Over at the University of Chicago Law School, the students in Randal Picker’s Tech Policy Seminar have been reading The Big Switch and commenting extensively on it on the class blog. Last week’s postings were on the first half of the book; this week’s are on the second half. The discussion is particularly interesting when it delves into the legal and regulatory implications of cloud computing.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, and they’re really freaking expensive. Google’s capital expenditures, the lion’s share of which go to building and outfitting data centers, soared to a record high of $842 million in the first quarter of this year, up from $678 million in the fourth quarter of ’07, notes Data Center Knowledge. Should the company maintain its current pace of investment, its spending on data centers and related infrastructure will surpass $3 billion this year, a remarkable total.

Reposted from the new edition of Edge:

What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world?

– Joseph Weizenbaum

Somehow I managed to miss, until just a few days ago, the news that Joseph Weizenbaum had died. He died of cancer on March 5, in his native Germany, at the age of 85. Coincidentally, I was in Germany that same day, giving a talk at the CeBIT technology show, and — strange but true — one of the books I had taken along on the trip was Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason.

Born in 1923, Weizenbaum left Germany with his family in 1936, to escape the Nazis, and came to America. After earning a degree in mathematics and working on programming some of the earliest mainframes, he spent most of his career as a professor of computer science at MIT. He became – to his chagrin – something of a celebrity in the 1960s when he wrote the Eliza software program, an early attempt at using a computer to simulate a person. Eliza was designed to mimic the conversational style of a psychotherapist, and many people who used the program found the conversations so realistic that they were convinced that Eliza had a capacity for empathy.

The reaction to Eliza startled Weizenbaum, and after much soul-searching he became, as John Markoff wrote in his New York Times obituary, a “heretic” in the computer-science world, raising uncomfortable questions about man’s growing dependence on computers. Computer Power and Human Reason, published in 1976, remains one of the best books ever written about computing and its human implications. It’s dated in some its details, but its messages seem as relevant, and as troubling, as ever. Weizenbaum argued, essentially, that computers impose a mechanistic point of view on their users – on us – and that that perspective can all too easily crowd out other, possibly more human, perspectives.

The influence of computers is hard to resist and even harder to escape, wrote Weizenbaum:

The computer becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology. The utility of this tautology is that it can reawaken us to the possibility that some human actions, e.g., the introduction of computers into some complex human activities, may constitute an irreversible commitment. . . . The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most “progressive” elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.

The machine’s influence shapes not only society’s structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, “indispensable” computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer’s (and its programmers’) terms. We become ever further removed from the “direct experience” of nature, from the signals sent by our senses, and ever more encased in the self-contained world delineated and mediated by technology. It is, cautioned Weizenbaum, a perilous transformation:

Science and technology are sustained by their translations into power and control. To the extent that computers and computation may be counted as part of science and technology, they feed at the same table. The extreme phenomenon of the compulsive programmer teaches us that computers have the power to sustain megalomaniac fantasies. But the power of the computer is merely an extreme version of a power that is inherent in all self-validating systems of thought. Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks.

His own invention, Eliza, revealed to Weizenbaum the ease with which we will embrace a fabricated world. He spent the rest of his life trying to warn us away from the seductions of Eliza and her many friends. The quest may have been quixotic, but there was something heroic about it too.

See other appreciations of Weizenbaum by Andrew Brown, Jaron Lanier, and Thomas Otter.

The clouds open and . . . the face of Google appears. As long anticipated, Google is now allowing outside developers to write applications that will run on its vast network of data centers. The company’s App Engine, now in a closed beta, provides a new cloud-based development platform that will compete with, and perhaps complement, the platforms run by Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, and others.

As it happens, I’m about to give a talk about the new cloud platforms, so I don’t have time to write more at the moment. But you’ll find more details from Richard MacManus and Brady Forrest (or you can go to TechMeme and enjoy the full force of the firehose).

Where’s Microsoft?

Arianna Huffington likes to say that her Huffington Post blogsite is becoming an “Internet newspaper.” There’s just one problem: there’s no such thing as an Internet newspaper. That, anyway, is my contention in The Great Unbundling, the initial post in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s weeklong forum on Newspapers and the Net: “The nature of a newspaper, both as a medium for information and as a business, changes when it loses its physical form and shifts to the Internet. It gets read in a different way, and it makes money in a different way.”

Also appearing today is a response from Clay Shirky, who argues that experimentation in the new medium may lead to new and perhaps even better ways to produce quality journalism.

Edge has posted Eliza’s World, a brief article I wrote about Joseph Weizenbaum, who died last month. It begins with my favorite sentence from Weizenbaum’s classic Computer Power and Human Reason:

“What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world?”

Read on.

Here’s my latest column for The Guardian, which appears in this morning’s edition:

Neuroscience and marketing had a love child a few years back. It’s name – big surprise – is neuromarketing, and the ugly little fellow is growing up.

Corporate pitchmen have always wanted to get inside our skulls. The more accurately they can predict how we’ll react to stimuli in the marketplace, from prices to packages to advertisements, the more money they can pull from our pockets and transfer into the coffers of their employers.

But picking the brains of consumers hasn’t been easy. Marketers have had to rely on indirect methods to read our thoughts and feelings. They’ve watched what we do in stores or tracked how purchases rise or fall in response to promotional campaigns or changes in pricing. And they’ve carried out endless surveys and focus groups, asking us what we buy and why.

The results have been mixed at best. People, for one thing, don’t always know what they’re thinking, and even when they do, they’re not always honest in reporting it. Traditional market research is fraught with bias and imprecision, which forces companies to fall back on hunches and rules of thumb.

But thanks to recent breakthroughs in brain science, companies can now actually see what goes on inside our minds when we shop. Teams of academic and corporate neuromarketers have begun to hook people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines in order to map how their neurons respond to products and pitches.

Last year, the journal Neuron published an article called “Neural Predictors of Purchases” by a group of scholars from three leading U.S. universities. The researchers described how they had used brain imaging to monitor the mental activity of shoppers as they evaluated products and prices on computer screens.

By watching how different neural circuits light up or go dark during the buying process, the researchers found they could predict whether a person would end up purchasing a product or passing it up. They concluded, after further analysis of the results, that “the ability of brain activation to predict purchasing would generalize to other purchasing scenarios.” Forbes heralded the study as a milestone in business, saying it marked the first time researchers have been able “to examine what the brain does while making a purchasing decision.”

At McLean Hospital, a prestigious psychiatric institution affiliated with Harvard University, an advertising agency recently sponsored an experiment in which the brains of a half-dozen young whiskey drinkers were scanned. The goal, according to a report in Business Week, was “to gauge the emotional power of various images, including college kids drinking cocktails on spring break, twentysomethings with flasks around a campfire, and older guys at a swanky bar.” The results were used to fine-tune an advertising campaign for the maker of Jack Daniels.

As you’d expect, a new group of high-tech consulting firms, with names like NeuroFocus, Neuroconsult and EmSense, have sprung up to help companies deploy neuromarketing. The neuromarketers are playing a prominent role at Re:think, the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual convention, which is being held in New York this week. The New York Times says that the agenda is “filled with presentations” on the new scientific approaches to marketing.

In the future, it seems clear, marketers won’t have to ask us what we think or try to decipher our intentions from our actions. They’ll be able monitor what we think directly – at the cellular level. That’s good news for companies. Not only will they be able to spend their marketing budgets more efficiently, but they’ll be able to wield more influence over the purchases we make.

The question is when does influence cross the line into manipulation? If businesses gain the ability to know more about what and how we think than we do ourselves, they’ll also gain the power to control our perceptions and even our behavior in ways we won’t be able to detect. Should neuromarketing achieve even part of its potential, it promises to tip the balance of power in the marketplace from the buyer to the seller.