Please excuse the off-topic contribution (its not directly
related to health-promotion), but I thought I would forward
the latest issue of Netfuture to this list as it contains a
couple of threads directly pertinent to the discussion of
technology. I recommend this newsletter (subscription info
is available at the end) not because I endorse all of the
ideas here (I think that they are a little reactionary),
but because if you don't listen to alternative ideas, you
can start to lose track of a critical perspective.
NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #39 Copyright O'Reilly & Associates January 29, 1997
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Opinions expressed here belong to the authors, not O'Reilly & Associates.
Editor: Stephen L. Talbott
NETFUTURE on the Web: http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS:
*** Quotes and Provocations
From Universal Access To Universal Paranoia
The Walmart Syndrome
Who Is Embedding Whom?
What Kind of Company Do You Work For?
*** Dorothy Denning on Cryptography Export Controls
Software is not speech
*** A Note on the Next Fifty Years (Steve Talbott)
Traffic Light Luddism?
*** About this newsletter
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*** Quotes and Provocations (190 lines)
>From Universal Access To Universal Paranoia
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Did you notice the Great Divide over which we recently passed? Well, I
didn't either -- not the exact moment of crossing. But I do know this:
my email box now seems flooded with missives about the bad guys and all
the dangers out there. We've got to figure out how to protect ourselves
against spammers, how to prevent the keywords we offer to search engines
from showing up in some company's marketing profiles of us, how to keep
our electronically recorded signatures out of the hands of undesirables,
how to fight off the censors, how to maintain online site security, how to
forestall the collapse of open standards before the onslaught of
commercial behemoths....
Not so long ago the champions of the Net had other fish to fry.
Everything was a matter of freedom, openness, and the miracle of universal
access. The magic of the Net was that nobody could keep us out,
censorship would automatically be routed around, we were entering a new
era of freedom and creative anarchy, and despotic regimes of every scale
and variety were about to fall.
How did we get from there to here? Well, if you think about it, "there"
was already "here." The old stories and the new ones mutually imply each
other, and their combined moral is the one I offered in my series on
privacy (NF #28): to the extent we are willing to present ourselves to
each other as bodies of interacting data -- and the assimilation of our
business and recreation to the Net strongly pushes us in this direction --
to that extent we become subject to all the impersonal openness of data
and at the same time to all the murky countermeasures designed to protect
us against the unwanted consequences of this openness.
What we are finding is that it is impossible to map the patterns and
institutions of existing society to the patterns of interacting data.
This is usually stated as, "The laws of physically based communities
cannot be transferred to cyberspace." But to celebrate the revolutionary
implications of this fact is to disregard the fact's core: neither can
our *humanity* be transferred in any full sense to cyberspace, or to the
fields of interacting data.
Our only hope is almost the opposite of the one the revolutionaries
latched onto. It is the hope that we will so greatly strengthen our non-
data interactions and offline institutions that their additional
muscularity and resilience can anchor the centrifugal and dissipative
tendencies of our online, more or less data-like projections of ourselves.
The Walmart Syndrome
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Just when I thought I couldn't take another "local community fights
Walmart" story, a new wrinkle occurs: activists are now expressing alarm
about Walmart's plans for a massive invasion of the online retailing
scene, where the company's almost unlimited capital gives it an "unfair"
and dominating advantage.
But doesn't it really come down to this: if the local (or online)
community *really* doesn't want the Walmart, then it needn't worry. The
store, if built, will go out of business for lack of customers.
No, I don't have any problem with activism directed against particular
business concerns. In fact, I'm often rather sympathetic to it. But as
long as the activism remains focused on one-shot decisions by corporate
"bad guys" and does not reckon with the larger context of continuing,
pervasive community choice, nothing much will ever be accomplished,
regardless of which way the immediate decision goes.
We can't consign our responsibility in such matters to a compartment
labeled "current activist campaigns." Our primary activism is our daily
activity.
Who Is Embedding Whom?
----------------------
No, Bill Gates' new home is not the only market for embedded computers.
These small slivers of guiding intelligence already surround you, from
your electric razor to your range and oven. But there's much more to come
as every conceivable device is assimilated to the logic of the slivers.
Embedded computers, according to David Kline (*Wired*, October, 1996),
will stitch together "a truly universal Internet" in which "the common
artifacts of daily life -- a car, a TV, a CD player, a phone, a piece of
office equipment, a natural gas meter, a PC -- are all connected via cheap
automated software in a global network."
Kline himself seems enthusiastic about all this:
Here, at last, is a vision of the Internet for the masses, in their
hundreds of milliions and ultimately in their billions. In it, the Net
is no longer just a publishing or an entertainment or a personal
communications medium, but rather a fundamental and indispensable
engine driving all social and economic life. It's an industrial medium
that enables automated monitoring and reporting on factory-floor
production; a home security and emergency response medium far more
reliable than today's phone-based 911 system; a medical medium through
which patient treatment plans are automatically routed to relevant
providers; a consumer appliance and office equipment medium that checks
the status of devices and initiates electronic repairs; a utility
management medium in which power usage is read and managed remotely.
You name the application, the Net will be essential to it.
Here, at last, is an Internet finally set free from its PC-centric
straitjacket -- a cyberspace transformed from just another platform
into an omnipresent glue that binds the whole of society, with all its
trillions of daily social and economic interactions, into a truly
connected civilization.
NETFUTURE readers will be all too familiar with the feel of this rhetoric
-- the conviction that the *next* technological breakthrough is what true
global transformation waits upon, and that proper physical connections are
all that societies lack if they would be bound into a harmonious unity.
Perhaps it is true, as Kline suggests, that the *Internet* will be set
free from its straitjacket (whatever that might mean), but what of *us*?
How will we navigate freely through our lives once we are beset by this
"omnipresent glue"?
It is amazing, but not uncommon, that a pundit should write of the
Internet's freedom while never saying a word about ours. That the
globalized system logic to which we adjust those "trillions of daily
social and economic interactions" might constrain our future choices and
restrict human expression apparently just never occurs to him.
Could it be that Kline has yet to interact with an automated telephone
answering system?
What Kind of Company Do You Work For?
-------------------------------------
There are two kinds of company: those who pursue worthwhile ends,
applying financial discipline to help them meet their goals, and those
whose end is profit, to be achieved by supplying whatever products and
services do the job.
However difficult it is to discern shades of gray as one sort of company
changes into the other, the difference in principle between the two
alternatives is nearly one of black and white. It is the difference
between people managing the company and the company managing people. I
like the analogy of the jogger who begins running for his health, but by
degrees becomes obsessed with his "numbers" until finally he dies of a
heart attack. Here a complete reversal occurs in the relation between
health and numbers: at first the numbers are a tool for regulating the
pursuit of health, but then health is sacrificed to the numbers.
The radical yet subtle distinction between the two cases is not one that
many businesses have tried to understand.
Which kind of company do *you* work for? Here's one indicator. If your
company is forever racing to get a product out the door just ahead of its
competitors, then it is almost certainly the second sort of company. Look
at it this way: if the worthwhile end your company is aiming for will in
any case be achieved by a competitor a few months down the road, then the
"margin of good" to which all your corporate resources are devoted is
pitifully small.
And why is the other guy your "competitor" anyway, if in fact he's trying
to fill the same niche you are? If your company's primary concern were
the good, and not the numbers, you would view any other company seeking
the same goal as an ally.
If, on the other hand, your competitor is pushing a less worthy solution
to a problem for which you've found the socially beneficial answer, why
your urgency to reach the market first? You should pull back and connect
with *your* market -- those who will choose your product as a matter of
principle. This may be a small market, but it will be the only one that
matters to your goal, since no enduring social good arises from consumers
who are unaware of, and do not care about, the value of what they are
buying.
Moreover, be honest: when your product finally does hit the street and
you're looking for the next thing, how much effort do your marketing
people put into identifying what would be healthy for society, and how
much into simply recognizing where the hell the market's going?
"But what you're saying would make life impossible for my company. We
couldn't survive." Just so. But as for you, there *are* other things you
can do upon the face of the earth. The things truly worth aiming for are
never things that someone else might beat you to.
In almost all fields one finds at least a few conviction-driven companies.
They tend to be small, because conviction-driven living -- and working and
purchasing -- are not a prominent part of our society. But that, of
course, is up to people like you and me -- and depends upon whether we
prefer cultivating a healthy society or instead playing our part in
driving society toward a collective seizure of the heart.
SLT
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*** Dorothy Denning on Cryptography Export Controls (144 lines)
Often the assumptions underlying an argument are freighted with much more
significance than is the immediate bone of contention. This, I suspect,
is true of the debate over export controls on cryptographic programs and
devices. With government spooks arrayed on one side and libertarians and
commercial interests straining at their binary bits in opposition, the
truly ominous development may be hidden in the natural ease with which the
libertarians have secured their legal case using the seemingly uncrackable
key, "freedom of speech." Who in the United States would dare try to pick
*that* sacred lock?
Well, NETFUTURE reader Dorothy Denning for one. Denning has thirty years
of programming experience behind her and is one of the most respected
deans of the Net. She happens also to be a world-class expert on
cryptography. In a guest editorial for *USA Today* (December 26, 1996)
she went straight to the point:
Free speech is one of our most fundamental and cherished rights. But
let us be wary of granting to machines, and the languages used for
controlling them, the status of human beings.
A computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of the
standard text, *Cryptography and Data Security*, Denning expanded on her
views at the RSA Conference on January 28. Among her central points:
* A computer program is an operational artifact, specifying the
operation of a machine.
* Programming languages are essentially expressions of mathematics and
symbolic logic. The most powerful modern tools for verifying that a
piece of software performs the desired function -- "theorem-provers,
specification checkers, and predicate calculus transformers -- treat
the software as undertaking mathematical functions on a computer."
* Programming languages differ in critical respects from natural
languages. "Their purpose is not to communicate values, culture,
emotions, feelings, political views, or arguments to a human being, or
to coordinate actions with another person. Rather, their central
purpose is to encode the steps to be performed by a machine." This is
why "universities long ago recognized the fundamental difference
between human languages and computer languages, disallowing use of the
latter to satisfy language requirements."
* "Software is not the same as speech about software." English,
pseudocode, figures, diagrams, and graphs can be used to describe
software, and such descriptions are not banned by the current export
controls. Denning points out that, for her book, she obtained
information about the Data Encryption Standard (DES) from a government
publication, and, based on what she wrote, her students have been able
to implement the DES algorithm correctly. This was legal, despite the
foreign sales of her book, since export controls apply only to
functional artifacts.
* In fact, it's even legal to sell scannable printouts of software.
Does this make the whole idea of controls nonsense? Not necessarily.
Denning mentions that a student tried to produce a working version of
DES from textbook source code by scanning the code into a computer.
The student, who did not understand the algorithm, failed. "Scanners
and humans are error-prone, so unless one understands the program, it
can be difficult to find and remove the errors."
Therefore, "in attempting to control only those artifacts that are
easily used to encrypt, the government's distinction between
electronic and printed materials is not irrational." The aim, I gather
her to be saying, is to deny ready availability of sophisticated,
working encryption devices to every ill-intentioned passer-by or
group.
Denning concludes her paper this way:
I am concerned about the long-term implications of attempting to treat
software generally as fully protected speech. Software has the
potential of being highly destructive. Witness the Morris worm,
computer viruses, or today's concerns about attacks on information
infrastructure. Future viruses might someday bring down the power grid
or direct the production of weapons of mass destruction. Do we really
want to consider distribution of such software as free speech? Surely
no one would say "logic bombs," or viruses should have the same
protection as political or religious speech, even if an author claimed
to be making a political statement. Yet treating software as fully
protected speech could lead us down that path.
Export control regulations express judgments that exporting certain
technological artifacts [is] harmful to the national well being and
that the regulations make an important difference. It is reasonable
and legitimate to question whether these regulations are serving the
country. However, let us address that issue directly and squarely.
Let us not muddle the issue by sweeping functional artifacts into the
First Amendment. Free speech is one of our most fundamental and
cherished rights. We should be cautious in applying it to the
distribution of computer programs.
I would add -- as Denning has already suggested -- that the attempt to
smuggle software inside the sacred halo of free speech has implications
far beyond the export control issue. To the extent that operational
artifacts constructed of mathematics and logic are regarded as human
speech, we have forgotten what is most valuable and worth protecting in
ourselves. One might already have suspected that zealous halo-polishing
in a nation where words are so extraordinarily cheap signifies our uneasy
awareness that what really counts -- what makes the right of free speech
so vitally important -- is somehow slipping through our fingers.
It's one thing to say "Here I stand" when a martyr's bonfire might consume
your position at any moment, or when, as on Tienenman Square, a tank might
roll over it. But it's quite another when "courageously breaking taboos"
is the quickest way to sell books or launch a mass movement. Free speech
is being born in the first case; in the second it looks suspiciously like
dying of trivialization.
Speech is worth defending because it is the bearer of meaning -- which is
to say, because it expresses the interior, qualitative content of human
consciousness. Recognizing this, we will *not only* defend the right of
utterance where appropriate, but *also* concern ourselves with the beauty
or ugliness, depth or superficiality, fidelity or obscurantism, of the
meaning. It was, after all, the world of meaning -- of human
significances -- in which we grasped the legal right of free speech in the
first place. And the right can be sustained only as long as we continue
to sense a certain life-or-death gravity in our words -- not something,
incidentally, that the Net has so far encouraged.
When concern about the legal right becomes such an obliterating obsession
that we can advantageously link even the export of encryption devices to
it, then we have clearly lost our sense for where the importance of free
speech lies, and the right itself is therefore at risk. Inflate a right
so that it can be used for everything, and it will, in the end, prove
useful for nothing.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I have cited Denning's paper
(http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~denning/crypto/rsa.html) by kind permission
of the author.
To trace many questions of language and meaning to their roots, one can
look at the ongoing work in artificial intelligence. AI researchers have
from the beginning misconceived the mathematically and logically
instructed behavior of artifacts as inherently (rather than derivatively)
meaningful. I have dealt with logic, meaning, and artificial intelligence
in the chapter, "Can We Transcend Computation?" in *The Future Does Not
Compute*. It is available online
(http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/fdnc/ch23.html).
SLT
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*** A Note on the Next Fifty Years (114 lines)
>From Steve Talbott <[log in to unmask]>
In honor of the first fifty years of computing, the editors of
*Communications of the ACM* have put together an impressive February issue
celebrating a range of hopes for "The Next 50 Years". Some 43
representatives of computer technology and culture were invited to submit
their hopes in the form of brief essays. I was privileged to be one of
these, and have reproduced my essay below (by permission).
Before long, the table of contents (at least) should be available at the
ACM site (http://www.acm.org/). However, if you want the full, undiluted
dose of opinion -- wild, woolly, and otherwise -- about our electronic
future, pick up the February issue (vol. 40, no. 2) for yourself.
ASLEEP AT THE KEYBOARD
I hope that during the next fifty years we will awaken to the challenges
and risks of the intelligent machinery to which we increasingly defer.
Just as, fifty years ago, only "eccentrics" worried about their
contributions to the local landfill or the materials they spread over
their lawns, so today it seems quixotic to suggest that we must each
accept personal responsibility for the quality of our daily interactions
with computing devices. But it is critically important that we do so.
The global mesh of tightly woven, mechanical logic constrains us ever more
closely, a fact we do not even notice unless we are uncommonly awake.
>From the way we are ushered through metropolitan traffic by automated
light signals (very different from, say, walking through a crowd in the
park), to the way we transact our financial business at ATMs (not at all
like approaching friends or neighbors for a small loan), to the way we
compose and scroll through email messages keystroke by keystroke (quite
unlike the expressive give and take of two persons facing each other) --
in all such ways we accustom ourselves to mechanized interactions.
It is not that traffic lights are bad. As little as they may be heeded, I
still would not want to try crossing Manhattan without them. But we need
to ask how we are conditioned by the machines with which we coexist so
easily, and how we can counterbalance our one-sided relations to them.
I mention traffic lights because they probably seem a trivial illustration
of intelligent machinery. Yet even so, strange things happen as the
lights orchestrate our complex, collective movements through the city.
Perfectly decent people -- you and me! -- spew more or less audible
streams of vitriol toward anonymous folk who innocently interfere with our
efficient passage through the mechanized system.
This does not so readily happen in the city park, even though a heavy
crowd might pose similar inconveniences. In the park we have to do more
directly with *persons* rather than with a system, so our reactions differ
drastically -- despite the inefficiencies of movement. In fact, the
absence of mechanically mediated efficiency as the overruling logic of the
park no doubt accounts for some of the difference in our responses.
If it requires a certain waking up to realize that behind the various
mechanisms of the traffic jam there stands a society of persons -- and
even more waking up to hold onto the fact -- the demands upon us are many
times greater as we yield ourselves to the mechanized efficiencies of a
globally networked world. These efficiencies are now producing an orgy of
celebration and excited anticipation -- which is already a bad sign,
because only those who do not realize the difficulty of remaining awake
while being cradled and rocked by technology could feel such unqualified
anticipation.
Efficiency, perceived as an end in itself, is *always* anti-human. The
only human question about efficiency is, "Efficiency toward what end?" If
the end is, say, to eliminate a human population, uncommon efficiency does
not look like a positive achievement. More to the current point: if the
end is to substitute an automated exchange for the meeting of persons,
then efficiency is at the very least an extremely high-risk achievement.
Space permits only one further example.
Banks now compete with each other to promise loan approvals in the
shortest time -- one hour is often advertised. They can do this because
the necessary data about you and me is available online, and because
software can analyze that data in the wink of an eye. It is no longer
necessary for us to meet with a loan officer.
What is lost? Almost everything that counts -- most importantly, the
opportunity for that officer, after sizing me up face to face, to make a
judgment that might not yet be justified by the data of my past. Perhaps
he recognizes in me a future trying to be born -- a future that my current
plight is conspiring to help make possible. A future that his gesture of
trust, his willingness to put himself at risk, might encourage. A future
that is not the past, and therefore is not available to the software.
What ought banking to be about, if not assisting at the birth of new human
possibilities? Even if you argue that such opportunities are few, surely
making them occur as often as possible is what our lives are all about!
Some people, presented with this example, say that the software is better
because it prevents prejudice. This response tells us just how extreme
the temptation to fall asleep has become today. We have adapted to the
mechanisms of our interaction with almost complete forgetfulness of the
human society those mechanisms were originally supposed to serve. For,
after all, this response is like saying, "people suffer abuse in families,
so we should abolish the family."
To exchange our human potentials for the impartiality and infallibility of
the machine is to give up on society's problems. I do not doubt at all
that many of our most unyielding social dilemmas owe their stubborn
persistence to the general feeling that they must be attacked first of all
with programs -- government, computer, or otherwise -- and not with more
wakeful behavior on our part. The existence of the programs enables us to
see only mechanisms where we might have recognized personal
responsibility.
So let us hope that the next fifty years will produce the kind of wide-
awake society that consciously masters its machines and insists on human
exchange even *through* all the mechanisms -- whether traffic lights,
teller machines, or the brave new devices of the coming decades.
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*** About this newsletter (29 lines)
NETFUTURE is a newsletter concerning technology and human responsibility
for the future. Publication occurs roughly once per week. Editor of the
newsletter is Steve Talbott, a senior editor at O'Reilly & Associates.
Where rights are not explicitly reserved, you may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
Current and past issues of NETFUTURE are available on the Web:
http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/
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Craig Silva, Electronic Outreach Program Officer
Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Melbourne Australia
e-mail: [log in to unmask], Tel: 61 3 9345 3211
Post: PO Box 154, Carlton Sth Victoria. 3053. Australia
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