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Episode 24, how do I love thee?
May 14, 2004
Far be it from me to deprive you of a new episode while I finish up this week’s essay to go with it. Check back by noon as I should have my thoughts together by then.
It’s an interesting little essay I think I’ll call :
Why most of Gizmodo’s daily outpouring of various techological marvels don’t capture my imagination in the same way, I’m not entirely sure, but there’s the promise of a direct personal connection with technology in robotics not seen outisde of lodging a microchip directly into your brain. I blame Star Wars for that… in fact the first book on robotics I ever bought was a 0.25 examination of our “automated friends” narrated by the elder statesman himself.
It’s that “humanization” of robotics that makes it so easy to imagine them doing wrong, programmed by some mad scientiest type to conquor the known Universe. It’s easy for people to understand how Robots could directly hurt them, what with the ”pushing down the stairs” and all. It’s less easy to get people concerned about what evil intent their toaster, or banking service, or automatic vote-counting machine may hold in it’s cold electronic innards.
Which brings me to today’s thrust - one of the reasons that the miraculous advances we’re making in technology do need to be scrutinized ad-nauseum is humanity, as a whole, has a very poor track record for abusing new technologies in the most depraved ways possible.
Jane Pinckard is one of the most literate writers and futurists about the societal impact of video games that I am aware of. She has written one of the defining essays of the year about genderplay in electronic entertainment and is a frequent speaker on her findings. Game Girl Advance, the site she founded, is one of the most erudite repositories of critical thought on the development of entertainment media on the Internet, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to see the 8-bit pastime develop into a truly mainstream media. Yet if you were to survey the floor at this years E3 (the yearly Mecca for all things “gamer”) I would suspect she would instead be almost solely recognized as the person who wrote the article about her own very personal connection to sex in video-games. Now it’s easy to brush this off as a story ready-made for the Internet’s rabid sound-bite devouring maw, frankly it covers the entire “Good Internet Story” meme-checklist: uniqueness (check), voyeurism (check), geek culture (check), and sex (check). But there is a greater truth at play, that when provided with new electronic entertainments mankind’s first instinct is usually to abuse that technology horribly, otherwise normal individuals seemingly dancing at the command of some kind of dark id-monster lurking in us all.
Case in point, ATT Labs Research has an amazing interactive multi-lingual demo of their formidable text to speech software. You type in blocks of text which are then spit out as synthesized .wav files in various crisp voices. It took your loyal DED creative team less a few minutes before we were cranking out dirty limericks, and long winded curses that would make Spider Jerusalem blush.
Think back to playing with toys as a child especially, heaven forbid “girls” dolls. How long before you got tired driving for groceries and waiting for Ken to come home from work and started putting Barbie in compromising situations?
How many of the future genius programmers of the future are sitting in their parents basement cranking out the next Sasser, soBig, or MyDoom relatively confident in their anonymity?
How many locker-room cell phone photographs sit in hidden directories on hard drives?
How much pornography clogs the bandwidth of the Internet each day? Terabytes? Petabytes?
Frankly, it’s important to be concerned about the technology that we adopt because we are giving it more and more control over vital societal functions. Even New Yorkers (ever the yardstick for jaded detachment) were surprised recently to learn that majority of traffic control buttons in their fair city had been disconnected since the 1980s , all traffic control long since turned over to automated systems.
In this light of exponentially increasing technological adoption the old concept of “black box” technology (that one just has to assume is working fairly) is completely unacceptable. The potential for misuse (and potential rewards for misusing) said systems increase daily. What if some programmer innocently rigged the traffic system to get to home from work faster each day? What someone purposely coded the system to give faster emergency vehicle response times to affluent areas? What if someone stuck in an Ambulance in traffic died because of it? One of the real benefits of the Open Source Software movement is that publicly accessible source code is publicly auditable source code. While this can be a tough concept to grasp (that an “open book” will lead to software that is considerably more secure in the long run) one only has to do a cursory investigation comparing DieBold, Election Systems and Software, and say Open-Vote to get a pretty good immediate impression on what the very tangibles benefits of Open Source Software.
So while my ongoing infatuation with personal robotics may seem quaint compared with say, activating SkyNet, there are technological battles being fought right now which will determine the accountability required of systems that will ultimately control important aspects of your everyday life. That’s why it’s important that each of us try to frame the short term gimmicks and fads of new technology (and the press-release fueled fluff and feature obsession of much of “technology journalism”) in the larger context of addressing the true transparency, accountability, and electronic liberty issues that I have no doubt will ultimately be as to our generation as civil rights reform were to the generation before us - the battleground that will define the type of civilization we share in the years to come. And if it helps keep my floor clean at the same time, all the better.
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