Captain Future's Log

Ranting Back at the Engineers of Interconnected Ignorance


Charlie Rose just had one of those fascinating and infuriating group interview shows on what’s next in technology and society, global economics and the U.S.

These people---like the head cheese of Cisco systems, president of Stanford U., John Doerr and Ether Dyson who have so many titles for so many entities (virtual or not) that they should have extra names---are undoubtedly smart, and they make a lot of sense on a number of issues. Doerr has a list for immediate needs, like a commitment to 100,000 new engineers from U.S. schools (and the end of idiotic Homeland Security laws that chase away foreign students) in four years, U.S. energy independence in five years, commitment to dealing with pandemics, plus real broadband, real health care, actual education in schools, etc. These priorities (many being widely shared among technology celebrities and ceos) are inarguable.

How far the U.S. has fallen behind in Internet related technology, in producing scientists and engineers, as well as in supporting a decent society with good public health, health insurance, education and respect for learning---it's all an immense and depressing scandal.

But some of the rah rah for innovations that technology will and should create, especially via the Internet, are a lot more troublesome. Some are the product of the limitations of scientific and engineering thinking. Some are just dumb.

For example, the idea that all information will be and should be digital, because it makes it accessible to more people. This is part of the Internet=Everything approach, so typical of a new technology yet in this case particularly dangerous because it’s possible.

In ten years, says Ether Dyson, the Internet will be like electricity---you won’t even think about it, you’ll just think about what you can do with it. It’s got a McLuhanesque prophetic non sequiter ring to it, and it’s also functionally insane. Because a great many of our real problems today are due to the fact that we don’t think about electricity, the infrastructure that delivers it, the costs to individuals and the planet of how we deliver it and especially the energy used.

On a practical level, it’s very easy for me to focus on this because I’ve just gone for 36 hours without electricity---and people I know who live within a couple of miles went 3 or 4 days, and within15 or 20 miles went 6 days without it. But 36 hours was enough to teach the lessons that we are more and more dependent on electricity---even for (as I mentioned in previous posts) things that didn’t used to be, like gas heating and cooking. So there are a lot of people around here talking about getting blowers for woodstoves that are powered by the heat of the stove itself, or kicking themselves for throwing out their manual typewriters.

The lesson may be forgotten, but fried systems and downed lines due to storms (which are likely to increase in many places in the next decade) or supply and demand problems and other infrastructure difficulties are both real and indicative. The same fossil fuel energy that is fueling those storms through global heating, is the energy that is running out. Local disruptions are likely to increase as the problems of supply and infrastructure grow.

And though technologists don’t like to point it out, the tremendous growth of the Internet has accounted for a large percentage of the growth in energy use. One normally tech-friendly futurist predicts that Internet use will soon consume as much power as the entire U.S. economy did way back in 2001. A single server farm uses as much energy as the city of Honolulu. Not to mention the tremendous energy used to build computers and especially make all the materials used (and wasted) in their construction. And so on. Not thinking about it is ignoring the cost, in pollution and the sicknesses created, in our current unthinking global suicide. (I'm not saying that Dyson would necessarily disagree, just that it's the kind of glib statement she made that gets repeated as the whole answer.)

And don’t tell me wireless is the solution—microwave technologies are quite vulnerable, and also depend on the physical world of structures with transmitters, as well as energy sources.

I ask you, who in their right mind would discard multiple ways of storing and presenting “information” in favor of a single highly vulnerable system? Scientists and engineers and people who would make a lot of money creating such a system, apparently.

Unless and until highly portable, decentralized, highly efficient, sustainable and renewable energy systems are widely and cheaply available as part of every electronic device, linked to a digital distribution infrastructure that is impervious to physical or software sabotage or disruption, this Internet as Everything within ten years is a moronic fantasy.

And if you haven’t accomplished this and a lot more in ten or maybe twenty years, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to have this fantasy ever again, at least in this millennium.

The urge to digitize entire libraries is supposed to supplant the need for those libraries, which the president of Stanford characterized as imprisoning information within walls. That’s very attractive to schools like Humboldt State, strapped for cash, which has already gone two years without buying a single new book for its library, apparently with little complaint.

I don’t see libraries as imprisoning information; I see libraries as protecting information. Make it accessible, of course. But don’t destroy it. (I can hear them objecting now—of course, we didn’t mean burn the books. Well, wake up, dreamers. They’ve already burned the card catalogues. Now in a brownout nobody can find anything. Of course, you burn the books. The San Francisco Library did when it went digital. I suspect the practice is widespread, even before digitizing those destroyed books was affordable. Who can afford to store them? And pretty soon, who can afford to print more? Sure, this is a broad question with many individual solutions, but the prediction was also broad.)

Then there’s the knotty problem of who is going to pay “content providers” in this new digital world. There are real problems involved, but the solutions I heard proposed show the fundamental idiocy embedded in the very vocabulary used to discuss these matters.

We have to find a way to “pay content providers” so they will have “incentive to create content,” as Charlie explained on the behalf of panelists. The Cisco Kid said that the wave of the future would be to pay not for information or access but for interaction. His two examples were: you don’t pay the doctor to take your blood pressure. You take it online yourself. You pay the doctor to interpret it, along with other medical information; you can instantly get three or four opinions on the same information. Second, you don’t pay somebody to write something, you pay them to answer questions about it.

The practicality of getting four competent doctors to comment on the same trivial case aside, the writer example gave me chills, perhaps because it revived every fear sweated into me by some of my English lit professors who took the Leavis side over C.P. Snow in the perennial Two Cultures debate, particularly on the cultural cluelessness of engineers.

I presume some of these “content providers” are artists, musicians and literary writers. First of all, they don’t need to be paid as “incentive.” They need to be paid so they can a) live and b) write, not necessarily in that order. Incentive is not the problem.

Secondly, this seems to propose that you don’t pay Doris Lessing or Gabriel Garcia Marquez for writing their books. You pay them for answering questions about them.

In some ways, this is only an extension of what’s been happening for the past two decades, which is writers like Doris Lessing are forced to go on book tours and promote their books in order to get paid. Now writers must do Internet chats, etc. or their publishers may very well refuse to publish them. Agents are more interested in your marketing plan than your words. (Whereas nobody seems to care about the expertise at writing of a marketing expert.) This is due to the marriage of technology and business. And this might be a real rather than prophetic example of the Cisco Kid’s belief that “technology will dictate business strategy.”

But promotion makes celebrities, not writers. And only someone who doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what a literary work is, who possibly has never read a literary novel or even a short poem of Rumi, could possibly suggest that the proper job of literary writers is explaining what they write.

By all means give us 100,000 new engineers, and teach them Chinese while you’re at it. But you’d better pay some attention to developing 100,000 new literature majors if you want a society in which humans can be human. And make a few new portable typewriters while you’re at it.