On Robots' Imitation Lips: You Are So Human!

When did it become a compliment to describe someone as a machine?

What I am talking about are those times when someone might say to another person, "You are a machine!" or "He/She is a machine!" Typically I hear these kinds of kinds of comments in the context of some athletic competition or some other kind of grueling physical labor. The suggestion seems to be that the person is acting in a manner that displays valuable machine like qualities such as an unrelenting effort to complete some task in an efficient and precise manner.

Why don't we ever compliment someone with the expression, "You are a human!" or "He/She is a human!"?

Granted, such a compliment lacks a certain specificity, but it does point to an interesting curiosity in comparing a person to a machine.

If I were to see a robot running in a fluid and relentless fashion, I would be considerably less impressed than seeing a human, world class, marathon runner near the end of a stunning race. It is precisely because someone is a finite human being and is performing some grueling physical labor in a determined, efficient, and precise manner that we are so often impressed and feel the need to compliment and acknowledge his or her admirable efforts. But such a performance only becomes significant to us against the backdrop of a finite creature that could and often does not perform so well. That is, it is precisely because we know that humans so often do stumble, trip, fall, and tire from exhaustion that when they do not, we look twice and admire.

Depending on where we choose to place the emphasis we are left with the choice of "He/She is a machine!" or "He/She is a human being!"

Increasingly, I think there is a place for acknowledging and affirming the human dimension of excellent performances.

Perhaps someday there will be advanced robots that compliment one another by saying "You are a human!" In the strangeness of such an expression on robots imitation lips, we may begin to ponder what our own finite, humanity means.

Advice to Independent Programmers: Stay young, Stay Small, Go Dancing

With the massive popularity of "apps" (short for computer applications) these days, chances are many of us have benefitted from the work of independent computer programmers operating on a small scale (either alone or in small groups). Such work is in contrast to that of mega corporations like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc., that employ armies of computer programmers to create and sustain flagship products (i.e. Microsoft Office, iLife, etc.). While I do appreciate the work of these larger companies, and have benefitted considerably from their "apps," I am increasingly impressed by what a single programmer or small group of programmers are able to accomplish (i.e. YummySoup by Ken Humbard, or Instapaper by Marco Arment).

It is not that the apps of independent programmers are without their glitches or that they demonstrate a perfectly complete and beautifully functional product (as we all know, even major software programs like Word fall short in that respect). Instead, what impresses me is the tremendous responsiveness and candidness I have often observed amongst many independent, small scale, computer programmers. Their apps are living creations undergoing frequent updates as new problems are discovered and new features added. Often these programmers maintain blogs or release statements explaining new updates that display a candidness that is lacking in the bureaucratic officialdom of many (though, not all) larger tech companies.

I do not doubt that there are many considerate, thoughtful, and helpful people working on app development at the larger companies, but I increasingly believe that the size of those companies combined with the intricate layers of process and procedure that becomes mandated in those environments often dampens a certain ability to meet with the users of any given app in a refreshingly smart, useful, candid, agile, and caring manner.

More and more, I want to say to small scale, independent programmers: "Stay small, you are growing too fast, enjoy your youth. Or better yet, as Death Cab for Cutie extols on their recent album (Code and Keys), 'Stay young, go dancing.'"

Am I selfish in wanting independent programmers to maintain small-scale operations? Does my advice amount to a call to refuse substantial economic profit by growing larger?

At the heart of my reflection here is this thought, how do we measure meaningful and valuable growth? Does the economic bottom line indeed capture all of the relevant variables for a good product or a good organization, in which case growing in size and profit is a sign of success. Or does growth involve something more?

Is small in fact beautiful as E.F. Shumacher proclaimed? Or can small organizations with excellent products and services in fact be giants as Bo Burlingham argues?

Remembering to Remember in an E-Book World

Over at Wired Magazine, John Abell has an article offering five reasons why E-books aren't there yet. The "there" he is referring to is being a replacement for the printed book. Of his reasons, I found his first the most interesting:

"An unfinished e-book is not a constant reminder to finish it."

Unlike a printed book that sits on your nightstand or on a desk, e-books lurk in the ether of the digital world pressed between computer circuits obscured by the shell of an e-book reader. As a result, it is often easier to forget about a half-read e-book compared to a half-read printed book.

What I find interesting about this insight is the way in which the physical presence of the book- its weight, its length and width, the colors on its cover, the texture of its binding, the shade of white of its pages- is often vital to the act of remembering.

Certainly, we can take deliberate steps to remember unfinished e-books (perhaps an electronic alert system when we first turn on the e-book reader), but such effort is of a decidedly different kind than the several books that I keep at the edge of my vision on my desk.

An astute reader at this point will ask, though, but how is it different and why is that significant?

Efficiency is perhaps the most obvious answer, the energy required to set a book on the edge of my desk as a reminder is decidedly less than setting up an alert system on an electronic device and then also remembering to occasionally turn on the device. In the world of electronic reminders we need reminders to check our reminders. And therein perhaps we begin to grasp at something significant.

A physical book establishes a presence in my environment, my home, my workspace. I might be able to hide that book away, but somewhere in the course of my day or weeks, or year, I am likely to stumble upon its rude physicality, as it dimensions and quality exact a certain amount of attention and response from me.

Alternatively, an e-book always threatens to disappear into the digital void that I do not inhabit, nor ever will. I will not stumble upon an e-book in the midst of moving or sorting through old books, rather, with the ease with which an e-book comes into my world, so it also disappears.

Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, half-read books or e-books are not so alarming as to favor one style of remembering over the other. But I wonder, what about people? As we carry out more of our interactions with other people online, how does our remembering change? What kind of presence does an embodied person occupy in my life versus the electronic profile of some individual on Facebook or the name of some person on an email in by digital inbox? Are electronic relationships more ephemeral than the relationship with a flesh and blood person that has decided to stop by for a cup of coffee? If so, to what effect? Put dramatically, do we leave the acknowledged existence of other persons in our lives up to the chance circumstances of whether the power is on and the internet working?

Deliberately choosing a slow technology

Often the promise of new technologies hinges on the faster speeds that they offer to the user. But should we be so quick to always adopt those technological implements that get the job done faster?

Certainly, there is the questionable assumption that time is money. If time is money then the argument goes that we maximize our economic profit by decreasing the amount of time that it takes us to perform any given task.

While I do not doubt that we can benefit from performing many tasks faster, I sometimes wonder if there is something also to be gained by slowing down.

In particular, I think about when I was much younger and we still used a dial up internet connection. All those familiar with that process will remember the characteristic dial tone over the computer speakers, the warble and static of a connection being made, a dramatic pause, and then, hopefully, success with the accompanied feeling of "I am now on the internet."

What was significant about that process was that in the space between clicking "Connect" and waiting for the dial up connection to work its magic, I had some time to think. I had time to think about what precisely I wanted to see or do on the internet, I had time to think about homework that still needed to be done, or if the dial up connection was being particularly slow to begin, I had time to think about whether I even wanted to go on the internet.

Today, with my always on internet connection, I do not have the space for such thoughts. Sure, I can think about these things before I sit down to my computer. But my point is that the nature of the technology no longer creates (even accidentally) a space in which to think deliberately about the task ahead.

This makes me wonder, in an effort to think more intentionally about my use of the internet and what I see or do on the internet, would I benefit from deliberately choosing a slower internet connection? Or more generally, do I stand to gain from technologies that actually move at a slower pace, and thereby create a space in which I can think about my use of that technology?

Why I still read a paper newspaper in an increasingly digital world

In a world where I can aggregate hundreds of digital news sources in a single application on my computer or iPod, or dart from one news site to the next on the web, why do I still read a physical newspaper published by one news company?

Economically it is dramatically cheaper to subscribe to free or low cost digital news sources than it is to subscribe to a physical newspaper, and yet, year after year I renew my subscription. As a student on a low budget, such choices are not insignificant.

My reasons for reading a physical newspaper seem to accumulate with time. Here are some of those that come to mind.

-I grew up always seeing my dad reading a paper newspaper. Role models are a powerful thing.

-I enjoy the fact that I can find myself relative to the paper newspaper. That is, as a physical object, my body is in spatial relationship to the paper. I am not sure where I am supposed to imagine my body being when reading electronic news sources. At best, I might position myself relative to a computer, but the webpages themselves seem to come from a non-place without perspective and depth; they just are. As such, when I read my newspaper in the morning at the table or in one of our reading chairs, I experience myself in a place that has a certain tactile feel and sensory routine that is sprawled across and arranged by the physical space. The internet provides me with a much more ambiguous experience.

-I think that the mediums that we write and read in do shape how we think. As such, I am not ready to see the end of print journalism. I think that something significant would be lost. So I will do my small part to give some revenue to maintain that industry.

-Serendipity. In a world where so much is available for customization, I appreciate the fact that I don't choose the stories that I will encounter in my morning newspaper. Therein, I maintain an ability to still be genuinely surprised and excited sometimes by what I come across in the newspaper.

These are some of my reasons for why I still read a physical newspaper.

The Metaphors of Digital Experience

Desktops, docks, windows, folders, pages, toolboxes, galleries, surfing, maps, browsing, scrolling...

These, and more, are the metaphors and labels that we use to make sense of our digital experience. I am struck by the fact that were I to select a few of the terms (desktop, windows, pages, toolbox, maps, scrolling, gallery), I might be well on my way to describing an author's writing corner, or a mapmakers workshop, or a craftsman's tool space, or an artist's exhibition. As high tech and cutting edge as computers, smartphones, and the internet are, they still retain the images of life grounded in concrete practices and traditions that have been practiced for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 

Is this a failure of our language to develop new terminology? Or, is it an intentional, though collective, move on our part to maintain a connection with the past? If it is the latter, do we or should we have a commitment to maintain and cultivate those concrete practices of writing, mapmaking, artistry, and craftsmanship that provide the dominant metaphors of our digital experience? If we fail to maintain these practices, what will become of our metaphors? And if our metaphors change, how will our digital experience change? 

iPad Commandments in the High Church of Technology

When I first watched the Matrix films, I thought it was strange how much religious imagery and practice was brought to bear on and synthesized with the machines and high technology of the Matrix world. But increasingly I have realized that it was not strange at all in the sense that technological gadgetry and innovation constitutes the image of the good life that many people in our current society have (think Ray Kurzweil as an extreme example). As James K.A. Smith observes in his recent book, Desiring the Kingdom, whatever makes up our picture of the good life, the flourishing life, is what we cannot help but worship to some degree. This does not entail that such things are always worthy of worship, but nonetheless, they are the profound ends to which our most basic desires yearn for and seek to bring about through daily endeavors.

This was underscored with the recent release of the iPad, to which the above "iPad commandments" allude. In reading the media stories leading up to the iPad release, one might have thought that some kind of savior was arriving to rescue us from our fallen state of digital existence brought on by wrongly choosing and using technologies we should not have. Perhaps I exaggerate, but if so, not by much. In a world of so much tragedy (wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, AIDS crisis in Africa, insufficient food and clean water for children throughout the world, earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people, and the list goes on) we are desperate for something to mark signs of progress out of the tragic and towards our vision of the good life, the flourishing life.

I am skeptical of faith in and worship of the promise of technology, though. Whatever solutions technology might offer, the constant peril is that they often fail to require any transformation of the behavior on our part that led to the problem in the first place. Perhaps this is why the church of high technology is so popular, it gives us everything we want without demanding confession, repentance, or atonement.

End of Publishing?

Got tuned into this video over on David Rothman's blog. It is a phenomenal illustration, be sure to watch the whole video.

The Beginnings of a Digital Ecology

Voices in the modern ecology movement have called for us to reconnect in deep and meaningful ways with our environments. One articulate proponent of such reform has been Michael Pollan, a journalist that wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and An Eater's Manifesto. His particular efforts have been to help us re-discover precisely what it is we are all eating on a regular basis, how it was found, cooked, manufactured,synthesized, shipped, etc. Bill McKibben, another prominent voice in the modern ecology movement, calls for deep economies conditioned by an intimate attunement to one's neighborhood and surroundings on a local level in contrast to broad economies that expand ever outwards but never deeper.

It strikes me that in this high tech age, where so many of us spend countless hours each day working on our computers we need a kind of digital ecology movement. How many of us if pressed could explain in any significant detail how our computers function, what they are made of, how software works with hardware, how all of the hardware fits together, etc? Yet, we are remarkably dependent on these machines that we do not know; we use them to store our photos, our documents, our music, to communicate with clients, customers, friends, and family, to create blogs and magazine layouts and films. Computers represent a significant investment of ourselves, they are the means by which we often think, remember, and communicate. And yet, while we reap all of the benefits of these devices, we are out of touch with precisely what makes it all possible. Is this irresponsible? Do we set ourselves up for disaster by trusting something so much that we do not understand in any significant degree? To be sure, we often invest ourselves in and trust other people with aspects of ourselves, but even there when we may not know the other person completely we at least share with them a common humanity, whereby we imagine that they have a similar kind of interior thought life to our own, that is, we do not imagine that we are merely interacting with zombies. And yet, we do not have this connection to computers, they have aura of the mysterious about them, shrouded and cloaked in an opaque container.

This is not an invitation to get rid of our computers, but rather to connect with them on a deeper level. That  is, to attempt to understand how they function, why they function that way, what the limits are on what they can do because of their particular configurations, and accordingly how software and hardware ultimately interacts with us, the users.

With My Head in the Cloud of Information

A recent issue of The Economist had a feature story on the information deluge that characterizes these modern times. While it has been said for a long time that we are living in the information age, our understanding of what that means continues to be reconfigured by the massive amounts of data that are currently being generated, processed, stored, and utilized around the world. In that article from The Economist, the writer observes that when the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy.

But as has now been observed in several sectors, just because we are able to collect massive amounts of data does not mean that we know how to utilize all of the data. In some ways it seems human beings in a modern age have resigned themselves to a pack rat mentality of collecting things simply for the sake of collecting without any clear sense that the items will have value or utility now or in the future.

So it is that I find myself standing at the edge of the proverbial hard drive looking into the great cloud of information and data that pervades digital existence. I am at once so aware of so many things, yet unable to effectively engage with any of them. Information is supposed to empower, but in the face of its sheer volume it has a strangely dis-empowering effect.

I do not mean to sound hopelessly despairing about the current information age. I think there is reason to maintain a sense of hope, and will explore that conviction in future posts. But what I do want to underscore is the need for something beyond the data or information alone.  Data alone simply cannot sustain and help us to create the kinds of lives, I think, we would like to live as human beings.