Societal Implications of Emerging Technologies: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Societal Implications of Emerging Technologies
the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

• Dr. David Gibbs
• Department of Mathematics and Computing
• University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
• Stevens Point, WI 54481
• Dave.Gibbs_at_uwsp.edu

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RMM Technology Fair

• Westwood Center
• Wausau, Wisconsin
• April 20, 2006

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Why Am I Here?

• this UWSP course
• CIS 300 America in the Age of Information
• Critical assessment of impact of information
  revolution on American society, including
  contemporary life, professions, privacy,
  security, education, law, government and
  employment.

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CIS 300 Course Components

• Readings
• 3 books
• Web readings
• Assorted hand-outs, including anonymous
• Student Presentations
• all lectures of the content
• e-News (current events in the Information
  Society)
• BYC Because You Can technologies

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Because You Can (BYCs)
Q Why would they create that? A Because they
can

• The LumiTouch Project
• MP3 Implants
• Neuticles
• Verichip (at right)

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CIS 300 Course Components

• Writing Emphasis
• Interim - 6 written papers in 12 days
• Activities
• Debate National ID Cards
• Including Biometric device discussions
• Including DNA analysis as the ultimate
  identification scheme

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the authors

• Neil Postman, Technopoly The Surrender of
  Culture to Technology
• Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines When
  Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

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Neil Postman

• 1931-2003
• NYU Professor, media theorist, and cultural
  critic
• 18 books, 200 articles

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Technopoly The Surrender of Culture to
Technology

• Legend of Thamus
• from Platos Phaedrus (dialog)
• King Thamus entertaining Theuth, the inventor of
  numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and
  writing.

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Legend of Thamus

• Theuth, on his invention of writing
• Here is an accomplishment, my lord the king,
  which will improve both the wisdom and the memory
  of the Egyptians. I have discovered a sure
  receipt for memory and wisdom.

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Legend of Thamus

• King Thamus, on Theus writing
• Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer
  of an art is not the best judge of the good or
  harm which will accrue to those who practice it.
  So it is in this you, who are the father of
  writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring
  attributed to it quite the opposite of its real
  function. Those who acquire it will cease to
  exercise their memory and become forgetful they
  will rely on writing to bring things to their
  remembrance by external signs instead of by their
  own internal resources.

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Legend of Thamus

• King Thamus, on Theus writing continued
• What you have discovered is a receipt for
  recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom,
  your pupils will have the reputation for it
  without the reality they will receive a quantity
  of information without proper instruction, and in
  consequence be thought very knowledgeable when
  they are for the most part quite ignorant. And
  because they are filled with the conceit of
  wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a
  burden to society.

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Legend of Thamus

• Why does Postman begin his book with this story?
• Why do I begin this talk with it?

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Legend of Thamus

• Thamus was right but only half-right.
• Writing is NOT just a burden it is both and
  at the same time a burden and a blessing.

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CIS 300 Course Components

• First written assignment
• Benefits and Harms of Technology
• 6 technologies
• 3 positive, or beneficial
• 3 negative, or harmful
• Present (and defend) your choices in class
• Examples cell phones, tv, i-pods, nuclear power

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Technology is non-neutral

• ALL technologies bring blessings and burdens.
• CHALLENGE find a technology that is either ALL
  good or ALL bad.

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With apologies to Clint Eastwood

• NOT the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly BUT
• The Good AND Bad, and the Ugly

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Technopoly The Surrender of Culture to
Technology

• Taxonomy of Culture, a timeline
• Intersection of Tools/Technology and Culture
• Tool-Using rocks, fire, to 1776
• Technocracy 1770s to 1910
• Technopoly 1910 to present

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The Taxonomy stage 1

• A Tool-Using Culture
• Tools solved the immediate problems of physical
  life, or,
• Water power, windmills, plow
• Serve the symbolic world of art, religion,
  politics
• Cathedrals, castles

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The Taxonomy stage 2

• Technocracy
• A society loosely controlled by social custom and
  religious tradition
• Tools moving Europe from a tool-using culture to
  technocracy
• Clock
• Printing press
• Telescope
• Origins of the scientific method

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The Taxonomy stage 2

• Technocracy
• Began in late 1700s
• 1765 James Watt, steam engine
• 1776, as defined by Adam Smith in Wealth of
  Nations
• Communications Revolution began
• Books (now affordable), telegraph, typewriter,
  transatlantic cable, photography
• Life just sped up

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The Taxonomy stage 3

• Technopoly
• The submission of all forms of cultural life to
  the sovereignty of technique and technology.
• Began in early 1900s
• 1925 Scopes monkey trial
• 1910 Frederick Taylor, Scientific Management
  EFFICIENCY maxims

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The Principles of Scientific Management

• The goal of human labor and thought is
  efficiency
• Technical calculation is superior to human
  judgment
• Human judgment cannot be trusted (laziness,
  ambiguity, subjectivity)
• What cannot be measured either does not exist or
  is of no value

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Technopoly The Surrender of Culture to
Technology

• To summarize
• Tool-using
• Technology is integrated into the culture
• Technocracy
• Technology attacks the culture
• Technopoly
• Technology becomes the culture efficiency is the
  paramount goal

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Truisms

• If what you have is a hammer, everything looks
  like a nail.
• If what you have is a computer, everything looks
  like data.
• If what you know is the scientific method,
  everything is solvable by applying science or
  engineering.

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Gibbsian Truisms

• Technology serves to distance people.
• Warfare
• Communications
• What technology makes easy to do, we tend to do.

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Ray Kurzweil

• born 1948
• Inventor, Author, Entrepreneur, Futurist
• Video Intro

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Kurzweil the Author

• The Age of Intelligent Machines (1989)
• The 10 Solution for a Healthy Life (1993)
• The Age of Spiritual Machines When Computers
  Exceed Human Intelligence (2000)
• Fantastic Voyage Live Long Enough to Live
  Forever (2004)
• The Singularity is Near When Humans Transcend
  Biology (2005)

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Kurzweil the Entrepreneur

• Kurzweil AI.Net
• Kurzweil Computer Products
• Kurzweil Technologies
• Kurzweil Music Systems
• Kurzweil Applied Intelligence
• Kurzweil Educational Systems
• Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies
• FatKat
• Ray Terrys Longevity Products

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Kurzweil the Futurist

• Predictions from 1989 book / Reflections from the
  2000 book
• P Computer will defeat human in chess by 1998
• R IBMs Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov in
  1997
• P World-wide information network will emerge
• R The Web emerged in 1994 and then took off
• P Software-based technologies will dominate in
  warfare
• R The (first) Gulf War established this
  paradigm
• P Biometric identification will replace locks
  and keys
• R Speech and facial pattern recognition used to
  control access

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Kurzweil the Futurist

• Predictions from 1989 book / Reflections from the
  2000 book
• P School classrooms will get wired
• R Programs were in place in most states
• P Most commercial music will be created on
  synthesizers
• R TV, movies, recordings use synthesizers,
  sequencers, sound generators
• P Continuous Speech Recognition with large
  vocabularies will emerge in the early 90s
• R Available by 1996

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Aldous Huxley

• 1894 1963
• British Novelist/Essayist
• Brave New World (1932)
• Science Fiction utopian (dystopian) picture of
  life in 2532 A.D.

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Brave New World

• Babies are decanted from jars after 267 days on
  assembly line
• Caste-like society alphas to epsilons
• Conditioning from pre-birth throughout books
  outlawed
• Promiscuity is required
• No family mother, father are obscenities
• Soma
• Worship Our Ford spirituality turned into sex
  orgies
• Consumption (consumerism) is preeminent

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Kurzweil before CongressTestimony (2003)

• Size of technology is shrinking
• Moral imperative to overcome human affliction
• Economic imperative, in a competitive economy
• Most of technology will be nanotechnology by
  2020
• With the advent of nanotechnology, we will be
  able to keep our bodies and brains in a healthy,
  optimal state indefinitely. (p. 3 of 45)

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Kurzweil heres why

• Intuitive Linear View vs. Historical Exponential
  View
• Law of Accelerating Returns
• Human intelligence has limitations machine
  intelligence does not
• Specific technological paradigms exhibit S-curve
  growth (e.g. Moores Law)

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S-curves

• Start slowly, accelerate rapidly, and taper off
• (until the next paradigm kicks in and the
  process begins anew)

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Linear vs Exponential
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What is meant by doubly exponential?

• It means exponential growth in the rate of
  growth, that is, in the exponent.Exp 2x Doubly
  2(2x)
• Many information technologies exhibit this as
  costs decrease, more resources are deployed
  (Singularity, p. 25)

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What will be the impact of Smaller, Faster,
Convergence?

• Biotechnology
• Genetics
• Nanotechnology
• Robotics

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Biotechnology

• Genetically modified organisms (GMO)
• Transgenic plants, animals
• Can humans be far behind? (designer genes)
• Choose your offspring
• (What technology makes easy to do we tend to do)
• (Technology serves to distance people)
• Good? Bad? Ugly?

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Nanotechnology

• 1 nanometer (nm) 10-9
• (one-billionth of a meter)
• Water molecule 0.3nm
• DNA chain 2.5nm across
• Red blood cell 7,000nm
• Typical human cell 20,000nm
• Human hair 80,000nm across

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Nanotechnology

• Combined with robotics (artificial
  intelligence) yields
• Nanobots
• e.g. Foglets (as per Michael Crichton, Prey)
• 100 micrometer 100,000nm
• Deliver chemotherapy directly to a cancer cell
• Multitudinous medical uses
• Issues
• Malicious use?
• Self-replication?

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Nanobots

• Good? Much more than good!
• Bad? Maybe so!
• Ugly? Easy to paint an ugly picture!

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RFID ChipsRadio-frequency-identification

• Components
• Chip (with unique ID)
• Antenna
• Reader

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RFID chips (syn tags, transponders)

• Passive Tags
• No internal power source
• Activated by a reader
• Active Tags
• Contain a battery, thus larger
• Used in electronic toll gathering (right),
  parking lots

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Parking Lot with RFID
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How does it work?

• EPC electronic product code
• 96 bit code i.e. 296
• or 7.92 x 1028 unique ids
• EPC and RFID
• How many things can be tagged with 1028 unique
  ids?
• Everything? People too?

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The Internet of Things

• Every tagged item could have its own web page!
• Early applications of RFID included
• automatic highway toll collection
• supply-chain management (for large retailers)
• pharmaceuticals (for the prevention of
  counterfeiting)
• e-health (for patient monitoring)

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RFID anywhere, everywhere

• More recent applications
• sports and leisure (ski passes)
• Tracking cattle (carcasses)
• personal security (tagging children at schools)
• Access to bars like the Baja Beach Club in
  Barcelona
• Military ID (dog-tags, etc.)
• Login to your computer! (at right)

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RFID

• E-government applications under consideration
• RFID in
• drivers licenses
• passports
• Currency (prevent counterfeiting)
• RFID readers are now being embedded in mobile
  phones.
• Nokia, released RFID-enabled phones for
  businesses with workforces in the field in
  mid-2004
• plans to launch consumer handsets in 2006.

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Retail Purchases?

• Put items in your cart
• Walk out!
• (provided you have an RFID yourself embedded or
  otherwise)
• And he causeth all, both small and great, rich
  and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in
  their right hand, or in their foreheads.
• And that no man might buy or sell, save he that
  had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the
  number of his name.
• Rev 13 16-17

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RFID

• Good?
• Market-supply management
• Bad?
• Big-brother, done to ourselves by ourselves (what
  computers make easy to do we tend to do)
• Ugly?
• What uses havent we even thought of?

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Kurzweil on evolution

• Evolution takes place at an exponential rate.
• Evolution is not just the process of organisms,
  but includes their tools (technologies)
• Technologies evolve, exponentially
• Evolution is ONE process, from single-cell to
  multi-cell to humans, to humans with technology,
  to human/technology sameness.

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KurzweilThe History of Evolution

• Evolution is a process of creating patterns of
  increasing order.
• Epoch 1 Physics and Chemistry
• Epoch 2 Biology
• Epoch 3 Brains
• Epoch 4 Technology
• Epoch 5 Merger of Technology and Human
  Intelligence
• Epoch 6 The Universe Wakes Up
• (Singularity, pp. 14-15)

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Epoch 1 Physics and Chemistry

• Big Bang
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Information in atomic structures

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Epoch 2 Biology

• Carbon-based compounds became increasingly
  intricate
• Development of precise digital mechanism (DNA) to
  store results of the evolutionary experiments
• Information in DNA

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Epoch 3Brains

• Begins as animals recognizing patterns
• Eventually creating abstract mental models
• Information in neural patterns

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Epoch 4Technology

• Increasing brain size (protein sources?) and
  opposing thumbs result in the evolution of
  human-created technology.
• Information in hardware and software designs

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Epoch 5 Merger of Technology and Human
Intelligence

• This marks the beginning of the Singularity in
  Kurzweils view, around 2040
• Integration of biology (including human
  intelligence) with the exponentially expanding
  human technology base (i.e. computers)

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Epoch 6The Universe Wakes Up

• Patterns of matter and energy in the universe
  become saturated with intelligent processes and
  knowledge
• HOW? By reorganizing matter and energy focusing
  on the goal of spreading out from planet Earth

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KurzweilHow to live forever?

• MUST REACH THE SINGULARITY!
• Fantastic Voyage website
• QA
• I take 250 supplements a day and really feel
  that Im reprogramming my biochemistry, just like
  I would reprogram my computers.
• Reprogram your biochemistry
• We advocate being active in reprogramming your
  biochemistry to achieve optimal health.
• Three Bridges to Immortality

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Three Bridges to Immortality

• Bridge 1 Applying Todays Knowledge
• Re-program your biochemistry (NOW) best
  practices and lots of supplements
• Bridge 2 Biotechnology
• Genetic tweaking, of both babies and baby boomers
  (within the NEXT decade)
• Bridge 3 NanoTechnology
• Nanobots in your bloodstream
• destroying pathogens, removing debris, correcting
  DNA errors, and reversing aging processes
• and then.

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The Singularity is Here

• Human life is transformed
• Humans will transcend the limitations of
  biological bodies and brains
• Extend and expand thinking
• By 2100, nonbiological intelligence will be
  trillions and trillions of times more powerful
  than unaided human intelligence. (Singularity,
  p.9)

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In a post-Singularity world...

• There will be no distinction, post-Singularity,
  between human and machine or between physical and
  virtual reality.
• (Singularity, p. 9)

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Summary

• Postman Technopoly
• Machines and humans in tension
• Huxley BNW
• Humans are (biological) machines
• Kurzweil two techno-steps to the Singularity
• Biotech
• Nanotech
• No discernible difference between humans and
  machines

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What to do, what to do?

• Reverse the truisms in your own life
• Stop distancing people (HOW??)
• Dont always do what technology makes easy to do
  (DIFFICULT!!)
• Remember the human what do you value?
• Remember the sacred theres a reason those
  belief systems have been around for millennia

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Thanks!

• http//www.uwsp.edu/cis/dgibbs/RMM
• Dave.Gibbs_at_uwsp.edu