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The Coming Cyberclysm - Part One
There are hordes of serious-minded people who insist that computing is driving us towards a Cyberclysm, when humanity becomes overwhelmed as it tries and fails to cope with the number, complexity, speed and nature of the things we make.
Even now, nobody can really keep up, and only a few can even fake it. Everyone is frantic, stressed, tethered, broke or worn out trying to manage. We are bombarded by inventions and advances we might not need or understand, that move more quickly and do more things than we want, that we can barely grasp, let alone service or repair.
The complaints and alarms are piling up.
Author James Gleick in "Faster" complains that technology is forcing everything to move too quickly. In his new collection of essays, Arthur C. Clarke writes "I have seen the future and it doesn't work."
The typical twenty-first-century person's day, he predicts, will include: "Skimming five hundred channel program listings, two hours; viewing television programs selected, four hours; catching up on recorded programs, six hours; exploring the hyperweb, six hours; and adventuring in artificial reality, four hours." He didn't even mention checking e-mail, answering fax-spewing and stock-listing cellphones, or responding to pagers and beepers.
Neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale goes further, warning in his books that technology is destroying the world. He wants us to smash our computers to save the planet.
In his apocalyptic new dirge "Staring Into Chaos," author Bruce Brander proclaims that western civilization itself is coming to an end.
The term Ubiquitous Computing is technological historian Langdon Winner's, who in Netfuture Issue No. 94 [http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1999/Sep1499_94.html#33], warns that society is drowning in a wave of absurd and unnecessary appliances and electronics, continuously and wastefully cranked out by some of the best minds alive.
Winner, a critic of the Wired-era hype about the Internet and networked computing, exults in what he perceives as a growing realization that Ubiquitous Computing isn't making life simpler or better, but harder, more expensive and chaotic:
"Simplify. Save time. Reduce effort. Liberate yourself from toil. This has been the continuing siren song of consumer technology through the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in its own terms, the dream is always self-defeating. As people add more and more time-saving, labor-saving equipment to their homes, their lives do not become simpler and easier. Instead their days become even more complicated, demanding and rushed."
A disclaimer here : I don't share Winner's summary view of computing. For me, appliances, hardware and software are the least interesting aspects of technology. For me, the siren song would be: Speak and Think Freely. Connect. Learn, and Share What You Learn. Then learn and share more. Grow. For me, this promise has been fulfilled, a thousand times over.
But Winner, one of the sharpest thinkers about technology in American society, does have a point. We are making a lot more things than we demonstrably need. We give far more thought to making and marketing them than we do to whether they are truly useful. TV's and sound systems, watches that monitor global time zones, multi-function phones - keep adding features daily, many of them of doubtful necessity to most of the people who buy them. One ad blanketing commercial TV touts new wireless phone technology that will allow people to get their e-mail, weather and sports scores instantly from anywhere. Does anybody really need to be that wired?
Even the most ardent geeks complain that they can never be out of touch, never have time to think, never completely catch up. As the world is able to reach us more easily, it expects us to be always available and more or less instantly responsive. This rushes us and our responses. It makes us edgy, grumpy, impulsive. Technology becomes a means of harassing and pressuring us instead of improving our lives. The genuine blessings of technology - information, opportunity, community, the portability of work - get overlooked in all the gadgetry.
All labor-saving devices don't necessarily improve the quality of life. Autonomous human beings can - and maybe should - take responsibility for the smaller details of life. After all, these labor saving devices require considerable labor: they need installation, adjustment, repairs and replacement - often at considerable time, cost and annoyance. There are enormous ecological consequences as well, to making so much plastic and metal, so many wires and chips.
Newsweek enthused last week, in a gee-whiz cover story about how the Internet is changing our lives, that tomorrow's automatic coffee maker will have access to our online schedule so it can automatically withhold the brew if we're out of town. This is by -now - instantly-recognizable media language of Technohype, computing and technology wrongly presented as a barrage of gizmos with chips that do things we can just as (or more) easily do for ourselves.
But if the laws governing technology are unpredictable, those governing capitalism are unwavering: What is made must be sold and, therefore, hyped.
Such overheated predictions don't evoke the future so much as the past. Remember Walt Disney's Tomorrowland with its notions of intergalactic travel, hover cars, people movers and other things that still don't exist? We may be closer to genetically engineering perfect humans, or even curing cancer, but we still can't cure the cold or come up with a practical battery-powered car, or make computers that don't drive the people using them nuts.
Alas -- according to almost every business or marketing projection, R&D labs will usher in the Millenium by making the creation and sales of info-gadgets and appliances an even greater preoccupation of the next century.
On the East Coast (where I live), in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, one little-noticed consequence of the storm was that power interruption rendered cordless telephones useless even if the phone lines were functioning. Moreover, the flooding of an AT&T installation in New Jersey knocked out hundreds of thousands of cellphones. For a few days, the only phones that worked were the Lo-tech sort, the non-electronic, non-digital kind that plugged into the wall jack, receivers attached to the base with curly cords. That's as apt a metaphor for the coming Cyberclysm as any. Perhaps the survivors will be the people with the simplest, not the most sophisticated, machines.
Whose responsibility is all this? Nobody's, of course. Technology has a mind, life and direction all of its own. It's inherently uncontrollable, even if anybody was up to trying.
But some of the fault lies in the way our institutions - education, politics, media - deal with technology. We're trapped between two useless states - alarm and euphoria. Either we are railing about pornography, disconnection, and addiction or we are banging the drums for Gee-Whiz Computing that exists much more for its own sake than for our benefit. Like cell phones that receive faxes in taxicabs or 21st century toilets that will monitor the family's health through chemical sampling of fecal matter, or mirrors over bathroom sinks that flash the day's headlines, so nobody in the family has to wait until they get downstairs to get the news, if their wireless phone hasn't already alerted them.
Perhaps the idea that there are people who keep up with all this stuff is in itself a technological myth.
Clarke warns that we're headed for a Cyberclysm (he and others have used the word), a catastrophic collision between computers, technology and humanity. We won't be consumed by evil aliens or runaway AI machines, as sci-fi futurists have long predicted. Instead, we'll conquer ourselves with too much information about too many things and too many appliances performing too many services.
Clarke has written often of the pitfalls of the Dream Machine, the seductive idea that gadgets will run the world and monitor the most intimate details of our lives while we are free to enjoy ourselves.
"There have been many science fiction stories," writes Clarke, "about frantic human attempts to unplug disobedient computers. The real future might involve exactly the opposite scenario. The computers may unplug us." And, he adds: "it would serve us right."
That leaves most of us holding the bag, confronted with two noxious choices: to fall back with the hare-brained Luddites who want to return to the sylvan forests, or to follow the Techno-Utopians on their runaway CyberBinge.
End Part One.
Tomorrow: Turning to AI computing and the Gods for salvation and survival - Clotho.org.
Mr. Katz:
While I respect your postings greatly, it is plainly clear that you have neglected to observe some of the great technological failures of the past few years.
Who can forget the siren call of Push, which would flood us with more graphics and data than we could possibly handle? Oh, right. Everybody. Once the novelty of Internet Animation wore off, the concept of computers dialing away in the middle of the night, retrieving late data that merely looked pretty looked about as lame as it really was.
Look back a little farther, why not, to the misshappen history of Netscape Plug-Ins. I remember browsing through an index of dozens--soon to become hundreds--of plugins, all sorts of new features(and complexities--uh oh!) that people would have to install to get The Latest Web.
In fact, if you look at the last few years, an entire calvacade of fads have been propped up by VC-desperate firms who, no doubt, all either hire the same PR firm or read the same trade rags. Portals! Plumbing! MULTIMEDIA! It's the next big thing!
For things that are truly useful, success awaits. Everything else gets washed away in the toilet that is Internet Time.
New technologies and infrastructures barely get their name embedded into people's minds before they're revealed as either truly useful(Slashdot, eBay, Linux, Google) or utter garbage(take your pick). It's this massive environment of collaborative filtering that the non-technical sociologists utterly fail to comprehend.
I dunno. Maybe it's a bit of Patent Office grade It's-Net-So-It's-New syndrome, but the concept that people are going to spend hours upon hours searching through their five hundred channel guide is patently ridiculous. Scaling the willingness to poke through a TV Guide for few minutes up to poking through an online channel guide for a few hours is the height of illogic. It reminds me of an old joke--in 1976, there were a few hundred Elvis Impersonators, but by the late 80's, there were tens of thousands of 'em. At that rate, by the year 2030, one out of every three humans will be an Elvis Impersonator.
People who channel surf already will continue to do so, but the real advantage will come to those who will finally be able to watch those shows they want to see--and not just whatever random BS is on. As the channel model is debunked by the sheer quantity of stations advertising content viewers might wish to see, the power moves from the network program directors to the writers, the actors, and the producers of the shows the customers actually want to watch.
If, by some cruel trick of nature, people only watching the shows they want to see is a harbringer of inefficiency and "cyberclysm", then NBC, CBS, and ABC have been poisoning the water supply for quite some time now.
I have a good deal of trouble accepting some of the presumptions I see made. The Sharper Image has existed for most of my life--I recently found a catalog of theirs, and revelled in the memories of drooling over their inventive products--yet, strangely, I don't see most people walking around with GPS capable cufflinks yet. Apocolyptic ravings about featuritis don't take away from the fact that while Geeks Like Me will always be interested in the abilities granted by high degrees of technification, most of the population will have better things to do.
And yet, it's only when something comes from the geek realm into modern, everyday life that the bells start ringing.
Much like the Pokemon Lawyers suing themselves, suddenly a major Geek Champion has been caught in fear of encroaching geekdom?
Please. Using a search engine instead of a card catalog does not a disaster of epic proportions create. There are those who have not yet learned the basics of computer usage, but User Interface developments will continue as they have been since the web finally exposed networked connectivity to a world not raised on control characters and LaTeX markup. Overall, those who want to connect will be able to, unless a hurricane hits. That much technology isn't designed as disaster-proof as Ma Bell's network could be construed as a bad thing, I suppose. I'll have to look into that.
In the meantime, those portending a disastrous future of chemically aware porcelain should do well to know--nobody wants a damn camera in their crapper, except the prisons the things were invented for.
Overall, I think you hit on the strongest point of them all in your column: Perhaps the survivors will be the people with the simplest, not the most sophisticated, machines.
It is not an accident that the most successful concepts in all of technology are those that remain both the simplest and the most sophisticated. Grace and form, it seems, are as critical in high technology as they are in most human work, be it architecture, sculpture, or even perhaps law.
If any of the futurists quoted can convince me that all of the world will forever embrace that which completely flaunts all tenets of grace and form; if they can prove the mass population will ignore the precedent of their flashing 12:00's and throw themselves at that which is almost designed to thwart the desires of its users, you'd have a case for a Cyberclysm. However, the continual successes of those technologies that Do It Right(and the continual cycle of destruction that everything else is wrung through) tell me That's Just Not Going To Happen.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
We only have two choices? Abandon all technology and flee to the woods or embrace the 'consuming technological chaos and be subsumed'? (Okay, that's my phrase, but I think I get Jon's point.)
How about treating technology as tools? I don't use a computer because I'm afraid that I can't keep up with the world unless I do -- I use it because it helps me do work. I don't write Perl code because of a deep-seated artistic desire for expression (that's what Perl poetry is for), I write it because it helps me get things done.
That's the same reason my father uses a welding torch or an air compressor or a socket wrench. Not because he wants to have the latest and greatest gadgets, but because he can use them.
Yes, I like to keep up with my e-mail, and I like to check a few web sites and newsgroups regularly, but I can take a week at the beach without any of those things and survive just fine.
I think most people can do the same. Thus, it's a false dilemma.
--
QDMerge 0.21!
how to invest, a novice's guide
The idea of a Cyberclysm seems to rest on the notion that, because we have 500 channels, I must examine them. Rubbish. I watch less TV than ever before, and then mostly what my kids are watching. I just received a cell phone and I've already made an iron rule that I do *not* attend to it in the car; I'll get back to you. When people offer me machines that speak, I usually ask where to find the switch that makes them silent.
The number one survival skill of the new millennium will be selectivity. Look over the options and throw away anything you don't see an immediate use for. Just don't use it. Be the master of the technology that you allow into your presence, not its servant.