sjr@datacube.com (Steve J. Rapaport) (12/06/87)
Paul Dubuc asks: > Would anyone like to share their ideas on the implications of treating > social problems as technical ones? and mentions that human problems are harder (by orders of magnitude) to solve than technical ones. He is, of course, right, but I think he's missed the point. The original suggestion was that the *medium* of the net be used to help solve social problems. The net, when used as an information exchange, is purely a social, not technical, mechanism. (Like the telephone.) Sure, it needs high tech to work, but that doesn't mean that any solution arrived at by the various *people* brainstorming through it will be a technical one. I think that if there's any hope of solving social problems, it will be done by groups of intelligent, knowledgeable people, who can communicate in an orderly way, with sufficient time delay that they are encouraged to focus on the issues, not the red herrings. It also helps if the communications can be stored and looked at later for fresh insights, and there is some way to tie a response back to the thought that originated it. Usenet meets these requirements, and so is a reasonable medium for exchange of ideas on any social problem. Regardless of the technology required to run it. As to whether a group of computer nerds, even with their heads (figuratively) together, can solve *any* social problem (most of them are still wondering why they can't meet Mr./Ms. Right on soc.singles), well, I leave that for history to decide. Steve Rapaport
swb@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Scott Brim) (12/15/87)
To change the subject slightly.... Actually, these days I'm feeling that so much of social structure and function depend on technology that keeping human society healthy is just as much a technical problem as one of human relations, government, etc. I don't mean that you need technology to keep our society running (although in the USA it's true); I mean the fabric of society itself is becoming technology-based. More and more of our accustomed and seemingly necessary interactions require it. Also, the kinds and frequencies of interactions are growing, and unexpected new ones which we aren't prepared to deal with will appear. The stock market problems are a simple example. They are indicative of the fact that a growing number of our technological solutions, which work well in an environment of little interaction with other such solutions and strong (usually human) damping of interactions between them, are becoming more and more interconnected, and the interaction times are becoming shorter. We haven't designed for this. There is little or no coordination of interconnections (we like it that way). We have no idea what the results are going to be. Even finding such interacting systems is going to be hard and full of surprises, so in making society work we're going to be playing rather desperate catch-up, patching as we can, just like we are with the stock market systems right now. Of course the rate of increase of such interactions isn't going to slow down at all, and our use of technology is going to increase in more and more critical areas. Hmmmm. Scott