and warn against, technology. That's because
I saw that tech was taking over our lives,
slowly, and yet it was wasteful and unnecessary,
very often.
This article, below, has helped to express the
ideas I've had about over-teching. Pretty soon,
people will be second class citizens, with the
robots being first.
I just saw an ad for a tv show called "what if"
where one guest was saying how robotics will
take over much of our lives, soon and he seemed
happy about it.
I think we're already too far removed from
nature. It also precludes us ever changing
the horrible political system, because
we'll be too busy working our apps to
get our robot to do backflips, or some such
stupidity.
So, if anybody is truly reading this, the
really advanced engineers will truly improve
life and not the P/E ratios of Apple. Society
will have to deal with the detritus of every
failed or surpassed technology.
checkit: new statesman
What happens when engineers run the world?
The global tech over.
By Aditya Chakrabortty Published 09 April 2013 8:34
the 2 books:
Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane, 384pp, £20
To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and
the Urge to Fix Problems that Don’t Exist
Evgeny Morozov
Allen Lane, 432pp, £20
On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a
Northwest Airlines plane wearing customised underpants stuffed with explosives.
As Flight 253 approached Detroit, he tried to blow himself up – along with
nearly 300 other passengers and crew. It was the biggest flop in the recent history
of Islamic terrorism. The baby-faced bomber succeeded only in setting his
trousers on fire and burning his legs, before getting doused by fire
extinguishers and being sat on by some intrepid souls in economy class. Not
even Ryanair dishes out that kind of treatment.
Landed with a huge story, the papers dutifully cranked out
their journey-to-jihad profiles and searched for a motivation. Abdulmutallab
had been a pious introvert. “Sex torment drove him nuts,” suggested the New
York Post (“The bomb wasn’t the only thing burning in his pants”). The most
intriguing explanation, though, came from a couple of academics. Whatever else
could be said about the failed terrorist,
he’d recently graduated from University College London with a degree in
mechanical engineering. That, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog wrote,
slotted him into a gruesome tradition summarised in the title of their paper:
“Why Are There So Many Engineers Among Islamic Radicals?”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta, 9/11’s mastermind
and one of its ringleaders, were both engineers. Imam Samudra, the plotter of
the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002, was an engineer. Kafeel Ahmed, who in 2007
charged a Jeep into Glasgow airport, had an MPhil in aeronautical engineering.
Analysing the backgrounds
of 178 jihadis, Gambetta and Hertog found that 44 per cent had studied for an
engineering degree – while engineers comprised an average of only 3.5 per
cent of the male workforce in their home countries. Most of the standard
explanations for this vast over-representation are no doubt familiar to
diligent New Statesman readers: graduate employment across the Middle East is
hard to find and, as Jean-Paul Marat could tell you, frustrated ambition is
often a catalyst for radicalisation.
While that accounted for the preponderance of degree-holding
jihadis, it did not explain the dominance of engineering. For that, the social
scientists turned to what they called the “engineering mindset”. “Engineering
is a subject in which individuals with a dislike
for ambiguity might feel comfortable,” they wrote. According to a US
survey, engineers were “less adept at dealing with the confusing causality of
the social and political realms and . . . inclined to think that societies
should operate in an orderly way akin to well-functioning machines”.
Had the sociologists panned their lens across from the
Middle East to the west coast of the US, they would have found that same
mindset not confined to the political margins but flourishing in the commercial
mainstream. If this age belongs to any profession, it surely belongs to the
engineer – not in the term’s historical sense of builders of dams and railways
but in its new sense of makers of technology and software. Look at the Forbes
billionaire list, published in March: of the ten richest people in the world,
three – Carlos Slim, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison – made their riches through
engineering. Run through the companies that have become household names in the
past 20 years and they are, at root, engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple,
Google, Facebook, Twitter.
Three things have converged to make this batch of engineers
more prominent than those of previous generations who worked at such venerable
giants as BAE or General Electric. First, rather than making bits of public
infrastructure – power plants and bridges, for example – this new lot are in your personal space. They produce the iPhone in
your pocket or the social media sites you check over lunch.
Second, the IT revolution has triggered a wave of inventions
and innovations. Look out for Google Glass spectacles that enable you to browse
the web and film what you’re watching. Wearers have already been given a
nickname: “Glassholes”.
Finally, the politicians and the commentariat, as well as
business executives, increasingly defer to the needs of those in engineering.
Think of how David Cameron cosies up to Google or consider how the coalition
government has cut public funding for all university teaching except in
science, technology, engineering or mathematics.
Precedents exist for each of these factors. Didn’t Harold
Wilson get excited about the “white heat of technology”? But add the three
together and lob in the propulsive force of venture capital and you have a
world in which books emerge with titles such as What Would Google Do?and in
which the untimely death of the chief
executive of a consumer electronics company, Apple’s Steve Jobs, prompts the
kind of mass grief that greeted the assassination of John Lennon. A world
in which engineers – and the culture described by Gambetta and Hertog – reign
supreme.
It’s the implications
of this new world that Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier discuss in their new
books. Where public debate still struggles to get over the giddiness brought on
by all this novelty (look, youngsters in Tahrir Square on Twitter!), both
writers want to draw out some of its shortcomings. Yet neither is hard-wired to
technophobia. The 28-year-old Morozov confesses that he used to be a digital
evangelist: “I remember perfectly the
thrill that comes from thinking that the lessons of Wikipedia . . . could and
should be applied absolutely everywhere.”
As for Lanier, he was
one of the pioneers of virtual reality and now works for Microsoft. He is that
odd combination, a member of Silicon Valley’s “1 per cent” and a philosopher
who has written widely about the limits of technology. He is also the owner
of the world’s biggest flute.
In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov describes how
responsibility for solving social problems has been arrogated by engineers at
Google and other private-sector businesses. Need to recycle more? Get BinCam, which photographs
your bin’s contents and sends the image to freelancers hired through Amazon.
They analyse just how wasteful you’ve been and then stick the results on –
you’ve guessed it – your Facebook page for all your friends to see. It doesn’t
stop there. Because your pals also have BinCams, soon an entire social network
is competing to see who’s the greenest. Result: Gaia is saved. Thank you, Mark
Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and BinCam!
This is a prime example of “solutionism”, as Morozov calls
it: the notion that a messy problem sprawling across morality and politics can
be resolved with just a little engineering ingenuity and the latest technology.
Solutionism is the natural extension of Gambetta’s and Hertog’s observation
about the engineer’s desire to turn society into a well functioning machine –
and it’s everywhere.
After a gunman killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Connecticut, a residents’ group named the Sandy Hook
Promise sprang up, looking for new technologies to increase gun safety.
Breakthrough ideas would be put in front of “venture capitalists and angel
investors”. The intentions are surely sincere but I can’t help feeling that the
most straightforward way to reduce gun crime would be to reduce gun ownership.
For the Sandy Hook Promise, however, that smells too much like politics.
Then there’s “big data”, the concept, fashionable across
Washington and now Whitehall, that any problem – from underperforming pupils to
failing hospitals – can be solved by collecting some tightly focused data,
crunching it and making tweaks such as shifting pupils or rejigging nurses’
shifts, rather than dealing with bigger issues, such as the poverty of the
catchment area or the spending cuts being made by your local trust.
This is an approach that focuses narrowly on “what works” without ever troubling to ask:
“Works for whom?” Its watchword is “smart”, which can easily be
appreciated, not “right”, which can’t. Putting trust in highly educated
technocrats, it is naturally less interested in public debate. Amplify this by
the imperative to deliver financial returns and the result is often easy to
admire – and yet to dislike.
In 2010, Google’s chief financial officer, Patrick Pichette, explained how his company
“is really an engineering company, with all these computer scientists that see
the world as a completely broken place”. Friedrich Hayek would have recognised
this sentiment. Over 60 years ago, he observed that the best engineers eventually “develop a passion for imposing
on society the order which they are unable to detect by the means with
which they are familiar”.
In his first book, The Net Delusion, Morozov rubbished the
idea that totalitarian regimes could be toppled by “slacktivists”: Iranian
hipsters retweeting badinage about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, say. It was a subtle
argument in which both the Belarusian and his opponents splashed around a
little too much black and white but Morozov captured how protesters in the
internet age often place trust in tools such as blogs and twitter simply
because they’re the closest to hand.
The new book develops that picture, suggesting that a cadre
of technologists and policymakers is now so depoliticised that it naturally
reaches for engineering solutions. The Prime Minister gets a dishonourable
mention here, on account of his enthusiasm for nudge policies to prompt voters
into eating better and being greener.
All this polemicising is delivered with a delightful
bitchiness and Morozov spends much of his book in hand-to-hand combat with some
of his “internet-centric” opponents (Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky). The result,
though, is that he pays too little attention to why we live in an age dominated
by zealous engineers. One answer may be generational – that technological positivism has become the
reflex instinct for a post-coldwar generation assured that all the big
questions in politics have now been settled.
Or you could look at two of the societies driving the IT
age. The US and India are both marked by small states, in which the aspirant
middle classes cannot rely on government support in good schooling, higher
education, health care and pensions. Inside your private bubble, why wouldn’t
you steer clear of the hurly-burly of democratic politics and go for pragmatic
individualism instead?
By not widening his focus to the political context, Morozov
is as guilty of internetcentrism as his targets. Indeed, until reading these
books, I hadn’t realised how much
serious, non-fiction writing now resembles those quarter-hour Ted talks in
which smart people rely on nifty neologisms and tidy framing to make an
argument. In his book, Lanier’s only
index is of new terms he has coined and where they first appear. And To
Save Everything, Click Here concludes with a joke about how Morozov should have
produced a book with “one big idea” but can only offer “two middle-sized
ideas”.
He’s better than that. For someone who was born in 1984,
Morozov has done an obscene amount of reading. Early in the book, he imagines a
dinner party attended by Michael Oakeshott, Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich and
Friedrich Hayek; and every time he takes on some wrong-headed internet
evangelist, he lets you know just how much of their dreck he’s yawned over.
As a result, To Save Everything, Click Here comes with
endnotes that stretch on for 50 pages. By contrast, Who Owns the Future? has a
bunch of links to blogs and Facebook pages. And Lanier writes as if pretty much
all Engine room: one of Google’s eight data centres he’s read is a bunch of
blogs and Facebook pages. It is a shame, because his earlier book You Are Not a
Gadget was a bracing polemic on how our reliance on IT is hollowing out
culture.
......
According to Lanier, our only hope is to charge these
companies for the data they gather on us. It is a cheerless future, in which 99
per cent of the population are, in effect, digital welfare claimants: doing
nothing productive or independent and surrendering their most intimate details
in return for spare change.
Whatever Lanier may think, Google, Apple and Amazon are not
forces of nature but businesses with workers and stockholders and supply
chains. There is nothing inevitable
about Apple outsourcing work to China, especially when research shows that it
could make its iPhones in the US and still take a gross margin of 46 per cent
– one of the highest in the world. Lanier does not bother with such frippery as
regulating our internet companies or nationalising these siren servers. Those
would be political solutions and he is an engineer who wants to do what works.
Towards the end of his book, Morozov quotes the Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset: “I
wish it would dawn upon engineers that, in order to be an engineer, it is not
enough to be an engineer.” For all his dissident qualities, Lanier is still
stuck in the engineering mindset.
