NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #132                                                    May 21, 2002
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                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
           Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

                  On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
     You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.

Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities?  NetFuture is a voice for
responsibility.  It depends on the generosity of those who support
its goals.  To make a contribution, click here.


CONTENTS
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Editor's Note

Quotes and Provocations
   Sex, the Internet, and Educational Reform
   Requiem for Distant Educators
   High Noon at the DB Corral
   On Giving Rats a Virtual Life

DEPARTMENTS

Announcements and Resources
   Genetic Engineering and the Intrinsic Value of Organisms

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                              EDITOR'S NOTE

A series of news items this month have brought the primary thrust of
digital technologies into uncommonly clear perspective.  We're seeing some
vivid pictures of the fruition of it all.  See how well your own
interpretations agree with mine.

SLT

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                         QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS

Sex, the Internet, and Educational Reform
-----------------------------------------

"One of the most thorough reports ever produced on protecting children
from Internet pornography has concluded that neither tougher laws nor new
technology alone can solve the problem" — so the New York
Times led off a story headlined, "No Easy Fixes Are Seen to Curb Sex-
Site Access" (May 3, 2002).  The mentioned report, "Youth, Pornography,
and the Internet", was issued this month by the National Research Council.

Former U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh, chair of the committee that
wrote the report, owned up to the obvious:

   It's not nearly as easy for an adult to supervise children who might
   seek or be inadvertently exposed to sexually explicit materials online
   as it is when such images are available in books or on the family
   television set.

In many respects, the authors of the report have simply thrown in the
towel, while trying to sound helpful.  They offer this analogy:

   Swimming pools can be dangerous for children.  To protect them, one can
   install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms.  All of these
   measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can
   do for one's children is to teach them to swim.

Sounds healthy, doesn't it?  The only problem is that the analogy doesn't
carry over to the Internet very well.  Here, by the authors' admission,
the locks, fences, and alarms can't be made to work in a reliable and
socially acceptable way, and the remaining advice ("teach them to swim")
amounts to this:  force these children to become like adults as fast as
possible.  (Well, presumably not like all those adults who keep the
massive online pornography industry in business.)  In other words, accept
a solution that doesn't apply to the people you were initially concerned
about — namely, children suffering the lamentable backwardness and
misfortune of still being children.

The problem with the Internet as a classroom tool is that it has been
conceived as a universally accessible, public medium.  Very little about
it conduces to the organic emergence of a local, intentional environment
with the sort of character that an intimate, place-based community can
nurture and protect.  When a Virginia law made it illegal to send
pornography to children over the Internet, a U.S. District judge threw the
law out on the ground that you cannot effectively deny this material to
children without in practice also denying it to adults.

Why not draw the obvious conclusion instead of walking around in circles
with our hands in our pockets, whistling innocently, and gazing vaguely
skyward as if to way, "Gee, isn't this a terrible puzzle?  I wonder where
we'll find an answer?"  The real puzzle is why we have so resolutely
turned away from the simple answer that is being shouted at us:  the
Internet just doesn't seem to be a good candidate for mediating a child's
education.

Even if this conclusion were not dictated from many other sides, it would
be suggested by the dead end our society seems to have reached regarding
the control of Internet content.  Anyone whose ideas about education can
be taken seriously realizes that the child's educational environment needs
to be "child-shaped" — that is, it needs to be family- and community-
based, secure, and specially designed to serve children.  A medium that
can override all such design aims in unpredictable ways, including the
extreme of pornographic invasion, hardly seems a natural candidate for
classroom use.

All of which brings me to this.  Aren't we about due for a new, multi-
billion-dollar educational fad?  Well, I happen to have a program in mind
that is neither faddish nor costly.  In fact, it would reduce
educational spending by many billions of dollars, simplify the classroom,
remove from teachers the crushing burden and distraction of special
training unrelated to their educational interests, give students much more
time to occupy themselves with educational content, increase teacher pay,
allow for higher teacher-student ratios, and, incidentally, put an end to
the absurdity whereby parents are asked to sign off on legal immunity for
schools that deliberately put children in harm's way.

Think about it.  Educators can breathe again.  If anyone had realistically
offered such an array of benefits ten years ago — before the Internet
hit the educational scene with full force — it would have been
considered an unparalleled gift from heaven.  Of course, the gift couldn't
have been offered ten years ago.  We needed a decade of collective
insanity first.  But now the gift can be offered, it is perfectly
realistic, and it requires only the simplest imaginable reform: take all
those computers out of the classroom and send them back to the
manufacturers for recycling.


Requiem for Distant Educators
-----------------------------

Katie Hafner has written what looks like the official obituary for the
distance education bubble ("Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U", New York Times,
May 3).  Among other things, she notes that "since the mid-1990's, most of
the purely virtual universities that sprang up — from Hungry Minds to
California Virtual University — have been sold or scaled back or have
disappeared altogether".

Much the same holds for the spin-offs from established universities.  Most
recently, Columbia University's senate urged the school to cut spending on
its Fathom venture.  The Fathom Consortium, led by Columbia in partnership
with the University of Chicago, London School of Economics, and others,
has yet to generate significant revenue, let alone turn a profit,
according to the executive vice provost at Columbia.  The tale is similar
for Western Governors' University, New York University online, the online
masters program at SUNY Buffalo College of Business, and numerous other
ventures.

Hafner points to a fundamental problem that has been underscored in
NetFuture from the very beginning:

   Some critics say that university administrators confused tools with
   education.  "We figured a quick wave of the magic wand and we'd
   reinvent how people learned after 900 years of a traditional university
   mode of instruction," Dr. [Lev A.] Gonick [of Case Western Reserve
   University] said.

The one success story Hafner offers is the technically oriented University
of Phoenix, with an online enrollment exceeding 37,000.  This illustrates
the self-referential aspect of much of the Net's progress.  If there's one
place computers ought to be essential, it's in learning about computers.
And if there's one place the web ought to be essential, it's in learning
about web programming, website management, and all the rest.  From the
earliest days of its ascendancy, a great deal of the clamor and enthusiasm
for the Net as a public good came from those who were making it their
private good — namely, programmers and other technical types, writers
excited to be on the Net in order to write about it, anthropologists and
sociologists excited to be on the Net in order to study its culture,
educators excited to be on the Net in order to promote its use in the
classroom, policy-makers excited to be on the Net in order to formulate
information-infrastructure policy — all the way down to the self-
serving entrepreneurs whose mutually supporting energies gave us the
Internet bubble and a national recession.

It's perfectly fine to be excited about your work as a programmer or
student of cyberculture.  The problem occurs only when the broader society
loses its ability to retain perspective in the presence of its more
technology-obsessed sectors — and in particular when it extrapolates
from the Net's value for promoting the Net to the Net's value for doing
other things.  This loss of perspective seems to have occurred with a
vengeance.  The question now is whether the sobering news from Dot-com
University and various other high-tech domains will encourage the rest of
us to begin getting a life — a life that we don't automatically feel
must be piggybacked upon the latest technological craze.

Related article:

"The New, Soulless University", in NF #104

   http://www.netfuture.org/2000/Mar2100_104.html


High Noon at the DB Corral
--------------------------

According to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, the problem in
fighting terrorists isn't that we have too few databases.  It's that we
have too many.  "The single thing we could do to make life tougher for
terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad
government databases was integrated into a single national file".
Ellison, whose company develops database software, has offered to donate
the tools for that single national file to the government.  He explains
further:

   We already have this large centralized database to keep track of where
   you work, how much you earn, where your kids go to school, were you
   late on your last mortgage payment, when's the last time you got a
   raise .... Well, my God, there are hundreds of places we have to
   look to see if you're a security risk.

As for privacy issues, "I really don't understand.  Central databases
already exist.  Privacy is already gone".

Ellison was asked whether the legal restrictions preventing government
agencies from sharing data should be relaxed.  "Oh, absolutely.  I mean
absolutely.  The prohibitions are absurd.  It's this fear of an
all-too-powerful government rising up and snatching away our liberties".
Since September 11, after all, "it's our lives that are at stake,
not our liberties".  When pressed about the possibility of government
abuse of personal information, Ellison replied:

   I feel like Alice has fallen through the looking glass .... Does this
   other database bother you here?  We can't touch that
   database because I won't be able to use my credit card.  Like, I won't
   be able to go to the mall!  Like that's really disturbing.
   Like, don't mess with my mall experience.  O.K., so people have to die
   over here without this, but that's not going to affect my experience
   going to the mall .... I mean, what the hell is going on?

Finally, Ellison was asked whether there were differences between
centralized databases at the Oracle Corporation and centralized government
databases:

   From the information-science standpoint, there's no difference at all.
   These central databases are cheaper and better and they solve all these
   problems.  We can manage credit risks that way.  We should be managing
   security risks in exactly the same way.

Security experts point out that credit profiles can be drawn up using
well-known, standardized, and readily available data, whereas there are no
known or foreseeable standards for identifying security risks in today's
world.  Everything is potentially relevant.  That makes for one
helluvan unwieldy database.

But, for some reason, Ellison's remarks sent me off in an entirely
different direction — to the early comparisons of the Internet with
the Old West.  As John Perry Barlow put it in 1990:

   Cyberspace ... has a lot in common with the 19th century West.  It is
   vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse ....
   hard to get around in, and up for grabs.  Large institutions already
   claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and
   independent, sometimes to the point of sociopathy.  It is, of course, a
   perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.

Well, I guess you could say cyberspace now has a sheriff, and his name is
Larry Ellison.

But, actually, it never made much sense to take the Old West as your
guiding metaphor for understanding the culture of the Net.  Clearly the
primary thing to look at was our own contemporary culture, and the most
relevant aspect of this culture was precisely its remarkable degree of
abstraction from all particular places.

The only way to make the Old West comparison work is to realize that our
abstraction from place was already well advanced in the nineteenth
century, accounting for our destructive attitude toward the land, its
inhabitants, and their culture — so that in this regard we definitely
do have something in common with that earlier time.  But our detachment
from place didn't pass away with the end of the frontier.  It continued to
increase, and the cultural corrosiveness of the Net is therefore very much
an expression of the reigning forces of our own time.

Our progressive detachment from place can be traced through the past
several centuries until, during the twentieth century, it was met by a
counter-movement.  This counter-movement comprised environmentalism, the
formation of land trusts and intentional communities, the preservation of
wilderness, the development of a science of ecology, the pursuit of
localism and voluntary simplicity as new ideals, and much else.

So in our day we see two opposite movements, represented by the extreme,
placeless abstraction of the online world, on the one hand, and these
nascent efforts to rediscover the significance of place on the other.  A
great deal depends on our ability to find a fitting balance between the
two.

Don't however, look to Larry Ellison for this balance.  His remarks are
the unambiguous testimony of a pure citizen of cyberspace — one for
whom the human being has become simple in the way that only an abstraction
can be simple.  He has, in his mind, reduced us to data, so that managing
complex social issues becomes primarily a matter of managing databases.
To conflate western heroes:  he is Wyatt Earp, with every bullet a silver
one.  Perhaps not coincidentally, he also has a huge personal investment
in the bullet factory.

(Quotations are from "Silicon Valley's Spy Game" by Jeffrey Rosen, New
York Times Magazine, April 14, 2002.)

Related articles:

"Privacy in an Age of Data", parts 1 - 3, in NF #28, #29, 30

   http://www.netfuture.org/1996/Sep2596_28.html (part 1)
   http://www.netfuture.org/1996/Oct1796_29.html (part 2)
   http://www.netfuture.org/1996/Oct2496_30.html (part 3)

On Giving Rats a Virtual Life
-----------------------------

After implanting remote-controlled electrodes in a rat's brain, scientists
have used a laptop computer to "accurately steer the animal, in real time,
over any arbitrarily specified three-dimensional route and over a range of
real-world terrains".  Writing in Nature (May 2, 2002), they inform
us that "a guided rat can be developed into an effective 'robot' that will
possess several natural advantages over current mobile robots".

Rats navigate in part based on sensations received through their sensitive
whiskers.  So the scientists placed two of the electrodes in sites of the
brain associated with left and right whisker sensations.  By stimulating
one or another of these sites, they were able to steer the rat.  Moreover,
stimulation of a different site in the brain can act as a cue or reward
for scientifically correct behavior.

So now you have a way to train rats that does not depend on a particular
mechanical or environmental set-up, and you can deliver rewards that are
(in the scientists' words) "relatively non-satiating" — rewards that
do not require the rat to "initiate consummatory behavior" (that is, the
rat needn't interrupt its activities by eating real rewards).  As a result
of all this, the scientists at their laptops had rats "running forwards
and turning instantaneously on cue" — and even navigating areas they
would normally avoid, such as open, brightly lit spaces.

Naturally, the technical report comes with a reminder of how useful these
rats might be.  Due to their ability to explore "large, collapsed piles of
concrete rubble", they could be used for "search and rescue in areas of
urban destruction".  You hear the intended resonance, of course.  We are
supposed to imagine robo-rats along with firemen and police as the heroes
of our terrorized future.  (Will there be salesmen for anything
over the next few years who do not employ this resonance in their
advertising slogans?)

I have stared at this report for a couple of weeks, at a loss for words.
I try not to write pieces that do little more than point at shameful
things and say, "Oh, how terrible!"  Yet, what else is there to say?  I'm
quite sure that some people will respond to this story with utter
abhorrence, while others will not have a clue as to why anyone should be
disturbed — and neither group (one very small and the other enormous,
to judge from the lack of response to the story) will have anything
meaningful to say to the other.  We really do seem to be coming to a great
divide.

For what it's worth, however, here are a few brief observations:

** These scientists are engaged in a kind of practical Cartesianism:  the
animal organism is not only conceived as a machine, but treated as one and
even partially reduced to one.  From the very beginning, such practice has
been an essential support for the more philosophic Cartesianism.

** The rat research gives us a vivid picture of the direction and
significance of digital technologies.  Nothing within the technological
juggernaut itself seems capable of raising any ethical question about this
technical accomplishment, whether it be applied to rats or humans.  We
find ourselves staring at the practical relation between technology and
the living organism, as this relation is seen from the side of technology.
The problem is that by the time we gain a picture of such crystalline
clarity, most of us have already become so accustomed to many of its
features that we hardly notice it.

** A rat lives in a world that comes to it in part through its whiskers.
The researchers have removed it from this world, substituting a ghastly
nightmare spun out by technicians at keyboards.  Behold the virtual life!
My colleague, Craig Holdrege, remarked on the irony that we have not only
made these rats more like machines, but by doing so we have also made them
more like humans.  That is, now we can disconnect rats from their natural
environment as thoroughly as we have disconnected ourselves.

** A massive portion of our lives is spent watching television.  This
means that a substantial amount of our sensory input — while still
mediated by our sense organs (unlike the virtual whisker sensations of the
rats) — is almost as radically disconnected from all the rest of our
lives as those experiences of the rats.  We lose ourselves in sense
experience without meaning or significance, in sensations designed to be
high-impact, but without any coherent relation to the meanings and
purposes we pursue, or once pursued, apart from the magical screen.  We
sit there passively sucked up into the disconnected, chaotic dreams spun
out by, yes, technicians at keyboards.  Except that these technicians
happen to reside, not in scientific laboratories, but on Madison Avenue,
in Hollywood, and in the high-tech industry.  With our concurrence, they
steal our senses from us.

** This was not a good day for me to receive, in a charitable mood, a book
advertisement from MIT Press announcing Cynthia L. Breazeal's Designing
Sociable Robots.  The sociable robot of the future, I learned from the
announcement, will be "a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated
tool .... Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as
collaborators and companions".  The lifelike quality of a robot Breazeal
developed encourages us to treat it "as a social creature rather than just
a machine".

Why in the world would we want to engage in the ditzy exercise of
pretending a robot is a living being, when we're also engaged in the dead-
earnest exercise of converting living beings into robots?  But I guess the
real meaning of both exercises is the same:  to train ourselves in losing
awareness of any distinction between robots and living beings.  Most of
the "great philosophical issues" in cognitive science today come down
mainly to the question whether we are training ourselves toward greater
awareness of such distinctions, or toward reduced awareness.  Our
philosophical perspective naturally follows from, and is "proven" by, the
limitations of our awareness.

** There was a time when this work on rats would have been universally
condemned as unnatural — against nature.  If we can no longer condemn
anything at all as unnatural, it is because we have no clear notion of the
nature of things.  And if we have no clear notion of the nature of things,
it is because, in our pursuit of a purely quantitative ideal of science,
we have progressively been losing awareness of qualities.  It is only the
qualitative character of an organism that expresses its way of being in
the world, and we cannot say what is fitting or not fitting in our
treatment of the organism without some sense for this character and this
way of being.  Scientists willfully ignoring the qualities of things have
no basis for responding one way or another to the charge that they are
committing unnatural acts.  If they were true to their intellectual
commitments, they would simply hold silent in the face of the charge — or
acknowledge their inability to respond meaningfully to it.  But as things
look now, it appears unlikely they will even have to hear the charge.

Related articles:

"Toward a 'Final Theory' of the Sloth?" in In Context #3

   http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic3/sloth.htm

"The Trouble with Qualities" in In Context #6:

   http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic6/qualities.htm

SLT

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==========================================================================

                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


Genetic Engineering and the Intrinsic Value of Organisms
--------------------------------------------------------

The International Forum for Genetic Engineering will hold a workshop
September 18 - 21, 2002, in Edinburgh, Scotland, entitled "Genetic
Engineering and the Intrinsic Value and Integrity of Animals and Plants".
Presenters at the workshop will include Harry Griffin, assistant director
of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh (where Dolly was cloned), Craig
Holdrege, director of The Nature Institute (publisher of NetFuture), and
Holmes Rolston III, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University.

The workshop's title already indicates something of its unusual nature, as
scientific conferences on genetics go.  The aim is to bring together the
variety of viewpoints necessary in order to go beyond extremely one-sided
and purely technical considerations.  So the disciplines represented at
the workshop will include, beside molecular biology:  farming and animal
husbandry, plant and animal breeding, ethics, law, economics, and
phenomenological science.

The Nature Institute's affiliate researcher, Johannes Wirz, was one of the
group of Europeans who founded Ifgene in 1995.  The organization aims "to
promote a deeper dialogue about genetic engineering by giving special
attention to:

** the worldviews out of which people approach science and its application
   to genetic engineering (biotechnology)

** the moral and spiritual implications of genetic engineering."

For more information about the workshop, which will be held at Edinburgh's
Royal Botanic Garden, contact David Heaf (101622.2773@compuserve.com) or
go to http://www.anth.org/ifgene/2002.htm.

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                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2002 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
newsletter for noncommercial purposes.  You may also redistribute
individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this
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Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web:

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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #132 :: May 21, 2002

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