On Immovable Technologies

There are some Big Ideas in the philosophy of technology that I find very helpful in understanding what's going on in the world of machines today. One of those ideas is a concept known as "technological momentum."

Technological momentum is a phrase coined by the historian Thomas Parke Hughes to describe the tendency of successful technological systems to become entrenched over time, growing increasingly resistant to change. This resistance is a product of both physical and psychological commitments. We invest materially in factories and emotionally in careers. Equipment and infrastructure accumulate and intertwine; dependence and force of habit build.

Professor Hughes' label has its problems, for reasons I'll explain, but before I do let me note two recent examples of technological momentum in action. Both, as they say, are ripped from the headlines.

Carol Bartz

The first example involves comments made earlier this month at a Fortune magazine forum by Carol Bartz, fired last year as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo. According to the NewYork Times, at one point Bartz was asked if she had any advice for her successor in those roles, Marissa Mayer. Bartz replied that Mayer shouldn't kid herself about quick turnarounds at a company as large as Yahoo. When informed of proposed changes in policy, she recalled, staff members there typically responded with agreement to her face and defiance in private. Bartz came away from the experience amazed by "how stuck individuals can be, much less 14,000 people." 

“It’s very, very hard to affect culture," she said. "And you can get surprised thinking you’re farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.”

The second example involves an even bigger tech brand, Microsoft. In August Vanity Fair magazine ran a lengthy dissection of the company’s creative decline under the stewardship of its Chief Executive Officer, Steven Ballmer. 

Steven Ballmer

The article portrays Ballmer presiding over a “lumbering” behemoth, "pumping out" tried and true products (Windows and Office) while failing to exploit opportunities (search, music, mobile) that have turned other companies (Google, Apple) into global icons. “Every little thing you want to write has to build off of Windows or other existing products,” a software engineer told reporter Kurt Eichenwald. “It can be very confusing, because a lot of the time the problems you’re trying to solve aren’t the ones that you have with your product, but because you have to go through the mental exercise of how this framework works. It just slows you down.”

That comment suggests why Professor Hughes’ "technological momentum" label isn't ideal. Momentum implies movement, but often as not the dynamics he’s describing lead to paralysis. Computer programmers refer to the acquired intractability of older software systems as problems of "legacy" or "lock-in," terms that may more accurately convey the obstinacy involved.

The fact that a software program can be an obstacle to change underscores a point touched on earlier: technological momentum is about more than stubborn geezers stuck in their ways. Technological systems become entrenched because they’re made out of real-world stuff. Companies can replace operating systems and assembly lines, but not without a lot of energy and expense, and inevitably the replacements have to incorporate some of what came before. An entire society’s commitment to a technology becomes almost impossible to reverse. America’s highway systems won’t be dismantled any time soon; the problem is keeping them repaired. 

Technological momentum tells us that technological systems tend to be self-perpetuating. There’s irony in that because the quality we typically associate with technology is progress, not stagnation. In fact both things are true: technological systems can be both disruptive and obstructionist, sometimes both at the same time. It’s also true, as any football fan knows, that momentum – forward momentum, that is – can be lost or regained. Steve Jobs did both at Apple, and Steve Ballmer is in the process, with the introduction of a new operating system, a new music service, a new phone system, and a new tablet computer, of trying to pull off the same trick at Microsoft. 

The greatest example of technological momentum is technology itself. Technology is astonishingly creative within its own realm, but it's incapable of recognizing any realm outside itself. To the degree that we fail to recognize that fact – which these days is almost completely – we surrender ourselves to the technological paradigm. Even sane people are beginning to think that the only way we'll be able to save the planet from environmental catastrophe is by the invention of some ingenious technique. Individual ambitions aim in the same direction; everyone’s out to make a dent in the universe on the scale of Gates or Zuckerberg or Jobs. These dreamers may consider themselves consummate innovators, but their thinking is still trapped in a box labeled “Technology.”

Image credits: Bartz, Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Closed Mind illustration: Harry Campbell

©Doug Hill, 2012

 

RIP Barry Commoner

Barry Commoner, one of the founders of the environmental movement and a great advocate for restraint in the exploitation of technological power, died Sunday.

Commoner was often portrayed as a radical for articulating views that in a sane world would be seen as common sense. Take, for example, his four laws of ecology:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.
2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Not that hard to understand, you'd think, yet Commoner's laws are to this day, around the world, widely, fatally ignored.

An interesting aside in that regard appeared in the excellent Commoner obituary that appeared in the New York Times Monday. President Richard M. Nixon, the Times noted, responded in his 1970 State of the Union address to the environmental movement that Commoner was so instrumental in starting.

“The great question of the ’70s," Nixon said, "is, Shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” 

Later that year Nixon signed legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency.

Time magazine, February 2, 1970

Two things about that historical footnote stand out, in addition to its reminder of how long we've ignored the urgent call to make our peace with nature:

1. Richard Nixon was a Republican.
2. The Environmental Protection Agency is the federal watchdog agency Republicans today are most eager to eliminate.

In the "Last Word" video interview that accompanies the Times' obituary of Commoner, he speaks of a "red thread" that runs through "everything that's happened in this country in our lifetime." That thread is this:

The thoughtless way in which we decide what we're going to produce and how to produce it. Thoughtless in the sense that all that we're interested in is getting the thing produced without thinking about how it's done and what impact that has, not simply on getting the product, but on our lives, our health, the welfare of poor people, the environment as a whole.

There can be no greater testimony to the power of technological autonomy than our ongoing inability to heed the warnings of Barry Commoner and many others like him. For speaking out nonetheless, they're heroes.

Talking Technology! (Job search edition)

From a Wall Street Journal article, "Meet the New Boss: Big Data," on the growing use of computerized personality tests to screen job applicants:

For more and more companies, the hiring boss is an algorithm...Personality tests have a long history in hiring. What's new is the scale. Powerful computers and more sophisticated software have made it possible to evaluate more candidates, amass more data and peer more deeply into applicants' personal lives and interests.

Image credit: Brainstorms, Stanford University

Talking Technology! ("Ouch!" edition)

When O'Reilly Radar posted my essay on Steve Jobs' affinity for Romanticism earlier this week, a commenter posted a link to a 2001 video interview with Jobs. 

The commenter was pointing out that some of what Jobs says in the interview speaks directly to the issues addressed in my essay (see 7:16 forward), and he was right.

It's interesting to note, in addition, that some of Jobs' other comments take on a certain resonance in the context of Apple's recent troubles with the Maps application for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6.

The interviewer asks (at 4:15) how Jobs motivates the employees of Apple to "think different." What do you do, she wants to know, to make sure that attitude "permeates" the company? Jobs answers:

You permeate it by example, ultimately. In other words, when something's not quite good enough, do you stop and make it better, or do you just ship it? And everybody watches to see how the senior management makes those decisions. And what we've tried to do is stop and make it great before we ship it. When we have problems, stop and fix them.…You can say anything you want but everybody watches very carefully when you're in a difficult situation, what decisions you make, what values you have.

Steve Jobs, Romantic

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Steve Jobs

"…the season

Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk

the fruitful matrix of Ghosts…"

                                                  Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Steve Jobs died a year ago October 5th, and we can expect his ghost to appear in any number of recollections and assessments as the anniversary approaches.

I'd like to talk here about a spirit that Jobs carried within himself. It's a spirit he relied on for inspiration, although he seemed at times to have lost track of its whisper. In any event what it says can tell us a lot about our relationship to machines.

I refer to the spirit of Romanticism. I spent much of this past summer reading about the Romantics – the original Romantics, that is, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and it's remarkable how closely their most cherished beliefs correspond to principles that Jobs considered crucial to his success at Apple.      

What Apple does that other companies don't, Jobs often said, is infuse the technologies it produces with human values. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said during one of his famous product introductions. "We believe that it's technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."      

Jobs can be forgiven for never getting very specific about what he meant by marrying technology to the humanities. It's by definition a subject that's hard to pin down, though not especially hard to understand. Basically he was saying that Apple's products have soul, and that people are attracted to those products because they can feel that soul, both consciously and unconsciously. These are things the Romantics thought about a lot.

That the creative artist can bring life to inanimate objects was a central conviction of the Romantic poets. (I'm speaking of the thrust of the Romantic movement in general; individuals within the movement disagreed on specific issues.) For them the inanimate object in question was words, for Jobs it was technology, but the basic point – that a work of art, properly executed, carries within it an invisible, living essence – was the same. Devoid of this essence, said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, what's produced is as lifeless as the "cold jelly" of a corpse. 

Jobs onstage presenting Apple's iPad 2

Put in contemporary terms, soul from the Romantic perspective is an emergent quality, a product of an organic, harmonious relationship between constituent parts. Even when those individual elements are familiar in other contexts, as the elements of Apple's products were often said to be, combining them with due attention to essence can bring something new into the world. As Coleridge put it, the true artist "places things in a new light…What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest…[He] not only displays what tho often seen in its unfolded mass had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, Lights & Relations."

Relations, in turn, create unity. Each part is completely faithful to the creation as a whole. To construct a work in accord with some "mean or average proportion" is to dilute its essence, said William Hazlitt, "for a thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself."

This supports Jobs' insistence that Apple maintain control over both its hardware and its software, a policy that insured they would work seamlessly together. Soul emerges on its own in nature, but not in art. The unity on which it depends is concealed, as one critic put it, beneath "a surface world of chaos and confusion." To reveal essence requires not only vision, but also focused attention and deliberate action. Coleridge coined a word to describe the unifying power of the creative imagination: "esemplastic," derived from the Greek for "to shape into one."   

Nor will essence emerge on the strength of reason alone. Indeed, Romanticism was explicitly and decidedly a revolt against reason, a rejection of the empirical presumption of the Enlightenment. Coleridge considered the "Mechanico-corpuscular philosophy" his lifelong enemy; its endless reductionism smothered, he believed, any trace of vitality. What remained wasn't art, he said, but "a lifeless Machine whirled about by the dust of its own Grinding" – a fair description of how Steve Jobs viewed the products of Apple's longtime rival, Microsoft.          

The Romantic contemplates nature

There's no question that Jobs was intimately familiar with and sympathetic to the Romantics' convictions, if only because they were shared by two of his most formative influences, Eastern religion and the 60s counterculture. This is not to say he was directly aware of that coalescence; I've seen no interview with Jobs in which the Romantics are mentioned. Nor is there evidence to suggest he recognized how freely the streams of the three philosophies intertwined. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, wrote poetry based on the Bhagavad Gita and paid tribute in person to Coleridge and Carlyle. Autobiography of a Yogi, a book Jobs claimed to have read annually since he was in college, quotes Emerson several times. Values regularly celebrated in Romantic texts – passion, spontaneity, authenticity – were counterculture touchstones as well.

Jobs' philosophy, then, overlapped with the Romantics', whether he knew it or not. Coleridge famously said that every person is either a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian – the Romantics were Platonists, Bill Gates would qualify as an Aristotelian – and that no one changes from one orientation to the other. It may be that Jobs was, as he and many others contended, an exception to that rule, able to play successfully on both sides of the technology/humanities divide.

There were signs that Jobs wasn't finding it easy to hold on to his Romanticism as his business career progressed. In Apple's early days he'd been a believer in the messianic promise of computers, convinced they were the greatest force in history for human liberation. In more recent interviews he dismissed suggestions that technology can solve the problems of the world, and he was stung by critics who said that some of Apple's products were more about consumerism than creativity. He also expressed disappointment in the narrowness of vision he saw in the students who came to hear him speak on college campuses. The only thing that seemed to impress them, he said, was how much money he'd made.

Jobs' weariness speaks to a point I'd mentioned at the beginning of this article: that the spirit of Romanticism can tell us a lot about our relationships to machines. To believe that technology can be our savior was a minority opinion in the counterculture. The predominant sentiments of the time were more in tune with the Romantics, who believed that salvation was to be found not in mechanical power, but by living as simply and as close to nature as possible.

Pastoral retreat on any substantial scale isn't likely at this point. Our technologies are with us to stay. Living more simply would seem to be an option, though. We might also consider the possibility of constructing those technologies more Romantically. That would entail recognizing, as Steve Jobs did, that the things we create really do have souls, and that they speak a language we can hear.                  

Books that were especially useful in my research for this reflection were Richard Holmes' two-volume biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp, David Newsome's Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought, and Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs.

Note: This essay was published earlier this morning by O'Reilly Radar. Thanks to Mac Slocum for opening the door. 

Image credits: iPad 2 presentation: Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post; "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," Casper David Friedrich, 1818.

©Doug Hill, 2012

Talking Technology! (No Free Lunch edition)

The New York Times published a superb report yesterday (the first part of a series) on the massive, and massively wasteful, power consumption that drives the Internet.

The article is notable not only for its reporting but also for its appreciation of the underlying issues.

Specifically it emphasizes that the Internet is not, as we'd like to believe, an entity that exists in some friction-less, dream-like realm called "cyberspace" or "the cloud." In truth, the Internet isn't "virtual" at all: It runs on such Earth-bound realities as diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, not to mention huge amounts of electricity and substantial amounts of pollution.

Here are some quotes:

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

The inefficient use of power is largely driven by a symbiotic relationship between users who demand an instantaneous response to the click of a mouse and companies that put their business at risk if they fail to meet that expectation.

At least a dozen major data centers have been cited for violations of air quality regulations in Virginia and Illinois alone, according to state records. Amazon was cited with more than 24 violations over a three-year period in Northern Virginia, including running some of its generators without a basic environmental permit.

Each year, chips in servers get faster, and storage media get denser and cheaper, but the furious rate of data production goes a notch higher.

With no sense that data is physical or that storing it uses up space and energy, [Internet users] have developed the habit of sending huge data files back and forth, like videos and mass e-mails with photo attachments. Even the seemingly mundane actions like running an app to find an Italian restaurant in Manhattan or a taxi in Dallas requires servers to be turned on and ready to process the information instantaneously.

“If you tell somebody they can’t access YouTube or download from Netflix, they’ll tell you it’s a God-given right,” said Bruce Taylor, vice president of the Uptime Institute, a professional organization for companies that use data centers.

A crash or a slowdown could end a [data center manager's] career…A field born of cleverness and audacity is now ruled by something else: fear of failure.

 “When somebody says, ‘I’m going to store something in the cloud, we don’t need disk drives anymore’ — the cloud is disk drives,” Mr. Victora said. “We get them one way or another. We just don’t know it.”

“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”

Technological Autonomy: Greasing the rails to Armageddon

There are any number of ways to frame the apocalypse, I suppose. As one who spends a lot of time thinking about technology, mine is a phenomenon known as "technological autonomy." 

I'm convinced that technological autonomy may be the single most important problem ever to face our species and the planet as a whole. A huge statement, obviously, but there's plenty of recent evidence to back it up.

Briefly stated, technological autonomy describes a condition in which we are no longer in control of our technologies: they now function autonomously. This isn't as absurd as it may sound. The idea isn't that we can't switch a given machine from "on" to "off." Rather, technological autonomy acknowledges the fact that we have become so personally, economically, and socially committed to our devices that we couldn't survive without them.*

Technological autonomy is probably the most controversial theory in the rarified but growing field known as the philosophy of technology. Paul T. Durbin, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Delaware, has written that the discipline is roughly divided between those who interpret technology narrowly and those who interpret it broadly. If you think of technology as tools, period, scholars in the narrow camp agree with you. They tend to have engineering backgrounds and become irritated at any suggestion that machines have taken on a life of their own. "It is not the machine that is frightening," says Joseph Pitt of Virginia Tech University, "but what some men will do with the machine; or, given the machine, what we fail to do by way of assessment and planning."

Scholars in the broad camp, who often come from philosophy or sociology backgrounds, says it isn't that simple. They insist that technology must be seen systemically, that it includes not only machines but also the social relationships and economic structures in which machines flourish. As Thomas Misa of the University of Minnesota puts it, technology is "far more than a piece of hardware," but rather "a shorthand term for the elaborate sociotechnical networks that span society."

From that perspective we can see that controlling our machines involves much more than just deciding, "Okay, we're not going to do that anymore." All of us, whether we like or not, are enmeshed in a massively complex web of interconnected, interdependent technologies and technological systems. To extricate ourselves from those systems would inflict massive, probably irreparable, damage to our way of life. I use the term "de facto technological autonomy" to suggest that while we can literally turn off our machines, practically we are unable to do so.

The people of Japan have learned a lot about technological autonomy since the tsunami hit the Fukushima reactors. They'd love to get rid of nuclear power altogether, but their leaders are telling them that to do so invites economic disaster. In much the same way we Americans, along with most of the rest of the developed world, are trapped by our automobiles. We know that for lots of reasons we'd be better off if we stopped driving them tomorrow, but we can't. If we did, life as we know it would collapse, since in one way or another we depend on the internal combustion engine for our jobs, our food, and virtually everything else we need. It's impossible to overestimate the implications of that particular dilemma, politically, economically, militarily, and – most important – environmentally.

The reasons I think technological autonomy is the most crucial issue in history are contained in several reports I've come across in recent months. They're collected on my hard drive in a folder labeled "The End of Civilization." Together they testify, explicitly or implicitly, to a growing consensus in the scientific community that we humans are not going to find it within ourselves to act soon enough or dramatically enough to forestall catastrophic climate change. If the battle is about bringing our machines to heel, it's pretty certain at this point we're going to lose.

An example appeared in a New York Times essay in July by Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University. The world's coral reefs, sources of food for millions of human beings, have become "zombie ecosystems," he wrote. They will collapse entirely within a human generation. Although the evidence that this is happening is "compelling and unequivocal," scientists and politicians alike have consistently "airbrushed" the truth. There's hope to save the reefs, we're told, if only we take prudent action. Forget it, Bradbury said. There isn't any hope.  

The scent of doom similarly emanated from a report in England's Guardian newspaper in February. "Civilization faces a 'perfect storm of ecological and social problems,'" the headline read. This was the conclusion of a group of 20 scientists who had all been winners of the Blue Planet prize, an international award the Guardian described as "the unofficial Nobel for the environment." The paper issued by the group made repeated use of the word "unprecedented," as in this passage:

"In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us."

A month later the journal Science published a paper signed by an international group of 32 experts who specialize in environmental governance. “Societies must change course to steer away from critical tipping points in the Earth system that could lead to rapid and irreversible change," the paper said. "Incremental change is no longer sufficient to bring about societal change at the level and with the speed needed to stop earth system transformation."

Yet another apocalyptic paper soon followed, this one by a group of 22 scientists from a variety of fields, writing in the June issue of the journal Nature. Entitled “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere," the paper warned that the planet's environmental systems are nearing breakdown on any number of fronts and that those "tipping points" will likely be sudden and dramatic rather than gradual. The Los Angeles Times quoted lead author Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, as comparing the likely severity of the environmental shifts we're facing to the effects of an asteroid hitting the planet. 

 

That the world seems to have taken little to no significant notice of these warnings strikes me as utterly astonishing. It's as if a family has been told that their house is on fire and they remain glued to their TV shows and video games, potato chips and soda at hand. Certainly climate change hasn't been anything close to a central issue in the current presidential campaign. The only conceivable explanation is that we are simply unable to contemplate the scope and depth of changes that will be required to forestall the catastrophes the scientists are predicting. That by definition comprises a condition of de facto technological autonomy.     

The volume of scientific alarms increased in recent months in part in anticipation of Rio+20, an international colloquy on the environment held in Rio de Janeiro in June. Officially named the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, the nickname was a nod to the fact that the conference was convened on the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit, also held in Rio. At that meeting a global "blueprint" was adopted that would supposedly set the nations of the world on the path to a saner environmental future. 

As it's turned out, the two Rio conferences can be considered benchmarks on our journey over the environmental cliff. Global warming, among other sources of degradation, has only accelerated since the first one, and nothing emerged from the second one to suggest we'll find a way to reverse that trend anytime soon. Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International, called the conference as a whole "a failure of epic proportions" and its rambling, inconclusive final report "the longest suicide note in history."  

Our ongoing impotence in the face of climate change prompted one of our better-known environmental activists, Bill McKibben, to publish an angry and pessimistic jeremiad in the August issue of Rolling Stone. He spent a few thousand words documenting the latest irrefutable evidence that disaster's approach continues unimpeded while the "charade" that we're actually dealing with it continues, as it has for decades.

"Since I wrote one of the first books for a general audience about global warming way back in 1989," McKibben said, "and since I've spent the intervening decades working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in."

The conclusion is inescapable that some challenges are just too difficult to face. Controlling the machines we've unleashed seems to be one of them. 

*For previous essays of mine on technological autonomy, see here and here.

©Doug Hill, 2012