Tag Archives: technology

The path not taken in Silicon Valley

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The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the original Internet of Things by John Tinnell is a really interesting read in the context of the latest developments in AI. I do have a boundless appetite for books about the history of the industry, and was intrigued by this as I’d never heard of Mark Weiser. The reason for that gap, even though he ran the computer science lab at Xerox PARC, is probably that his philosophy of computing lost out. In a nutshell, he was strongly opposed to tech whose smartness involved making people superfluous.

Based on his reading of philosophers from Heidegger and (Michael) Polanyi to Merleau-Ponty, Weiser opposed the Cartesian mind-body dualism involved in Turing’s (1950) paper and the subsequent development of late 20th century digital technologies focused on ‘machines that think’, electronic brains. He aimed to develop computing embedded in the environment to support humans in their activities, rather than computing via screens that aimed to bring the world to people but through a barrier of processing. In one talk, he gave the analogy of what makes words useful. Libraries gather many words in a central location and are of course very useful. But words that ‘disappear’ into the environment are also useful, like street signs and labelling on packages in the supermarket. Nobody would be able to shop efficiently if there were no words on the soup cans, and they had to go to a library to refer to a directory of shelf locations to find the tomato flavour.

Weiser emphasised also the role of the human body in knowledge and communication: “The human body, whatever form it took, was a medium not a machine.” In a dualist conception of mind and body it seems to be reasonable to think about a machine substituting for the activities of the mind. But the body’s senses are not information processors, and cannot be substituted by digital sensors. Embodied human experience in the world is part of human knowledge. Weiser became highly sceptical of the industry’s trajectory whereby software more and more “dictated what could and could not happen in a place.” Rather than mediating between the physical world and humans, tech should be looking to augment the material world in useful ways (hence the subtitle about the original Internet of Things).

Weiser died young, another possible reason why he is not better known. One can imagine though what he would have thought of generative AI. The book’s Introduction ends with a quote from Lewis Mumford: “The machine is just as much a creature of thought as the poem.” These AI products have been imagined as disembodied brains that get in the way of our direct experience of the world and indeed increasingly limit our ability to shape the world we want. A really interesting read, and one that will send me off to read other things – including the work of a PARC ethnographer who is really the second hero of this book, Lucy Suchman.

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Not engineering

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This week I read Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial, first published in 1969, and must confess to not knowing what to make of it. He contrasts ‘the artificial’ to ‘the natural’ but also more specifically applies it to complex systems designed to adapt to their environment, and compares arenas such as economics, management, and engineering systems. The point is then to analyse what properties they have in common, on the basis of information theory. The aim is evidently to present a common analysis of the various types of system considered. So far, so good. And as Professor Google tells me, the book was very influential in the design of computer systems and design theory more generally.

Beyond that? Well, I asked Bard, which said:

“The book argues that artificial systems can be studied scientifically, just like natural systems. Simon defines an artificial system as “a system that has been brought into being by human design.” He argues that artificial systems are not just imitations of natural systems, but are in fact a distinct class of systems with their own properties and laws.

Simon then goes on to discuss the various aspects of artificial systems that can be studied scientifically. He covers topics such as the design of algorithms, the nature of problem solving, and the role of heuristics in decision making. He also discusses the relationship between artificial systems and human intelligence.”

Very timely, then. But I’m hard pushed to summarise what the conclusions are, and allergic to the strong positivism of it. As readers of Cogs and Monsters will know, I think economic systems differ from engineering systems in important ways, and are not amenable to exactly the same kind of ‘scientific’ analysis. The ‘sciences of the artificial’ seem like they do well in analysis of algorithmic systems, but not so much – contrary to the claim in the book – for education, art and architecture, or indeed economics.

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Internet empires – their rise and decline?

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Has the American Empire simply moved online? That’s the argument made in an enjoyable polemic by Sean Ennis, Internet Empire: The Hidden Digital War. It’s a book with two strands. One about wars and empires through history: what motivates conflict, how empires grab territory when the economic advantages outweigh the costs of maintaining the colonies, why empires either collapse or survive.

This is braided with an account of how the US (and, thanks to protection of its domestic market, China) won near-global dominance of the internet and the money to be made from the internet for its own companies. Marvellous technology, an economic system favouring enterprise and investment, and active policy support from successive US governments have created the market-dominant players who shape modern life.

Hence, “The core thesis of this book is that the modern-day internet structure is economically equivalent to what, in prior times, would have been an empire acquired through aggression into new territories.” The aggression this time has involved weapons such as effective lobbying/political blackmail over tax and trade policies, control of domain names, non-enforcement of antitrust policies to enable the giants to grow, and so on. It’s an interesting analogy although I’m not persuaded that commercial and actual conflict/conquest are really similar.

The US succeeded where France’s earlier Minitel system did not, the book argues, because Minitel was a closed interface system run by a state-owned incumbent telco – whereas in the US, AOL tried this approach in the early internet days but dropped this when the attractions of the open internet to users became both evident and available through browsers and the web. “The unquestionable French lead in the release of digital technology was squandered by the country.”

This prompts two reflections. One is that the book – in asking with Europe has no internet giants – ignores the advantage of scale. When there are high fixed costs and netwrok effects, the bigger the addressable market the better.

The other is that if open beats closed in the end, are the current internet giants undermining their own success? For what they are trying to do is tie users in ever-more tightly, and exploiting this captive market to degrade their services – just think how much search results have deteriorated on Google or Amazon. Meanwhile Mr Musk is similarly degrading the attractiveness of Twitter. The width of the open goal they are presenting to newcomers with their own great technology is increasing by the day. Regulators and competition authorities can help by mandating more, much more, open data and interoperability – as the Bundeskartellamt seems to be doing.

Still, as the book concludes, we can all do something. It ends with a list of To Dos: use multiple platforms – click away from Google. Buy direct from sellers even if it’s a bit less convenient. Go to the local high street to shop. Pay for a newspaper. In short, give up just a bit of the convenience and cost-saving to keep the digital giants on their toes and maybe open the way for new ones to come along. I’m sceptical individual action will make a big difference although happy to encourage the use of Hirschman’s Exit and Voice disciplines. It’s going to take policy choices, and almost certainly by the EU, to reshape digital markets.

Internet Empire The Hidden Digital War

Against social media?

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Anti-social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan was published in 2018; I can’t remember how it came to be in the in-pile. Anyway, it’s an interesting analysis that does what it says in the subtitle, and does so far better than the massively over-hyped and underwhelming Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshan Zuboff the following year. The chapter each focus on a theme: surveillance, attention, privacy, protest etc.

Despite the title – and indeed the conclusion – each is quite measured and nuanced. For instance, I like his definition of privacy: “The word more accurately describes the ways we manage our reputations within and among various contexts,” rather than the all-or-nothing way it’s usually discussed. I’ve been using a similar concept, of “privacy in public,” the wish to reveal specific information to specific people for a purpose. Similarly his co-ordination problem argument for regulating social media rather than leaving it to companies themselves. Or his masterly debunking of the Cambridge Analytica claim to being all-effective at winning the Trump election.

So there’s a lot to like in the book. It doesn’t quite add up though. Although it’s mostly about Facebook, other Big Tech firms slip in as miscreants – so why were they left out in the first place? I suppose attention has turned now to the Musk-ing of Twitter so we’re less focused on Facebook than was the case in 2018, and that doesn’t mean the issues have gone away.

More than that, the regulators and politicians should be part of the story. It has taken until late 2022 for competition authorities to start to get tough, and in the UK the patchy Online Safety Bill is still chugging through the legislative process. Why was the policy world so slow to act? I sometimes wonder what would have happened if social media companies had been regulated as publishers right from the start – an option that was discussed and rejected back in the day. Now there’s an alternative history.

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Money stuff

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Modern money is intangible, electrons whizzing around – unlike older forms of money, whether paper and coin, or wartime cigarettes, or huge stone wheels. Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks and Other Money Stuff, edited by Bill Maurer and Lana Swartz, is a reminder that even the 1s and 0s have a material basis – such as credit card machines, dongles, mobile phones, and indeed the whole physical infrastructure of the wired and wireless networks and the electricity network. What’s more, the less tangible the tokens of exchange, the more important the accounting system recording transactions. This explains the emphasis crypto folks put on the blockchain, but as one of the essays in the book points out, this has its drawback as nothing is reversible, not even transactions that ought to be reversed. There is no substitute for trust in a co-ordinating institution that keeps record.

The book is a nicely illustrated collection of essays by money afficionados from different disciplines, and spanning the Inca civilisation to Dogecoin. As a collection, there’s no central argument – except that we would do well to remember the physical and social embededness of money. There are lots of, “Well, who knew?” moments, which makes it an enjoyable read – at least if you have a fact-magpie mind like mine. I particular enjoyed Keith Hart’s reminiscence of becoming a fence and money lender during his PhD fieldwork in Ghana – which gave rise to the notion of the informal economy; I’ve met Keith (a fellow Mancunian) and love his book The Memory Bank.

Also Swartz’s essay about cash, and the notion that technological innovation in money – the Diners Club card and later credit cards – was forced by the postwar economic boom and associated travel. It reminded me of my first job at the Treasury in the 1980s, trying to find a monetary aggregate that wouldn’t grow too damn quickly for a monetarist government, at a time when rapidly increasing use of ATMs and credit cards was affecting the velocity of money and making monetary aggregate control a hopeless task.

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