the universe works, but also what it means. Metaphysics, they tell us, can now be considered a subset of physics.

Thus it's not surprising that distinguished hackles would be raised when a spirited counter-attack is launched by a well-known philosopher who contends that scientists

a) have conveniently ignored gaping holes in their understanding of how evolution has shaped the world and 

b) might learn something from the evangelical Christians who promote Intelligent Design.

The philosopher in question is Thomas Nagel, who years ago attracted more than the usual attention accorded philosophy professors with his essay, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Nagel's new book, Mind and Cosmos, comes with a subtitle that succinctly describes the epistemological chip he's placed on his shoulder, daring scientists to knock it off: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.

Nagel's argument is that the mechanics of natural selection can't answer one of the most crucial questions of our existence: how living, reasoning creatures emerged from insensate matter. Although he himself is an atheist, Nagel says he shares the theists' conviction that the appearance of such creatures strongly suggests that the universe has, from the beginning, evolved teleologically, meaning it's moving purposively, toward ever-higher levels of consciousness.

Thomas Nagel

"Each of our lives," he writes, "is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself." In the present intellectual climate, Nagel hastens to add, "such a possibility is unlikely to be taken seriously."

He got that right. Mind and Cosmos has been the subject of a number of high-profile takedowns, earning it top honors in the Guardian's list of Most Despised Science Books of 2012. So vitriolic has been the response that, as Jennifer Schuessler pointed out in the New York Times, even a relatively sympathetic review ran under the headline, "Thomas Nagel is Not Crazy."

My purpose here is not to review the controversy (the Times article includes a generous sampling of links for those interested in such a review), but rather to add some historical context by pointing out the striking parallels between Nagel's arguments and those made more than a century ago by one of my heroes, the great Samuel Butler.

Butler is best known as the author of the fantasy novel Erewhon, published in 1872. Erewhon, in turn, is best known for its extended meditation on the possibility that machines might one day attain consciousness and take over human beings.

The central character in Erewhon, unnamed in the original novel but identified in the sequel as Higgs, is a hiker who becomes lost in the mountains and stumbles upon an isolated civilization called Erewhon ("nowhere" spelled backward, sort of). Higgs learns that, five hundred years before his arrival, the citizens of Erewhon were alerted to the danger of technological revolt and banned the use of anything but the most primitive machines. The rationale behind this decision is spelled out in a manifesto called The Book of the Machines, which serves as a vehicle for Butler's musings on the implications of Darwinism.

The basic argument in The Book of the Machines is that technology is just as subject to the laws of evolution as plants and animals. There had to have been a moment in biological history when matter made the leap from inert to alive. Who's to say that at some point machines won't make the same leap? The speed of technological progress suggests they're already half way there.

The playful, almost absurdist tone of the Book of the Machines made it easy to conclude that Butler was making fun of Darwin - On The Origin of Species had been published 13 years earlier, and remained hugely controversial. Butler denied it. He told Darwin in a letter that he'd intended only to demonstrate, for purposes of his own amusement and that of others, how easily a scientific concept could be distorted by exaggerated analogy.

Those feelings soon changed. Not long after Erewhon appeared Butler began to see what he considered the dark side of Darwin's theory: it portrayed evolution as a wholly mechanical process that removed any spark of creative vitality from the universe. This was directly counter to the views expressed, supposedly as a joke, in The Book of the Machines, which argued that willful intention can be discerned on far lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder than those occupied by human beings.

"Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead," the Book of Machines says.

He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming from the cellar window and sends his shoots crawling straight thereto; they will crawl along the floor and up the wall and out at the cellar window; if there be a little earth anywhere on the journey he will find it and use it for his own ends.

Thomas Nagel makes the same point in Mind and Cosmos when he contends that "intelligibility" is "latent in the nature of things." The difference is that Nagel means his argument to be taken seriously, whereas Butler, initially at least, did not.

Early in his writing career Butler considered himself a devotee of Darwin; letters he'd written to newspapers defending natural selection were favorably noted by Darwin himself. Apparently, playing with the ideas implicit in Darwin's theory sowed seeds of doubt in Butler's mind that grew into full-fledged dissent. As Butler's biographer, Clara Stillman, put it, "One of the most interesting things about Butler's reaction to Darwinism is the fact that he was already criticizing it subconsciously before he had any conscious quarrel with it."

That quarrel would come to dominate the remainder of Butler's life. A series of books followed in which he relentlessly attacked not only the limitations of Darwinism, but the integrity of Darwin himself. The great man was guilty, Butler believed, of consistently failing to acknowledge the superior contributions to evolutionary theory of his predecessors, among them Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, all of whom perceived signs of teleology in evolution.

Charles Darwin

Butler repeatedly argued that Darwinism explained the mechanics of evolution but overlooked its impetus, a point echoed by Nagel. "The appearance of animal consciousness," Nagel writes, "is evidently the result of biological evolution, but this well-supported empirical fact is not yet an explanation—it does not provide understanding, or enable us to see why the result was to be expected or how it came about."

Like Nagel, Butler believed purposefulness imbues all of creation. He was not an avowed atheist, as Nagel is, but he did eschew and dismiss conventional notions of deity in favor of what can be described as a scientifically-informed pantheism. There's no need, he wrote, to posit some "quasi-anthropomorphic being who schemed everything out much as a man would do, but on an infinitely vaster scale." Rather, he said,

The proper inference is that there is a low livingness in every atom of matter...It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration and motion there is life and memory, and that there is vibration and motion at all times in all things.

Clara Stillman points out how neatly these ideas anticipate quantum physics, as well as the physics-inspired philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and others.

Nagel does not extend his musings in Mind and Cosmos to technology. Those issues became less a focus for Butler as well, once he began to take his objections to the biological problems in Darwinism seriously. He would, however, continue to use technological analogies.

Teleology doesn't suggest that the amoeba knew it was going to evolve into a fish, Butler said, any more than the first person who used a tea kettle necessarily envisioned a steam engine. We get from amoeba to fish, or from tea kettle to steam engine, incrementally. Change is driven by an inclination to adapt at each step along the way. "The manufacture of the tool and the manufacture of the living organ prove therefore to be but two species of the same genus, which, though widely differentiated, have descended as it were from one common filament of desire and inventive faculty."

This is another point Nagel precisely shares. "My guiding conviction," he says, "is that mind is not just an afterthought or an accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature...I believe that the role of consciousness in the survival of organisms is inseparable from intentionality: inseparable from perception, belief, desire, and action, and finally from reason."

Yet another parallel between Nagel and Butler is that both challenged the scientific orthodoxy of their day from positions outside the scientific establishment, and both were considered by members of that establishment unqualified to render an opinion. It may be that the distance between educated amateur and scientific expert has widened since the nineteenth century, but the religious sensitivities Darwinism inflames seem to have remained fairly consistent.

Perhaps the most dramatic shift since Butler wrote has to do with the evolution of technology. If the transhumanists are right, the uprising of the machines is almost upon us. There's still time to ban them, I suppose, although in Erewhon a civil war was necessary to enforce that course of action.



  

©Doug Hill, 2013

 

Everything is Connected (Rodent Relocation Edition)

Among the side-effects of Hurricane Sandy, itself a preview of our global warming future: Rats!

The New York Times reports today that the massive low-land flooding caused by Sandy has driven legions of rats inland to take up residence in apartments, schools, restaurants, and office buildings, even cars. It's an especially robust invasion because the storm left plenty of garbage in the streets for displaced rodents to feed on.

They became so bad I couldn’t even take all the jobs,” said Jonathan Vargas, a partner with All Day Exterminating, who estimated that his rat complaint calls doubled in number after Hurricane Sandy. Timothy Wong, a managing partner with M&M Environmental, a pest control company on the Lower East Side, said rat complaints began to soar after the hurricane and have not let up yet, partly because the wintry weather is driving the rodents indoors.

“The subway, the sewer, a lot got disrupted,” said Mr. Wong, who said complaints about rats were about as bad as he has seen in 10 years. “There’s so much garbage out in the streets these days. Renovations because of the flood. Christmas trees. These things make it worse. For them, it’s Restaurant Week.”

 "Everything is Connected" is a recurring feature named in honor of the late Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.  

 

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

Robot Burger Update

Momentum Machines' robot delivers a burger

Earlier this month I wrote an essay on the issue of technological unemployment, "Hello Robots, Goodbye Fry Cooks." It featured an unusual press release from a company called Momentum Machines. The essay attracted a significant amount of attention and was subsequently picked up by the technology blog Cyborgology.

Momentum Machines touted in its release the benefits of a hamburger-making robot that would make it possible for fast food restaurants to get rid of all their line cooks, saving the "Quick Service Restaurant" (QSR) industry billions of dollars annually in labor costs. 

At the same time the release expressed the company's desire to help displaced line cooks find new jobs as engineers by offering opportunities for discounted technical education. The release also cited the theories of economists who have long argued that technological advance eventually produces more rather than less employment.

My essay questioned some of those assumptions and described a brief email exchange I'd had with the president of Momentum Machines, Alexandros Vardakostas.

This morning on a whim I looked in on the Momentum Machines web site and discovered that its original press release has been changed.

The original, somewhat inflammatory headline ("The Restaurant Industry Is The Most Labor Intensive Industry In The Country; Our Technology Can Save The QSR Industry $9 Billion/Year In Wages.") has been replaced by a friendlier claim:

Our Technology Will Democratize Access to High Quality Food

Making It Available to the Masses

A subhead elaborates on this theme: "Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices."

Much of the original copy remains, with an occasional tweak. For example, the company still promises that its machine will make it possible to replace all the line cooks in a restaurant, but now the point is made that what management saves in labor can be spent on higher-quality ingredients. 

The new release still promises to help train cooks displaced by its technology (no details offered), and still endorses the historical economic argument that advances in technology ultimately produce increases in employment. It ignores the rash of recent articles, cited in my essay, that question whether the sorts of radical advances now being realized in automation technologies might make those historical arguments obsolete.

Note also that since my essay appeared, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes presented a piece addressing the same issues, and asking the same question.

Photo credit: Gizmag

©Doug Hill, 2013

 

Jimi H.

In case anyone was wondering, the argument here is not that ALL technologies are bad. 

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