Our Technology & Humanity
Upon returning home from checking out the newfangelest technological contraption in town, neighbor Blood’s telescope, Thoreau penned in his journal a word of caution to the ages: Henry David’s testament to the foregoing promise of applied American Studies:
“A few good anecdotes is our science, with a few imposing statements respecting distance and size, and little or nothing about the stars as they concern man; teaching how he may survey a country or sail a ship, and not how he may steer his life.
Astrology contained the germ of a higher truth than this. It may happen that the stars are more significant and truly celestial to the teamster than to the astronomer. Nobody sees the stars now. They study astronomy at the district school, and learn that the sun is ninety-five millions [of miles] distant, and the like, – a statement which never made any impression on me, because I never walked it, and which I cannot be said to believe. But the sun shines neverthe-less.
Though observatories are multiplied, the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye may easily see farther than the armed. It depends on who looks through it. No superior telescope to this has been invented. In those big ones the recoil is equal to the force of the discharge.” [Emphasis added] Journal, January 21, 1853
Do not become the tools of your tools, Thoreau went on to caution us. A co-option whose conception begins, indeed, in our thinking. What are we to understand by the fact that our brain, which predates the computer by millennia, has come to be referred to as a “computer”? May we become aware of such mindlessness — can we duly say?
Here we introduce a new initiative inspired by the words of Thoreau: “Don’t Become the Tool of Your Tools”
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The following reflection is by Joseph Weizenbaum, former professor of Computer Sciences at MIT, creator of one of the first computer programs, Eliza, author of the ground-breaking book, “Computer Power & Human Reason”, and member in memoriam of the Center for American Studies at Concord’s Honorary Board of Trustees. The reflection is a contribution to the Center’s forthcoming publication: “The Inner Art of Computing: A Loving Call to Arms, Hearts, & Minds: A Manual for Users, Non-Users, & Ab-Users.” Few, in our estimation, have struck the balance so finely between Man and Machine, our Humanity and Technology.
IN MY BOOK, Computer Power and Human Reason, there is a chapter which questions what I refer to as the “imperialism of instrumental thinking.”
By imperialism I mean an activity where one regulates an areas that is not one’s own. Imperialism is the expression of force. Instrumental mechanistic thinking is the regulator today.; it regulates, in large measure through the computer, increasingly larger areas of our lives.
The pressure toward instrumental thinking is particularly strong in our schools. In large measure it comes from the parents. Their reasoning is that the computer pervades our life. Thus, if their children are computer illiterate, they will not be able to get a job. Money is the driving factor.
Though one can understand the argument, it is not so simple. What about the television and electric motor? Are they any less pervasive? We do not insist on television or electric motor literary courses. What is going on . . . ?
Something has allowed us to exist in a balanced way to date with these developments: savy, electrical savvy — if the term is clear — as opposed to literacy. Savy recognizes that the phenomenon belongs to our times and can be dealt with apart from such direct means. It doesn’t blow issues out of proportion, but rather adapts the phenomenon — in this case the computer — to the otherwise normal human developments.
As with any new development, so with the computer. The excitement over it led, pretty much from the start, to questionable reasoning, based not so much on facts but on emotions. Such questionable reasoning we have, it appears, adapted ourselves to — without thoughtful consideration. The reasoning has, subsequently, become embedded in our minds and, thereby, culture.
All too easily one thinks that the problems of education, which are, and always will be, essentially human problems, can be fixed automatically by a device, con-trap-tion. Such is our modern American fixation.
If a child has difficulty reading or writing, put him or her on a computer. What happens, as a result, is that the computer masks the real problem, which in education, as in life, have to do with motivation, with the desire to learn and advance oneself in, for many, this increasingly inhuman world in which many find themselves.
We made an interesting discovery at M.I.T. In one of my last years, 1031 freshmen were accepted to the school. We gave them a writing test, a 500 word essay on a topic of their choice. Out of the 1,031 students, the cream of the crop of American education, 800 flunked. Grammar, syntax was a mystery to them.
Those are the generation who came to us from the “writing to read” programs. It’s not so simple as the computer suggests. Writing is more than a mechanical process. The focus of the editing on a word processor, for example, is what we call “local” editing: changing a word here, correcting a spelling error there.
Good writing requires more. The composition of a paper has a structure like music. The word processor, by its nature, discounts this non-functional element. Clarity and vitality of expression can not be accomplished by such means, regardless of the number of aids one employs.
The automatic spelling corrector is a good example of where such thinking takes us. Such innovations correct a wrong word merely by putting up the right letters. The question about the word itself isn’t raised: is the ab of abstract the same, for instance, as that of ab-normal? Ab means away from; tract has to do with tractor, pulling.
All this is passed over, as is the actual experience of learning. The answer one gets when one raises such points is: “We can solve that problem. We’ll just write a new command into the program: It is not ad but ab. Would you like to know where the word comes from?” The reasoning is the same. The point is missed. Education is more than filling students’ heads with facts.
We have to look at the issue more closely. People say that the computer produces information. That is like saying a nuclear power plant produces energy. It doesn’t; it transforms energy. the idea that the computer produces something new, something that the teacher can not provide, leads us on to the notion that they can also produce knowledge. In a few more year’s time, it will be wisdom.
Each conclusion increasingly obscures the point that all the computer does is take the information we give it and transforms it. Is this fact clear? If not, you will neither understand the computer, nor its omnipresent role in our lives today.
The essence of computation is the manipulation of knowledge and the control of complexity.
In each case, manipulation and control, computation presuppose a knowledge of models. And yet few people understand the central reality of models: that is, their limitations. What models do is focus in on choice elements, those elements that can be most readily ascertained.
Life, however, is not so elementary.
Its living, vital quality comes from precisely that which is intangible. Einstein said that it is a miracle that we can learn anything from our models. And his words bear due consideration.
The presupposition is that models leave out reality; thus they are models. The point is that after one separates the whole into parts, analysis, one has to take the next step: synthesize them together. That is the goal of education, and it is something the computer can NOT do. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise. Panaceas will not serve us in our efforts to address life’s challenges.
The computer can carry out demands, but it can not make us learn. We find that a disturbing number of the students who flunk the computer courses are precisely those who have had the most prior experience in computing. They may have learned a technical skill, but they have done it at the expense of learning how to learn.
One of the problems is that we don’t really know yet how to study the effects of the compute on the child.
The conventional approach is that you pick a child, hook it up to all sorts of instruments, which test, as unobtrusively as possible, the blood pressure, pulse, etc., of the child under normal conditions.
Then the child is set before the computer and he or she interacts, giving data which is recorded automatically in a computer-reader form. It’s as simple as that. It’s a model and, as such, it misses most of the reality.
Like the television, the computer and its effects are everywhere. It is present when the child discusses it in school, or through a monitor at the airport, hi-tech advertisements on billboards, and magazines, or mailings that computers put forth.
All these myriad examples have an impact on the child. And yet they are seldom considered because, as expressed, they evade our modern modular thinking.
The essential question is what the computer has to do with the essence of education, learning itself. Until that is answered, the tremendous investment of time and resources in bringing the computer into our schools has to be looked at very carefully.
What we do know is that positivistic thinking dominates the world today. Our children’s imaginative powers are atrophying. A healthy child can make anything out of a stick, if one leaves him or her to their own. In play, as in dreams, a child’s standard of evidence is not positivistic.
The computer rationalizes these vital living forces in children today. Even more serious, I feel, is the fact that the television or video-display terminal is seen as a source of authority. The inner life of the child, indeed of us all, is soon forgotten.
Living imaginations cease to have any meaning or relevancy for people. And yet we easily forget that those are the creative forces that brought even the computer itself into existence. The point being that, through our reliance on such a mechanical, instrumental thinking, we are undermining our fundamental imaginative, creative processes and, thus, our very future. Without the nurturing of such processes, we can expect little genuine progress.
The computer has all but forced its way into our classrooms, right down to our kindergartens themselves. Such a development is driven, on the one hand, by business, that is businessmen and -women, who are seeking ready markets, and by parents, on the other hand, whose unfortunate, if understandable, motive, is fear — fear that their child will not get a “good job”, make money.
Such concerns, and the instrumental, mechanical thinking behind them, are undermining our educational system, as every thoughtful teacher and administrator I’ve met realizes.
If the computer is brought into the classroom, it should be taught in the context of a subject, as opposed to being the focus of the course itself
In a social studies course, for example, one can discuss the social consequences of computers. In science, the computer appears as the example of an electronic device. In a history class, the computer is the product of an industrial age.
The question of computers in the classroom is the question of context. The only time it would be the focus of the course, itself, is when upper class students want more technical emphasis, to become, for instance, programmers.
The computer has presented us with important challenges.
It requires that we consider what thinking, in fact, is. Is there a difference, for instance, between Man and the Machine? If so, what?
A computer is completely unambiguous. A pipe is concave when viewed from one side and convex from the other. The computer can only focus on one given reality. It misses the fact that the pipe contains both realities.
The result is that the nuances are taken out of life. Life, itself, has become mechanized, computed.
The gradations, which comprise our humanity, have become increasingly lost. Such logical “advances” lead to further conclusions, that are no less determined in their nature: since life will inevitably cease, let us create computers which can carry on all our best characteristics. One can call such an increasingly prevalent attitude “carbon chauvinism.” Only be refining and taking away human properties, so that one is finally speaking of an entity referred to as “ideal” Man, can one come to such conclusions.
The question arises whether we are destroying our minds as we are developing our brains, so called “computers.” Whether our common sense has all but departed.
Behind these developments is that fact that people are driven by different ideals. Mine may be a sense of unity with the world. For those who pursue these other lines of thought, such a notion as unity has no value. Here is where the questions and learning itself starts. These are the vital issues, which we must focus on and which the computer, ironically, is calling to our attention.
Most challenging today in my experience is the assumption that the computer represents the next step in evolution. It become the embodiment of intelligence, which grows ever greater. With such conclusions, the moral underpinnings for pushing the button or for destroying the gene pool quickly become lost. A conclusion that becomes self-evident, if we are able to pause long enough to consider.
As a naive person, not a theologian, I think that the destruction of the gene pool is murder of God, however one cares to define Him/Her/It. Kafka’s play “Metamorphosis”, in which a human being becomes an insect, leads us in the direction of such holocausts.
If the human being has no essential humanity, is really a beetle, or some other animal, what does it really matter what we do with him?
And so we arrive at the question: If we deposit our intelligence with the computer, what vestiges of our humanity remain?
Again, we come back to the question of developing an appreciation for a living, imaginative thinking. That is where education has to start. The computer has a role in our lives, but it might be the one we least imagine: to show us clearly what we are not . . . . and to challenge us, through clear thinking, to recognize who we, the human being, in truth, are.
Common sense?
That which we, humanity, are called to revive, ever and anew.
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Your best thoughts on the foregoing reflection and the subject of Man & Machine are welcome. – Stuart Weeks
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For more information, contact: Willard Sunstein at info@concord-ium.us