taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (06/23/86)
Computers and Society Digest, Number 12
Sunday, January 26th 1986
Topics of discussion in this issue...
The impact of technology in Japan
Re: Computers and Society Digest #11
Thoughts on computers in society...
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Date: Fri, 24 Jan 86 12:55:43 JST
From: <a friend in Tokyo, Japan>
Subject: The impact of technology in Japan
[editorial note - this is in response to a question I asked my friend
in our last email correspondence, added here with the ">" delimiter]
> Could you tell me something about how technology has impacted the
> society there? It seems to me that of all the industrialized nations,
> Japan must be the one that has gone from essentially no high-technology
> to the most per person. It seems like all that occurs there is
> technological innovation, be it computers, cars, or whatever.
>
> Is technology really that pervasive a presence in Japanese society?
I don't know if I can answer your questions. In the case of the
Japanese, I think it is due to the nation-wide Japanese characteristic to
like technologies in any sense. The Japanese characteristic could be
summarized as below in historical order:
1945 - 1954: Wish for survival (after the W.W II)
1955 - 1964: Wish for possession (such as T.V set)
1965 - 1974: Wish for superiority (such as owning houses or
oversea tourism)
1975 - : Wish for the creation
To satisfy the wishes, improvements in the productivity may be
necessary to make money and to make free time. The computerization, and
automation ... freed up the people from doing non-creative work. (Although
it is usually said that automation takes away ones job, it actually gave
time for one to do other things.) For the Japanese, the average people,
the self-satisfaction might be the way to differentiate one from others.
The attitude might impact the technology and the tecnological innovation
is feed back to the attitude. For example, I like the clean-still capability
of the VTR [VCR] from the beginning though the use is not particularly high.
To possess the superiority, I would pay much more or find vendors having the
same with less cost. It seems to me that the desire is common to Japanese
and makers produce to have the capability with less cost to each other by
mass-production. It encourage, in turn, the desire of other people to
have VTRs since the price became more reasonable. The wish for the
possession/superiority wins over the rationality.
The technological innovation and the impact on the society has
a snowballing effect.
Since I don't usually think of this sort of thing, my saying
may not be the truth, but just vague to you. Sorry about that.
[incidentally, anyone from another country (we have a number of non-US
readers) who would also like to discuss the impact that technology has
had on their society is more than welcome!]
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Date: 24 Jan 86 12:09 EST
From: hplabs!WAnderson.wbst%xerox.com@CSNET-RELAY
Subject: Re: Computers and Society Digest #11
I have a suggestion about Brian Godfrey's suggestions for generating
discussion on this digest.
He suggests that not only could professors submit syllabi for "Computers
and Society" courses, but they permit submission of student assignments.
This is a good idea, and might generate worthwhile discussion. I think
it would be an interesting idea to try to tackle some book or topic as a
digest group. I mean, we could submit our own assignments, based on our
own work. Then rather than simply exchanging opinions (which has its
own value), we could be sharing ideas that we have developed by
answering a specific question about a specific topic.
Another idea would be to find a paper, or a book, and agree to read it
as a group. Sort of an electronic seminar. We would need a moderator.
The objective is to read some material and try to understand what the
author is driving at, whether we agree, and what new questions are
brought up or left unresolved.
I know this requires some discipline, but it seems like a worthwhile
experiment.
Bill Anderson
Xerox Systems Group
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Date: Sunday, Janyary 26th, 1986
From: hpcnou!dat (Dave Taylor)
Subject: Thoughts on computers in society...
Computers in Society
or
"Winning through Intimidation"
Dave Taylor
-- Introduction --
In the past twenty or thirty years computers have invaded almost all
aspects of our lives. It's hard to live through a day now without encountering
either computers or some other high-tech artifact. And yet, with all this
seeming acceptance, there is an uneasy truce at work between the machines
and society.
It is this state of siege that I'm going to talk about in this paper -
to try to understand why it exists, demonstrate the pervasiveness of it, and
finally suggest ways to alleviate it.
There is a glimmer of light in the otherwise proverbially dark
picture, though - the children. At the end, we'll consider how children
deal with and accept the current technologies and try to imagine how they'll
deal with future technologies.
-- They're just dumb machines!! --
Certainly one of the more interesting and significant effects of the
industrial revolution was to show mankind that it is possible to have machines
that are somehow 'more' than the people who create and use them. To some
extent, we were forced to confront the truth of the adage that the "sum can
be greater than the parts that comprise it".
Consider the printing press in use in the late 1930s as an example -
it was a massive monstrosity, large, expensive, and extremely noisy, yet it
worked faster and better than the people it replaced (although you'd actually
have to go back a long way to find a newspaper that was printed by hand).
It's clear from reading the headlines and popular literature of the day that
people starting having problems fitting these machines into the previously
comfortable niches of 'tools' and 'people'. Obviously, they were not tools
in the same sense that the tea kettle or rake was a tool, but the machines
certainly didn't posess the intelligence and skills of people.
I don't think that we've adjusted yet to monolithic machines in
society. To witness this consider your reaction to standing in front of
a train while it's engine is being stoked (or recharged) or standing on
a bridge overlooking a highway. The power of the machines, even with the
people inside, is very intimidating. Immediately, people have defensive
reactions and rationalize their fears with such calming thoughts as "without
us that machine wouldn't exist" or "that machine can't do anything without
someone controlling it".
The second comment is I think quite important. The concept that
since a person must control the machine, the machine has some sort of
denigrated status. It's just a tool. There's certainly no threat from a
spoon sitting on the table, after all!
Yet even that thought is indicative of the quandary we're put in.
We must Control the machine, not Use it. It's almost as if the machine
has a mind of it's own and we must supress it to a lower level of existence.
It's somehow reminiscent of the rationalizations of slave-owners from the
late 1700s - they had to control their slaves because "they certainly couldn't
handle life by themselves". Again, the predominant theme is not that of
usage or exploitation (although of course there was a frightening amount
of exploitation involved with keeping slaves) but that of control. Power.
The ability to project ones thoughts and desires to those near them without
any questions asked.
If the questions are asked, like "why?", then suddenly the person
in control is revealed to have less than a perfect knowledge of the world
(omniscience is a presupposition of someone who feels that they have
enough knowledge to command) and is someone diminished in stature. With
machines, not only do we feel the need to "control" them, but they're
always asking "why?" The creations of our own minds, and yet they seem to
be skeptical of us and our behaviours...
-- We don't need you, humans! --
By the late 1950s, the beginning of what I consider to be the "golden
age" of computer science and technology, most of the world knew what computers
were and knew, somehow, perhaps instinctively, that they were things to be
cautious of. Consider such books as the "Forbin Project" or "Colossus", both
of which, in the guise of science fiction, projected gloomy futures where
machines were indeed autonomous, and could decide on their course of action
independently. In fact, the main conflict of the stories was between the
humans trying to control the machines and the machines desiring to be
independent, and finally alone.
And it's the independence of the machines that I think also is
disturbing to us. It's hard to understand exactly what's occuring with a
machine that doesn't even make sense if you tear it open. For the average
computer illiterate person, it's even worse. Our society is so enamoured of
technology that those people who aren't willing to make 'keeping up' a hobby
rapidly fall back to a previous era.
Consider the recent discussion about the difficulty of electronic
writing - it's the young people that can adjust easily to purely electronic
forms of communication, while (some of) the older employees pine for a day
when everything was done by distributing paper.
For another example, let's consider the behaviour of "HAL" in the
classic film "2001: A Space Odyssey". In this, Stanley Kubrick presented
a computer that was in control of the lives of the people on a spaceship
going towards a possible encounter with alien life. The main conflict was
not in fact the potential of alien life forms, though, but the interaction
of the machine with the men on board.
Throughout the film, the computer was portrayed as omnipresent.
More than that - a malevolent presence. At one point the astronauts come
to the realization that not all is well with HAL and they try to hide in a
small space capsule to talk without the machine overhearing them. Yet it
does anyway, because they don't realize that Hal can read their lips...
It's this image of the computer that really frightens. The image
of something far superiour to man. A machine that can synthesize and
exploit it's own knowledge for it's own use a million times faster and
more accurately than we can.
--- better faster stronger ---
Perhaps the basis of the difficulty is that we as a group are
intimidated by the awesome computational power of the machine.
The human mind is a really amazing thing, actually. For
example, consider the process you're going through reading this
message; As you read this message, you translate the shapes on the
screen into letters; translate the groups of letters into phonemes
(if you're saying it to yourself); and then into words. Finally the
words are translated into specific thoughts or concepts which are then
evaluated and decided upon not only based on each individual word,
but also in context of the previous information presented (e.g. the
usage of "it" in English). All this happens so fast that you're
not even concious of it happening. All you know is that you can
read a LOT of words a minute.
And yet when confronted with the raw computational ability of
the computer we are intimidated and become defensive.
A similar situation arises with physical abilities. For example,
we can easily pick up a stack of books, but being in the presence of a
large hydralic crane that can pick up a half-dozen cars without even
straining - even though humans created it - is disturbing.
I think the conceptual issue here is that man is a curiously
egocentric being and so to be upstaged by anything (or anyone) is quite
devastating.
Consider the reactions of competitive athletes to other athletes
that beat them...they always seem to have 'rationalizations' for their loss,
such as "they trained harder" or "they had a better starting spot". The
one thing that you NEVER hear is "I guess they're just better than I am."
With technology, though, those rationalizations are obviously
quite weak ... so part of the problem is if we accept that we need to
be able to rationalize and 'justify' that we aren't the 'best' at
everything (like mathematics, which we invented) then we need to be
able to create some good fictions about what really is happening.
And here we've also tied back in with the issue of control. If
we can consider ourselves in control of the technology then it cannot be
as much of a threat. But that fails too, even though it's fairly common.
How common? Just think of how the average teacher reacts when they
realize that a student might be better at a subject than they. A large
number of teachers will start to get 'defensive' towards the student
and, perhaps subconciously, try to repress the student. But the
teacher is the one in control...
--- The Truth of the Matter ---
At this point we've come to somewhat of a turning point in the
discussion, and we have to decide whether we indeed require some sort
of fictions or rationalizations to be able to deal with having computers
and other technological apparatus in our society.
My feeling is that we should be able to avoid this trap altogether.
As with the student being subconciously repressed by the teacher we don't
want to stop the growth in power of the machines. On the other hand, we
also don't want to let the technology run rampant through society either.
How to escape the trap? I propose through education. If people
were cognizant of the actual abilities and functionality of the machines
that they currently are concerned about we could alleviate a lot of the
anxiety.
It's rather a thorny problem...
--- Ahhh but the children ---
In the future, however, the problem will begin to lessen if
children are presented with technology as a neutral area. As I believe,
the technology unto itself is certainly not either good or evil but
simply like modelling clay - malleable.
If you watch a child explore a computer toy you'll see how they
are happy dealing with it initially as another creature. Then they
come to the realization that the machine lacks the spark of human
reason...at that point they realize it's just a plaything. An
incredibly sophisticated one perhaps, but a plaything nonetheless.
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