Edmund Storms wrote:
I suggest we are seeing the the effects produced by a society and its
technical problems becoming too complex for the average person to properly
comprehend. The energy problem is one example of an issue that is only
properly understood by people having either technical training or the
intelligence and interest to understand the complex relationships.
Naturally, I am strongly in favor of more education for everyone,
especially Congressman and newspaper editors!
Things do seem to be getting more complicated, and sometimes this does hurt
society's ability to make rational decisions. But I have thought about this
carefully, and I conclude that the problem may not be as bad as it looks.
It is complicated. Here are some of my reasons.
First, as I said, my mother and other older people said that things are no
worse now than they were back in 1925. Most people back then had no clue
how electricity, telephones or wind-up Victrola record players worked, and
today people have no idea how cell phones or iPods work. An IPods is more
complicated than a Victrola, but it is hard to see why this matters to an
ordinary person, or why it would help him to understand either one. In 1925
most people had only indistinct notions about how much coal was being
mined, what it was doing to the atmosphere, or who was profiting from it.
The same is true today. But people did not say that democracy was
ungovernable in 1925 just because folks had no clue how technologies
worked. In 1935 people *did* begin to say that. A utopian "technologist"
movement arose. Proponents said that engineers should be put in charge of
society. I doubt it would have helped. Herbert Hoover was the only engineer
ever elected US president, and his record on the economy was not good. (He
was a brilliant engineer, without doubt, and a superb organizer. Before he
became president he did excellent work in mining engineering, industrial
standardization in the US, and he did such a magnificent job organizing
food relief after the First World War that in some parts of Europe his name
literally became a byword for charity.)
Second, I question whether the key aspects of technology that have a major
social or political impact really are more complicated. Outwardly, they
seem simpler. The inner mechanisms that have become more complex are
hidden, and have no impact on society. An iPod might be a million times
more complex than Victrola measured by standards such as the cost of the
machinery needed to manufacture the iPod, or the scale and precision of the
components, or the clean room standards required to assemble the machine.
But is an iPod fundamentally more complicated, from the user's point of
view? Does it require more highly educated factory workers to assemble than
a Victrola did? Is the social impact a million times greater? Is the impact
on society more profound, and should lawmakers know more about the
technology before they legislate intellectual-property laws? I do not see
why. In the 1920s, with the advent of radio, intellectual-property and the
recording and broadcasting of music was a major social concern. The laws
and customs devised back then still serve us well today, even though our
technology is far beyond analog recording and AM broadcasting.
Today's energy sources such as coal, nuclear energy and ethanol do not seem
substantially more complicated than the energy systems of 1925. Nuclear
fission is scientifically inscrutable to most people, but so was combustion
until 1800, and I doubt many people in 1925 really understood the role of
oxygen in combustion.
A computer-controlled hybrid automobile is much more complicated than any
automobile made in 1975. But it is easier to drive. All of the safety
regulations, traffic signals, highway construction, driver education, and
so on we put in place to support automobiles works just as well with a
hybrid as with the older, simpler models. Lawmakers and the engineers who
devise safety standards can deal with hybrid automobiles as well as they
deal with conventional automobiles. The increased complexity does not seem
to impair our ability to cope with this technology, and handle it
responsibly. Consumers can judge whether these cars are cost-effective or
not, and insurance company underwriters can determine whether the cars are
safe and how much they should charge to cover the cost of accident repairs
(which are likely to be somewhat more expensive).
Reading books and watching movies from the past, I do not get the sense
that people knew more back then, or understood their own world better than
we understand ours. James Thurber's wrote hilarious descriptions of his own
ineptitude with machines. People have never been observant. In the 1930s,
my aunt spent the summer working on a turkey farm. That Christmas she was
making a decoration for the mantelpiece: a turkey made out of paper, an
apple, raisins and toothpicks. After putting two legs on the bird, she
looked at it with a puzzled expression and said, "Where do the other two
legs go?" To take another vivid example, consider a scene from the movie
"The Day the Earth Stood Still." A crowd of people are standing around on
the Mall looking at the flying saucer. The alien spaceman, disguised as a
human, is in the crowd along with a boy he has befriended. The boy asks him
how do spaceships work, and the alien tells him, outlining some basic
Newtonian physics -- action and reaction, etc. The crowd of people standing
nearby listens in and begins to snicker and poke fun at the alien. An old
man says to the boy, "he had you going there; he really pulled your leg,
didn't he?" Now this is only a movie, but I sense that the audience
watching this movie back in 1951 probably did not realize that what the
alien was saying was perfectly correct and elementary. It probably sounded
like complicated, advanced scientific doubletalk, and the dramatic point
was supposed to be that this alien is so far advanced compared to the
humans in the crowd, they ridicule him instead of realizing he must be the
flying saucer pilot. When you know that the alien's explanation is straight
out of the textbooks, the scene seems weird, not dramatic or convincing.
Most of the science portrayed in movies today, and in documentaries on the
History Channel and Discovery Channel, is more sophisticated and accurate
than it was in 1950s or '60s (except for the movie "2001.") It seems the
audience has become more knowledgeable. Then again, maybe not. This may
only be surface knowledge, or empty "book learning" as it used to be
called. Some (but not all) ancient people had deep technical knowledge
compared to modern people. Operating a sailing ship was far more difficult
than operating today's vessels. Building a Coliseum in ancient Rome was
more difficult than building a modern concrete structure. For that matter,
programming a computer in 1975 was harder than programming today's
machines. It called for more knowledge of the machinery, clever techniques,
do-it-yourself assembly language programming and so on. Yet I do not get
the sense that programmers from 1975 (including me) are somehow more
capable of judging the in's and out's of computers than today's young
experts are, or knowing the future of computers, or running a computer
company. It seems to me that Ed's hypothesis predicts that the more you
know about computer fundamentals, the better you should be at running IBM
or Dell. That is not in evidence. Ken Olsen of DEC helped invent the modern
computer as a grad student at MIT, and he was one of the most knowledgeable
computer company executives of all time, but his disastrous performance as
president rivaled that of Herbert Hoover. You might say he knew too much
about the technology and not enough about customers or markets.
Having said all that, I agree that in many cases our judgment regarding
technology and social policy has become impaired. Ed is right; the trend is
worrisome. There is a growing disconnect between people and hands-on
commonsense knowledge of technology and nature. People nowadays do not know
how to light a fire. A few years ago, parents at a county fair near Atlanta
were outraged when a farmer told the children that milk comes from cows;
they thought the farmer was telling their children disgusting sexual
fantasies. In pre-modern Japan, the mark of an aristocratic young woman was
that she did not know where rice comes from. Even if she did know, she
would beguile a wealthy young man by saying, "oh goodness how pretty the
farmland looks, but pray tell, what tree do they grow rice on?" * This sort
of ignorance is now widespread, because we can afford to be ignorant.
Indeed living close to nature has become a luxury. I expect this will only
grow worse in the future.
- Jed
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Footnote
* The technique is still with us. There is even a word for this kind of
woman in Japanese: "kamatoto," which is shorthand for the question, "Do
they make fish paste out of fish?" A kamatoto is "(n) a kind of woman who
pretends to be all sweet and innocent and naive" (wwwjdic.com) Now
*there's* something I'll bet you readers did not know, and you probably
would not read it on Ludwik's mail list, either.
