Are we making ourselves into techno-monsters?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, psychology, parenting, education, technology

It took me an incredible amount of time to read i-Minds: How and Why Constant Connectivity is Rewiring our Brains and What to Do About It, Second Edition (AKA i-Minds 2.0), by Mari K. Swingle, PhD. Other than a brief post 14 days ago, which came 9 days after the prior "real" book review, I have utterly neglected this blog. To those few who follow it, I apologize.

This book is so big, 498 pages of 9-pt. type, and covers so much ground, it is hard to take it all in. The author is a therapist whose work begins when a "problem child" (or young adult) is brought to her, and she performs an EEG study. She can discern quite a number of odd things going on in the brain from the EEG, and she explains a few of them. One of the most important is "disregulation". A person gets out of control because the brain cannot self-control or self-regulate. An i-addicted person can only self-regulate when looking at their screen of choice. Children of all ages may throw tantrums for a number of reasons, but some of the most frightening tantrums occur when a child who spends too long with the laptop, phone, or tablet, is kept from using it for a time. In adults, tantrums are replaced by other kinds of misbehavior, some of which can land one in jail.

Side note: Recently the electrical grid failed in most of Texas for three days, parts of it for longer. I wonder how many homes were host to an extreme form of "cabin fever" when all the batteries ran down?

Although the book is very big, I could have read it faster if it were better written. The author presents a great deal of good and useful information and advice, very badly! Soon after I began reading, I was ready to drop it entirely. It just seemed she was so impressed with herself she had to write every fleeting thought. The writing style swings between clinical and colloquial. Just as I'd get going at a good clip, I'd encounter a word such as neuroatypicality or psychoneurophysiology, or a sentence with missing prepositions, or a half sentence ending in a period, only to find it taken up again after a subordinate clause with its own period. I guess the author took to heart the advice to avoid run-on sentences, somewhat too literally! By the way, look at the way I used a comma in the prior sentence. Try covering the comma with the corner of a piece of paper and reading it again. There is a difference in connotation. In this book commas are sometimes overused and sometimes neglected. My advice to the author: Before preparing version 3.0, hire two people in sequence: Firstly, a good copy editor, and then secondly, pass the edited copy to someone who can produce Reader's Digest Condensed Books and have it condensed. Most of the content of this book could have been said in half the space or less.

Herewith, to save space, I will do little more than reproduce my notes and comment on them:

• ch 6, "Boxed In – Anxiety in the Masses", on collecting hobbies. She is derogatory. She doesn't distinguish actual field collectors from "silver pickers". I am a collector of several categories of things, so perhaps my reaction is to my own ox being gored. The more sedentary things I collect are stamps and coins (world variety, not gold/silver coins). But in each case, I make it social by belonging to stamp and coin clubs, and even going to auctions (to be resumed after the pandemic), both as a buyer and seller, but usually a kibitzer. I also collect photographs, which gets me out and around, though I do spend a lot of time with "digital darkroom". My first love is rock collecting. "Silver picking" is buying mineral or fossil specimens from others. I've never bought a rock, though I traded for a few. I prefer to get out there and hit rocks. Any of these hobbies can be conducted without ever turning on a computer or looking at a phone. A cousin of mine's main hobby is long-distance high-altitude hang gliding (sometimes oxygen is needed!). Try doing that on your phone!
• p108, ch 8, "The Narrowing of Minds", on children who grow up gaming more than playing: "Today, many kids don't lose the creativity, they never find it!" Further, a "grouping quiz" example: 3 yellow squares of different sizes, then the choice of "which is the most similar?" a pink square or a banana? Is it the banana? Yes, according to the test the author saw, because it is the right color. If a child chooses the pink square, the ugly beep and WRONG appear, even though the shape is right. Who is to say that color supersedes shape? Particularly if no other information is given, either with this "question" or in the context of the rest of the "test".
• p140, ch 10, "Of Systems and Process", on writing (scribing) versus keyboarding, "…studies clearly show that we remember more, and significantly more, by writing than by keyboarding." I used to visit a typesetting shop. The proprietor was able to typeset in Spanish while conversing with me in English. Clearly, he could not possibly retain anything of the Spanish document. In my own case, though I can type very fast, I find I retain more by taking sketchy handwritten notes than by taking a laptop to a lecture and transcribing chunks of it verbatim.
• p202, ch 13, "Learning, Play, and Parenting", compares nature with "screen stuff, summarized in a keen table. I imaged the entire page, which is inserted here without further comment. Tap or click to see it larger, or to download it.

• p263 +/-, ch 17, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Esports and the Business of Gaming", on the relabling of i-games as "eSports": a cynical attempt to coopt the positive image of sports. The author decries "…the deviant brilliance of early game design ensuring that children legitimately would be penalized for leaving a game mid-play (or not returning…". This triggers extreme peer pressure. When a child (of any age less than 200 years) cries, "But I HAVE TO!!", he or she fears becoming a pariah more than death. It is time for some extreme re-training.
• p296-7, ch 19, "Breaking the Trance", "Ten things parents learned in science class the gaming industry wants them to forget (aka Lost Lessons from Research 101)". I scanned this pair of pages also, but I'd better not include them here. Put an e-mail address in a comment and I'll send you the image. The "Ten things" boil down to ten of the most popular fallacies of logic, exploited by the game-writing-and-selling industry to keep regulators at bay.
• p310, ch 20, "i-Tech and Healthcare – To Care or i-Care", "Why do we want to replace ourselves with interactive technologies? Why do we want i-tech taking care of our children and … our elders?" This fosters dissociation and vanquishes healthy attachment. Isaac Asimov foresaw this, blurrily, in his very early story "Robbie", about a robot babysitter to which the child became attached, moreso than to the parents. But Asimov's point was introducing the concepts that became his "3 laws of robotics", so he sidestepped whether the child in question was in any way harmed; I suspect he thought not, as he was himself famously neurotic and might have preferred a robot caretaker to a human nurse.
• p 356, erratum, "Zukerberg" for "Zuckerberg". Spelled correctly in other places. [grammatical errors and other solecisms would have filled pages]
• p394, ch 26, "Community, Communication, Digital Mediation, and Friendship", to txt or not to txt? Are emojis replacing facial expressions such that we no longer can read actual faces? A factor tending towards autism. I have long asserted that I get along with machines better than people. But I recognize it and have taken steps for 60+ years to learn to relate to people in spite of my own autistic tendencies. I fear that, had I been born in 2020 rather than the 1940's, I'd have become a clear case of Aspergerism, or "high-functioning autism", or worse. We can all exhibit autistic behaviors under stress, such as the autistic rocking of someone who has suddenly lost their beloved spouse, child, or pet. Such should be rare.
• p459-50, ch 31, "i-Addiction and i-Life", levels of i-addiction:

1. Generalized Internet Addiction: "Excess internet use is not an addiction in itself, but rather, the internet is the space where an individual can engage in addictive behavior." The Net facilitates access to one's fetish, but does not create the addiction.
2. Fantasy Internet Addiction: Addictive behaviors that would otherwise not occur, such as engaging in role-playing games (less frenetic games such as Dungeons & Dragons, that can be played as a board game, came after their online counterparts); and chat rooms and similar sites with pseudonymous interaction including cybersex.
3. Technological Internet Addiction: The technology itself is the addicting element. The Poster Child is compulsive follow-the-white-rabbit searching, which for some people can consume hour after hour, even day after day. [unbounded exploration] Here process itself is the bait on the hook.

• p463, same chapter, "Scientific Corner" [a feature found scattered throughout the book], an introduction to IAT, the Internet Addiction Test [search for "Internet Addiction Test Young" to find one you can take online. Many versions are behind a paywall]. My score is 18 (out of 72, see below). Paradoxically, many of the most addicted persons who are single young men have a lower score than you'd expect on the IAT, because all the questions about their relationships are answered with "no effect" or "not relevant", because they have no relationships!

• p491, ch 33, "Our Future Our Selves", The coolness factor is overcoming prudence in applying technologies that are dehumanizing us. [Many parents who work for Google, FB, etc., send their own children to private schools where screens of any kind may not be used prior to 8th grade, and the school strongly encourages that the home environment ought to be nearly screen-free. What do they know that the rest of us don't?]

Human intelligence, like all natural intelligence, is embodied. The body is a part of nature. Send your kids outdoors! Free-range children grow up the best adjusted! To grow up as an appendage of digital culture is to become more like the machine than like a human.

You have what you need from what is written above. For the research and references, do get the book, but be prepared to use it as a resource. Only read it through if you're as much a glutton for punishment as I was, reading the whole thing! I hated the presentation, but content kept me going.

Screening the Screens

kw: education, technology

I am halfway through a book I recommend to anyone who is the least bit concerned about how technology affects learning: i-Minds 2.0 by Mari K. Swingle, PhD. Two points stick in my memory:

1) In Silicon Valley, the most popular private schools have a policy for grades 1-7 that PROHIBITS screens inside the school buildings (phones, tablets, laptops, everything), and strongly suggests that parents limit "total screen time" to one hour daily for children younger than 10. The parents are those folks who labor to make social media addicting...to YOUR kids, and to you also.

2) Overuse of i-tech increases the tendency to autism. No matter where a child may begin, on the "autism spectrum", he or she will move progressively toward more and more autistic behaviors, the longer the overuse continues.

I write more when I finish the book and can produce a more fitting review.

The real masters of the planet are underfoot

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, termites, technology

This interesting aerial view in northeastern Brazil is a portion of an area the size of England all covered with this kind of patterned landscape. The bumps are termite mounds; there are millions of them, each about 30' (9m) wide and 8' (2.5m) tall. They have had their ages measured: between 700 and nearly 4,000 years. This is just one major area occupied by just one termite species. The area of Britain is 122,000 square miles. The amount of the earth's surface that we humans have covered with roads and buildings and other infrastructure comes to 2 million square miles.

It is safe to say that our "underground footprint" is smaller than our surface works. Not so for termites. Even mound-building termites have substantial subsurface workings. Of course, mound-builders are not the subterranean termites that plague suburban homeowners in the US. Their nests around here are entirely below ground, plus inside the wood of our buildings and of dead and fallen trees. Mound-building termites gather grass or other plant material and return it to the mound, where they either digest it directly or use it to make compost to grow a fungus that they consume.

Here is another view, of an area in Australia, populated with termite mounds, of a different genus and species from those in Brazil. These can be 15' (4.5m) tall.

There are about 2,000 species of termites. Added together, the world's termites weigh ten times as much as the entire human population. For all that, termites are little critters. Typically half the length of a grain of rice, they are similar in size to the little "sugar ants" and "grease ants" that might invade your kitchen (not the big carpenter ants that occasionally come indoors).

This is what Eastern Subterranean Termites (Reticulitermes flavipes) look like, magnified about 10x. The big soldier (with the orange head) is 5mm long, and the workers are mostly 3mm long, although you can see at least one extra-small worker that is no more than 1.5mm long. This image is by Gary Alpert of Harvard University, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License; see more images at bugwood.org.

Termite are practically ubiquitous, living nearly everywhere except in areas of permafrost. Lisa Margonelli became interested, then fascinated, then obsessed with termites. In particular, she wanted to know what the latest termite research had to say. As she writes in Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, most termite research, being funding-driven, is focused in two areas. Firstly, knowing that termites can digest wood, scientists want to know how it is done, with the goal of replicating the feat to make woody and grassy plant matter into fuel. The general term has morphed from "biofuel" to "grassoline". Secondly, termites and their mound-building skills are studied to inform the technology of swarming robots. It has been calculated that the amount of neural matter in a large termite nest or mound is comparable to the brain of a Labrador Retriever. Can multitudes of nearly brainless critters carry on a kind of collective cognition? We are not talking self-awareness here, just calculating power.

Now, guess who funds the latter effort the most. The Military. Midway through the book, a researcher opines that if millions or even billions of tiny, flying robots can be 3D printed for $1 each, and each can carry a tiny shaped charge weighing 1g, capable of piercing the human skull, they might be able to wipe out an entire army without any of "our" folks coming in harm's way. It occurred to me that it might take a rather sophisticated CPU to be able to reliably recognize foe and friend. And now that we're at the limits of Moore's Law for single CPU power, it's unlikely that a robot "brain" lighter than a small cell phone's motherboard could do the trick, now or years into the future. To make such a 'bot fly, you'd need wings large enough that it would be the size of a seagull rather than a big wasp. It's hard for a seagull to sneak up behind someone so as to crack their skull. But then, if it is that big, you could give it a bigger bomb.

Ms Margonelli spent nearly ten years visiting and working alongside scientists in Namibia, Australia, South America, and a few places in the US, being instructed tirelessly by them as she struggled to grasp the concepts. In this image the bent-over witch's hat shape is not random. The angle and its direction optimize the mix of sun and wind exposure. Though one theory has such tall mounds acting like chimneys to facilitate the flow of gas and vapor, the research she witnessed did not bear that out. It is still a mystery, but millions of mounds throughout Namibia have the same shape and orientation. The more vertical mounds in Australia (second picture above) must operate differently, perhaps partly because they are at a different latitude.

So far, grassoline cannot be efficiently produced. The metabolic pathway for digesting cellulose and lignin includes a huge assist from bacteria and protozoa in a termite's gut. There are a great many steps, and yields are low. Consider: If you can only produce a gallon of liquid fuel by also producing 100 gallons of unusable waste—stuff nothing will eat and that can't be burned—is that worth it? In recent years, Americans consumed on average a little more than one gallon of gasoline per day, each. Nearly 400 million gallons daily, more than 110 billion gallons yearly. What do you do with 1.1 trillion tons of waste? In addition to what we already produce…

No matter what we do with termite research, rampantly increasing pollution of all kinds, including "heat pollution" caused by greenhouse warming, will make the future less pleasant than the present. Will we be driven back to a new "stone age"?  That is quite unlikely, but there are certain to be disruptions. One side finding from all the termite research is that the land above termite workings is more fertile and grows more vegetation. The little critters may have a hand in saving the planet for us, for they work steadily to make it better for themselves, with too little brain to indulge in politics.

Living without plastics

kw: book reviews, science fiction, near-future, technology, sociology

Look around your house, your schoolroom, your workplace…can you find many objects that do not contain at least a little plastic? Maybe you won't always recognize it. Almost anything that isn't wood, stone, metal, silk or cotton is probably plastic or contains a lot of it. By "plastic" I mean manufactured polymers, from polyethylene to nylon, from Lucite to ABS (bullet proof windows in banks). Even printing ink contains polymers these days. The wires in your computer and phone have plastic insulation.

There are tens of thousands of polymerized materials that are entirely artificial. There are polymers in nature, including all fibrous materials: cotton, silk, linen, etc. Even protein and DNA are aperiodic polymers. But nearly all manufactured polymers have a periodic structure, and are simpler than the natural polymers.

Let us now assume that our plastics begin to disintegrate, turning to goo and then to liquid, one after another. Now what? This scenario is how Drop by Drop, by Morgan Llewelyn, begins.

The idea is a great one. Many SF stories surround troubles with computer equipment or electrical technology either failing or going rogue. But plastic? We are not fully aware how much of modern life depends on them. Actually, in the novel, I was wondering when the author would introduce widespread electrical failure as insulation melted off wires and the generating equipment shorted out. She doesn't go there, and I suppose there was just so much dystopia she was willing to handle.

There is a little tech discussed by characters in the book, but that isn't the author's point. This is her first SF novel, but not her first novel. She has many books in print. Her focus here is on people's reactions to a Change. In the face of overwhelming and irreversible change, some people persevere and even thrive, and some go off the rails. All sorts of reactions are explored as the people in a small town cope (or don't) with The Change, with losing contact with the rest of the world except via a network of ham radio operators who build crystal sets that use no plastics, for example; with the asphalt on roads turning to goo, and then the tires of the autos.

The book is well written, entertaining, and made me wonder, what could bring about such a change, and what would most of us do about it? What if the things that failed weren't made of plastics but of steel?

It grabs you where you live

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, addictions, technology

When I saw the book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, by Adam Alter, the verse 1 Corinthians 16:15 came to mind. It speaks of a certain family that "have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints". At least, that is how the King James Version and two others translate the word εταξαν, a form of τασσω, which in the First Century meant "to set, appoint or ordain", but has lost that meaning in the centuries since. Becoming curious about the English usage of the King James era (early 1600's), I found that "addiction" referred mainly to fascination and devotion. Thus many English versions of the verse use either "set" or "devoted". The term was neither positive nor negative prior to the mid-1800's

Addiction has a much stronger and more focused meaning today. To be addicted is to be in the grip of a compulsion or obsession that harms one, or may eventually kill. Since the early 1900's or a little earlier, "addiction" has referred to a compulsion to use substances such as cocaine. As author Adam Alter tells us, there was quite a struggle in the later Twentieth Century among psychiatrists and psychologists about whether to recognize "behavioral addictions". But the modern phenomena—from binge-watching of TV episodes to online game playing, online gambling, twelve- to 24-hour FaceBook sessions and even "checking in" so compulsively that people walk into fountains, manholes and lampposts—have convinced nearly all that behavioral addiction is real and can be really, really bad.

Note the phrase above, "…or may eventually kill." I do not mean just the shortening of life due to bad health from being a "couch potato" or "FB zombie". Suicides have resulted, not just from being trolled online, but from despair over falling behind the social media rat race.

In a fascinating busman's tour through history, we find that addictive tendencies are with us for very good reasons: our distant ancestors did not become ancestors by ignoring the siren call of pleasurable experiences. In pre-agricultural days, over most of the Earth, eating everything that tasted good kept you alive, and getting all the sex you had opportunity to obtain gave you a chance at having descendants. Also, our ancestors traveled, and the dopamine-fueled thrill of seeing what is over the next ridge motivated many of them to seek new pastures and far horizons. Those who traveled the farthest may have been subject to extra risks, but the chance to populate a new and empty landscape was a benefit not to be ignored.

Our tendencies to fall prey to obsessions, compulsions, and addictions are a direct result of the tens of thousands, even millions of years, that humans lived with scarcity. Now about half the human race lives with relative abundance. What happens then? We overdo it; we overdo it big time.

The author describes many behavioral hooks that turn a potentially enjoyable experience into a compelling one. Unsteady rewards are a big, big factor. Even as Pavlov learned, once a dog has learned to associate receiving food with the ringing of a bell, it will salivate when the bell rings, whether food is given or not. But if food is given roughly every third time, the dog will salivate more and more. Rats given the chance to push a bar to get a food pellet will do so, of course. But if pushing the bar doesn't always yield a pellet, they will push the bar again and again, gathering pellets far beyond their need to eat them. Uncertainty is a big hook.

The most addicting games are those that you win about 1/3 of the time. If you win every time, you get bored. If you win less than 1/10 of the time, you look for a "better" game. This is just one example. Apparently, the most addicting computer game to come along, at least up to the time the book was written, is World of Warcraft. The second-most is probably League of Legends, which my son plays more than he should…though so far it hasn't affected his work enough to cut into his income. I hope that day doesn't come, but for many others it has come already (Cue a stereotypical video of a jobless Millennial who lives in the parents' basement and plays games all day).

So, can we do anything about this? Friends of ours despaired of even slowing down their daughter's FaceBook addiction. Her grades suffered badly. She almost dropped out of college. Nobody knows quite what happened, but she somehow developed a backbone, and a level of resistance, so that her grades improved, she graduated, and now has a responsible job. I don't know how much she may still read her News Feed on FB but I don't see a lot of posts from her. There are other folks—well, I just shake my head. I wonder how they have time to put one or two or three dozen posts in their News Feed every single day. Maybe we just have to let people outgrow it. Pity those who never do.

At the end of Irresistible the author discusses one "thing" (I can't think of another word) that seems to make positive use of the hooks that draw us in: Gamification. This is adding an element of fun into otherwise mundane, boring or unpleasant tasks. In the modern era, technological hooks can be used to trigger our compulsions, just enough, but breaks or "units" are inserted so we won't binge out. The FitBit is a potential gamification of exercise, but it doesn't have any checks, so some people damage their health trying to achieve ever-increasing goals. It needs some work.

But even without FitBit and its kin, overdoing it is a risk. I used to exercise a lot, including certain body-mass strengthening routines, and began keeping records. As it happens, that might have been a mistake. Or, at least, I ought to have obtained a buddy or coach to help me keep track and not ramp up my routines too fast. One day I did too many dips and pulled a muscle in my chest. It took five months to heal (I was about 40; were I younger it might have taken only a month or two). By then, the cycle was broken, and since then I primarily walk. There was no FitBit involved, nor have I ever owned one.

I am also reminded of Zooniverse, with more than 70 somewhat gamified "citizen science" projects. There aren't even any bells and whistles, just accumulating numbers of tiny projects completed, but that is enough that millions of people (myself included) enjoy sorting galaxies, counting penguins, or transcribing hand-written museum labels. Without a few little hooks in the projects, it is actually deadly dull work!

I consider the matter unfinished. We don't yet know how to cope with behavioral addictions. As the author writes, we are in the foothills of addictive technology. But not everyone is equally prone to addiction, whether to substances or behaviors. Perhaps Darwinism will run its course, and a future generation will consist mostly of people who are largely immune to the allure of the Like button.

How tech is changing business

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, business, technology, artificial intelligence, trends

My, my, what a long time it took me to work my way through this book! It goes to show that I still have a poor mind for business. During the latter half of my career in IT, the managers and even some supervisors would speak of the "business reasons" for doing one thing or another. One day I asked a manager named Carol, "What is a 'business reason'?" She replied, "It's something people are willing to pay for." The thought had never entered my head. I have always done things for reasons such as "it is interesting", "it will make this or that task easier", "it does things in a more excellent way" and so forth. Getting paid was nice, but it wasn't my focus. When I heard a new company president speak of having a "passion for profits", I sent him an e-mail explaining how I had always had a passion for excellence, and that profits seemed always to follow. His response was so disturbing, revealing such abysmal blindness to everything I find meaningful, that I immediately sought work in a different company among the Dupont family of companies, and luckily found one within a few months.

I am not sure what I expected once I saw the cover of Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson. Something more techie than what it delivered, certainly. But the authors' application of technological trends to present and future business was sufficiently appealing that I read it all.

The three words that begin the title emphasize the subjects of the book, which is a follow-on to their book The Second Machine Age. These words outline three dichotomous trends that are driving businesses:

• Mind and Machine
• Product and Platform
• Core and Crowd

The trends are toward the right, and it is uncertain how far each will proceed. I debated with myself, whether to use "versus" rather than "and". But these pairs are not truly at odds; rather they are synergistic and supplementary to each other. For example, I built much of my career as a scientific programmer and systems analyst on discerning the appropriate tasks for the Machine to do, so as to free up people's Mind to do the things that we do better. From the beginning of the Computer Century (now about 70 years along), computational machinery has been called "mechanical brains", and the term "artificial intelligence" began to be applied even before ENIAC's tubes first lit up.

We now have pocket phones and nearly-affordable wristwatches that are millions of times as computationally powerful as ENIAC (this article includes notes on its speed of computation). But only within the past decade have "AI applications" begun to carry out tasks that are still – usually – done better by people and many animals. Many Sci-Fi stories bring us ideas of giant computers somehow becoming conscious more-or-less by accident (e.g., "Colossus" and "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"). There is a reason for that. Nobody yet has the slightest idea how to define consciousness in any unambiguous way, and therefore, no idea how to write appropriate code to "do consciousness". To repeat myself, I define "genuine artificial intelligence" thus:

That a mechanism, electronic or electromechanical, carries out its own investigation, does its own research, and obtains a patent or at the very least has its patent application accepted by the U.S. Patent Office.

For the time being, the next generation or two at least, there will remain numerous "real world" tasks that minds will perform better than machines. The authors contend that nearly any repetitive task, including many now deemed "too creative" for a machine to carry out, will over time become the province of machine work, and that humans will be squeezed out. Will the day arrive when humans are no longer permitted to pilot an automobile? Cook their own meals?

The discussion of Product and Platform was harder for me to follow. Having a viable Product is the essence of a Business Reason for doing something. People pay for products, including those more squishy "products" we call "services." For example, technically, nursing care is a "service", but in the context of business, it is a product, delivered as a series of "service tasks" by a skilled person on behalf of another. Where does that fit into the notion of a "platform"? I think I understand that a platform packages products and services to make them easier for a producer to deliver and for a consumer to order and obtain. Will there one day be a platform like Uber for nursing care? I am almost afraid to look; it may already be out there. But there is still the need for the nurse-person (one day, a nurse-machine?) to physically do something to or for the person receiving nursing care.

Then, Core and Crowd. Hmm. I look on this as an expansion of Mind and Machine, where the "machine" has become a human-machine synergy we call the Crowd. I love the Citizen Science efforts out there, 73 of which (to date) are available under the Zooniverse umbrella. I have participated in about a dozen of them, and am most recently active in three that are of most current interest to me. A few years ago I classified more than 6,000 galaxies in one of the early Zooniverse projects. The machine part is the image delivery and questionnaire system. I and thousands of others (many minds) do the crowd part. The designers build in lots of redundancy, so as to spot errors and the occasional troll. The key to such projects is good planning and curation.

The authors focus on more business-oriented crowd projects. Their aim is to show that many untutored folks find innovative ways to solve problems that the "experts" would never think of. Very frequently the synergy of various "out of discipline" methods come together to do something ten or 100 times as well as the best that the "experts" had produced.

This principle comes home for me. Although I long aspired to be a scientist, because I was someone who nearly always wrote software for other scientists I had little occasion to publish; I wrote stuff to support work that other scientists published about. But the key paper of mine that made it into a peer-reviewed journal (Computers and the Geosciences) applied some sideways thinking to the numerical analysis of stiff differential equations used to simulate complex chemical reaction networks. I mixed principles used by astronomers in orbital mechanics with methods devised originally by civil engineers. In my dissertation, I used, and described, another numerical method that applied descending reciprocals to Runge-Kutta methods so that linear equations (linear in the "Diff Eq" sense) could be solved to any order desired. It was just a little part of my research, but crucial for certain computations that were otherwise too lengthy to carry out on the mainframes of the late 1970's.

So, I have rambled a lot into technical areas, mainly to cover up my difficulties "getting" the business focus of the book. It is written as a self-help text, with summaries and guiding questions following each chapter. It is written for business managers and executives. It is well enough written to hold my interest, even where I was in over my head.

Not to end on a downer, but I must quibble: on page 271 it is stated that the "amino acids" are strings of the genetic bases A, C, G and T. Those who know how wrong this is, just take comfort in "the old college try" that McAfee and Brynjolfsson gave it, when they were even more out of their depth than I am in their realm of expertise. (Hint to others: ACGT make genes, which are translated into proteins, composed of amino acids that do NOT include ACGT. That is why it is called translation.)

Are we dumbing ourselves down?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, automation, surveys, critiques

Six years ago Historian George Dyson wrote on Edge.org, "What if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?", summarizing an article by Nicholas Carr. Writing about 60 years earlier, in "The Feeling of Power" Isaac Asimov presented a future in which small calculating devices had so usurped arithmetical abilities, that a man who rediscovers paper-and-pencil methods of addition and subtraction is a phenomenon (Strangely, I haven't been able to find a date for this story).

Nicholas Carr has continued to think and write about automation and its effects on us. His recent book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us explores mainly the uglier side of current trends in technology. The best quote in the book is, "How far from the world do we want to retreat?" (p. 137)

Every person will have a unique answer to this question. For people like me, the answer would be, "Very far indeed, for long stretches of time, but with the option to return to full engagement at times and for durations of my choosing." For most of my life I have been more comfortable with machines than with people. Yet I need human contact…just not on the constant basis required by extroverts.

Technology is ancient and continuing: Stone tools as old as 3-4 million years; the successive technologies after Stone of Bronze, Iron, Steam and now Electronics; pocket computers we call "phones" for which making calls is now a minor function. The first time I saw a cell phone in use, some 15 years ago, there were two girls about 7 years old, running together through a park, each talking on a phone to someone else. (Note to self. Try making most calls while walking or jogging. Might be a good way to shed that next 5 pounds or so.) I recall predicting that during my lifetime, our "phone" would be installed in the mastoid bone at puberty and be entirely voice operated. Little wire to a microphone embedded in our jaw somewhere, and software filtering to subtract out the effects of flesh-to-bone conduction of our voice.

I am no slouch when it comes to computer use. I've been what was once called a Power User since the 1960s, when computers were too big to fit in most bedrooms. The motto of the Elephant Club: Don't Trust a Computer You Can See Over. Except today, a new club—the Power Tower Club?—might need a new motto: Don't Trust a Computer Smaller Than a Toaster Oven. Sure, my wife and I have a laptop, but my favorite workstation is a tower 18" tall (46 cm) with a pair of screens that gives me about a meter-wide view into cyberspace. For some of the work I do, that much screen real estate is essential. But do you know what one of my favorite activities is? A few times monthly I am a Historical Interpreter at Hagley Museum, in the Machine Shop, demonstrating machine tools (lathes, drill presses, mills, etc.) from the 1860s and 1870s, powered by a water mill in Brandywine Creek.

I wonder, though, if some machine workers of the early 1800s thought it was somehow "cheating" to use a power tool, when they were perfectly capable of making parts using hand tools. Probably not! Particularly for machine work, one needs a peculiar combination of intelligence and patience. I often point out to museum visitors that cutting the teeth on a medium-sized gear (5" thick and a foot in diameter; about 120 mm and 300+ mm) took a week in the 1870s. You set up a machine with eye and hand. You monitor the machine by ear; by the end of apprenticeship a machinist knows the changes in cutting sound that herald trouble on the way. So you need the brains to set the right index for a 17- or 19-tooth gear on a 40:1 indexing attachment, and the patience to listen for trouble for the next 60 working hours of your life…with resetting of the cut and rotation of the piece about 4 times per hour. Fast-forward to the modern era: Such a gear, if needed today, could be produced in a few minutes using electromachining, or in about an hour on a more conventional NC mill. Those old-time machinists would drool!

In many areas we are going through a transition, and Mr. Carr points out several of importance. The airline industry was among the first to automate wayfinding and autopilot aircraft control. If needed, any modern jetliner, and many smaller planes, are capable of taking off, flying themselves, and landing, without the pilot doing a thing. The trouble is, machines break, thunderstorms and solar flares disrupt communications and sometimes damage equipment, and because no program is totally bug-free, a rare combination of factors puts the autopilot's program into a confused state. In all these cases, the "fail safe" provisions immediately turn control over to the pilot. A few times, this has caused crashes, typically with the loss of everyone on board.

This brings to mind another principle that seems to be lost on modern engineers and programmers, "fail soft". Is it really appropriate for all the software to totally cut out so instantly? If the plane is at all still capable of level flight, the autopilot needs to alert the pilot(s) while keeping the plane on some standard course, giving the humans time to get their brain in gear. There may still be cases such as the "standard course" being straight into a mountainside (and I am reminded of the crash of a small plane in Malaysia in 1991, that effectively decapitated the Conoco corporation), but further development of "standard course" back-up routines ought to take care of that.

Such issues multiply when we come to the driverless car. It sounds seductive. Plot your course on a GPS navigator, press "GO" and take a nap, or play cards, or read or whatever. But the "lanes" in which an airplane "drives" are a few miles wide. Highways lanes are 12 feet (3.66 m) or less. For most of a plane flight, course corrections are few and may be hours apart. On the road, course corrections can occur minute-by-minute and even second-by-second. I have read a time or two about auto-driving "road trains", made up of dozens of autos on a superhighway at superspeed, inches apart to take advantage of drafting. Now suppose a solar magnetic storm disables half a dozen GPS satellites, the road-side "driving aid" equipment being relied upon by the cars, and perhaps some of the electronics in the cars. What is the "fail soft" scenario? Is one even possible??

We are in transition, all right. Casualties of all kinds are one price of progress. YouTube abounds with videos of people so engrossed in texting as they walk that they walk into fountains, manholes, lampposts and each other. We can expect the phones to become even smarter, so they would be on the lookout for such events. Maybe blare, "Look up, dope!", and make a red, flashing screen as such incidents approach. Smart phone technology is not yet complete, nor even appropriate for human use. It's why I use a flip phone that can call and make texts. Period.

In a late chapter Mr. Carr writes of the young Robert Frost and his poems about scythe work. The scythe is an extraordinary instrument. Using one creates muscle tone around your rib cage that no other exercise can match. Learn to use a scythe properly, and use it frequently, and you'll never have back problems. It exemplifies the kind of work that keeps a fellow close to the earth. Even as we try to re-educate America for a supposed post-manufacturing economy, there are huge numbers of jobs that remain very, very hands-on. A company may outsource its call center, computer programming, and database management to drones in India or China. You can't outsource construction, electrical work, plumbing and paving, nor landscaping or even repairing (and washing!) your car. Yeah, I know most New Yorkers just look puzzled when asked by a tourist where to buy gas…like they'd know! But deep in the bowels of the city are track workers and subway car maintenance folks that they'd suddenly feel a great need for if there were a month-long strike.

I have major mixed feelings about automated medicine, though. In certain cases, the Caduceus program has been able to make quick diagnoses where medical experts were baffled. But in others it has been embarrassingly off the mark. In medicine as in many other areas, the term "robotic" is being misused, most notably with the Da Vinci Robot for precision surgery. Let us reserve the term "robot" for autonomous devices such as the Roomba vacuum cleaner. The Da Vinci device is actually a tele-operated "Waldo" with vision magnification and down-scaled, feedback-enhanced motions so a surgeon can operate on something half an inch across while feeling like the object is the size of a basketball. I was once trained on a soldering Waldo used for attaching leads to integrated circuits. It worked at 25x, so a millimeter looked and felt like an inch. It greatly simplified the job. By the way, "Waldo" comes from an old story (1942!) by Robert Heinlein, where the concept was first made public.

Do I want a doctor to cede control in an operation to a robot? Probably not. Diagnosis? Not without human review. Only humans have a sense of what is sensible! How about prescribing? Ditto. I prefer the physician to not only make the decision, albeit aided by the computer system, but also to discuss it with me, because in teaching me how and why he chose a certain medication or treatment, he's rethinking it in a way that is useful to him and may cause him to realize something extra he might at first have missed (Feminists out there, I'd have used "she" and "her" if I had a female physician). "Thinking out loud" is often the most useful kind.

Artificial intelligence, once it gets on a par with us as a conversationalist, will still be quite different from us, so it could provide a very useful function: serving as a "straight man" to our musings, asking questions no human would think to ask, and adding a powerful level of synergy. A very neglected area of ergonomics has been to determine what tasks humans will always do better than machinery, and which tasks should be at the top of the list for turning over to machines. The various Zooniverse projects, citizen science at its best, primarily take advantage of our superior visual abilities. We can recognize the difference between spiral and elliptical galaxies at a glance; or different kinds of beetles; or see that a certain black-and-white blob is a rock and its shadow rather than a penguin.

Some might see The Glass Cage as a Luddite polemic. Not at all. Mr. Carr points out that we are a technological species. We can't live without it. Even the prototypical "cave man" was no naked savage killing prey with teeth and fingernails. The tool kit of Paleozoic people included dozens of tools that require skill to produce but reduce either the effort or the danger of doing the work. I, for one, am glad of today's technologies. I am equally glad that I can pick and choose which to use and which to ignore. Looking around the room I am writing in, I see several thousand objects, nearly all artifacts. Only the insect collection and a few shelves of mineral and fossil specimens are not technologically produced (though I used technology to mount and display them!).

Physically we are more "gracile" (that is, thinner and weaker) than the Cro-Magnons of just 20,000 years ago. They are called "modern" in an anthropological sense, but the technologies they inherited from their ancestors, and added to in following millennia, resulted in a modern civilization in which we don't need the great strength they required for day-to-day living. Our teeth are a little smaller, and as our jaws shorten, most of us need our wisdom teeth removed. All this results from technology. Will this age of intelligent machines cause our brains to atrophy? It's not likely. Our descendants will probably think differently than we do, just as we think differently than our grandparents who mostly grew up without radio, television, airplanes or automobiles.

I'm thinking of my own grandparents, here, all of whom were born in the late 1800s. I know most millennials are of an age to be my own grandchildren. We got our first television when I was 8 years old. Black and white, in a console the size of a divan. Our phone was on a party line. The most local of calls were made by clicking the button 1, 2, 3, or 4 times. "In-exchange" calls needed only 4 or 5 digits. All long distance calls went through an operator. So the change in the "thought world" of today's young adults is as different from mine as mine is from my own grandparents. It is another side of progress. So the book is more of a call to enter the future thoughtfully. We are creating it, after all.

Paranoia is more justified than ever

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, privacy, data mining, cyber crime, surveillance

Whom do you fear the most? The criminals or the police? For most people it will depend on where they live. For me, living on the liberal coastlands of America, criminals are the bigger threat. However, that may not always be true.

George Orwell's 1984, which he thought was set comfortably some 36 years in his future, is now set 30 years into our past, and will be set 36 years into the past in 2020. By then its forecasts may prove all too true. The newest models of "smart televisions" and some set-top cable boxes have cameras and microphones. Many owners never turn on the devices, and most forget they are there. But these are only the tip of the iceberg of the surveillance society in which we live.

Prior to about 40 years ago, the most skilled safecracker or most wily train robber could snatch a payroll in cash. A few skilled embezzlers working at banks used "bologna slicing" methods to skim a few cents here and there from thousands of bank accounts. But as recent data-theft cases from companies such as Target show, the ubiquitous Network ("The Net", formerly called "the Internet") facilitates much broader-scale thievery, of the identities and buying (or other) habits of tens of millions at a time.

Suppose that you could be assured you'd never lose a penny to fraud or theft of any kind, yet your every move would be known and your every word recorded, even in your most intimate moments? Growing numbers of people are paying $100 or more yearly for "ID theft protection" services such as LifeLock. What would you pay to be sure neither Big Brother nor the neighborhood felon, nor even your brother-in-law, could ever see into your toilet, bedroom, or clothes closet?

It's funny. Privacy in America is a big issue in some areas, such as Abortion ("privacy" is THE core of the Roe vs Wade decision), yet is no issue at all in others, such as what you eat, whom you love, what your doctor says, or where you go on vacation. The countries of Europe have strong constitutional or legislative protections for privacy, usually giving you ownership of everything that can be recorded about you. Not so in the good ol' USA.

Privacy! Do you forget the smart phone in your pocket, with its camera and microphone that can be controlled remotely? The cameras, not only the ones in the store with all those little black hemispheres in the ceiling (or simply sitting in the open), nor the ones at red-light-violation intersections, but in places you might never think to look. All are recording 24/7, attached to near-infinite data storage devices. When was the last time you saw a news report about some crime or disaster somewhere that didn't show a few seconds of surveillance footage? And just the other day on a walk my wife and I saw one of our neighbors learning how to use a quad copter in the park down the street. Today, he is satisfied to zoom it around and do acrobatics. Does it have a camera? Probably. How long will it be before I hear it humming overhead as I work in the yard? or outside my window?

A note to the handy: a search for "homemade herf" yielded 100,000 hits just now. Might be worth a look. The device will be the size of a trash can, but can zap a drone out of the sky. Careful, though, a side lobe can zap your PC in the house and the phone in your pocket.

All this is leading up to a very handy reference book: Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Recognizing Threats, Defending Your Rights, and Protecting Your Family by Theresa M. Payton and Theodore Claypoole. Their premise is simple: technology allows ever more intrusion into our private lives, and we are doing it to ourselves. Particularly in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, now 13 years ago, at least half of Americans feel trading away some of their rights is worth getting increased protection. The trouble is, we are getting a pig in a poke. We don't know if we are getting what we pay for, and the pig is accompanied by a wolf: what the government can see can also be seen by criminals.

I was present at some of the meetings in 1980 between Control Data Corp. and data managers for the Mormon Church, who were planning to install a 1TB data store for genealogy records. Its projected cost was $1.2 million. Considering that a big disk in those days was 500 MB, and the drive cabinet was half the size of a washing machine, the building to house the 2,000 disk drives and their A/C equipment was going to cost another quarter million. I recently got a backup disk, 2 TB for $99. The current million-dollar system would be around a tenth of an exabyte, or 100 PB (petabytes). An exabyte is a million TB.

Do you know just how big a Terabyte is? One minute of good quality MP3 audio produces about a 1MB file. 1,000 minutes (16.7 hours) takes up 1GB, and 16,700 hours of audio would fill 1TB. But lower quality audio, such as a phone call recording, can be 1/3 the size, or smaller, so a 1TB disk could hold more than 50,000 hours of telephone conversation, or 3 million minutes. That is 5.7 years of non-stop talk. Even a dedicated motormouth would be hard put to use the phone more than 2,000 minutes per month, so the disk could hold 125 years of phone use for that one person. On the other hand, uncompressed text is quite compact, and compressed text is even smaller. If you type at a "standard" rate of 40 wpm, that's 14.4 KB per hour or about 1/70 of a MB. 1TB is a million MB. That's why it is so easy to copy and store billions of e-mail messages.

In 1980, at one of the meetings mentioned above, someone from CDC joked, "If we invent a disk with infinite capacity—call it the God Disk—the Government will buy two of them." One of the Mormons deadpanned, "So would we." But a big disk is nothing without software to sort and collate it. Now that any $500 laptop can sift through huge amounts of data in a few seconds, all kinds of records become useful.

"All kinds" is amazingly comprehensive to Payton and Claypoole. Nearly everything we buy, from groceries to clothes to knickknacks to more personal items, is recorded, usually along with our identity. To keep from having a purchase tagged to you, you'd need to pay cash at the point of sale, and be among the lucky ones to buy from a store that doesn't have face recognition software running on its security cameras. Retailers love data about buying habits. So do criminals; they want to know who just bought anything expensive and comparatively portable. Government usually doesn't care, except for certain kinds of purchases. I suspect an order for 500 decks of cards, not from a casino, might get scrutiny for two reasons. Firstly, the possibility of an underground high-stakes card game. Secondly, the plastic in certain card brands can be chemically altered into a cheap plastic explosive.

How soon will it be that the store's computer system knows who you are, and your tastes, by the time you walk in the door? Maybe it knows who you are from your phone, or maybe from cameras. The rest is online and they're already tied in to it. Think you can fool the cameras with a wig or hat and dark glasses? They way you walk and other bodily motions you habitually make are harder to disguise (a one-time fakeout can be had by putting some duct tape across your back or a pebble in your shoe).

Planning to travel abroad? The authors advise, most particularly for repressive countries, that you leave your usual phone at home and take a cheap throwaway phone. Also, make no purchases using the phone! Some global companies have their expat executives take "vacations" to safer climes when they need to arrange sensitive deals or discuss important matters with HQ. If you need to carry your phone, keep it in a metal case, and turned off, when not in use, along with those credit cards and their convenient microchip. An easy alternative is an aluminized Mylar balloon, deflated and just wrapped around your electronics. Then the phone can't communicate with cell towers and the chips can't be read by someone walking by using a RFID reader. In one chilling section, though, the authors report on gadgets to read brain waves from a modest distance, say a foot or so. Will I need a foil-lined hat? Better yet would be a phony brain wave generator in my hat, a kind of jammer.

How do we use social media? I never tell my FB "friends" where I am going, only where I have been…usually! Many online retailers want to use us for free advertisements, and urge us to "share" on FB or somewhere. Some have six or more "share" options! Even if you don't share, you'll start seeing more ads for the thing you just bought, or only researched. If you do share, those ads will multiply. That's your "payment" for your "help".

Things will only progress. There is no going back. The authors close with a chapter on legislation. Here we learn that America, where "privacy" was so important to winning the abortion decision, does the least to protect privacy among so-called Democratic nations. Levels of black-market activity are lower in America than nearly anywhere else, which indicates more trust in government here. But I am not worried so much about the government of today in America. I am worried about future governments here and around the world, with a more and more nannyish attitude, or worse yet, with Sharia laws and the technology to enforce them in absolutely every case.

The trusting American people are embracing cars that know more and more about them, and report on them to the car dealer and insurance company; electronic medical records with poor security; smarter and smarter pocket computers that have phones attached, along with multiple cameras and microphones and geolocators and accelerometers and whatever is next; and cameras, cameras everywhere. The members of the freest society ever to arise are forging their own chains.

Click to prosper

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sociology, trends, technology

The title of this post may better fit an earlier book by this author, but I haven't read that one yet.

When you hear "Word of mouth," what do you think of? Is it Advertising? If so, that's the association Marc Ostrofksy wants for his book titled Word of Mouse: 101+ Trends in How We Buy, Sell, Live, Learn, Work, and Play. The title is a near-table of contents. Just add two items: Communicate and Safeguard., though the last chapter is really subtitled "Cyber Crime".

The earlier book is Get Rick Click!, and this one follows the theme, being mostly business oriented. I wonder how quickly both titles will become obsolete, as we move from 30 years of mousing to using touch, gestures, voice and, perhaps quite soon, thought patterns, to direct our devices. Who'd like to set up a pool on the first day someone's grandkid asks, "What were mouses like?", not referring to tiny mammals.

The author is relentlessly cheerful, almost frisky. Sometimes I felt the book had been written by a juvenile Labrador Retriever. But there is no mistaking his message. It may be obvious to some, but not to all: we are on the verge of cyborgification. The smart cell phone is close to the logical conclusion to which computer technology has been leading for nearly 70 years.

I remember the first time I saw children using cell phones. My wife and I were taking a walk, and saw a woman following two young girls, no older than 6, who were dashing and skipping along while each chatted with a friend on a flip phone held to her ear. I said to my wife, "In a couple decades, puberty will be marked with the installation of a device the size of a pea in the bone behind the ear. There'll be a mic in your jawbone. You'll just say, 'Hey, phone, call Allison.'" A couple decades have passed, and we're not there yet, but I've recently read a couple news articles in which "installable phones" were mentioned.

I figure the built-in phone will be necessary because anything you carry can be stolen, but an installation will not be. I haven't heard of anyone stealing the pacemaker out of someone's body, even though they cost as much as a small auto. I hold out little hope for "kill switch" technology. The only drawback to an installed phone: It'll be harder to turn all the way off. Maybe you can just cover the area where its antenna lies with foil…

I do hold out a lot of hope for increasingly clever devices to help us do pretty much anything short of stirring the soup pot or flipping an omelet (though they can show you an instructional video on it), or pluck my guitar for me, but then what's the use of muscle memory? Hmmm, now if they find a way to instantly attain muscle memory, they might have something!

Well, I'll leave it to interested readers to peruse the book. I didn't find anything like "101+ trends" listed out. Each chapter peppers you with ideas, some being trends and others being less well defined. I did happen to pause to think when he was discussing personal branding. Since retirement I've toyed with the idea of getting some really creative cards made. I'm not limited to company format any more. But a Polymath has a lot of irons in the fire, and there is too much to fit on one card. It is like the time I entered college. Though I picked a major, I really wanted to major in all the sciences. I eventually majored in four, then synergized all of them into a career writing software. This'll take further thought. I need a holographic card, that can project about a wall size display! Or—the simpler solution—several cards.

The book was plenty of fun to read, so a drawback or two I've mentioned above shouldn't deter anyone from reading it. Particular if you're looking for ideas to better use the Gigahertz processors at your fingertips, you'll likely find plenty in its pages.

This may be who we will be

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, futuristics, technology

Yogi Berra said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yet I love to read books of projection when they are well produced. When you get the former CEO of Google together with the head of Google Ideas together, good production is a given. Good prediction? Perhaps.

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen are big thinkers, they operate on a big stage, and their book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business is appropriately wide in scope. Their topics are ourselves, our identities—and all that goes with them—, and the world's nations and their fates under galloping scrutiny. I was relieved to read their focus on people and what people do with technology, rather than a gee-whiz screed on the neat-o things technology is doing.

For a privileged few, greater technology yields a closer and closer approach to a Utopia. It is reasonable to expect increasing good for most people. An unknown proportion of humanity will instead suffer even greater repression: 1984 on steroids. It all makes me wonder whether it will remain possible to keep a low profile, when every profile passes through smart pattern-seeking software. And what patterns will it seek? That is up to the writer(s) and the agency.

People wonder why I, a power user of computers since the 1960s, would keep my "dumb" phone—it makes phone calls and texts, and I don't have a data plan—when I have a desktop supercomputer that I built myself. Well, I know better than to think I have a life as private as the norm of the 1990s or earlier. But I do take steps to mitigate the damage, and I'll leave it at that.

These authors repeatedly state that what humanity does with technology is up to them and thus uncertain, for better or for worse. Yet they go into some detail about just how a repressive state can go into total control freak mode, such as by practically giving smart phones to all, but phones that are preloaded with apps that track and surveil the owner. Yet surveillance can work both ways. Fully half the book delves into the consequences of state failure and chances of reconstruction, after making it clear that better communications make revolution easier, but following up on a revolution even harder.

The loud and clear message is that, particularly in a disruption, communication is primary. One might think you need to first get food and water to refugees in a disaster. You do, but how do you know where they are, and how to make sure the supplies go where they ought? Communication. So the authors recommend erecting cell towers in stage one of any rescue or reconstruction effort. Then it occurred to me: Why not make every Red Cross (or whomever) truck a mini-cell tower or satellite hot spot? Use it to "light up" the few square miles around its location with good communications.

Human ingenuity always transcends the vision of an inventor. No technology is fail-safe, and fail-soft is pretty hard to achieve. New uses are always discovered, and new abuses even more so.

The apocryphal Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times" will now apply more than ever.

A utopia, in her eyes

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, places, technology

Did you ever talk to someone who was full of excitement about something that didn't excite you at all? That is how I felt during and after reading Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn From the Innovation Capital of the World by Deborah Perry Piscione. It is odd; Ms Piscione is a good writer, she is passionate about her subject, and Silicon Valley is truly a marvelous place and state of mind. I'm not sure why it leaves me underwhelmed (not cold, mind you, but not all warm-n-fuzzy either).

I scarcely remember my early childhood in California, but I do recall the decade or so I lived there as an adult. I spent most of that in Orange County, arguably the next-best utopia after Silicon Valley. But, not liking the crowds, and preferring not to spend half a million bucks for a bungalow, I left for less populated places. I suppose I'd have enjoyed going to Stanford rather than Cal Tech (where I worked but did not matriculate) or Cal State (where I did matriculate, and graduate). I have a ton of friends there, in San Jose and Los Altos and nearby places. But I have a bigger ton of friends now, here, in the southern and western suburbs of Philadelphia. Not exactly a Silicon anything, but it is where I've spent the longest stretch of my life yet, coming up on 20 years. I've retired here, so I reckon another 20 is in the works, God willing.

But we are supposed to be talking about Silicon Valley. The core of its appeal is twofold: Stanford University and nearly perfect weather. (Aside: depends on how you define 'perfect'. I prefer enough rainfall so water doesn't have to be imported.) The ideals set forth at the University's founding and further developed over the decades since have resulted in a nearly perfect climate for entrepreneurship. Somehow, the California legislature agreed, and onerous laws seen in other US states do not exist there. However, when you have a lot of money chasing the usual amount of goods, prices rise. Land along "Investors' Row" on Sand Hill row can cost up to $144 per square foot (the land, not the structures), or nearly $6.3 million per acre. And I thought land was high here, at a quarter million an acre! Imagine paying $750,000 for a 5,000 sq ft lot. And there is no house on it yet! (I live on a 16,000 sq ft lot, valued at $90,000, under a house of modest value, say twice that of the land.) Of course, Sand Hill is commercial, but commercial real estate in this area isn't much over 30% more than residential, for undeveloped land. I certainly hope residential land there is less than a million for a ¼ acre lot!

Well, I suppose if I'd become an internet millionaire, I wouldn't complain about such prices. The amenities are surely attractive. You really can water ski or surf in the morning and snow ski before nightfall. The eateries are nonpareil. There is usually enough gentle wind, in the right direction to keep SF smog going somewhere else. (Another aside. Traveling westward some years ago, as we descended to land in Salt Lake City, I saw it was smog-bound. Flying out westward an hour later, I saw that the smog was flowing through the mountain passes from the west. It covered all of that part of Nevada we flew over. Then I saw it coming over Cajon Pass and others as we approached LAX. It was LA smog, covering a third of the country! SF smog can get as dense, but is not nearly so voluminous.)

The key to Silicon Valley's success is the mind set. Based on the Stanford ethos – if the school wants a student, its huge endowment ensures they can attend for free, but if they don't want you, all the money in the world won't get you in – there is an egalitarian spirit there that ensures almost anyone with an idea to pitch can get some attention, however brief, from a venture capitalist or investment angel. Your idea better be good, but you won't get brushed off just because you don't have a PhD from, say, Georgetown or Harvard, which is what it takes to get to talk to a VC in DC or NYC.

It takes three kinds of people to make a venture a success: Openers, those with the good ideas and a fair notion of how they might be carried out; Closers, those who know how to complete a task once begun; and Producers, the ones you can hire who will hit the ground running and take the Opener's idea and ideals, and develop them to the point that the market-oriented Closers can induce folks to part with cash. A Silicon Valley culture brings these together in abundance, and provides the mental framework in which they can work together without mutual antagonism.

That last phrase is why Bill Gates is a hero of mine, and Steve Jobs is not. Jobs was a jerk, and managed to antagonize, or exile, everyone who didn't agree with him about nearly everything. Bill Gates knows that if two people agree on everything, one of them is redundant. He hired for variety as much as for talent. Though Microsoft is based in Seattle rather than San Jose or thereabouts, it has connections there, and it embodies the Silicon Valley ethos. It is nice to have the surf-n-ski climate and so forth, but it is the quality of mind and openness to the tremendous variety of human thought, that makes an enterprise successful.

Now, that excites me more than the rest, and deserves stronger billing in this book. So, underwhelmed I may be, but I declare it is a book well worth reading, particularly by anyone who might wind up in the Valley someday, or is there but directionless, or someone in one of the other places seeking to replicate its success.

Overconcentrated

kw: technology

I have read a number of articles recently on phones as the new electronic wallet, that will soon replace everything except maybe the large-screen TV (watching Avatar on a 3.6-inch screen is less than impressive). One title was "The End of Cash?", in which people said (on cue), "Oh, my life is on this little phone".

A few million phones are stolen in the U.S. yearly. A wise thief will attempt to snatch the phone either without your knowledge, or when you are far from help, so the race against time (the thief trying to crack your phone and get to your data before you call, on someone else's phone, to suspend service) is in his favor. And until you get a new phone and configure it, you're like an old-time traveler who has lost his Traveler's Checks and is 100 miles from the nearest embassy or AmEx office.

Meantime, paranoid that I am, I am quite happy with my flip phone from the days before smart phones. It makes phone calls, and it can do text. Period. If it gets stolen, the SIM card will contain nothing but a bunch of phone numbers. No apps that link to my banker and stock broker; no access to my retirement plan, or even my medical records. I don't mind the "delays" inherent in doing my banking and such in the same way I have since the 1960s. The only use I have for "online banking" is to make sure I have enough balance before writing a big check, like for a major auto repair. Some "conveniences" come with risks I am not willing to take.

Ghettoizing the internet

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, technology, internet, privacy, polemics

Try this sometime, on a computer that you don't use for your banking or paying bills online (maybe at the public library...): Delete all cookies, go to a search web site of your choice and make a search. Then open the privacy window that lets you read all your cookies and see how many have appeared, all from a single action. There may be very few, or even none, but the top "cookie monster" that I've heard about so far was looking up "depression" on dictionary.com. The harvest? 233 tracking cookies!

Another interesting experiment: Call a friend in the phone, then both of you do the same simple search on Google or Yahoo! or Bing, and tell each other what are the top ten hits. Also take note of how many hits there are (it will probably be in the millions). Or you can make a game of it. Collaborate with five or ten friends to do several searches, chosen beforehand, and see who can collect the most hits, or the fewest (these friends all have to be honest!). It is important that everyone do this from their own home, because search personalization depends on your location, and whether you are logged in or searching anonymously.

Why should there be such differences? That is the subject of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser. The book is a polemic, in the better sense of the word, exposing and decrying practices that disturb the author, and ought to be of concern to all of us. Yet it is not shrill. The 233 cookies example comes from page 6 of the book.

Just looking at my cookie collection, after a run by AdAware that removed a couple dozen tracking cookies, reveals nearly 260 domains that have cookies stored on my computer. Spot checking shows that my e-mail account server keeps 34 cookies; findagrave.com, where I do genealogical research, has 9; and my online bank keeps 8. Even this blog has one cookie stored there. It is safe to say there are at least a few thousand cookies on my computer, and for most of them I don't know whether I really need them.

Cookies are just the tip of the iceberg. Google stores everything we do through its web site, whether we are logged in or not. Google usually knows who we are even when we are not logged in. But our searching and clicking activities are aggregated into a great many categories that are said to be for purposes of "personalization": the company uses our preferences, as evidenced by what we look for and what we look at, to raise or lower the ranking of search results. The days of pure PageRank are long gone. The data about you that Google or Yahoo! or Bing or Amazon have gathered is stored on their own computers. I've even noticed that, when I finish a blog post and publish it, the next screen usually includes one or two ads that are pertinent to the blog post's subject (in case you didn't know, Blogger is a Google product).

What is the danger of personalization? How harmful can it be? That depends on the personality of each of us. I happen to be rather easy to influence when confronted by an authority figure. This is why I gave up live debating many years ago. It is also why I have learned to hang up quickly (even if it is rude) when a telemarketer or pollster calls. Sometimes I am kind enough to say, "No, sorry" before I hang up; sometimes not. Psst! Did you know that many "polls" over the telephone are actually attempts to influence the way you are likely to vote, or a product you might soon buy? Online marketers of both the commercial and political variety are experts at discerning the levers that influence what you will do next. They vary their approach by time of day, by the mood you seem to be in as seen in how you write, and the various profiles about you, such as your FaceBook account.

Here is a FaceBook experiment: Check your News feed, and sort it by time. Then go to the wall of someone with whom you almost never interact, and find something to "Like", or leave a comment or two. Return to News and see if that person's updates have magically appeared. Sometimes it takes leaving several tracks to get this to work. P.S. If you have more than 100 FaceBook friends, keeping up with all of them is quite arduous. Let's all suggest that FB make available a sorted list of interactions so we can figure out a few people to UnFriend.

In eight chapters, Pariser makes his case, that all this personalization has the effect of isolating us, with the technology that was supposed to make us more connected. I have often said that, if two people have all the same opinions, one of them is redundant. We need variety in our lives, but too much personalization removes a great source of variety. If you only see search results that square with your past interests, how will you ever develop new interests? How can we grow? Serendipity, and the matching of diverse topics, drive our creativity. Personalization is a great creativity killer.

The author and others, including the authors of this USA Today article, mention products like Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, TrackerBlock and Do Not Track Plus, as means to cut out part of the tracking. Nothing will eliminate it all. Thus the author suggests political solutions, legislative solutions, in his last two chapters. I am skeptical of the approach. Like dealing with a home invader at 3:00 AM, sometimes the 38 caliber "solution" is the only effective one; the police can only do something after a crime has been committed. Too late.

I have, instead, a suggestion that is in keeping with the way Google and other search sites already work. I suggest prefixes that influence the filters temporarily. I suppose you know if you put "define:jejune" in the search box, the first hit will be a definition. Google has other prefix words. Here are some it needs to add:

• all or every: Results only filtered by the PageRank algorithm that got Google started in the first place.
• serendipity or ser for short: Results deliberately scattered among topical interests.
• anti: Results from an interest set that is the opposite of my own. If I'm liberal, a bunch of right-wing rants; if I'm literary, some scientific and engineering stuff; if I like rock music, some old Roy Rogers or folk music or swing; and so forth.
• statistical or stat: Results based solely on Bayesian statistical ranking, defeating even PageRank.

I am sure some more could be determined. This would shine a light on just what personalized ranking is doing, and we could make better choices as a result.

The other political solution is a series of high-profile lawsuits. To avoid such suits, Google needs to provide a tool to show you what it has on you; FaceBook needs a tool to show you whom it is filtering in and filtering out of your News Feed; and the other aggregating companies out there need to make available to all of us the data that exist about us, and allow us to correct mistakes, of which there are billions I am sure. Otherwise, our entire history will dog us forever, not taking proper account of changes in marital status, religious conversions, or the change in lifestyle that would result from a sudden windfall or its converse, loss of occupational income. How ironic is it if the homeless woman using a library computer is besieged by ads based on her former status as a corporate VP?

The book's website has a "10 Things You Can Do" section that can help us all partially alleviate the effects of the Filter Bubble as it currently exists. On this last day of 2011, I wonder what the coming decade will bring?

It is not just the lamps

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, light, lighting, technology, infrastructure

When I began to read Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox, I was first prompted to consider the various technologies that have been used to light our homes and environment, from campfires to oil lamps to kerosene/mantle lamps to the electric filament bulb to fluorescents and LEDs. And what is next? Thinking about these things, and the continuing quest to produce more light and less heat, was behind this post of a couple days ago.

Ms Brox's book does indeed outline the progress of technologies used to create light, but I realized there is much more involved. There are three basic stages of light production, and each has been supported by a particular infrastructure, without which the light-producing device itself is of comparatively little use.

First, consider the technology of oil lamps, which are basically bowls with a wick and some melted or meltable oily substance. During the thousands (millions?) of years that this technology prevailed, there were the parallel technologies of oil/fat production and rendering, of producing the wicks, of passing the fire from place to place, and of starting the fire if yours has gone out and no near neighbor has any. This last was usually accomplished using a twirled hardwood rod, a dimple or hole in a piece of pine or other softwood, and some tinder.

When more volatile fuels such as light whale oil, kerosene and later coal gas came into use, primarily in Europe and America, there was a parallel development of chemical knowledge. Thus, while a technology for distributing fuels grew until it culminated in the neighborhood gas house and the piping systems that brought gaslight to homes and street corners, strikable matches and flint/steel strikers were also developed to make it easier to light one's lamps.

Finally, although the first incandescent electric light was energized in 1802 by Humphrey Davy, it took another 77 years of experimentation by many, including Edison's technicians, for a practical lamp to be produced. We give Edison credit for the bulb, but forget that his greater accomplishment was the infrastructure that made the bulb practical. The batteries of the day could only energize one of his bulbs for a short time, perhaps a few hours. Keeping that first bulb lit for fourteen hours until its glass envelope cracked was no mean feat, requiring the swapping of batteries in relays.

Thomas Edison envisioned a system of dynamos and underground, shielded wiring that would take care of the needs of a neighborhood at a time. His preference (almost a mania) for DC rather than AC current eventually led to his system being eclipsed by an AC infrastructure developed by George Westinghouse, based on Edison's but with the addition of transforming equipment so that power sent over a longer distance could be boosted to a higher voltage, reducing resistive losses in the wiring.

One characteristic of each successive infrastructure system has been increasing fragility. Thus, a few late chapters in the book cover the great blackout of 1965 and subsequent blackout events, and the efforts that are still being made to make "the grid" ever more robust and reliable. To meet the needs of the later 21^st Century in America and Europe, at the very least, new trunk lines and newer switching equipment needs to be set up. It won't be cheap, but not doing it will eventually be hugely more costly. China, India and other major developing countries in Asia and Africa are watching our progress, so they can get their infrastructure right the first time.

With many business places lit entirely by fluorescent light, lighting consumes less than 8% of our energy budget. With many middle class homes using more and more CFL lamps, and a switch to LED's just beginning, this amount will decrease even more. But our use of light is the most visible manifestation of our electrical society. As we learn to make more light while using less energy to produce it, we also need to improve the efficiency of all our uses of energy.

I am reminded of something I learned forty years ago. AC power has this characteristic, that its use is less efficient if the voltage and current get out of phase. "Inductive" loads, such as electric motors, cause current to lag the voltage. "Capacitive" loads, and there are no simple examples, cause the current to lead instead. There are nearly no large electricity consuming devices that are capacitive, meaning that most industry operates with lagging current and its inherent inefficiencies. As it turns out, a type of electric motor called a synchronous motor acts as a large capacitive load. I don't understand the physics of it, so I can't explain why. Anyway, the primary market for large synchronous motors is major industrial plants that install them and keep them running just to balance the phase of their electricity, which significantly reduces their electric bill! I wonder if this would work at the house level. If I look at the transformers on the power poles up the street, I can see that some are accompanied by large capacitors, almost the size of the transformers, that the power company has installed to keep their own system in balance. Maybe there is a way to add a large capacitor or a synchronous motor in parallel with my furnace fan (the largest motor in the house). Don't hold your breath, but I do plan to look into this. Haven't given the matter any thought since 1970 until today!

The last chapter of the book is devoted to the loss of dark skies as we have gone to more and more street and exterior lighting. Not only is it inefficient, there is growing concern that it doesn't do as much as we thought to reduce crime. Perhaps just a little light is better than too much, while still being better than none at all. On my last visit to Japan, while my father-in-law was still living, I was told that he had installed most of the neighborhood's walkway lights. They were a series of single-tube fluorescent fixtures, and while they were nowhere near as bright as the lighting in my neighborhood, they were quite adequate for finding one's way around after dark. It was also easier to see the stars in the sky, which I much enjoy. His lights are probably very close to the amount of light we genuinely need, and a lot more economical than the way most American cities are lighted at present. Thanks to the author of Brilliant for such a thought-provoking book!

Light and heat in the front room

kw: analysis, light, technology

The way to make light, that is, to create photons, is to accelerate electrons. The oldest technology for doing this is to burn something. The hot carbon atoms in a candle flame emit light because the molecular collisions due to the heat knock electrons about. Also, carbon particles in the same flame emit light because the heat energy in the particles is carried by electron interactions, some of which produces "incandescent" photons. Neither process is particularly efficient, which is why lighting a room with candles, kerosene lamps, or gaslight creates a lot of heat. All the technologies of making light are driven by the need to do so at lower cost in power consumed, that is, in heat emitted.

I got to wondering how little heat I can produce while producing the light I want in my front room, by means of various technologies. There are two scenarios: (1) I am reading by myself; (2) We have guests. In the first case, I do quite nicely with one 18-watt CFL in a lamp that used to have a 75-watt tungsten bulb. The amount of light is equivalent, about 1100 lumens. The bulb's efficiency can be expressed as about 15 lumens per watt; the CFL's is about 62 lm/w.

In the second case, we add a stand light that has three 13-watt CFL's and a torchiere fitted with a screw fixture and a 23-watt CFL. That total of 80 watts of CFL's at 62 lm/w produces about 4,950 lumens. The same amount of light once needed 330 watts of incandescent bulbs.

But what if I had to use gaslight or candlelight? The former produces about 0.6 lm/w, the latter about half that. These watts are now counted as heat of burning. At 0.6 lm/w, 4,950 lumens requires more than 8,000 watts of heat. And candles? 16,000 watts seems an inconceivable amount! A heat pump type furnace consumes 3,000 watts to produce 10,000 watts of heat transfer. Even in winter, you'd drive everyone from the room in short order. This is why in the days of combustion-type lighting, the parlors were lit quite a bit more dimly than they are today.

And what of the future? Will LED's do better? The present state-of-the-art LED (so far only in the lab) produces 90 lm/w. I could light my room with 55 watts. That is a little better than today's 80 watts. LED's produce light by more cleverly accelerating electrons within certain semiconductor materials. The "white" ones in LED flashlights use a blue LED and a yellow wideband phosphor that converts part of the blue to green, yellow and red.

The theoretical maximum efficiency for an LED, using multi-colored emitters rather than fluorescent conversion, is either 200 or 250 lm/w, depending on the color mix, whether "flat white" or "center-hump". At 250 lm/w, I could produce 4,950 lumens using only 20 watts. Now, that's a goal worth shooting for.

Me not robot, me Person

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, manifestos, technology

Computationalism (noun): The belief that human thought processes are entirely describable as computations, or can be perfectly mimicked by computations. Coined by Jaron Lanier and published in his book You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto.

Try this. The next time you search using Google or Yahoo (or whatever), locate a site that answers your question that is not from Wikipedia or another Wikimedia entity. In just under ten years, this most successful of web 2.0 products has become the "go to" place for information. It is the exemplar of the now-popular notion that "the wisdom of crowds" is somehow greater than the wisest individual. Try telling that to Jaron Lanier, and he'll likely ask which crowd would have produced the special or general theory of relativity, or nylon, or the Hubble space telescope.

I made a few Google searches, with the following results: The first hit for Mayflower Compact, E coli, geomorphology, Edison, and Churchill was wikipedia; for life insurance and bioinformatics wikipedia was the second and for metabolic engineering it was third. Making almost any "what is" query yielded a first hit from Wikimedia Answers. But make the experiment yourself. You are likely to find that the non-wiki site has better content.

Lanier's book is primarily a push-back against the more dewy-eyed predictions of the promoters of web 2.0, which began as a synonym for Semantic Web (that is, the web itself "understanding" meaning), and morphed into a looser composition of interactive services including blogs, wikis and "the cloud". The phrase "wisdom of the crowd" underlies many web 2.0 dreams. All too often, the crowd becomes a mob, and little wisdom results.

The author first tackles the concept of lock-in. While there may be many ways to do something, only one or a few become predominant, and often not the best way(s), just because of history. The classic example is the QWERTY keyboard. Few know that the prototype typewriter had an alphabetical keyboard. Typists soon gained sufficient speed to jam keys frequently, so the keyboard was carefully redesigned to slow them down! 75% of common words are typed entirely or all but one letter using the left hand on the QWERTY keyboard. No alternative keyboard has become popular, even though several designs make typing easier and faster, for someone learning for the first time (I once spent a month learning to use the Dvorak keyboard. It was too late; I'm locked-in to QWERTY).

The most telling example from computer science is the UNIX/Linux set of operating systems, which are designed around a command-line interface. Windowing systems laid on top of these systems (including their close cousin MS-DOS, which underlies MS Windows) are sending commands to a command-line interface. This makes it very, very hard to write truly real-time responsive software. Current systems are responsive only because they run on CPU's that can perform a few billion operations per second. It takes a lot of overhead to turn a "command" into a few simple instructions that request the CPU to perform what the user is really asking for.

It seems that modern culture is based on the mash-up. Like "mix tracks" made of snippets of favorite songs, everything is being mashed together, with little thought of the creativity that went into the original productions. While it can be quite creative to produce a collage, the collage-maker must rely on truly creative artists to produce the works that are cut up to make it. When the collage-maker gets more recognition (and money) than the original artists, what incentive is there for artists to produce more art? They have to get "day jobs" to keep body and soul together, and produce much less art as a consequence.

I built a forty-year career upon the premise that people ought to do what people do better than machines, and machines ought to do what they do better than people. Confusing these categories is bad for both people and their machines. Lanier has a very similar stance, and it underlies one of his principal complaints. Technological lock-in, as mentioned above, is one result of trying to make people conform to what is overly easy for machines. But things can change. For many tasks, mouse clicks are much better than keyboard commands. The recent spate of gesture-driven devices such as the I-pad gives hope that innovation is continuing. And I like the Kinect attachment for the XBox 360. For tasks where it is appropriate, particularly for an immersive virtual environment, it is a large step in the right direction.

Thus, the last quarter or third of the book is more optimistic. The author, a working musician, has looked for working artists who are able to make a living by distributing their work over the internet. The number is discouragingly few. However, a trend is just arising toward a compensation scheme similar to pay-per-view on cable TV, but more equitable (and lots cheaper, individually). Though he does not mention it, the Netflix model of movie distribution is a step in the right direction. My brother, a self-published author, has found that Amazon is a great way to eliminate the middle man, and that having a relationship with a print-on-demand publisher completes the circle of resources an author needs. As more books are published electronically to Kindles and Nooks, and to print-on-demand for those who love paper, fewer authors will need either agents or the big publishing houses to market and distribute their books. This aspect of web 2.0 seems to be largely positive.

And Lanier thinks it can be more and more positive if we can step back from the wilder claims and take advantage of what the web can do for us in a practical way. The web is not just a lot of machines. Behind the machines we find hordes of very talented people. Without them the machines do nothing. Only people can either have or confer meaning. Only people innovate. People make things work. Even an "inference engine" that produces (actually, reproduces) inventions, was programmed by some person(s). So far, no machine-designed machine has gone beyond the capabilities of the original machine without human help. Until we understand much more deeply what consciousness is, none ever will. And maybe not even then.

As a working programmer, I can verify the author's contention that only small programs can be made to work perfectly. The larger a program gets, the larger the number of intractable bugs it will contain. There is an axiom in this business, "A large computer program that works grew out of a small program that worked." A huge system like Linux or Windows will have thousands of programming errors, and in addition, will have thousands of unexpected behaviors because no complete flow chart of stimulus and response can be produced.

With that in mind, consider that the human brain contains 10 billion neurons and 100 billion glial cells. The average neuron has 7,000 synapses to other neurons, and a smaller number to the neighboring glia. This means that an average brain has something like 100 trillion connections. A computer simulation of ten neurons with complete connectivity among them is a huge challenge for a supercomputer. And just in case nobody else noticed, Moore's Law for processor cycle time ended about five years ago. The primary way to get more speed from our computers is now to add more and more processors. The software to parcel out a problem to multiple processors is difficult and buggy. We're not at risk of a computer "brain" superseding us anytime soon.

Computers have the potential to free us to be more human. Far too many techno-enthusiasts have been busy finding ways to make people more like machines. This violates our humanity. So does trying to make the machine "too human". Let the machines do what they do well, and the humans do what they do well. We remain irreplaceable.