Slashdot Mirror

It surely deserves this award. However, after 15 years doing software development, I now consider two other books even more important even thought they are not quite as information-full as the design patterns book. They are: "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn and "Software Craftsmanship" by Pete McBreen. I have a full list of books, web sites and tools that I recommend at my Software Resources page.

http://www.berteig.org/mishkin/IrreducibleComplexi ty.html

This is Blatant Self Promotion (you have been warned).

Here's a good list of software resources, mostly books that I've collected over the last five years or so. Lots of stuff about agile, stuff for managers as well as developers.

Technology is not morally or societally neutral, despite what we would like to think. A very simple example of this is the car: cars, in order to maximize their utility, require a vast network of roads, parking spaces, and gas stations. This network is expensive to society for environmental reasons and has definite social and economic effects (such as time lost in commuting and traffic jams). These are unavoidable if we wish to use the technology of cars.

I have an essay in progress on this topic: The Analysis of Technologies - its got some stuff that is quite out of date since I started working on the essay eight years ago :-)

A really great book on the subject of analyzing the future effects of technology is "In the Absense of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander. This book is very much slanted politically to the "small/simple is beautiful" outlook, but provides a very substantial wealth of logical arguments and academic studies to demonstrate some of the necessary principle of analyzing technologies.

As for your specific questions, one obvious effect will be that in our commercial environment, not everyone will have equal access to the benefits that may be provided by the integration of computational and biological technologies.

Since it will not be genetic engineering in the "traditional" sense, this technology may be used as a backdoor for creating designer babies without actually modifying a zygote's genetic material.

I am in the process of reading PoEAA - I agree wholeheartedly with the review. As a professional software architect and mentor, I often recommend Fowler's books. Another great one is "Refactoring" which presents a systematic method for improving the design of existing code.

I have a list of excellent resources for software developers, architects, project managers, executives, etc.

I have read Software Craftsmanship. I have also read extensively in the general field of software development methodologies, software engineering, and project management. On thing that this book does, that is very rarely dealt with is the personal responsibility that one has as a software developer. Most methodologies are designed, in essense, around the idea of minimizing the human impact on the bottom line. Software Craftsmanship deals with this question to a superlative degree.

One thing that I found lacking is the issue of why exactly craftsmanship is a better model than software engineering. There is some discussion of this, and although I agree with the conclusion, it was not very well supported. My feeling is that engineering works for physical structures where humans intuitively understand the rules and the use of the structure follows the same rules as the creation of the structure, but in software, you make up the rules themselves and the rules are different for the process of creation and the actual use of the software!

Another two books which deal with the question of personal responsibility are Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn. If you are interested, I have compiled a list of resources for people interested in creating software.

This is a load of crap. Corporations predict where their technologies are going to go all the time. Bell predicted many of the long-term social effects of the popularization of the telephone _long_ before it was popular. Some companies have 50, 100 or 500 year plans (although it is not so common in the West). Want some documentation? Check out the book "In the Absence of the Sacred" by Jerry Mander - and don't let the title prejudice you: it is a very well written and thought out book (although it does go a little over the top sometimes). The whole point of science is to develop models which PREDICT the future. These models are becoming more sophisticated, and more general as we learn more and more. Are you so arrogant as to think that science cannot address the economic, environmental and even societal effects of technologies? By the way, I want to reveal my bias: I am writing a paper about exactly this issue. I believe there are specific useful areas where we can predict the effects of technology. The paper is not done, and has some parts that are getting old, but if you are interested, here it is.

Katz has brought up some good points, but I think he left unsaid one of the most important: specific technologies are not neutral in their effects on society, the environment, and the economy. Often misunderstood, Marshall McLuhan (a Canadian BTW), said "the medium is the message". This has been continually misunderstood as "the medium affects the message". But in fact, any medium (read technology) fundamentally has a message which is its effects on society, the environment and the economy. As a simple example, television is not possible without some pretty serious infrastructure: studios, transmission systems and receivers. This infrastructure costs a huge amount of money to create and maintain so television can never be used effectively by people or groups without money. Not only that, but despite a bit of unpopularity of the concept of globalism, technologies now have an immediate global effect (Linux would not be as far as it is today without globalism). Ignoring this effect is arrogance of the most dispicable kind, and is common among corporations (the dark underbelly of globalism). I have been writing an essay on this topic of a moral and social framework for analyzing technologies. It is still very much in progress, and there are parts that are sounding a bit old, but for what its worth, here it is.

It is impossible to deny that technologies and media have social and cultural effects. Let me be clear what I mean by that: any new technology or media as it is implemented and used in a society, transforms that society. First an example: back in '96 I went to the Marshall Islands to do some volunteer work. Although I do not know the exact dates, they had recently begun to receive television from the USA. The cultural impact was obvious and undeniable. Children and teens completely changed the way they dressed and played (this was the minor, most visible impact). Violent youth gangs formed (this was the really bad, less visible impact). There were many other changes. There is nothing in their previous culture which suggested that these people had a shred of violence in them. But within a few short years of media contact their culture radically changed.

I strongly encourage people to take the debate away from technology-freedom vs. non-technology-morals. This debate is a straw man. Every technology is different enough that it must be evaluated on its own, appart from an irrelevant larger debate which can't be resolved. The middle ground, the rational discussion that we need, can only be done by recognizing that every technology has a host of effects, and that we must try to see those effect clearly in order to make a rational choice about the adoption of the technology.

I am writing a paper about this topic. It is still in progress so if you take a peek, please excuse any stupid phrasings or unsupported claims... As well, I would like to point people to some books by Jerry Mander: Four Arguments for the Elmination of Television and In the Absence of the Sacred and a book by Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media. These books try to be fairly balanced. Jerry Mander does get a little wierd at times, but on the balance has good arguements for his points.

Hmmm. I once spent three hours riding with a woman who had a child diagnosed with ADHD (H is for Hyperactivity - this is more extreme than ADD). She and her child tried many things but she really wanted to avoid drugs. Eventually, she did what should be obvious to any parent who loves their children and actually spends time trying to help them be real human beings (instead of vidiots): she started to look at his attention deficit and his hyperactivity as a _good_ thing. She just basically called them something different: intense curiosity and enormous energy. She and her child talked a lot about things and eventually they came up with a really simple solution for the times when his "disability" became difficult for others around him: he would run around the block as many times as it took to burn off some of that energy. Aparently this worked marvels. His school work improved etc. etc. <miracle story continues...>.

So what's the point? Well, as other posters are sure to mention this seems to me to be another case of parents and society prefering technological solutions to solutions based on responsibility. I have recently been reading a book called How To Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence which basically talks about how the nature vs. nurture issue is a moot point until we actually figure out how to take full advantage of the nuture side of the equation. The book goes on to describe so-called miraculous accomplishments by brain injured children as well as normal children such as: reading, high speed math, learning multiple languages, etc. all before the age of 3!!! I have used some of the techniques with my own son who is now 26 months old. He was able to read about 40 words at age 14 months. We (my wife and I) dropped the ball and didn't continue with his learning up till now. Hopefully we are not to late.

Ever since I was a child, I have always felt that adults seriously underestimate the abilities of children. I am concerned that our diagnoses such as ADD and ADHD are really a reflection of our impatience and intollerance of children's natural abilities.

I have a few ideas to suggest that may not be very popular, but which would probably help a lot. Most of "my" ideas about this aren't really my own - I'll try to credit where credit it due.

• I think the primary principle that we need to add is the concept of the Unity of Humanity. Can anyone doubt that will now live in a global society? We travel and communicate with a facility and frequency that would utterly astound people from even 25 years ago. Our national economies are so tightly interlinked it is ridiculous. Corporations have known this for a long time and have a huge lead on social institutions as a result. Our social institutions, (dare I say it here) government must catch up and the only way is by organizing at a global level. The UN and the Baha'i community are both diverse global organizations that are working on putting this principle into practice. Our technological efforts must be refocused in such a way as to bring the greatest benefit to humanity. Environmental issues also come under this category.
• As a consequence of the previous point, we need to inform ourselves of globally held beliefs about the fundamental rights of people. The vast majority of countries in the world have agreed on just such a list of rights in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Any technological and societal developments need to be carefully examined with this fundamental statement of rights in mind. This might mean that Napster should be stopped - or it might mean that it should be promoted - but either way, we need to look at the effects of new technologies on these rights and always choose rights ahead of what is new and cool and in our own personal interest.
• The final principle, which is implied by the previous two points, is that technologies are not "neutral". This will be a big point of contention with many here on Slashdot, but I hold to it. Marshall McLuhan has said "the medium is the message" - what is this other than a statement that technologies have very specific measurable effects on people and societies. These effects are not neutral. For a simple example, consider the lightbulb - it requires a very large power generation and distribution infrastructure in order to be useful. The creation and operation of that infrastructure has societal effects - some good, some bad - definately not neutral.

I am writing a paper on the topic of the careful pursuit of technology. It is in progress so my appologies for the rough and unsubstantiated parts :) A book called The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom has some very interesting related points and is generally a good read.

I think that technology is not neutral. Believing that a technology is only "as good as the person who is using it" is naive! Every technology has social ramifications that are inherent in its purpose. Marshall McLuhan is often quoted "the medium is the message" but people generally misunderstand this to mean that a medium influences what content can be transmitted on it. I think what it means is more literal: a medium is itself a message... a technology has a specific effect on society... a lightbulb requires a power infrastructure which implies large capital interests, which in democratic capitalism meant large power companies. This is a direct social effect of the technology of the lightbulb.

So what's my point?

Well, I think that both political and social institutions as well as geeks need to fully wake up to the fact that "the medium is the message" and start making decisions about technology on that basis. And do it in a rational manner... not in some haphazard way through boycotts, legislation, lawsuits etc.

I think that a rational examination of technologies will be built on a framework that includes the following three pillars:

1. "the medium is the message"
2. human rights (a la Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
3. "the world is one country" and humankind its citizens