technologies (technology, technical, technique, tech)
Olaf: my theory about advancing technologies as (is) both our savior and our doom?
source:
Frozen II, disney, DVD, 2020
____________________________________
Peter Thiel with Blake Masters., Zero to one : notes on startups, or how to build the future, 2014
p.5
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
p.6
A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.” I'll give my own answer later in this chapter.
p.6
But what makes the future distinctive and important isn't that it hasn't happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today.
p.6
If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world.
p.6
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
pp.8─9
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
([ technology : methods, techniques, tools, devices, machines, machinery, technical systems that make things better, make things easier, cover-up and hide the complexity with a simplified user interface; a technology could be bringing a pre existing technical knowledge and implemetation (most system are difficult to implement when no known system like it has been build, developed, and evolved before) together into one tool or technical system or a product and a service; technologies amplify existing ...; certain technologies can amplify things so much that the technology that initial was positive can be come a negative because it being use too much by too many people without paying much attention to the fabric of society or the biological ecosystem of nature; a prime example of this is the massive floating factory / fishing vessel that is one of the contributing factor to fishery collapse; of course, what is too much and not enough is dependent on social status, social class, perspective, you role and position in the society and/or organization; for example wind mill, water wheel, ...; an example from a different category and field, the wide spread use of highly refine and processed sugar is a new development in human society, and initially sugar was very expensive and only the rich can affort it; it was only later that sugar production has increase enough to be affordable to almost all social class and income in society; however, this wide spread use of sugar causes teeth problems, tooth decay (which was not that common, a problem, or of great concern before the introduction of sugar), and with high fructose corn syrup (a type of sugary substance refined from corn syrup) we have children and grown up with too much fat (sign of fatty liver) and over weight problem (obesity), the kind of obesity (a fancy word for too much fat on the body and over weight) that we see from drinking too much alcohol and beer; ... ])
detailed notes on Peter's class “Computer Science 183: startup”
https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup/
(Zero to one : notes on startups, or how to build the future / Peter Thiel with Blake Masters., 1. new business enterprises., 2. new products., 3. entrepreneurship., 4. diffusion of innovations., HD62.5.T525 2014, 685.1'1──dc23, 2014)
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Reed E. Hundt, You say you want a revolution, 2000 [ ]
p.131
Ann Lewis
“The Vice President has persuaded people to feel positively about technology,” she said. “This is a big change. Technology causes unpredictable change, and people don't like that. Change threatens jobs, produces anxiety. The elites believe in the benefits of innovation, but voters do not. Al has turned those attitudes around. He has increased America's confidence in the future.”
(Hundt, Reed E., 1948─, You say you want a revolution : a story of information age politics / Reed E. Hundt, 1. united states. telecommunications act of 1996., 2. telecommunication policy──united states., 3. information superhighway──government policy──united states., 4. internet (computer network)──government policy──united states., HE7781.H88 2000, 384.3'3'0973──dc21, 2000, )
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Jon Gernter., The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation, [2012]
p.152
He had a formula
p.186
And depending on how it played out, one might attach a corollary to Kelly's loose formula for innovation ── namely, that in any company's greatest achievements one might with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginning of its own demise.
p.186, p.185
Max Matheus
acoustics departments at Bell Labs 1955
department head of acoustic and behavioral research unit.
pp.185─186
In many respects, says Mathews, a phone monopoly in the early part of the 20th century made perfect sense. Analog signals ── the waves that carry phone calls ── are very fragile. “If you're going to send sound a long way, you have to send it through fifty amplifiers,” he explains, just as the transatlantic cable did. “The only thing that would work is if all the amplifiers in the path were designed and controlled by one entity, being the AT&T company. That was a natural monopoly. The whole system ── an analog system ── wouldn't work if it was done by a myriad of companies.”22
But when Shannon explained how all messages could be classified as information, and all information could be digitally coded, it hinted at the end of this necessary monopoly. Digital information as Shannon envisioned it was durable and portable. In time, any company could code and send a message digitally, and any company could uncode it. And with transistors, which were increasingly cheap and essential to digital transmission, the process would get easier by the year. Mathews argued that Shannon's theorem “was the mathematical basis for breaking up the Bell System.” IF that was so, then perhaps Shockley's work would be the technical basis for a breakup.
And depending on how it played out, one might attach a corollary to Kelly's loose formula for innovation ── namely, that in any company's greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.
·‘’•─“”
(The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
1. bell telephone laboratories──history──20th century.
2. telecommunication──united states──history──20th century.
3. technological innovations──united states──history──20th century.
4. creative ability──united states──history──20th century.
5. inventors──united states──history──20th century.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384──dc23
384 Gernter
)
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Jon Gernter., The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation, [2012]
p.20
The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal;
p.20
; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm ── usually a disc made of this aluminum ── that was backed by another thin metal disc. A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented. As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it. The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the electric current running between the metal discs. In the process sound waves would be converted to electric waves. On a simple journey, the electrified voice signal would then travel through a wire, to a switchboard, to another cable, to another switchboard, and finally to a receiver and a distant eardrum. But a telephone voice signal was weak ── much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph's simple dot-dash signal. Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner ── or “attenuate”, to use the phone company's preferred term ── after even a few miles.
─“”
p.22
Then Jewett asked his friend for help. “Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater.”18
Here was a new approach to solving an industrial problem, an approach that looked not to engineers but to scientists.
─“”
p.23
Within two years Arnold came up with several possible solution to the repeater problem, but he mainly went to work on improving an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest. The early audion was vaguely magical. It resembled a small incandescent light bulb, yet instead of a hot wire filament strung between two supporting wires it had three elements ── a metal filament that would get hot and emit electrons (called a cathode); a metal plate that would stay cool and attract electrons (called an anode); and between them a wire mesh, or “grid”. A small electrical current, or signal, that was applied to the audion's grid could be greatly amplified by another electrical current that was traveling from the hot cathode to the cool anode. Arnold found, through trial and error, the best materials, as well as a superior way to evacuate the air inside the audion tube. (He suspected correctly that a high vacuum would greatly improve the audion's efficiency.) Once Arnold had refined the audion, he, Jewett, and Millikan convened in Philadelphia to test it against other potential repeater ideas. The men listened in on phone conversations that were passed through the various repeaters, and they found the audion clearly superior. Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize 20th century communications.
p.32
That an industrial laboratory would focus on research and development was not entirely novel; a few large German chemical and pharmaceutical companies had tried it successfully a half century before. But Bell Labs seemed to have embraced the idea on an entirely different scale.
p.32
Harold Arnold
As Arnold explained, his department would include, “the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.”10
p.51
In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place ── perhaps all three ── require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then ── sometimes ── a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious. When Niels Bohr ── along with Einstein, the world's greatest physicist ── heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he splapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have been!”11
p.113
There had been whispers in the electronics industry about whether Bell Labs' enthusiasm over the transistor was overblown; the reported difficulty in manufacturing the devices only added to the skepticism. Whether it was a shortcoming or an advantage, Kelly's confidence was almost certainly rooted in his early experiences. He remembered the endless days and nights constructing vacuum tubes in lower Manhattan, the countless problems in the beginning and then the stream of incremental developments that improved the tubes' performance and durability to once-unimaginable levels. He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common ── in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like ── they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible. He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn't sold anything you hadn't innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything. So Kelly looked at the transistor and saw the past, and the past was tubes. He thereby intuited the future.
pp.149─150
Mervin Kelly
March 23, 1950
a polished version of the lecture about Bell Labs
Royal society
Bell Labs was the world's foremost example of a place where scientists pursued creative technology.
p.150
Bell Labs helped maintain and improve that system, he said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups. The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservior of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That's when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. In Kelly's sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.
p.150
the telephone system, Mervin Kelly
p.151
a living organism
In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual. Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other. These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building. Researchers and engineers would find themselves discussing their respective problems in the halls, over lunch, or they might be paired together on a project, either at their own request or by managers. Or a staffer with a question would casually seek out an expert, “whether he be a mathematician, a metallurgist, an organic chemist, an electromagnetic propagation physicist, or an electron device specialist.”
p.151
Physical proximity, in Kelly's view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn't do.
Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” as Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.
p.152
What he went on to describe in London, though, was a systematized approach to innovation, the fruit of three decades of consideration at the Labs. To Kelly, inventing the future wasn't just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.
Bell Labs' experience over the past few years demonstrated that the process of innovation could now be professionally fostered and managed with a large degree of success ── and even, perhaps, with predict ability.
Industrial science was now working on a scale, and embracing a complexity,
p.152
He had a formula
p.152
In TECHNOLOGY, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure.
p.274
John deButts considered AT&T's vast communications network to be unique in all the world. No one else could replicate it; no one else could run it. Its construction and maintenance, done over the course of a century, had been Herculean. Its electronic architecture was the product of genius and hard work. He was correct in all these respects. He did not seem to grasp, however, how quickly technology could now be replicated, in part thanks to Bell Labs' widely available patents.
Mervin Kelly had predicted during World war II that the telecommunications industry would eventually begin to compete against the larger electronics industry, where radio and television makers constantly battled over products and prices.
“We have been a conservative and non-competitive organization,” Kelly had pointed out to his colleagues in 1943. “We engineer for high quality service, with long life, low maintenance costs, high factor of reliability, as basic elecments in our philosophy of design and manufacture. But our basic technology is becoming increasingly similar to that of a high volume, annual model, highly competitive, young, vigorous and growing industry.”10
MCI was proof of that striving and competitive future. Bob Lucky recalls a day in the early 1970s when several AT&T executives were discussing with Bell Labs executives the prospect of upstart companies offering long-distance service. “You don't have to worry about this,” the AT&T executive assured them, “because we have the network. No one else has the network.” <skip the last two sentences.>
pp.299─300
Some of the most farsighted thinkers at Bell Labs had long believed that the phone monopoly might not endure. Mervin Kelly, for one, constantly had that possibility on his mind, from the mid-1940s onward. Their reasoning was neither legal nor philosophical. Popular technologies spread quickly through society; inevitably, they are duplicated and improved by outsiders. As that happens, the original innovator becomes less and less crucial to the technology itself. “I think they new that,” says John Mayo, a legendary engineer who began working at Bell Labs in the 1950s and rose to become its president some years after the litigation had ended. An intriguing questions, at least to Mayo, is why the leadership that preceded him at Bell Labs ── Jewett, Kelly, Fisk, Pierce, Baker, and the rest ── none-the-less decided to invest so heavily and so consistently in research and in exploring what he calls “the unknown.” They were not forced to; other government-run phone companies around the world did not. Arguably, Bell Labs could have existed as a highly competent development organization without doing much in the way of basic or applied research. In Mayo's view, “it's not clear what possessed them to do such a unique thing, because in the long term it clearly was not something that assured their future.”
Morry Tanenbaum puts it somewhat differently. “Technology would have destroyed the monopoly anyway,” he says. Tanenbaum notes that Bell Labs' most significant research and development efforts ── transistors, microwave towers, digital transmission, optical fiber, cellular telephone systems ── all fit a pattern. They took years to be developed and deployed, and soon became essential parts of the network. Yet many of the essential patents were given away or licensed for a pittance. And those technologies that weren't shared were duplicated or improved upon by outsiders anyway. And eventually, the results were always the same. All the innovations returned, ferociously, in the form of competition.
─“”
p.332
In 1986, for instance, the challenges that lay ahead remained indistinct. John Pierce, watching the fate of his old employer from his perch in California, set down some thoughts at the time in a letter to a friend.
p.332
As Pierce saw it, the great laboratories of the 20th century had a clear purpose: “Someone depended on them for something, and was anxious to get it. They were really needed, and they rose to the need.” For Bell Labs, Pierce noted, the need was modern communications. That future rested upon the institution and the researchers who worked there.
p.332
Pierce was now watching “as an interested on looker” to see if the new AT&T Bell Laboratories could figure out a new mission, a new purpose. He wasn't skeptical; he believed it was indeed possible. But he wasn't terribly optimistic, either. The old world was already gone, he explained, it was just that most people hadn't yet noticed. “It is just plain silly”, he wrote, “to identify the new A&T Bell Laboratories with the old Bell Telephone Laboratories just because the new Laboratories has inherited buildings, equipment and personnel from the old. The mission was absolutely essential to the research done at the old Laboratories, and that mission is gone and has not been replaced.”2
─“”
(The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
1. bell telephone laboratories──history──20th century.
2. telecommunication──united states──history──20th century.
3. technological innovations──united states──history──20th century.
4. creative ability──united states──history──20th century.
5. inventors──united states──history──20th century.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384──dc23
384 Gernter
)
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Noam Chomsky
We live in a highly indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried.
United States invaded South Vietnam
The military system, to a substantially extend, not totally, is a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high technology industry.
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source of energy:
development and the wide spread use of fire
hearth
hot spring
wood
charcoal
wind mill
water wheel
coal (fossil fuel)
whale oil
bee wax
kerosene (fossil fuel)
gasoline (fossil fuel)
petro (fossil fuel)
jet fuel (fossil fuel)
gas (fossil fuel)
geothermal
geothermal power plant
solar power (electricity) (sun)
solar power (heat) (sun)
solar power (sunlight)
solar power (plant life and all life)
solar power (weather, climate)
earth
clear sky
underground storage (cellar) (basement) (below the frost line)
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Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, Breakthrough, 2004 [ ]
p.203
Electricity (1873)
Telephone (1876)
Automobile (1886)
Radio (1905)
Television (1926)
VCR (1952)
Microwave (1953)
PC (1975)
Internet (1975)
Cell phone (1983)
([ washing machine (????) ])
([ gas : propane ])
Figure 10.1
Percentage of Americans owning various technological devices. Used with permission of Gary Starkweather.
p.214
Gordon Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel
In 1996, in a personal retrospective9 on research, he argued that this was an important principle:
Intel operates on the Noyce10 principle of minimum information. One guesses what the answer to a problem is and goes back as far as one can in a heuristic way. If this does not solve the problem, one goes back and learns enough to try something else. Thus, rather than mount research effort aimed at truly understanding problems and producing publishable technological solutions, Intel tries to get by with as little information as possible .... Another advantage to operating on the principle of minimum information: the company generates few spinoffs. Because it does not generate a lot more ideas than it can use, Intel's R&D capture ratio is much higher than Fairchild's ever was. (p.168)
9. See Gordon E. Moore, “Some Personal Perspectives on Research in the Semiconductor Industry,” in Engines of Innovation, ed. Rosenbloom and Spencer.
p.214
No niche lasts forever. By 2002, Intel faced saturation in the market for microprocessors for personal computers, and its attitude about research began to change. It expanded its internal research laboratories and developed a program of outsourcing research to “lablets” at other institutions.
(Stefik, Mark., Breakthrough : stories and strategies of radical innovation / Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik., 1. technological innovation., 2. inventions., 2004, )
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Kevin Kelly, What technology wants, 2010 [ ]
In other words, technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.
p.12
German word technik
French noun technique, used by French philosophers to mean the society and culture of tools
technium: this idea of a self-reinforcing system of creation
At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence. It began to exercise some autonomy.
p.91
Science is costly for an individual. Sharing results is of marginal benefit if you are chiefly seeking a better tool for today. Therefore, the benefits of science are neither apparent nor immediate for individuals. Science requires a certain density of leisured population willing to share and support failures to thrive. That leisure is generated by pre-science inventions such as the plow, grain mills, domesticated power animals, and other techniques that permit a steady surplus of food for large number of people. In other words, science needs prosperity and populations.
p.153
An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is [,at that moment in space and time,] worthless; no one can follow. Ideally, an innovation opens up only the next adjacent step from what is known and invites the culture to move forward one hop. An overly futuristic, unconventional, or visionary invention can fail initially (it may lack essential not-yet-invented materials or a critical market or proper understanding) yet succeed later, when the ecology of supporting ideas catches up. Gregor Mendel's 1865 theories of genetic heredity were correct but ignored for 35 years. His keen insights were not embraced because they did not explain the problems biologists had at the time, nor did his explanation operate by known mechanisms, so his discoveries were out of reach even for the early adopters. Decades later science faced the urgent questions that Mendel's discoveries could answer. Now his insights were only one step away. Within a few years of one another, three different scientists (Hugo de Vries, Karl Erich Correns, and Erich Tschermak) each independently rediscovered Mendel's forgotten work, which of course had been there all along. Kroeber claims that if you had prevented those three from rediscovery and waited another year, six scientists, not just three, would had made the then-obvious next step.
p.170
For instance, close scrutiny of Kryder's Law in hard-disk densities shows that it is composed of a sequence of overlapping smaller trend lines. The first hard-disk technology, ferrite oxide, ran from 1975 to 1990. The second technology, thin film, had a slightly better performance and slightly faster acceleration and overlapped ferrite oxide, running from 1985 to 1995. The third technological innovation, magneto resistance, began in 1993 and improved at a still faster rate. Their slightly uneven slopes combine to yield an unwavering trajectory.
([
“ Once a development path is set on a particular course, then network externalities, the learning process of organizations, and the historical derived modelling of the issues reinforces the course.”
― Douglas North
• Uncertainty and path dependence
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
])
p.196
In 1997, I interviewed [George] Lucas ... . ... [...] ... I asked him, "Do you think technology is making the world better or worse" Lucas's answer:
If you watch the curve of science and everything we know, it
shoots up like a rocket. We're on this rocket and we're going
perfectly vertical into the stars. But the emotional intelligence
of humankind is equally if not more important than
our intellectual intelligence. We're just as emotionally illiterate
as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is
completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and
the vertical are getting farther and farther apart. And as
these things grow apart, there's going to be some kind of
consequence of that.
I think we underestimate the strain of that gap.
(Kelly, Kevin, 1952—, T14.5.K45 2010, 303.48'3—dc22, copyright © 2010)
(What technology wants / Kevin Kelly, 1. technology—social aspects., 2. technology and civilization., )
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Kevin Kelly, What technology wants, 2010 [ ]
pp.138—139, p.142
pp.138—139
A light based on a coil of tungsten strung within an oval vacuum bulb is not inevitable, but the electric incandescent light-bulb is.
The general concept of the electric incandescent lightbulb can be abstracted from all the specific details allowed to vary (voltage, height, kind of bulb) while still producing the result——in this case, luminance from electricity. This general concept is similar to the archetype in biology, while the specific materialization of the concept is more like a species. The archetype is ordained by the technium's trajectory, while the species is contingent.
The electric incandescent lightbulb was invented, reinvented, coinvented, or "first invented" dozens of times. In their book Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn list 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs prior to Edison. It might be fairer to say that Edison was the very last "first" inventor of the electric light. These 23 bulbs (each an original in its inventor's eyes) varied tremendously in how they fleshed out the abstraction of "electric lightbulb." Different inventors employed various shapes for the filament, different materials for the wires, different strengths of electricity, different plans for the bases. Yet they all seemed to be independently aiming for the same archetypal design. We can think of the prototypes as 23 different attempts to describe the inevitable generic lightbulb.
p.142
STAGE TASK EXAMPLE
Think of possibily Recognizing an opportunity We should use elctricity
for solution for lighting
Idea of how to Imagining the crucial An incadescent wire in a
elements of the solutions sealed bulb!
Details specified Selecting specific Welded tungsten, vacuum
solutions pump, solder exhaust port
Working device Proving your solutions Prototypes by Swan, Latimer,
work reliably Edison, Davy, etc.
Enabling adoption Convincing the world to Edison's bulb (and
adopt your solutions electric system)
(Kelly, Kevin, 1952—, T14.5.K45 2010, 303.48'3—dc22, copyright © 2010)
(What technology wants / Kevin Kelly, 1. technology—social aspects., 2. technology and civilization., pp.138—139, p.142)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
<< Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement >>
[[ oppressed [seduced, induced] by their addiction to amusement ]]
<< Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence. >>
[[ oppressed by state violence. ]]
[[ George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ]]
What is the peekaboo world?
a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress.
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https://prezi.com/p/egoxlf6-bln8/neil-postmans-five-ideas-to-technological-change/
first idea: all technological change is a trade-off
second idea: advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population
third idea: embedded in every technology there is a philosophy, epistemological, political, or social prejudice
fourth idea: technological change is not Additive [to add]; it is Ecological
fifth idea: technology becomes mythic which is perceived as part of the natural order of things
https://prezi.com/p/egoxlf6-bln8/neil-postmans-five-ideas-to-technological-change/
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https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change
by Neil Postman
Talk delivered in Denver Colorado
March 28, 1998
Neil Postman, speech at NewTech '98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZKUak1fYr0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZKUak1fYr0
First Idea
----------
First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.
The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the
advantage may well be worth the cost.
Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape.
Idea Number One, then, is that culture always pays a price for technology.
Second Idea
-----------
Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.
This leads to the second idea, which is that the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all.
Let us take as another example, television, although here I should add at once that in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way or another. In America, where television has taken hold more deeply than anywhere else, there are many people who find it a blessing, not least those who have achieved high-paying, gratifying careers in television as executives, technicians, directors, newscasters and entertainers.
And now, of course, the winners speak constantly of the Age of Information,
always implying that the more information we have, the better we will be in solving significant problems—not only personal ones but large-scale social problems, as well. But how true is this? If there are children starving in the world—and there are—it is not because of insufficient information. We have known for a long time how to produce enough food to feed every child on the planet. How is it that we let so many of them starve? If there is violence on our streets, it is not because we have insufficient information. If women are abused, if divorce and pornography and mental illness are increasing, none of it has anything to do with insufficient information. I dare say it is because something else is missing, and I don’t think I have to tell this audience what it is. Who knows? This age of information may turn out to be a curse if we are blinded by it so that we cannot see truly where our problems lie. That is why it is always necessary for us to ask of those who speak enthusiastically of computer technology, why do you do this? What interests do you represent? To whom are you hoping to give power? From whom will you be withholding power?
I say only that since technology favors some people and harms others, these are questions that must always be asked. And so, that there are always winners and losers in technological change is the second idea.
Third Idea
----------
Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice.
Here is the third. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.
Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments.
The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet, Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence, “The medium is the message.”
Fourth Idea
-----------
Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.
Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals. In America, our most significant radicals have always been capitalists—men like Bell, Edison, Ford, Carnegie, Sarnoff, Goldwyn. These men obliterated the 19th century, and created the 20th, which is why it is a mystery to me that capitalists are thought to be conservative. Perhaps it is because they are inclined to wear dark suits and grey ties.
All they were trying to do is to make television into a vast and unsleeping money machine. That they destroyed substantive political discourse in the process does not concern them.
Fifth Idea
----------
And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.
I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic. I use this word in the sense in which it was used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes. He used the word “myth” to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. I have on occasion asked my students if they know when the alphabet was invented. The question astonishes them. It is as if I asked them when clouds and trees were invented. The alphabet, they believe, was not something that was invented.
When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control. If you should propose to the average American that television broadcasting should not begin until 5 PM and should cease at 11 PM, or propose that there should be no television commercials, he will think the idea ridiculous. But not because he disagrees with your cultural agenda. He will think it ridiculous because he assumes you are proposing that something in nature be changed; as if you are suggesting that the sun should rise at 10 AM instead of at 6.
What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.
Conclusion
----------
And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.
source:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Summary
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.
The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end".
Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that "television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan – altering McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" to "the medium is the metaphor" – he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.
Postman argues that commercial television has become derivative of advertising. Moreover, modern television commercials are not "a series of testable, logically ordered assertions" rationalizing consumer decisions, but "is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people" being driven to "near ecstasy by their good fortune" of possessing advertised goods or services. "The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue" because more often than not "no claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama." Because commercial television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer.
for the hardcore Reader, you can download a pdf format of the book at:
https://archive.org/download/postman-neil-amusing-ourselves-to-death_202012/Postman%20Neil%20-%20Amusing%20Ourselves%20to%20Death.pdf
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
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1:25:12
College Lecture Series - Neil Postman - "The Surrender of Culture to Technology"
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=173
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=173
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
College of DuPage
Published on Jun 3, 2013
A lecture delivered by Neil Postman on Mar. 11, 1997 in the Arts Center. Based on the author's book of the same title. Neil Postman notes the dependence of Americans on technological advances for their own security. Americans have come to expect technological innovations to solve the larger problems of mankind. Technology itself has become a national "religion" which people take on faith as the solution to their problems.
7 questions
1. what is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
2. whose problem is it?
3. suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively, what new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?
4. which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution
5. what changes in language are being enforced by new technologies?
what is being gained and what is being lost by such changes?
6. what sort of people and institution acquire special economic and political power, because of technological change?
this question needs to be asked, because the transformation of a technology into medium always results in a realignment of economic and political power.
7. what alternative uses might be made of a technology the one proceeds here by assuming that any medium we have created is not necessarily the only one we might make of a particular technology
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1035
1. what is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
now this question needs to be asked, because there are technologies that are not solution to any problem that a normal person would regard as significant
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1440
2. whose problem is it?
but this question, whose problem is it, needs to be applied to any technologies. most technologies do solve some problem, but the problem may not be everybody's problem or even most people's problem. we need to be very careful in determining who will benefit from a technology, and who will pay for it. they are not always the same people.
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1521
3. suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively, what new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?
the automobile solves some very important problems for most people
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1740
4. which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2259
5. what changes in language are being enforced by new technologies?
what is being gained and what is being lost by such changes?
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2746
6. what sort of people and institution acquire special economic and political power, because of technological change?
this question needs to be asked, because the transformation of a technology into medium always results in a realignment of economic and political power.
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2925
7. what alternative uses might be made of a technology the one proceeds here by assuming that any medium we have created is not necessarily the only one we might make of a particular technology
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=3037
1. what is the problem to which a technology claims to be the solution
2. whose problem is it
3. what new problems will be created because of solving an old one
4. which people in institutions will be most harmed
5. what changes in language are being promoted
6. what shifts in economic and political power are likely to result
7. what alternative media might be made from a technology
automobile, television, computer, [firearms?]
the same blindness, no one is asking anything worth asking
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=3629
60:29 Tocqueville says in democracy in America
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
p.157
before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past 80 years.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
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Charles Perrow, Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies, 1999 [ ]
p.310
Baruch Fischhoff, in a thoughtful examination of cost-benefit analysis (the article has the engaging title, “Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”), notes another consequence of the monetarization of social good by economists.14 Cost-benefit analysis is “mute with regard to distribution of wealth in society”, he notes. “Therefore, a project designed solely to redistribute a society's resources would, if analyzed, be found to be all costs (those involved in the transfer) and no benefits (since the total wealth remains unchanged).” Risks from risky technologies are not borne equally by the different social classes; risk assessments ignore the social class distribution of risk.
( Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies / Charles Perrow, 1. industrial accidents., 2. technology--risk assessment., 3. accident., HD7262 P55 1999, 363.1--dc21, 1999, )
____________________________________
Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
‘’•─“”
pp.11─12
A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of “moment to moment”. He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. “The clock”, Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measureable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.
In Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the 14th century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all of treatises produced by the phil
p.12
; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God [[ nature ]], in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representation of time.
p.14
Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.
p.14
And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.
p.14
It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th century not only made it possibel to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improve able. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th century and gene-splitting research in the 20th.
p.14
Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind.
If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible that ids and egos and super egos also lurk somewhere unseen?
pp.14─15
What else is psycho analysis but a microscope of the mind?
Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors generated by our tools?
p.15
What does it mean to say that someone has an IQ of 126?
There are no numbers in people's heads. INtelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like.
p.15
When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies politic.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
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Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans, 2017 [ ]
p.175
“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.”
Marc Andressen on Twitter
(Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans, 2017, 081 Ferriss, )
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
pp.23─24
Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
____________________________________
Theodore Rockwell., The rickover efffect : how one man made a difference / 1992,
p.157
As machines relieve of us the brutal, tiring, and time-consuming
labor that had been the lot of the majority of men
from time immemorial; as they enable us to universalize
affluence and leisure, we face a choice: we may take these
benefits and live the life of the idle rich of old, pursuing a
good time and not bothering about the quality of our own
life or the life of the nation. Or, we may decide to emulate
those ── and there were many ── who in the past considered
wealth and leisure a trust, to be utilized for self-improvement
and for improvement of their particular societies. The
choice is for each individual to make. Moreover, each individual,
under our form of government, has a right to speak
out publicly in favor of making better use of science and
technology than is possible under present conditions.
If those who agree with this new viewpoint became a
majority; in other words, if a consensus is reached through
public discussion of this issue, the American people may
decide to take action. The action may displease powerful
vested interest, but this is how we govern ourselves. The
status quo has no absolute sancity under our form of government.
It must constantly justify itself to the people in
whom is vested ultimate sovereignty over this nation.
H.G.R.
p.201
The wise use of technology calls for a higher order of
thinking than we have so far accord it. We have largely
left it to the management of practical men. I submit that we
now have scientific knowledge of such immensely dangerous
potential that we ought to bring a broader range of
intellectual power to bear upon its use.
I think one can make a general statement that the
practical approach to a new scientific discovery is short-range
and private, concerned with ways to put the
discovery to use in the most economical and efficient manner,
little thought being given to side effects and future
consequences. The scholarly approach ── if I may use this
term ── is long-range and public; it looks to the effects
which the use of a new discovery may have on people in
general, on the nation, perhaps on the world; present and
future ... What is important is to recognize that each
approach is necessary to illuminate the problem and help
solve it. To exclude the one or the other prevents finding a
way to reconcile technology and democracy ...
Conservation had had extremely hard sledding in this
country because we worship practical men and have little
respect for scholars. This is not an intelligent point of view
in today's world.
H.G.R.
p.278
The professional person's standing in the community
depends, in final analysis, on the public's insight of his
work, that is, on the educational level of the man in the
street. When specialized knowledge of professional people is
incomprehensible to the average man, he is apt to flounder
between frustrated suspicion and excessive awe, leading him
either to interfere unduly with professional independence or
to accept naively every claim made by anyone who calls
himself a professional. The relationship between the expert
and the public is one of the central problems of our day ...
Thus we observe a widening gap between the experts
and the public who depend for their well-being on the work
of these experts. This disturbing cleavage exists in the
humanities no less than in science. Thus most people are not
well informed in such vital matters as the languages and cultures
of the various peoples who share this earth with us;
the historic, geographic and economic background of current
events; the place of American civilization in the estimation
of the world; and the real strength of our country in the
shifting sand of power relations.
H.G.R.
(The rickover efffect : how one man made a difference / Theodore Rockwell., 1. rickover, hyman george., 2. nuclear submarines ── united states ── history., 3. admirals ── united states ── biography., 4. united states., navy──biography, V63.R54R63 1992, 359.3'2574'092--dc20, united states naval institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 1992 )
____________________________________
• “The failure to see the world as humanly made is
called reification, which can also be defined
as the tendency to see the humanly made world
as having a will and force of its own, apart
from human beings. ... But if we talk about
technology as if it were a force in its own
right, the people who do the building and
choosing disappear. ... Reification keeps
us from seeing that the force attributed to
technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do
things together in certain ways.
If we don't see this, we may forget to ask
important questions, such as, Who is choosing
to build what kinds of devices? Why?
How will our society be changed?
Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose
because of these changes? Should we avoid
these changes? Who will be held accountable
if these changes hurt people?”; pp.21-23,
Michael Schwalbe, The sociologically examined life, 1998.
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
reify [< L. res, thing (see REAL) + FY] to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object--reification n.
Alfred Korzybski's work maintained that human beings are limited in what they know by
(1) the structure of their nervous systems, and
(2) the structure of their languages.
[pp.21-23]
It is not easy to become and remain mindful of the social world as humanly made. For many reason the social world seems to be "just there," as if no one were responsible for making it. So what? What difference does it make if we forget that the social world is a human invention? The difference it makes is like that between using one's tools with an awareness of what they are good for and letting those tools--as if they had minds and will of their own--take charge.
The failure to see the world as humanly made is called reification, which can also be defined as the tendency to see the humanly made world as having a will and force of its own, apart from human beings. For example, someone might say, “Computer technology is the major force behind changes in our economy today.” In this statement, computer technology is reified because it is spoken of as having a will of its own, independent of human beings. It is technology that appears to make things happen.
"Computer technology," however, is only metal and plastic. People forge these materials, turn them into computers and other devices, and then decide how to put such tools to work. All along the way there are people who choose what to build and how to use the results. But if we talk about technology as if it were a force in its own right, the people who do the building and choosing disappear. It thus seems as if technology is like gravity or the wind--a natural force about which we can do nothing.
Reification keeps us from seeing that the force attributed to technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do things together in certain ways. If we don't see this, we may forget to ask important questions, such as, Who is choosing to build what kinds of devices? Why? How will our society be changed? Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose because of these changes? Should we avoid these changes? Who will be held accountable if these changes hurt people? Should we decide to use technology in some other ways?
Here is another example of reification: “The market responded with enthusiasm to today's rise in interest rates, although economists predict that this could have unfavorable consequences for employment.” You've probably heard this kind of statement before. It sounds like a report about a flood or some other natural disaster. Yet a market is just a lot people doing things together in a certain way; interest rates established by people; and employment results from choices by employers. Reification makes these people and their choices disappear.
In a large complex society the tendency to reify is strong because it can be hard to see where, how, and by whom decisions are made. And so it is easier to say that technology, the market or a mysterious THEY is making things happen. Even people who ought to know better get caught up in this. When sociologists say things like “Trends in inner-city industrial development are causing changes in family structure,” they too are guilty of reification. Such language again makes it seem as if no one is responsible for choosing to act in a way that hurts or helps others.
Reification thus keeps us from seeing who is doing what to whom, and how, such that certain consequences arise. This makes it hard to hold anyone accountable for the good or bad results arising from their actions. Usually it is powerful people whose actions are hidden and who get off the hook.
Reification can also make us feel powerless because the social world comes to seem like a place that is beyond human control. If we attribute independent force to abstractions such as "technology," "the market," "government," "trends," "social structure," or "society," then it can seem pointless even to try to intervene and make things happen differently. We might as well try to stop the tides. People who think this way are likely to remain passive even when they see others being put out of work, living in poverty, or caught up in war, because they will feel that nothing can be done.
When we reify the social world we are confusing its reality with that of stars and trees and bacteria. These things indeed exist (as material entities) independent of human ideas and action. But no part of the social world does. To reify is to forget this; it is to forget to be mindful of the social world as a humanly made place. As a result, we forget that it is within our collective power to re-create the world in a better way. If we are sociologically mindful, we recognize that the social world as it now exists is just one of many possibilities.
“”
(Schwalbe, Michael, 1956-, The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation, copyright © 2008, 2005, 2001, 1998)
(The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation / Michael Schwalbe.--4th ed., 1. sociology--methodology., 2. sociology--philosophy., pp.21-23 )
____________________________________
Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
p.157
technological changes
more ideology-laden
our modes of communication
our modes of transporation
[[ get the text for this ]]
p.157 (pdf)
It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology none-the-less, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance.
p.157 (pdf)
Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
p.157 (pdf)
This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past 80 years.
p.157 (pdf)
For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who would have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
p.157 (pdf)
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation.
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation.
p.157 (pdf)
Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with moveable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.
p.158 (pdf)
And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind the movement.
____________________________________
For every technology, there should be a ‘paired’ metrics, one that addresses the adverse consequences of the [...], and another that addresses beneficial outcome of the technical development or [...], we should do this for current technology and technical systems, like automobile, television, computer, firearms (gunpowder, steel, precision machining), the application of atomic fusion and fission (also known as nuclear power (new clear is a rebranding effort)) (a more decriptive name might be plutonium and uranium power), biological research development application, and others
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
____________________________________
____________________________________
Olaf: my theory about advancing technologies as (is) both our savior and our doom?
source:
Frozen II, disney, DVD, 2020
____________________________________
Peter Thiel with Blake Masters., Zero to one : notes on startups, or how to build the future, 2014
p.5
Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
This question sounds easy because it's straightforward. Actually, it's very hard to answer. It's intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it's psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
p.6
A good answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.” I'll give my own answer later in this chapter.
p.6
But what makes the future distinctive and important isn't that it hasn't happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today.
p.6
If things change radically in the next decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world.
p.6
Most answers to the contrarian question are different ways of seeing the present; good answers are as close as we can come to looking into the future.
pp.8─9
My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.
([ technology : methods, techniques, tools, devices, machines, machinery, technical systems that make things better, make things easier, cover-up and hide the complexity with a simplified user interface; a technology could be bringing a pre existing technical knowledge and implemetation (most system are difficult to implement when no known system like it has been build, developed, and evolved before) together into one tool or technical system or a product and a service; technologies amplify existing ...; certain technologies can amplify things so much that the technology that initial was positive can be come a negative because it being use too much by too many people without paying much attention to the fabric of society or the biological ecosystem of nature; a prime example of this is the massive floating factory / fishing vessel that is one of the contributing factor to fishery collapse; of course, what is too much and not enough is dependent on social status, social class, perspective, you role and position in the society and/or organization; for example wind mill, water wheel, ...; an example from a different category and field, the wide spread use of highly refine and processed sugar is a new development in human society, and initially sugar was very expensive and only the rich can affort it; it was only later that sugar production has increase enough to be affordable to almost all social class and income in society; however, this wide spread use of sugar causes teeth problems, tooth decay (which was not that common, a problem, or of great concern before the introduction of sugar), and with high fructose corn syrup (a type of sugary substance refined from corn syrup) we have children and grown up with too much fat (sign of fatty liver) and over weight problem (obesity), the kind of obesity (a fancy word for too much fat on the body and over weight) that we see from drinking too much alcohol and beer; ... ])
detailed notes on Peter's class “Computer Science 183: startup”
https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup/
(Zero to one : notes on startups, or how to build the future / Peter Thiel with Blake Masters., 1. new business enterprises., 2. new products., 3. entrepreneurship., 4. diffusion of innovations., HD62.5.T525 2014, 685.1'1──dc23, 2014)
____________________________________
Reed E. Hundt, You say you want a revolution, 2000 [ ]
p.131
Ann Lewis
“The Vice President has persuaded people to feel positively about technology,” she said. “This is a big change. Technology causes unpredictable change, and people don't like that. Change threatens jobs, produces anxiety. The elites believe in the benefits of innovation, but voters do not. Al has turned those attitudes around. He has increased America's confidence in the future.”
(Hundt, Reed E., 1948─, You say you want a revolution : a story of information age politics / Reed E. Hundt, 1. united states. telecommunications act of 1996., 2. telecommunication policy──united states., 3. information superhighway──government policy──united states., 4. internet (computer network)──government policy──united states., HE7781.H88 2000, 384.3'3'0973──dc21, 2000, )
____________________________________
Jon Gernter., The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation, [2012]
p.152
He had a formula
p.186
And depending on how it played out, one might attach a corollary to Kelly's loose formula for innovation ── namely, that in any company's greatest achievements one might with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginning of its own demise.
p.186, p.185
Max Matheus
acoustics departments at Bell Labs 1955
department head of acoustic and behavioral research unit.
pp.185─186
In many respects, says Mathews, a phone monopoly in the early part of the 20th century made perfect sense. Analog signals ── the waves that carry phone calls ── are very fragile. “If you're going to send sound a long way, you have to send it through fifty amplifiers,” he explains, just as the transatlantic cable did. “The only thing that would work is if all the amplifiers in the path were designed and controlled by one entity, being the AT&T company. That was a natural monopoly. The whole system ── an analog system ── wouldn't work if it was done by a myriad of companies.”22
But when Shannon explained how all messages could be classified as information, and all information could be digitally coded, it hinted at the end of this necessary monopoly. Digital information as Shannon envisioned it was durable and portable. In time, any company could code and send a message digitally, and any company could uncode it. And with transistors, which were increasingly cheap and essential to digital transmission, the process would get easier by the year. Mathews argued that Shannon's theorem “was the mathematical basis for breaking up the Bell System.” IF that was so, then perhaps Shockley's work would be the technical basis for a breakup.
And depending on how it played out, one might attach a corollary to Kelly's loose formula for innovation ── namely, that in any company's greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise.
·‘’•─“”
(The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
1. bell telephone laboratories──history──20th century.
2. telecommunication──united states──history──20th century.
3. technological innovations──united states──history──20th century.
4. creative ability──united states──history──20th century.
5. inventors──united states──history──20th century.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384──dc23
384 Gernter
)
____________________________________
Jon Gernter., The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation, [2012]
p.20
The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal;
p.20
; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm ── usually a disc made of this aluminum ── that was backed by another thin metal disc. A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented. As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it. The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the electric current running between the metal discs. In the process sound waves would be converted to electric waves. On a simple journey, the electrified voice signal would then travel through a wire, to a switchboard, to another cable, to another switchboard, and finally to a receiver and a distant eardrum. But a telephone voice signal was weak ── much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph's simple dot-dash signal. Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner ── or “attenuate”, to use the phone company's preferred term ── after even a few miles.
─“”
p.22
Then Jewett asked his friend for help. “Let us have one or two, or even three, of the best of the young men who are taking their doctorates with you and are intimately familiar with your field. Let us take them into our laboratory in New York and assign to them the sole task of developing a telephone repeater.”18
Here was a new approach to solving an industrial problem, an approach that looked not to engineers but to scientists.
─“”
p.23
Within two years Arnold came up with several possible solution to the repeater problem, but he mainly went to work on improving an amplifier known as the audion that had been brought to AT&T in 1912 by an independent, Yale-trained inventor named Lee De Forest. The early audion was vaguely magical. It resembled a small incandescent light bulb, yet instead of a hot wire filament strung between two supporting wires it had three elements ── a metal filament that would get hot and emit electrons (called a cathode); a metal plate that would stay cool and attract electrons (called an anode); and between them a wire mesh, or “grid”. A small electrical current, or signal, that was applied to the audion's grid could be greatly amplified by another electrical current that was traveling from the hot cathode to the cool anode. Arnold found, through trial and error, the best materials, as well as a superior way to evacuate the air inside the audion tube. (He suspected correctly that a high vacuum would greatly improve the audion's efficiency.) Once Arnold had refined the audion, he, Jewett, and Millikan convened in Philadelphia to test it against other potential repeater ideas. The men listened in on phone conversations that were passed through the various repeaters, and they found the audion clearly superior. Soon to be known as the vacuum tube, it and its descendants would revolutionize 20th century communications.
p.32
That an industrial laboratory would focus on research and development was not entirely novel; a few large German chemical and pharmaceutical companies had tried it successfully a half century before. But Bell Labs seemed to have embraced the idea on an entirely different scale.
p.32
Harold Arnold
As Arnold explained, his department would include, “the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.”10
p.51
In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place ── perhaps all three ── require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then ── sometimes ── a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious. When Niels Bohr ── along with Einstein, the world's greatest physicist ── heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he splapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have been!”11
p.113
There had been whispers in the electronics industry about whether Bell Labs' enthusiasm over the transistor was overblown; the reported difficulty in manufacturing the devices only added to the skepticism. Whether it was a shortcoming or an advantage, Kelly's confidence was almost certainly rooted in his early experiences. He remembered the endless days and nights constructing vacuum tubes in lower Manhattan, the countless problems in the beginning and then the stream of incremental developments that improved the tubes' performance and durability to once-unimaginable levels. He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common ── in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like ── they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible. He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives. As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn't sold anything you hadn't innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything. So Kelly looked at the transistor and saw the past, and the past was tubes. He thereby intuited the future.
pp.149─150
Mervin Kelly
March 23, 1950
a polished version of the lecture about Bell Labs
Royal society
Bell Labs was the world's foremost example of a place where scientists pursued creative technology.
p.150
Bell Labs helped maintain and improve that system, he said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups. The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided “the reservior of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.” The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two. In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical. That's when the third group came in. These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems. In Kelly's sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.
p.150
the telephone system, Mervin Kelly
p.151
a living organism
In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual. Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other. These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building. Researchers and engineers would find themselves discussing their respective problems in the halls, over lunch, or they might be paired together on a project, either at their own request or by managers. Or a staffer with a question would casually seek out an expert, “whether he be a mathematician, a metallurgist, an organic chemist, an electromagnetic propagation physicist, or an electron device specialist.”
p.151
Physical proximity, in Kelly's view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn't do.
Kelly had even gone so far as to create “branch laboratories” as Western Electric factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture.
p.152
What he went on to describe in London, though, was a systematized approach to innovation, the fruit of three decades of consideration at the Labs. To Kelly, inventing the future wasn't just a matter of inventing things for the future; it also entailed inventing ways to invent those things.
Bell Labs' experience over the past few years demonstrated that the process of innovation could now be professionally fostered and managed with a large degree of success ── and even, perhaps, with predict ability.
Industrial science was now working on a scale, and embracing a complexity,
p.152
He had a formula
p.152
In TECHNOLOGY, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure.
p.274
John deButts considered AT&T's vast communications network to be unique in all the world. No one else could replicate it; no one else could run it. Its construction and maintenance, done over the course of a century, had been Herculean. Its electronic architecture was the product of genius and hard work. He was correct in all these respects. He did not seem to grasp, however, how quickly technology could now be replicated, in part thanks to Bell Labs' widely available patents.
Mervin Kelly had predicted during World war II that the telecommunications industry would eventually begin to compete against the larger electronics industry, where radio and television makers constantly battled over products and prices.
“We have been a conservative and non-competitive organization,” Kelly had pointed out to his colleagues in 1943. “We engineer for high quality service, with long life, low maintenance costs, high factor of reliability, as basic elecments in our philosophy of design and manufacture. But our basic technology is becoming increasingly similar to that of a high volume, annual model, highly competitive, young, vigorous and growing industry.”10
MCI was proof of that striving and competitive future. Bob Lucky recalls a day in the early 1970s when several AT&T executives were discussing with Bell Labs executives the prospect of upstart companies offering long-distance service. “You don't have to worry about this,” the AT&T executive assured them, “because we have the network. No one else has the network.” <skip the last two sentences.>
pp.299─300
Some of the most farsighted thinkers at Bell Labs had long believed that the phone monopoly might not endure. Mervin Kelly, for one, constantly had that possibility on his mind, from the mid-1940s onward. Their reasoning was neither legal nor philosophical. Popular technologies spread quickly through society; inevitably, they are duplicated and improved by outsiders. As that happens, the original innovator becomes less and less crucial to the technology itself. “I think they new that,” says John Mayo, a legendary engineer who began working at Bell Labs in the 1950s and rose to become its president some years after the litigation had ended. An intriguing questions, at least to Mayo, is why the leadership that preceded him at Bell Labs ── Jewett, Kelly, Fisk, Pierce, Baker, and the rest ── none-the-less decided to invest so heavily and so consistently in research and in exploring what he calls “the unknown.” They were not forced to; other government-run phone companies around the world did not. Arguably, Bell Labs could have existed as a highly competent development organization without doing much in the way of basic or applied research. In Mayo's view, “it's not clear what possessed them to do such a unique thing, because in the long term it clearly was not something that assured their future.”
Morry Tanenbaum puts it somewhat differently. “Technology would have destroyed the monopoly anyway,” he says. Tanenbaum notes that Bell Labs' most significant research and development efforts ── transistors, microwave towers, digital transmission, optical fiber, cellular telephone systems ── all fit a pattern. They took years to be developed and deployed, and soon became essential parts of the network. Yet many of the essential patents were given away or licensed for a pittance. And those technologies that weren't shared were duplicated or improved upon by outsiders anyway. And eventually, the results were always the same. All the innovations returned, ferociously, in the form of competition.
─“”
p.332
In 1986, for instance, the challenges that lay ahead remained indistinct. John Pierce, watching the fate of his old employer from his perch in California, set down some thoughts at the time in a letter to a friend.
p.332
As Pierce saw it, the great laboratories of the 20th century had a clear purpose: “Someone depended on them for something, and was anxious to get it. They were really needed, and they rose to the need.” For Bell Labs, Pierce noted, the need was modern communications. That future rested upon the institution and the researchers who worked there.
p.332
Pierce was now watching “as an interested on looker” to see if the new AT&T Bell Laboratories could figure out a new mission, a new purpose. He wasn't skeptical; he believed it was indeed possible. But he wasn't terribly optimistic, either. The old world was already gone, he explained, it was just that most people hadn't yet noticed. “It is just plain silly”, he wrote, “to identify the new A&T Bell Laboratories with the old Bell Telephone Laboratories just because the new Laboratories has inherited buildings, equipment and personnel from the old. The mission was absolutely essential to the research done at the old Laboratories, and that mission is gone and has not been replaced.”2
─“”
(The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
1. bell telephone laboratories──history──20th century.
2. telecommunication──united states──history──20th century.
3. technological innovations──united states──history──20th century.
4. creative ability──united states──history──20th century.
5. inventors──united states──history──20th century.
TK5102.3.U6G47 2012
384──dc23
384 Gernter
)
____________________________________
Noam Chomsky
We live in a highly indoctrinated society where elementary truths are easily buried.
United States invaded South Vietnam
The military system, to a substantially extend, not totally, is a mechanism by which the general population is compelled to provide a subsidy to high technology industry.
____________________________________
source of energy:
development and the wide spread use of fire
hearth
hot spring
wood
charcoal
wind mill
water wheel
coal (fossil fuel)
whale oil
bee wax
kerosene (fossil fuel)
gasoline (fossil fuel)
petro (fossil fuel)
jet fuel (fossil fuel)
gas (fossil fuel)
geothermal
geothermal power plant
solar power (electricity) (sun)
solar power (heat) (sun)
solar power (sunlight)
solar power (plant life and all life)
solar power (weather, climate)
earth
clear sky
underground storage (cellar) (basement) (below the frost line)
____________________________________
Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik, Breakthrough, 2004 [ ]
p.203
Electricity (1873)
Telephone (1876)
Automobile (1886)
Radio (1905)
Television (1926)
VCR (1952)
Microwave (1953)
PC (1975)
Internet (1975)
Cell phone (1983)
([ washing machine (????) ])
([ gas : propane ])
Figure 10.1
Percentage of Americans owning various technological devices. Used with permission of Gary Starkweather.
p.214
Gordon Moore, co-founder and former chairman of Intel
In 1996, in a personal retrospective9 on research, he argued that this was an important principle:
Intel operates on the Noyce10 principle of minimum information. One guesses what the answer to a problem is and goes back as far as one can in a heuristic way. If this does not solve the problem, one goes back and learns enough to try something else. Thus, rather than mount research effort aimed at truly understanding problems and producing publishable technological solutions, Intel tries to get by with as little information as possible .... Another advantage to operating on the principle of minimum information: the company generates few spinoffs. Because it does not generate a lot more ideas than it can use, Intel's R&D capture ratio is much higher than Fairchild's ever was. (p.168)
9. See Gordon E. Moore, “Some Personal Perspectives on Research in the Semiconductor Industry,” in Engines of Innovation, ed. Rosenbloom and Spencer.
p.214
No niche lasts forever. By 2002, Intel faced saturation in the market for microprocessors for personal computers, and its attitude about research began to change. It expanded its internal research laboratories and developed a program of outsourcing research to “lablets” at other institutions.
(Stefik, Mark., Breakthrough : stories and strategies of radical innovation / Mark Stefik and Barbara Stefik., 1. technological innovation., 2. inventions., 2004, )
____________________________________
Kevin Kelly, What technology wants, 2010 [ ]
In other words, technologies can be patented, while the technium includes the patent system itself.
p.12
German word technik
French noun technique, used by French philosophers to mean the society and culture of tools
technium: this idea of a self-reinforcing system of creation
At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence. It began to exercise some autonomy.
p.91
Science is costly for an individual. Sharing results is of marginal benefit if you are chiefly seeking a better tool for today. Therefore, the benefits of science are neither apparent nor immediate for individuals. Science requires a certain density of leisured population willing to share and support failures to thrive. That leisure is generated by pre-science inventions such as the plow, grain mills, domesticated power animals, and other techniques that permit a steady surplus of food for large number of people. In other words, science needs prosperity and populations.
p.153
An invention or discovery that is too far ahead of its time is [,at that moment in space and time,] worthless; no one can follow. Ideally, an innovation opens up only the next adjacent step from what is known and invites the culture to move forward one hop. An overly futuristic, unconventional, or visionary invention can fail initially (it may lack essential not-yet-invented materials or a critical market or proper understanding) yet succeed later, when the ecology of supporting ideas catches up. Gregor Mendel's 1865 theories of genetic heredity were correct but ignored for 35 years. His keen insights were not embraced because they did not explain the problems biologists had at the time, nor did his explanation operate by known mechanisms, so his discoveries were out of reach even for the early adopters. Decades later science faced the urgent questions that Mendel's discoveries could answer. Now his insights were only one step away. Within a few years of one another, three different scientists (Hugo de Vries, Karl Erich Correns, and Erich Tschermak) each independently rediscovered Mendel's forgotten work, which of course had been there all along. Kroeber claims that if you had prevented those three from rediscovery and waited another year, six scientists, not just three, would had made the then-obvious next step.
p.170
For instance, close scrutiny of Kryder's Law in hard-disk densities shows that it is composed of a sequence of overlapping smaller trend lines. The first hard-disk technology, ferrite oxide, ran from 1975 to 1990. The second technology, thin film, had a slightly better performance and slightly faster acceleration and overlapped ferrite oxide, running from 1985 to 1995. The third technological innovation, magneto resistance, began in 1993 and improved at a still faster rate. Their slightly uneven slopes combine to yield an unwavering trajectory.
([
“ Once a development path is set on a particular course, then network externalities, the learning process of organizations, and the historical derived modelling of the issues reinforces the course.”
― Douglas North
• Uncertainty and path dependence
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfkQW7_-Pg
])
p.196
In 1997, I interviewed [George] Lucas ... . ... [...] ... I asked him, "Do you think technology is making the world better or worse" Lucas's answer:
If you watch the curve of science and everything we know, it
shoots up like a rocket. We're on this rocket and we're going
perfectly vertical into the stars. But the emotional intelligence
of humankind is equally if not more important than
our intellectual intelligence. We're just as emotionally illiterate
as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is
completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and
the vertical are getting farther and farther apart. And as
these things grow apart, there's going to be some kind of
consequence of that.
I think we underestimate the strain of that gap.
(Kelly, Kevin, 1952—, T14.5.K45 2010, 303.48'3—dc22, copyright © 2010)
(What technology wants / Kevin Kelly, 1. technology—social aspects., 2. technology and civilization., )
____________________________________
Kevin Kelly, What technology wants, 2010 [ ]
pp.138—139, p.142
pp.138—139
A light based on a coil of tungsten strung within an oval vacuum bulb is not inevitable, but the electric incandescent light-bulb is.
The general concept of the electric incandescent lightbulb can be abstracted from all the specific details allowed to vary (voltage, height, kind of bulb) while still producing the result——in this case, luminance from electricity. This general concept is similar to the archetype in biology, while the specific materialization of the concept is more like a species. The archetype is ordained by the technium's trajectory, while the species is contingent.
The electric incandescent lightbulb was invented, reinvented, coinvented, or "first invented" dozens of times. In their book Edison's Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn list 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs prior to Edison. It might be fairer to say that Edison was the very last "first" inventor of the electric light. These 23 bulbs (each an original in its inventor's eyes) varied tremendously in how they fleshed out the abstraction of "electric lightbulb." Different inventors employed various shapes for the filament, different materials for the wires, different strengths of electricity, different plans for the bases. Yet they all seemed to be independently aiming for the same archetypal design. We can think of the prototypes as 23 different attempts to describe the inevitable generic lightbulb.
p.142
STAGE TASK EXAMPLE
Think of possibily Recognizing an opportunity We should use elctricity
for solution for lighting
Idea of how to Imagining the crucial An incadescent wire in a
elements of the solutions sealed bulb!
Details specified Selecting specific Welded tungsten, vacuum
solutions pump, solder exhaust port
Working device Proving your solutions Prototypes by Swan, Latimer,
work reliably Edison, Davy, etc.
Enabling adoption Convincing the world to Edison's bulb (and
adopt your solutions electric system)
(Kelly, Kevin, 1952—, T14.5.K45 2010, 303.48'3—dc22, copyright © 2010)
(What technology wants / Kevin Kelly, 1. technology—social aspects., 2. technology and civilization., pp.138—139, p.142)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
<< Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement >>
[[ oppressed [seduced, induced] by their addiction to amusement ]]
<< Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence. >>
[[ oppressed by state violence. ]]
[[ George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ]]
What is the peekaboo world?
a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress.
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https://prezi.com/p/egoxlf6-bln8/neil-postmans-five-ideas-to-technological-change/
first idea: all technological change is a trade-off
second idea: advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population
third idea: embedded in every technology there is a philosophy, epistemological, political, or social prejudice
fourth idea: technological change is not Additive [to add]; it is Ecological
fifth idea: technology becomes mythic which is perceived as part of the natural order of things
https://prezi.com/p/egoxlf6-bln8/neil-postmans-five-ideas-to-technological-change/
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https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change
by Neil Postman
Talk delivered in Denver Colorado
March 28, 1998
Neil Postman, speech at NewTech '98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZKUak1fYr0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZKUak1fYr0
First Idea
----------
First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price.
The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the
advantage may well be worth the cost.
Think of the automobile, which for all of its obvious advantages, has poisoned our air, choked our cities, and degraded the beauty of our natural landscape.
Idea Number One, then, is that culture always pays a price for technology.
Second Idea
-----------
Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.
This leads to the second idea, which is that the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others. There are even some who are not affected at all.
Let us take as another example, television, although here I should add at once that in the case of television there are very few indeed who are not affected in one way or another. In America, where television has taken hold more deeply than anywhere else, there are many people who find it a blessing, not least those who have achieved high-paying, gratifying careers in television as executives, technicians, directors, newscasters and entertainers.
And now, of course, the winners speak constantly of the Age of Information,
always implying that the more information we have, the better we will be in solving significant problems—not only personal ones but large-scale social problems, as well. But how true is this? If there are children starving in the world—and there are—it is not because of insufficient information. We have known for a long time how to produce enough food to feed every child on the planet. How is it that we let so many of them starve? If there is violence on our streets, it is not because we have insufficient information. If women are abused, if divorce and pornography and mental illness are increasing, none of it has anything to do with insufficient information. I dare say it is because something else is missing, and I don’t think I have to tell this audience what it is. Who knows? This age of information may turn out to be a curse if we are blinded by it so that we cannot see truly where our problems lie. That is why it is always necessary for us to ask of those who speak enthusiastically of computer technology, why do you do this? What interests do you represent? To whom are you hoping to give power? From whom will you be withholding power?
I say only that since technology favors some people and harms others, these are questions that must always be asked. And so, that there are always winners and losers in technological change is the second idea.
Third Idea
----------
Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice.
Here is the third. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. These ideas are often hidden from our view because they are of a somewhat abstract nature. But this should not be taken to mean that they do not have practical consequences.
Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV camera, everything looks like an image. To a person with a computer, everything looks like data. I do not think we need to take these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments.
The third idea, then, is that every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. This idea is the sum and substance of what the great Catholic prophet, Marshall McLuhan meant when he coined the famous sentence, “The medium is the message.”
Fourth Idea
-----------
Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates.
Here is the fourth idea: Technological change is not additive; it is ecological.
That is why we must be cautious about technological innovation. The consequences of technological change are always vast, often unpredictable and largely irreversible. That is also why we must be suspicious of capitalists. Capitalists are by definition not only personal risk takers but, more to the point, cultural risk takers. The most creative and daring of them hope to exploit new technologies to the fullest, and do not much care what traditions are overthrown in the process or whether or not a culture is prepared to function without such traditions. Capitalists are, in a word, radicals. In America, our most significant radicals have always been capitalists—men like Bell, Edison, Ford, Carnegie, Sarnoff, Goldwyn. These men obliterated the 19th century, and created the 20th, which is why it is a mystery to me that capitalists are thought to be conservative. Perhaps it is because they are inclined to wear dark suits and grey ties.
All they were trying to do is to make television into a vast and unsleeping money machine. That they destroyed substantive political discourse in the process does not concern them.
Fifth Idea
----------
And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.
I come now to the fifth and final idea, which is that media tend to become mythic. I use this word in the sense in which it was used by the French literary critic, Roland Barthes. He used the word “myth” to refer to a common tendency to think of our technological creations as if they were God-given, as if they were a part of the natural order of things. I have on occasion asked my students if they know when the alphabet was invented. The question astonishes them. It is as if I asked them when clouds and trees were invented. The alphabet, they believe, was not something that was invented.
When a technology become mythic, it is always dangerous because it is then accepted as it is, and is therefore not easily susceptible to modification or control. If you should propose to the average American that television broadcasting should not begin until 5 PM and should cease at 11 PM, or propose that there should be no television commercials, he will think the idea ridiculous. But not because he disagrees with your cultural agenda. He will think it ridiculous because he assumes you are proposing that something in nature be changed; as if you are suggesting that the sun should rise at 10 AM instead of at 6.
What I am saying is that our enthusiasm for technology can turn into a form of idolatry and our belief in its beneficence can be a false absolute. The best way to view technology is as a strange intruder, to remember that technology is not part of God’s plan but a product of human creativity and hubris, and that its capacity for good or evil rests entirely on human awareness of what it does for us and to us.
Conclusion
----------
And so, these are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us.
source:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
Summary
Postman distinguishes the Orwellian vision of the future, in which totalitarian governments seize individual rights, from that offered by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, where people medicate themselves into bliss, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights. Drawing an analogy with the latter scenario, Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment.
The essential premise of the book, which Postman extends to the rest of his argument(s), is that "form excludes the content", that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas. Thus rational argument, integral to print typography, is militated against by the medium of television for this reason. Owing to this shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and "news of the day" becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate.
Postman asserts the presentation of television news is a form of entertainment programming; arguing that the inclusion of theme music, the interruption of commercials, and "talking hairdos" bear witness that televised news cannot readily be taken seriously. Postman further examines the differences between written speech, which he argues reached its prime in the early to mid-nineteenth century, and the forms of televisual communication, which rely mostly on visual images to "sell" lifestyles. He argues that, owing to this change in public discourse, politics has ceased to be about a candidate's ideas and solutions, but whether he comes across favorably on television. Television, he notes, has introduced the phrase "now this", which implies a complete absence of connection between the separate topics the phrase ostensibly connects. Larry Gonick used this phrase to conclude his Cartoon Guide to (Non)Communication, instead of the traditional "the end".
Postman refers to the inability to act upon much of the so-called information from televised sources as the information-action ratio. He contends that "television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
Drawing on the ideas of media scholar Marshall McLuhan – altering McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message" to "the medium is the metaphor" – he describes how oral, literate, and televisual cultures radically differ in the processing and prioritization of information; he argues that each medium is appropriate for a different kind of knowledge. The faculties requisite for rational inquiry are simply weakened by televised viewing. Accordingly, reading, a prime example cited by Postman, exacts intense intellectual involvement, at once interactive and dialectical; whereas television only requires passive involvement.
Postman argues that commercial television has become derivative of advertising. Moreover, modern television commercials are not "a series of testable, logically ordered assertions" rationalizing consumer decisions, but "is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people" being driven to "near ecstasy by their good fortune" of possessing advertised goods or services. "The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue" because more often than not "no claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama." Because commercial television is programmed according to ratings, its content is determined by commercial feasibility, not critical acumen. Television in its present state, he says, does not satisfy the conditions for honest intellectual involvement and rational argument.
He repeatedly states that the eighteenth century, the "Age of Reason", was the pinnacle for rational argument. Only in the printed word, he states, could complicated truths be rationally conveyed. Postman gives a striking example: many of the first fifteen U.S. presidents could probably have walked down the street without being recognized by the average citizen, yet all these men would have been quickly known by their written words. However, the reverse is true today. The names of presidents or even famous preachers, lawyers, and scientists call up visual images, typically television images, but few, if any, of their words come to mind. The few that do almost exclusively consist of carefully chosen soundbites. Postman mentions Ronald Reagan, and comments upon Reagan's abilities as an entertainer.
for the hardcore Reader, you can download a pdf format of the book at:
https://archive.org/download/postman-neil-amusing-ourselves-to-death_202012/Postman%20Neil%20-%20Amusing%20Ourselves%20to%20Death.pdf
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
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1:25:12
College Lecture Series - Neil Postman - "The Surrender of Culture to Technology"
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=173
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=173
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE
College of DuPage
Published on Jun 3, 2013
A lecture delivered by Neil Postman on Mar. 11, 1997 in the Arts Center. Based on the author's book of the same title. Neil Postman notes the dependence of Americans on technological advances for their own security. Americans have come to expect technological innovations to solve the larger problems of mankind. Technology itself has become a national "religion" which people take on faith as the solution to their problems.
7 questions
1. what is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
2. whose problem is it?
3. suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively, what new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?
4. which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution
5. what changes in language are being enforced by new technologies?
what is being gained and what is being lost by such changes?
6. what sort of people and institution acquire special economic and political power, because of technological change?
this question needs to be asked, because the transformation of a technology into medium always results in a realignment of economic and political power.
7. what alternative uses might be made of a technology the one proceeds here by assuming that any medium we have created is not necessarily the only one we might make of a particular technology
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1035
1. what is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
now this question needs to be asked, because there are technologies that are not solution to any problem that a normal person would regard as significant
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1440
2. whose problem is it?
but this question, whose problem is it, needs to be applied to any technologies. most technologies do solve some problem, but the problem may not be everybody's problem or even most people's problem. we need to be very careful in determining who will benefit from a technology, and who will pay for it. they are not always the same people.
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1521
3. suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively, what new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?
the automobile solves some very important problems for most people
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=1740
4. which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2259
5. what changes in language are being enforced by new technologies?
what is being gained and what is being lost by such changes?
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2746
6. what sort of people and institution acquire special economic and political power, because of technological change?
this question needs to be asked, because the transformation of a technology into medium always results in a realignment of economic and political power.
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=2925
7. what alternative uses might be made of a technology the one proceeds here by assuming that any medium we have created is not necessarily the only one we might make of a particular technology
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=3037
1. what is the problem to which a technology claims to be the solution
2. whose problem is it
3. what new problems will be created because of solving an old one
4. which people in institutions will be most harmed
5. what changes in language are being promoted
6. what shifts in economic and political power are likely to result
7. what alternative media might be made from a technology
automobile, television, computer, [firearms?]
the same blindness, no one is asking anything worth asking
https://youtu.be/hlrv7DIHllE?t=3629
60:29 Tocqueville says in democracy in America
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
p.157
before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past 80 years.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
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Charles Perrow, Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies, 1999 [ ]
p.310
Baruch Fischhoff, in a thoughtful examination of cost-benefit analysis (the article has the engaging title, “Cost-Benefit Analysis and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”), notes another consequence of the monetarization of social good by economists.14 Cost-benefit analysis is “mute with regard to distribution of wealth in society”, he notes. “Therefore, a project designed solely to redistribute a society's resources would, if analyzed, be found to be all costs (those involved in the transfer) and no benefits (since the total wealth remains unchanged).” Risks from risky technologies are not borne equally by the different social classes; risk assessments ignore the social class distribution of risk.
( Normal accidents : living with high-risk technologies / Charles Perrow, 1. industrial accidents., 2. technology--risk assessment., 3. accident., HD7262 P55 1999, 363.1--dc21, 1999, )
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
‘’•─“”
pp.11─12
A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch. But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in our own times. Lewis Mumford, for example, who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is. Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of “moment to moment”. He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clock makers nothing at all. “The clock”, Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measureable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God's conception, or nature's. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.
In Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the 14th century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all of treatises produced by the phil
p.12
; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God [[ nature ]], in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representation of time.
p.14
Thus, it takes some digging to get at them, to grasp, for example, that a clock recreates time as an independent, mathematically precise sequence; that writing recreates the mind as a tablet on which experience is written; that the telegraph recreates news as a commodity.
p.14
And yet, such digging becomes easier if we start from the assumption that in every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.
p.14
It has been pointed out, for example, that the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th century not only made it possibel to improve defective vision but suggested the idea that human beings need not accept as final either the endowments of nature or the ravages of time. Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improve able. I do not think it goes too far to say that there is a link between the invention of eyeglasses in the 12th century and gene-splitting research in the 20th.
p.14
Even such an instrument as the microscope, hardly a tool of everyday use, had embedded within it a quite astonishing idea, not about biology but about psychology. By revealing a world hitherto hidden from view, the microscope suggested a possibility about the structure of the mind.
If things are not what they seem, if microbes lurk, unseen, on and under our skin, if the invisible controls the visible, then is it not possible that ids and egos and super egos also lurk somewhere unseen?
pp.14─15
What else is psycho analysis but a microscope of the mind?
Where do our notions of mind come from if not from metaphors generated by our tools?
p.15
What does it mean to say that someone has an IQ of 126?
There are no numbers in people's heads. INtelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like.
p.15
When Galileo remarked that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he meant it only as a metaphor. Nature itself does not speak. Neither do our minds or our bodies or, more to the point of this book, our bodies politic.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
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Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans, 2017 [ ]
p.175
“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.”
Marc Andressen on Twitter
(Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans, 2017, 081 Ferriss, )
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
pp.23─24
Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual.
(Amusing ourselves to death./ Niel Postman, bibliography: p. 173., includes index., 1. mass media ── influence., P94.P63 1986, 302.2'34, 86-9513, A section of this book was supported by a commission from the Annenberg scholars program, Annenberg school of communications, university of southern california. SPecifically, portions of chapters six and seven formed part of a paper delivered at the scholars conference, “Creating meaning : literacies of our time”, February 1984., [1985] )
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Theodore Rockwell., The rickover efffect : how one man made a difference / 1992,
p.157
As machines relieve of us the brutal, tiring, and time-consuming
labor that had been the lot of the majority of men
from time immemorial; as they enable us to universalize
affluence and leisure, we face a choice: we may take these
benefits and live the life of the idle rich of old, pursuing a
good time and not bothering about the quality of our own
life or the life of the nation. Or, we may decide to emulate
those ── and there were many ── who in the past considered
wealth and leisure a trust, to be utilized for self-improvement
and for improvement of their particular societies. The
choice is for each individual to make. Moreover, each individual,
under our form of government, has a right to speak
out publicly in favor of making better use of science and
technology than is possible under present conditions.
If those who agree with this new viewpoint became a
majority; in other words, if a consensus is reached through
public discussion of this issue, the American people may
decide to take action. The action may displease powerful
vested interest, but this is how we govern ourselves. The
status quo has no absolute sancity under our form of government.
It must constantly justify itself to the people in
whom is vested ultimate sovereignty over this nation.
H.G.R.
p.201
The wise use of technology calls for a higher order of
thinking than we have so far accord it. We have largely
left it to the management of practical men. I submit that we
now have scientific knowledge of such immensely dangerous
potential that we ought to bring a broader range of
intellectual power to bear upon its use.
I think one can make a general statement that the
practical approach to a new scientific discovery is short-range
and private, concerned with ways to put the
discovery to use in the most economical and efficient manner,
little thought being given to side effects and future
consequences. The scholarly approach ── if I may use this
term ── is long-range and public; it looks to the effects
which the use of a new discovery may have on people in
general, on the nation, perhaps on the world; present and
future ... What is important is to recognize that each
approach is necessary to illuminate the problem and help
solve it. To exclude the one or the other prevents finding a
way to reconcile technology and democracy ...
Conservation had had extremely hard sledding in this
country because we worship practical men and have little
respect for scholars. This is not an intelligent point of view
in today's world.
H.G.R.
p.278
The professional person's standing in the community
depends, in final analysis, on the public's insight of his
work, that is, on the educational level of the man in the
street. When specialized knowledge of professional people is
incomprehensible to the average man, he is apt to flounder
between frustrated suspicion and excessive awe, leading him
either to interfere unduly with professional independence or
to accept naively every claim made by anyone who calls
himself a professional. The relationship between the expert
and the public is one of the central problems of our day ...
Thus we observe a widening gap between the experts
and the public who depend for their well-being on the work
of these experts. This disturbing cleavage exists in the
humanities no less than in science. Thus most people are not
well informed in such vital matters as the languages and cultures
of the various peoples who share this earth with us;
the historic, geographic and economic background of current
events; the place of American civilization in the estimation
of the world; and the real strength of our country in the
shifting sand of power relations.
H.G.R.
(The rickover efffect : how one man made a difference / Theodore Rockwell., 1. rickover, hyman george., 2. nuclear submarines ── united states ── history., 3. admirals ── united states ── biography., 4. united states., navy──biography, V63.R54R63 1992, 359.3'2574'092--dc20, united states naval institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 1992 )
____________________________________
• “The failure to see the world as humanly made is
called reification, which can also be defined
as the tendency to see the humanly made world
as having a will and force of its own, apart
from human beings. ... But if we talk about
technology as if it were a force in its own
right, the people who do the building and
choosing disappear. ... Reification keeps
us from seeing that the force attributed to
technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do
things together in certain ways.
If we don't see this, we may forget to ask
important questions, such as, Who is choosing
to build what kinds of devices? Why?
How will our society be changed?
Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose
because of these changes? Should we avoid
these changes? Who will be held accountable
if these changes hurt people?”; pp.21-23,
Michael Schwalbe, The sociologically examined life, 1998.
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
reify [< L. res, thing (see REAL) + FY] to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object--reification n.
Alfred Korzybski's work maintained that human beings are limited in what they know by
(1) the structure of their nervous systems, and
(2) the structure of their languages.
[pp.21-23]
It is not easy to become and remain mindful of the social world as humanly made. For many reason the social world seems to be "just there," as if no one were responsible for making it. So what? What difference does it make if we forget that the social world is a human invention? The difference it makes is like that between using one's tools with an awareness of what they are good for and letting those tools--as if they had minds and will of their own--take charge.
The failure to see the world as humanly made is called reification, which can also be defined as the tendency to see the humanly made world as having a will and force of its own, apart from human beings. For example, someone might say, “Computer technology is the major force behind changes in our economy today.” In this statement, computer technology is reified because it is spoken of as having a will of its own, independent of human beings. It is technology that appears to make things happen.
"Computer technology," however, is only metal and plastic. People forge these materials, turn them into computers and other devices, and then decide how to put such tools to work. All along the way there are people who choose what to build and how to use the results. But if we talk about technology as if it were a force in its own right, the people who do the building and choosing disappear. It thus seems as if technology is like gravity or the wind--a natural force about which we can do nothing.
Reification keeps us from seeing that the force attributed to technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do things together in certain ways. If we don't see this, we may forget to ask important questions, such as, Who is choosing to build what kinds of devices? Why? How will our society be changed? Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose because of these changes? Should we avoid these changes? Who will be held accountable if these changes hurt people? Should we decide to use technology in some other ways?
Here is another example of reification: “The market responded with enthusiasm to today's rise in interest rates, although economists predict that this could have unfavorable consequences for employment.” You've probably heard this kind of statement before. It sounds like a report about a flood or some other natural disaster. Yet a market is just a lot people doing things together in a certain way; interest rates established by people; and employment results from choices by employers. Reification makes these people and their choices disappear.
In a large complex society the tendency to reify is strong because it can be hard to see where, how, and by whom decisions are made. And so it is easier to say that technology, the market or a mysterious THEY is making things happen. Even people who ought to know better get caught up in this. When sociologists say things like “Trends in inner-city industrial development are causing changes in family structure,” they too are guilty of reification. Such language again makes it seem as if no one is responsible for choosing to act in a way that hurts or helps others.
Reification thus keeps us from seeing who is doing what to whom, and how, such that certain consequences arise. This makes it hard to hold anyone accountable for the good or bad results arising from their actions. Usually it is powerful people whose actions are hidden and who get off the hook.
Reification can also make us feel powerless because the social world comes to seem like a place that is beyond human control. If we attribute independent force to abstractions such as "technology," "the market," "government," "trends," "social structure," or "society," then it can seem pointless even to try to intervene and make things happen differently. We might as well try to stop the tides. People who think this way are likely to remain passive even when they see others being put out of work, living in poverty, or caught up in war, because they will feel that nothing can be done.
When we reify the social world we are confusing its reality with that of stars and trees and bacteria. These things indeed exist (as material entities) independent of human ideas and action. But no part of the social world does. To reify is to forget this; it is to forget to be mindful of the social world as a humanly made place. As a result, we forget that it is within our collective power to re-create the world in a better way. If we are sociologically mindful, we recognize that the social world as it now exists is just one of many possibilities.
“”
(Schwalbe, Michael, 1956-, The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation, copyright © 2008, 2005, 2001, 1998)
(The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation / Michael Schwalbe.--4th ed., 1. sociology--methodology., 2. sociology--philosophy., pp.21-23 )
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Niel Postman, Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business, new introduction by Andrew Postman [2005], [1985]
p.157
technological changes
more ideology-laden
our modes of communication
our modes of transporation
[[ get the text for this ]]
p.157 (pdf)
It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology none-the-less, for it imposes a way of life, a set of relations among people and ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance.
p.157 (pdf)
Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.
p.157 (pdf)
This, in spite of the fact that before our very eyes technology has altered every aspect of life in America during the past 80 years.
p.157 (pdf)
For example, it would have been excusable in 1905 for us to be unprepared for the cultural changes the automobile would bring. Who would have suspected then that the automobile would tell us how we were to conduct our social and sexual lives? Would reorient our ideas about what to do with our forests and cities? Would create new ways of expressing our personal identity and social standing?
p.157 (pdf)
To be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple. Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation.
Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation.
p.157 (pdf)
Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with moveable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.
p.158 (pdf)
And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind the movement.
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For every technology, there should be a ‘paired’ metrics, one that addresses the adverse consequences of the [...], and another that addresses beneficial outcome of the technical development or [...], we should do this for current technology and technical systems, like automobile, television, computer, firearms (gunpowder, steel, precision machining), the application of atomic fusion and fission (also known as nuclear power (new clear is a rebranding effort)) (a more decriptive name might be plutonium and uranium power), biological research development application, and others
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