Note: This is a write-up I did for my communications class. We were to watch a 90-minute video done by PBS, Digital Nation, then find one point in it to make a counter-argument for. This is what I pulled together.
In some of her interview during the Digital Nation broadcast, Turkle made the comment that “Technology challenges us to assert our human values.” But she noted that requires us to figure out what those values are. She also expressed hope that we would be able to find a balance, though it might be a slow process.
There were several themes in the segments, the idea of technology leading to loss of memory, shorter attention spans (writing in paragraphs instead of essays), the reality of information overload. These themes questioned the impacts of technology on our humanity, our creativity. Kids multitasking were seen through some studies to be less capable at tasks than those who don’t. We have drone pilots who one commentator contended were divorced from the impact of war – the costs are all one-sided, and the pilots don’t have to pay.
In response and dialogue with those thoughts about the impact of technology, I turn to a piece of fiction.
Back in 1991 author David Weber wrote a science fiction book, Mutineer’s Moon, whose main character was Dahak, a sentient computer residing the body of earth’s moon, which was actually a space ship (okay, some people could say the main character was Colin MacIntyre, the US astronaut — but for my money it is Dahak). Five years later he authored his third book in this series, from which I rip the below long quote:
Colin MacIntyre tossed his jacket into a chair, and his green eyes laughed as a robot butler clucked audibly and scooped it up again. ‘Tanni was as neat as the cat she so resembled, and she’d programmed the household robots to condemn his sloppiness for her when she was busy elsewhere.
He glanced into the library in passing and saw two heads of sable hair bent over a hologram. It looked like the primary converter of a gravitonic conveyor’s main propulsion unit, and the twins were busily manipulating the display through their neural feeds to turn it into an exploded schematic while they argued some abstruse point.
Their father shook his head and continued on his way. It was hard to remember they were only twelve – when they were studying, anyway – but he knew that was only because he’d grown up without implant educations.
With neural interfacing, there was no inherent limit to the data any individual could be given, but raw data wasn’t the same as knowledge, and that required a whole new set of educational parameters. For the first time in human history, the only thing that mattered was what the best educators had always insisted was the true goal of education: the exploration of knowledge. It was no longer necessary for students to spend endless hours acquiring data, but only a matter of making them aware of what they already “knew” and teaching them to use it – teaching them to think, really – and that was a good teacher’s delight. Unfortunately, it also invalidated the traditional groundwork and performance criteria. Too many teachers were lost without the old rules – and even more of them, led by the West’s unions, had waged a bitter scorched earth campaign against accepting the new. The human race in general seemed to think the Emperor possessed some sort of magic wand, and, in a way, they were right. Colin could do just about anything he decided needed doing … as long as he was prepared to use heavy enough artillery and convinced the battle was worth the cost.
It had taken him over three years to reach that conclusion where Earth’s teaching establishment was concerned. For forty-three months, he’d listened to reason after reason why the changeover could not be made. Too few Earth schoolchildren had neural feeds. Too little hardware was available. Too many new concepts in too short a time would confuse children already in the system and damage them beyond repair. The list had gone on and on and on, until, finally, he’d had enough and announced the dissolution of all teachers’ unions and the firing of every teacher employed by any publicly funded educational department or system anywhere on the planet.
The people he’d fired had tried to fight the decree in the courts only to discover that the Great Charter gave Colin the authority to do just what he’d done, and when they came up against the cold steel his homely, usually cheerful face normally hid so well, their grave concern for the well-being of their students had undergone a radical change. Suddenly the only thing they wanted to do was make the transition as quick and painless as possible, and if the Emperor would only let them have their jobs back, they would get down to it immediately.
Why do I appeal to fiction, and why such a long quote, to respond to the Digital Nation. Because I think this affirms Turkle’s hopes, and gives thought to the other people’s concerns.
Weber, writing just before, or just as, internet and the digital connections were getting underway, was able to visualize a time when those connections would be in place, when they would allow kids to really learn, to find out how to think, aided by technology. But his story isn’t the triumph of technology. We see the struggle of Emperor Colin versus the unions. It is still the story of people using their creativity to decide and determine what to do with the technology, how. It is a story of human values being asserted, of the defining of those values. The technology doesn’t act in a void – human decision is the driving force, determining when and how to use what is available, human creativity shaping the end result.
If Weber can visualize such things before they were reality, we certainly can visualize our way out of the dilemmas presented by the technology before us. Humans are still creative enough to shape the technologies into our vision, instead of being molded into the image of the technology.
References
Weber, D. (1996) Heirs of Empire, Riverdale, NY, Baen (pp 35-37)
At The Rainbow 