Technology, Humanity, Destiny (Part 1)

There has always been a latent suspicion of knowledge, at least in Western culture. As early as the Genesis story the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil was the source of all human ills on earth. It was not how they lived up to the point of that acquisition, for God obviously approved of what it had created. It was the knowledge that the way they were living was immoral, hence the fig leaf. But worse than their lifestyle, was the fact that they had partaken of their creator's knowledge. In this foundation story for Christian civilization knowledge is therefore evil.

Again, Faust has to sell his soul to the Devil in order to acquire knowledge, which human beings are not supposed to have.

When knowledge began to be applied to the physical world technology, which consists of that application, made real that erstwhile vague suspicion. The Luddites set about destroying the machines of technology as they saw them robbing them of jobs and the sustenance of life.

The threat of technology to not only human welfare, but to human self esteem took root early in the 19^th century. The story of John Henry the steel driving railroad hero competing with the new steam-driven machine portrayed a human who would not let a machine deprive him of his sense of self-worth based on his strength. In this age of mechanical technology the machine was competing with the human body.

Then came the bitter acceptance of defeat by the machine as Charlie Chaplin could not keep up with his relentless assembly line in Modern Times and was last seen enmeshed in the gears of the monster he serviced. In somewhat the same vein Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis portrayed a dystopia ruled by an intellectual elite high in their towering skyscrapers controlling a regimented laboring class doomed to service the blast furnaces and factories of immense heartless machines.

In all of this rebellion against technology the underlying theme was the machine's competing with the human body and winning.

With the advent of the computer in the 20^th century the machine began to compete with the human brain. In the 1957 movie Desk Set the John Henry competition between human and machine breaks out in a corporate reference library. Spencer Tracy is demonstrating his new computer system designed to quickly answer reference questions. This corporate function has been traditionally performed by a small crew of highly skilled reference librarians. It is interesting to note that when it comes to brain-machine competition females replace male. In this early example of human-computer competition, humans win. By the early 1990's HAL, the computer antagonist of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, starts killing his masters, but is eliminated by the last surviving human on the spaceship who progressively disconnects HAL from the power and information it needs--a close call for the humans.

In an earlier column I mentioned Ray Kurzweil's book Singularity and its argument that artificial intelligence superior to human intelligence is on the near horizon of technological development and that the U. S. military is already wrestling with how much self control to give a combat robot.

In all the above comment on technology I do not mean to imply that it has provided no benefits. It obviously has. The inherent and generally disregarded fact is , however, that the very benefits, say the immensely extended life span, have generated our equally massive problems, e.g. overpopulation. We humans have not learned to control ourselves in our own interests. We have not learned the lesson of the Golden Mean or All Things in Moderation--maxims recommended as a primary virtue more than 2500 years ago by the philosophers of Greece and Rome. As Dennis Kucinich pled with Americans in the 2008 presidential election "Wake up America, Wake up!" so I would urge "Grow up World, Grow up!

In this part 1 my concern has been to trace human reaction to its cognitive brain from suspicion to backlash. In part 2, my next post, I will deal with some of the more subtle, but perhaps more fateful consequences of technology, especially the economic and social significance of continually diminishing resources.

Bob Newhard

Pale Blue Dot

The 20th century was the bloodiest, most destructive, century in human history. The first decade of the 21st century, fraught with death and destruction, does not bode well for humanity. It is abundantly clear that things cannot go on like this. It is also abundantly clear that existing institutions have not been effective in significantly reducing the level of violence. The United Nations, while of value, is not up to the job precisely because its components are nations each of which is still playing the balance of powers game. What is obviously needed is a united people of the world. This, I suggest, requires a paradigm shift in human socio-political attachment from the nation, tribe, and religion to the Earth itself. Further, this attachment must be rational and evidentiary as in science, so that adjudication among the people has a better chance at fairness.

This suggestion is different from the one-world community's focus on bringing the nations together to form a world society. It is also different from Earth First, which is concerned with our impact on our physical home, the environment, as important as that obviously is. This proposal is about conditioning human beings, as we do with good citizenship in our public schools, to see the Earth as our only home, as small, as fragile, as alone in the vastness of space and upon which we are utterly dependent. This awareness must be the mother's milk of childhood education and as pervasive in day to day human affairs as the weather. With this pervasive awareness, the conflict, death and suffering we visit on each other will be seen as the pure folly it is. For this to happen we need a concept and a symbol so powerful that it can overcome narrow allegiances and the emotional ties humans have to them. I believe the absolute loneliness of our pale blue dot in the vastness of space as Carl Sagan has described it, and the NASA photograph of that profound isolation, can serve this purpose. As Sagan wrote in his book Pale Blur Dot, "Apart from that, (the warmth ad light we receive from the sun) this small world is on its own."

Bob Newhard

E pluribus duo

I recently had occasion to consult Samuel P. Huntington's essay The Clash of Civilizations, which was initially a lecture delivered at the American Enterprise Institute and subsequently expanded into a book. The primary thesis of the essay is that following the end of the Cold War America's conflicts would no longer be over ideological differences, but over cultural, especially religious differences. Huntington names the various civilizations and in the book even provides a map of them. Knowing that Huntington's thesis was especially popular among conservatives, note where he first broached his thesis, I sought critical evaluations of the work. Fortunately, the magazine Foreign Affairs, which had published the original essay, had collected the responses to the essay and Huntington's rejoinder in a book titled The Clash of Civilization. The Debate. One of the critics of Huntington's thesis pointed out that it viewed civilizations as though they were clear cut, highly defined, "hard," objects like billiard balls, which repel each other upon contact. The author of this criticism suggested a more apt metaphor would be the sponge. In this author's view civilizations absorb much from each other, which, among other things, makes any analysis of civilizations and their relationships a somewhat murky enterprise. For example, you may have noticed that the mass protests in Egypt consisted of men predominantly reflecting Muslim culture, yet these men were mostly dressed in western style jeans, reflecting an acceptance of western culture.

I believe this apposition between Huntington's "hard" concept of civilizations and his critic's "softer" portrayal reflects a deeper political division among humans. Remembering that Huntington first gave voice to his thesis in a lecture to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, we can assume The Clash of Civilizations reflects a conservative view of things as they are and as they will be. I suggest that it found favor among this group, in part, because of its prima facie clarity and its call to conflict as the resolving mechanism. In brief, it offered a simple, easy to grasp, explanation of what is going on at the global level. It also tapped into American cultural beliefs, making it an easy sell for politicians and the corporate media and providing cover for corporate expansionism. This has a good deal to do with the conservative preference for military, whether by act or threat, solutions over the tedious and uncertain diplomatic solutions. They have the shoot first and ask questions later mentality. Despite the warnings against invading Afghanistan and Iraq, which they declared to be a "cake walk," they went ahead and ten years later millions are dead and the invaded countries nearly demolished. The same initiative and its consequences occurred in Vietnam. There are real consequences to our conceptions. We should not treat them lightly, for in many respects they are the fathers of all wars. This desire for sharp distinctions plays out in conservative domestic policies, e.g. the standardized and rigorous testing of the No Child Left Behind approach to education, which has nearly destroyed meaningful education. Their social "solutions" in general do not take account of the variety of human conditions, capacities and responses to life. This tendency to over simplification in public policy is fodder for the greed of the wealthy and the bigotry of their religious supporters. As the philosopher Alfred Whitehead advised, "Seek simplicity, but distrust it." It should also be noted that simplicity functions well for propaganda purposes. It not only relieves people of the need to think, it also reinforces prejudice, taps the emotions of tradition, whether valid or not, and in general suborns a thoughtful approach to the world.

This conservative view of humanity can and has eventuated in dictatorship and the worst form of religious and cultural bigotry. Osama bin Laden was a firm believer in the clash of civilizations.

Progressives and people who place people first derive their views, tentative as they often are, from the needs and opinions of the many and do not, in general, have recourse to simple answers. They must consider opposing views and, as in the Occupy Wall Street movement, seek consensus. An interesting contrast is the organized precision and discipline of the annual World Economic Forum and the comparatively chaotic World Social Forum. This willingness to begin with the amorphous "people" can and has, in the extreme, led to mob rule, witness the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, and the wanton killing based on class membership that followed it. Daily it becomes clearer that in a world of murderous technology we must find a way to facilitate profound change without the violence that greed, fear and bigotry create. We can, for instance, pressure our government to seek cooperation with liberal elements within otherwise conservative regimes. Israel comes to mind. Why do we let the far right Likud define the Israel we will support? Why not the liberal element that want a two state solution to the Palestinian issue? We had no qualms about supporting the opponents of Gaddafi. Why not support the liberal opponents of the Likud who want a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue and decry the continuing expansion of Israel's borders and desire a secular state? Where was our support for the substantial component of the Egyptian revolution that wanted a secular state? We obviously have a major task in foreign policy. We can do better at promoting democracy and peace. As is so frequently the case, we progressives must construct an organized movement, as they did in the Progressivism of the turn of the last century. This constitutes both a morally commendable and a very difficult undertaking. We progressives have a profound need to offer mankind a coherent view of society as we conceive it and an organized path to that end. This path is subject to change as humanity better understands itself, but is always guided by eliciting what is best in human nature. It is a very tall order, but one of absolute necessity if civilization, not to mention our species, is to survive.

Bob Newhard

None Dare Call It Murder

The ridiculously light sentences received by the Haditha Marines, especially the three months of house arrest and the reduction in rank and pay received by the sergeant in charge, have outraged many in this country and in Iraq. One of the things I found peculiar was that, as far as I could determine, no one was prepared to call it murder. Most frequently it was called the killings, occasionally a massacre. For this type of event the word "killing" is almost a neutral term. We kill everything from insects to humans. We even kill time. The term "massacre" suggests killing indiscriminately. Some of these innocent people were killed at such close range they had powder burns from the gun that killed them. Some publications did say this represented "execution style" killing. Yet none were willing to call it murder. Why?

Aside from such legal niceties that "murder" might have a specific meaning, e.g. that murder consists of one person premeditatively killing another, I suggest that these light sentences are a consequence of the rampant militarism that has found a home in America. While the military has always been permitted to conduct its own trials of its members, the sentences of these soldiers have shown the ludicrousness of this exceptionalism. It may be said that military combat is so chaotic and the threat to life so high that civilians could not render an informed judgment. Hence these men would not face a jury of their peers. However, the same can be said of a police officer on a gang hit list or undercover DEA agents accused of wrongful killing, yet we try them in civilian courts. All of these light, to the point of absurdity, sentences reflect, in my view, the privileged position the military has come to occupy in current American culture.

To the above comparative observations there is the questionable process of sentencing. The military judge is an officer. Like other officers his situation and future are dependent upon the esteem he has in the eyes of his superiors. This fact puts significant pressure on the judge to conform to the wishes of these superiors. Can this explain the light sentences? It certainly would not hurt recruitment in a volunteer military. There is, in my judgment, a conflict of interest at work here. In other areas officers have been known to cover up, delay, or obfuscate crimes committed by others. Colin Powell and the My Lai massacre and the flat out lying in the Pat Tillman case come to mind. Should we expect less of these judge-officers?

Should the military be permitted to conduct its own trials? The practice appears to have arisen from the belief that military combat is so unique that only military personnel can be expected to render a fair verdict. Even more important, can a military judge, who is just another officer, be expected to impose a penalty that is not in concert with the views of superiors who have the power to influence his future? As I have indicated above, I think this is false. The fact that the military tends to deal lightly with the killing of innocent people so long as they are not American should give us great pause when we consider letting the military conduct its own trials. Further, we have used this separate legal system to try our enemies or presumed enemies, including, again, innocent people, e.g. Guantanamo and to permit torture.

That the military justice system has so obviously failed to serve the demands of justice and that it appears fraught with impediments to securing justice is bad enough. Given recent federal legislation, I suggest it now poses a direct threat to the American citizenry.

The 2012 Defense Authorization Act permits the military to indefinitely detain any U.S citizen at its own initiative. Presumably any further legal action would be conducted by a military tribunal as has been the case with Guantanamo detainees. In taking over a previously civil function the military continues to expand its role in the affairs of this country. There is a pathetic commentary to be found in the decline of American democracy when one notes that Egypt, new to democracy, has massive protests to get rid of military rule while the United States welcomes it. Fear, that highly emotional response to threat, real or fabricated, is the deadliest enemy of democracy. Democracy requires participative courage from its citizens or it perishes. In the end, a democracy must put its trust in the citizenry, not the military.

Bob Newhard

The Janus of Empire

January 24^th 2012 saw two hugely contrasting events that portray the sick, delusional militarism of this country.

One was President Obama's State of the Union speech in which his repeated effulgent praise of the military was strikingly noticeable. One line of that praise was "We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world." Respected?

The other was the final phase of the Hidatha massacre trials for the sergeant who ordered his men to shoot first and ask questions later as they burst into a dwelling and proceeded to kill children, one of whom was a toddler, women and men one of whom was a septuagenarian. Neither the sergeant nor his men, who pled that they were obeying their superior will serve any time in prison for their horrendous crime. The "superior order" defense did not work for the Nazi criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, but it does for American criminals. So much for the arrogance of empire. This was an act of vengeance pure and simple for an earlier roadside bomb that killed a member of the squad and wounded several others.

The glaring contrast between Obama's praise and the murders in Haditha reflects the profound rise of an uncritical militarism in this country.

After every war prior to World War II this country had disarmed. After World War II the military was not only kept intact, but began a life of increasing budgets. This nation was kept on a semi-wartime footing called the Cold War for forty-five years. Over two generations of Americans were raised under this continuing threat, including home bomb shelters and classroom drills in "duck and cover." When the Cold War finally ended there was no peace dividend. The military budget remained high while we went looking for other enemies that might justify this huge distorting expenditure for armaments. We attacked Panama because, it was said, its president was dealing in drugs. With the attack on the Twin Towers we finally had an enemy which, even though it was few in numbers, had no borders and was not a country. Nonetheless, we declared war on it. Even this was not enough to satisfy the lust for war. We attacked Iraq on the trumped up charge that it was preparing nuclear weapons to attack us. In all this long sad sequence Americans learned perpetual fear and their leaders learned to govern through that fear.

We are now in the process of militarizing our domestic law enforcement in flat contradiction to our Constitution. The passage of military technology through the Homeland Security Department to local police is now customary and the military has recently begun direct training exercises with local police in Los Angeles. We have again, in contradiction of our Constitution, given the military, per the National Defense Authorization Act, the right to detain any American citizen indefinitely without warrant or trial.

As all of this is in such sharp contrast to this nation's previous disposition toward the military, I sometimes wonder whether the American people were traumatized by the Cold War and the continuing threat it represented for so long a period that they became inured to the loss of freedom that threat imposes as people seek protection. Both Obama and G. W. Bush justified our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq as protecting us from terrorism. I submit that by our actions we have increased that threat by enhancing the recruitment power of the Taliban and other terrorist groups enormously and that we have spread a virulent anti-Americanism world wide. Contrary to Obama, we have not won respect. We have inculcated a widespread fear that has generated protests demanding that we leave Iraq and Afghanistan. I also suggest that fear and dislike of American influence was one element used by the Islamic Brotherhood to capture controlling power in Egypt and that we shall see increasing resistance to American influence in the Muslim world. Drone attacks generate fear, not respect and any respect paid to fear is always accompanied by hate. Democratically disposed groups in Egypt and Israel who could use our help can no longer seek it because we have so sullied our reputation by wanton aggression that these groups would experience backlash. The neocons laid out the plan for world domination. G. W. Bush and Barack Obama have carried it out. Now we reap the whirlwind.

If and until we get over this imperialism that identifies world domination with our national interest, things will only get worse and someone else will have to carry the banner of democracy, that is, if democracy is to survive. Recalling Dennis Kucinich's 2008 campaign plea "Wake up America," I strongly recommend Chalmers Johnson's book "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" to understand the connections between American imperialism, American militarism, and a failing American democracy. Chalmers notes that that as the Roman Empire grew larger and more complex the deliberative body, the Roman Senate, found that it could no long administer it. Eventually it passed its powers on to Octavian who became the first Emperor of Rome. In short, size matters if democracy is to function. There are significant similarities to this country's current state of affairs, as presidents engage in wars without consulting Congress and there has been a call for a "unitary" presidency. We are on the brink of losing our democracy. Does it really matter to this country's citizenry? Looking backward we see the consequences of empire for Rome. Looking at the present we are staring at the prospects for the future. Dennis Kucinich's call to America to "Wake up!" should be the loudest rallying cry of this election, especially for progressives.

Bob Newhard

Future Shock

There is a fundamental bifurcation in the human animal between its brain and the rest of its organism. The brain unlike the rest of our being is not tied to the real world. The brain can envision what the rest of our human organism can never experience. This ability to abstract has been both the source of immense human accomplishment and immense human destruction. Our brains have created myth which many of us believe in with the same conviction that we believe the sun will rise tomorrow, if not more so. It is willing to kill other human beings who do not share that belief. This is how tenacious our brain constructs can be.

That same human brain has, using that same capacity to abstract, by carefully observing the world around it, constructed elaborate systems that allow it to place our species on the moon. For most of my adult life this bifurcation has been fundamental to my understanding of human behavior and society. For example, it led me to view human life as essentially tragic because we could conceive more than we could ever be.

However, Ray Kurzweil's latest book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology argues that the brain is breaking its shackles and probably within the first fifty years of this century, certainly by the end of this century, it will have done so. (The term "Singularity" in the title refers to the point at which machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence. The term is derived from its use in physics where it refers to the point in a black hole at which gravity is so intense it destroys space-time. Nothing is the same afterwards.) The driving force behind this development is the relentless exponential increase in technological comprehensiveness and power, especially in artificial intelligence, biometrics and computer capacity. Kurzweil and other scientists, applying Moore's law (the power of computers will double about every two years) to the whole of technology, sees these technologies doubling their capacities every 24 to 30 months. For example, in 1997 IBM's Deep Blue computer, designed to play chess, defeated world champion Gary Kasparov, who five years earlier had scoffed at the idea that a computer could do this. In 2011 IBM's Watson computer defeated the two most winning contestants of the Jeopardy game. The computer was not specifically designed to play the game in which any question can be asked. It won its match. In 14 years this form of computerization had advanced from a single game machine to one that had to deal with every possible question, decide whether it should answer or not and if it answered to be reasonably sure it was correct. (In this game there is a significant penalty for a wrong answer.) The real purpose of Watson is to quickly extract reliable information from very large, complex, databases.

As the power of artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate, so is the rate of global warming and human population growth. All three are expected to reach some sort of threshold in this century. Understanding the full implications of this convergence is, to put it mildly, mind boggling and may require Watson generation 3 or 4 to provide that understanding.

The joker in all this is, of course, that humans are designing these initial iterations. Will they build in their customary human aggression and fear reactions and will this machine intelligence be devoted to military and other human-destructive uses? Kurzweil serves on the five member Army Science Advisory Board. The military, in an effort to minimize battlefield casualties, is moving increasingly to robots. A major problem is to what degree they make the robots autonomous, independent of human control. Technology, it should be constantly kept in mind, is a two edged sword. Kurzweil, however, believes wars are becoming less destructive, especially of human life, as a result of advanced technology. He compares the war technology of World War II, e.g. carpet bombing, with its millions of casualties to those of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I find this dubious, especially when one looks ahead to the destructive potential of such biological warfare weapons nano-sized viruses.

Yet in spite of all this, and there is far more to it than I have mentioned, if Kurzweil and other technologically savvy academics and innovators are right about an immanent explosion of artificial intelligence, then the run up to it as well as its consequences will mark one of the most dramatic shifts in human existence. Some compare it to the introduction of agriculture and language.

One of the useful things one can do is look for the signs of the run up to the Singularity. For example there is a current controversy as to whether astronomy or atoms should be the measuring source for time. The problem is that atomic time, and time measured by the rotation of the earth, are getting increasingly out of sync. While on the one hand the atomic source is more accurate, on the other hand all of human behavior has been molded from the very beginning of evolution by astronomical time. How much of what we are as humans, of our institutions and our accounting for ourselves, is tied to astronomical time? Is one more link between man and his environment being broken?

The same issue without the apparent conflict can be seen in a video clip in which owners of Sony's robot dog Aibo gathered to discuss their dog's latest tricks and other behaviors. The emotions and attachments to their dogs were obviously the same as if they had been real dogs. Simulation is one of the technologies that will smooth the passage to and through the Singularity as humans identify ever more closely with their creations.

The conflict between human values and human technology is not new. A hundred years ago John Galswothy published his story of a bootmaker know for the high quality of his boots, losing out to factory-made boots of lesser quality. That quality, i.e. human care and competence, no longer mattered, was incomprehensible and devastating to the bootmaker.

My stepfather was born in a covered wagon heading to Canada where his father had heard farming opportunities were better than in his native Iowa. He lived to see a man on the moon. I have often asked myself, given the increasing rate of technological change, what change I might see that could approach such a dramatic difference. I think I may be seeing the initial stages of that change in which the human brain creates an intelligence vastly superior to itself and must live with the consequences.

This rapid coalescing of major global-scale trends, i.e. global warming, population increase and the shift of intelligence to machines, portends a future of enormous complexity. Will human beings finally realize that intelligence is the only tool they have for dealing with this complexity and can this be done without surrendering their humanity? Will the bifurcation in man's brain become the bifurcation in his future?

Bob Newhard

A Way Out?

It is generally agreed that humanity has to develop a sustainable economy; otherwise we will consume ourselves out of house and home. Various proposals have been made for achieving sustainability such as retuning to a simpler life in which we consume less and much of what is consumed is produced locally thereby reducing the many adverse environmental impacts of the global market. When one considers proposed solutions such as this the problem of how to get from here to there inevitably becomes daunting because of the apparently insurmountable social and economic changes that would be required, which would, past human behavior indicates, create enormous suffering and violence. It would take stark awareness of impending doom to bring humanity to this point.

There may be, however, a method of transitioning humanity to a substantially less environmentally demanding economy than the one we have. Additionally, we have already incorporated a great deal of this less demanding economy into our everyday lives. I suggest that we look carefully at the service economy as a device for segueing to a less destructive economy.

Given the low wages that many people associate with service jobs, e.g. waitresses, store clerks, gardeners, etc., this may seem like a real downer. Consider however that doctors, lawyers and teachers are also service jobs. In a World Bank Report titled Growth of the Service Sector, which may be found at http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/beyondco/beg_09.pdf, another dimension to the service economy is that it can handle growth with much less adverse impact than the commodity capitalism that now prevails.

We thus have in the service economy an existing and growing economy. Mike Davis in his book Planet of the Slums observes that the so called informal economy, in which individuals work for other individuals under terms arbitrarily stipulated by the employer, e.g. domestics, gardeners, constitute as high as 70% of total employment in some poorer countries. The service economy is already there. It has to be made more rewarding. One way of doing this is to impose a cost-to-the-environment tax on the producing of things. Notice that we now allow oil and mining companies to deduct a depreciation allowance from their taxes for the materials they remove from the earth, not to mentions such allowances on equipment made from mined ore. The environment requires that we make far fewer things than we have in the past, yet we subsidize that activity. That subsidy could be put to far better use by increasing the wages in the poorer parts of the service economy.

To my mind, the service economy offers other benefits as well. By its very nature it brings people closer together in shared undertakings in a time when the fascination with technology is displacing the fascination with people. The world of things we have created has introduced a substantial level of individual isolation. Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone notes some of the fallout from this. The service economy is also much more directly focused on human beings than our economy of production. It keeps humanity at the center of things, not some arbitrary function called profit. Keeping human beings as the focus in something as bedrock serious as employment is necessary as the so-called economies of robotization dictate that humans compete increasingly with their machines for existence. Economies are created by humans and humans must insure that their economies serve them well, including preserving their home.

Bob Newhard