Technology below and beyond

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“Neither helplessness nor unbounded enthusiasm and indifference to consequences would have allowed humans to inhabit the earth for very long,” observed Bruno Latour in a lecture in Copenhagen in February. “Rather a solid pragmatism, a limited confidence in human cunning, a sane respect for the powers of nature, a great care invested to protect the fragility of human enterprise — these appear to be the virtues for dealing with first nature. Care and caution: a totally mundane grasp of the dangers and of the possibilities of this world of below.”

We live in two worlds, Latour says. There’s first nature, the earthly “world of below,” and there’s second nature, the transcendent “world of beyond.” Second nature reflects our yearning for a world “more solid, less transitory, less perishable” than that of the earth. Through most of history, second nature manifested itself in myth and religion. Now, argues Latour, it manifests itself in the “laws” of economics:

The transcendent world of beyond has always been more durable than the poor world of below. But what is new is that this world of beyond is not that of salvation and eternity, but that of economic matters. […] The world of economy, far from representing a sturdy down-to-earth materialism, a sound appetite for worldly goods and solid matters of fact, is now final and absolute.

Purging an economic system of its contingencies and investing it with inexorability tends “to generate for most people who don’t benefit from its wealth a feeling of helplessness and for a few people who benefit from it an immense enthusiasm together with a dumbness of the senses.” You get either fatalism or hubris.

It strikes me that what Latour says about our current conception of economics goes equally well for our current conception of technology. Consider the following passage from his speech in which, in three instances, I’ve replaced the word “capitalism” with the word “technology”:

We begin to see how difficult it is to disentangle the contradictory affects created by an appeal to the concept of technology: it generates a prodigious enthusiam for seizing unbounded opportunities; a dystopian feeling of total helplessness for those who are submitted to its decrees; a complete disinhibition as to the long-term consequences of its action for those who profit from it; a perverse wound of smug superiority in those who have failed to fight its progression; a fascination for its iron laws in the eyes of those who claim to study its development, to the point that it appears to run more smoothly than nature itself; a total indifference to how the soil on which it is rooted is occupied; a complete confusion about who should be treated as a total stranger and who as a close neighbor. And above all, it marks a movement towards modernization that delegitimates those who stay behind as so many losers. Actually now that technology is thought to have no enemy, it has become a mere synonym for the implacable thrust forward of modernization. From this tangle of effects, I get no other feeling than an increased sense of helplessness. The mere invocation of technology renders me speechless.

“Resistance is futile”: Depending on who’s speaking, it’s a statement of triumphalism or of defeatism.

Latour finds, in thinking about our shifting sense of economics, a great irony in the “inversion of what is transitory and what is eternal.” The irony becomes even stronger when we consider the similar inversion that has taken place in our view of technology. The glory of technology stems from the possibilities it opens to people in the material world of first nature. The glory hinges on technology’s contingency, on the way it yields not only to circumstance but to human desire and planning. When technological progress comes to be seen as a transcendent, implacable force, a force beyond human fashioning, it begins to foreclose opportunities at least as often as it opens them. It starts to hem us in.

“A solid pragmatism, a limited confidence in human cunning, a sane respect for the powers of nature, a great care invested to protect the fragility of human enterprise”: Would not these earthly virtues serve us equally well in dealing with technology?

Image: detail of Botticelli’s “St. Augustine in His Studio.”

Seeing through Glass

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The War of the Eyeballs begins today, with the initial public offering of Google Glass. To mark the occasion, I give you my all-time favorite Marshall McLuhan quote:

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

Just a heads-up.

The joy of cooking

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From Max Levchin:

I relax by fine-tuning various kitchen processes and recipes using approaches borrowed from genetic algorithms. I approach a recipe as if it were a genome where every ingredient and process in the recipe is a gene that I modify randomly. I use a computer program so the modifications are truly random. I basically recombine the genetic makeup of the best recipes over and over again until I come up with what tastes the best.

It never really struck me before, but I do something very similar when I decide which combination of condiments to put on a hot dog.

Image: Jennifer Lamb

The William Wilson effect

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“Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! —to the earth art thou not for ever dead?”

Returning to the Smashing Facebook meme — a meme of my own imagining, I acknowledge — it struck me that Edgar Alan Poe might shed light on the matter. Poe understood the psychology of social media when Mark Zuckerberg’s great-great-great-grandfather was still in short pants.

Just yesterday, an acquaintance of mine let it be known that he was, as he put it, “off the Book.” Translation: he had cancelled his Facebook account. This was not, I immediately recalled, the first time he had made such an announcement. He had gone off the Book, and then back on the Book, at least a couple of times previously. That’s not unusual these days. I’ve met a lot of people who, exhausted with the work of maintaining appearances on Facebook, try to break the habit, only to find, a few days or a few weeks later, that they’ve reactivated the account.

At the start of Poe’s story “William Wilson,” the title character recalls how, in his youth, he met a schoolmate who shared not only his name but his aspect, his tone of voice, his manner of dress, his personality. The very image of himself, this double, this doppelganger, becomes, after a brief period of friendship, William Wilson’s rival and then his nemesis. As the years pass, wherever Wilson goes the other Wilson is there. His presence becomes ever more oppressive.

“From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.”

Finally, Wilson can take no more. In a moment of hopelessness and rage, he attacks his double.

“The contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and the power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscotting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.”

The doppelganger is mortally wounded. And yet William Wilson is anything but liberated. He discovers, after the violent deed is done, that there is no other man in the room with him. He is alone. He looks into a mirror and, aghast, discovers that it is he himself who has been stabbed.

“But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, — so at first it appeared to me in my confusion — now stood where none had been perceptible before; and as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.”

I know you see the moral of the tale, dear reader, but indulge me while, like Aesop, I belabor it: One terminates one’s Facebook account only to discover that one has terminated one’s self.

“You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead — dead to the world and its hopes. In me didst thou exist — and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

Image: still from Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Fire the robot

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Toyota, which just yesterday announced a recall of more than six million cars for a variety of defects, is having second thoughts about its robot culture. A longtime pacesetter in factory automation, the company is putting a new stress on nurturing human expertise and craftsmanship, reports Bloomberg:

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said [Mitsuru] Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.” These gods, or Kami-sama in Japanese, are making a comeback at Toyota, the company that long set the pace for manufacturing prowess in the auto industry and beyond. Toyota’s next step forward is counter-intuitive in an age of automation: Humans are taking the place of machines in plants across Japan so workers can develop new skills and figure out ways to improve production lines and the car-building process.

The trend in manufacturing is to turn workers into robot tenders who feed parts into automated machines and watch for breakdowns. The shift of core manufacturing tasks from people to robots may boost productivity in the short run. But the cost is a decay in human know-how and a loss of the unexpected insights that come with that know-how. Robots, for all their speed and precision, lack perspective and understanding. They can monitor and optimize measurable aspects of production processes, but they can’t view those processes from different angles, and they have no feel for the goods being produced. So-called “smart factories” are actually pretty stupid.

Recognizing the dangers in allowing craftsmanship to decay, Toyota is giving pink slips to some of its robots, returning their jobs to people in order to promote the development of deep know-how:

Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn’t get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines. At about 100 manual-intensive workspaces introduced over the last three years across Toyota’s factories in Japan, these lessons can then be applied to reprogram machines to cut down on waste and improve processes, Kawai said. In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.

Much of the current thinking about the future of automation adopts the viewpoint of the robot. It overstates the importance of the things computers are good at (things that tend to be easily measured) and understates the importance of the things that people are good at (things that often are not easily measured). The flaw in that view manifests itself only over the long run, after masters have begun to lose their mastery and companies have begun to lose the intangible benefits mastery brings. Just because a robot can take over a job doesn’t mean it should.

Photo: Wikipedia.

The loom of the self

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“It is hard to resist a technology that is also a tool of pleasure,” write Sarah Leonard and Kate Losse in the new issue of Dissent. “The Luddites smashed their power looms, but who wants to smash Facebook — with all one’s photos, birthday greetings, and invitations?”

That’s on the money. Things do get messy, confused, when the means of production is also the means of communication, the means of expression, the means of entertainment, the means of shopping, the means of fill-in-the-blank. But out of such confusion comes, eventually, simplification, a concentration of effort and effect. Imagine if, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the power loom were also a social medium. In weaving your quota of cloth, you also wove the story of your life and unfurled it in the public eye. Think of how attached you’d become to your loom. You’d find yourself staying late at the mill, off the clock, working the levers and the foot pedals, the shuttle purring. Hopelessly entangled in the threads, you’d demand a miniature loom that you could use at home, and then an even smaller one that you could carry around with you. Every chance you got, you’d pull out your little loom and start weaving, and all around you others would be doing the same, weaving, weaving, weaving.

I have taken my life from the world, you would say, and I have turned it into cloth, and the pattern in the cloth: that is who I am.

The myth of the endless ladder

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“Ultimately, it’s a virtuous cycle,” declares economics reporter Annie Lowrey in a Times Magazine piece on the job-displacing effects of automation technologies, “because it frees humans up to work on higher-value tasks.” The challenge today, she writes, a few paragraphs later, “is for humans to allow software, algorithms, robots and the like to propel them into higher-and-higher-value work.” The idea is an old one. Aristotle compared tools to slaves: both provide their masters with time for more refined activities. Thinkers as various as Marx, Keynes, and Oscar Wilde said similar things during the industrial revolution. It remains a common refrain today, as automatons and software take over more of the work people used to get paid to do. “We need to let robots take over,” wrote Kevin Kelly last year. “They will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.”

There’s something deeply comforting about the notion that labor-saving technology inevitably pushes workers to higher pursuits. It salves our anxieties about job losses and wage declines — everything will work out fine, “ultimately” — while playing to our unbounded sense of self-importance. The ladder of human occupation goes forever upward; no matter how high our machines climb, there will always be another rung for workers to clamber to. But like many of the comforting things we tell ourselves, it’s no more than a half-truth. And when trotted out as a pat response to contemporary unemployment and underemployment problems, it becomes a dangerous fallacy. By promoting a reassuring fantasy about the future, it relieves us from grappling with the possibility that new, structural problems are opening up in the economy.

The problem with the endless-ladder myth begins with the fuzziness of its claims. What exactly is a “higher-value task”? Are we talking about value for the employer, or value for the employee? Are we measuring value in terms of productivity and profit, or in terms of worker skill and satisfaction? Not only are those two things different; they’re often in conflict. One way that a machine can improve labor productivity is by reducing the number of workers required to produce something. Another way is by reducing the skill requirements of the worker’s job and hence reducing the worker’s pay. As analyses of the employment impacts of industrial machinery show, the use of technology to automate a job tends at first to enhance the skills of a worker, making the job more challenging and interesting, but as the machine becomes more sophisticated, as more job skills are built into its workings, a deskilling trend takes hold. The highly skilled craftsman turns into a moderately skilled or unskilled machine operator. Even Adam Smith understood that machinery, in enhancing labor productivity, would often end up narrowing jobs, transforming skilled work into routine work. At worst, he wrote, the factory worker would become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

That’s not the whole picture, of course. In evaluating the long-term effects of automation, we have to look beyond particular job categories. Even as automation reduces the skill requirements of an established occupation, it may contribute to the creation of large new categories of interesting and well-paid work. That’s what happened, as the endless-ladder mythologists will eagerly tell you, during the latter stages of the industrial revolution. The efficiencies of assembly lines and other mechanized forms of production pushed down the prices of all sorts of goods, which drove up demand for those goods, which led manufacturers to hire not only lots of blue-collar workers to operate and repair the machines but also lots of white-collar workers to manage the factories, design new products, market and sell the products, keep the books, and so forth. The  resulting expansion of a consumption-minded, experience-seeking middle class ratcheted up demand for all sorts of other workers, from retail clerks to doctors and nurses to teachers to architects to pilots to journalists to government bureaucrats to etc. A virtuous cycle it most definitely was. What it wasn’t was the manifestation of some universal virtuous cycle, some inevitable dynamic in the economy. It was a virtuous cycle very much contingent on its time, and one of the most important of the contingencies was the limited capacity of industrial machinery to take over human work. Even a highly mechanized factory needed lots of people to tend the machines, and most professional and other white-collar jobs lay well beyond the reach of technology.

Times are different now. Machines are different, too. Robots and software programs are still a long way from taking over all human work, but they can take over a lot more of it than factory machines could. It seems pretty clear now that that’s one of the main reasons we’re seeing persistently depressed demand for workers in many sectors of the economy. What’s perhaps less well acknowledged is the spread of the deskilling phenomenon into so-called knowledge work. As computers become more capable of sensing the environment, performing analyses, and making judgments, they can be programmed to take over more white-collar skills. Professionals and office workers start to look more and more like computer operators, tenders of machines.

There will always be opportunities for individuals to design cool new products, make new scientific discoveries, create new works of art, and think new thoughts. But that says little about the prospects for the labor market in general. There’s no guarantee that the deployment of computers is going to open up vast new swathes of interesting, well-paid jobs the way the deployment of factory machines did. Recent experience suggests that computers may have very different consequences. What they seem to be particularly good at is concentrating wealth rather than spreading it, narrowing the work that people do rather than broadening it.

The language that the purveyors of the endless-ladder myth use is revealing. They attribute to technology a beneficent volition. It “frees us” for higher-value tasks and “propels us” into more fulfilling work and “helps us” to expand ourselves. We just need to “allow” the technology to aid us. Much is obscured by such verbs. Technology doesn’t free us or propel us or help us. Technology doesn’t give a rat’s ass about us. It couldn’t care less whether we have a great job, a crappy job, or no job at all. It’s people who have volition. And the people who design and deploy technologies of production are rarely motivated by a desire to create jobs or make jobs more interesting or expand human potential. They’re motivated, as Adam Smith also pointed out, by a desire to make money. Jobs have always been a byproduct of the market’s invisible hand, not its aim.

The biggest beneficiaries of the endless-ladder myth are those who have gained enormous wealth through the profit-concentrating effects of commercial computers. The myth helps them feel good about themselves. They, after all, are the ones who are setting in motion the virtuous cycle that, in the fullness of time, will bring us all to the nirvana of “higher-and-higher-value work.” It suits their business interests, too, by conflating those interests with society’s interests. Software and algorithms and robots will solve our problems, if we allow them to.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible that we’ll soon be blessed with all sorts of great new jobs. The world’s complicated; the economy’s complicated; no one knows what the future’s going to bring. I’m saying that we can’t take it as a given that that’s going to happen, and we certainly shouldn’t assume that machines have the best interests of workers at heart. Ultimately, it’s a virtuous cycle — except when it’s a vicious one.

Image of ladder-climbing robot: DARPA.