What Technology Wants (26 page)

Listen to the technology, Carver Mead says. What do the curves say? Imagine it is 1965. You've seen the curves Gordon Moore discovered. What if you believed the story they were trying to tell us: that each year, as sure as winter follows summer and as day follows night, computers would get half again better, and half again smaller, and half again cheaper, year after year, and that in 5 decades they would be 30 million times more powerful than they were then. (This is what happened.) If you were sure of that in 1965, or even mostly persuaded, what good fortune you could have harvested! You would have needed no other prophecies, no other predictions, no other details to optimize the coming benefits. As a society, if we just believed that single trajectory of Moore's, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout.

The invariant growth ratios found in transistors, bandwidth, storage, pixels, and DNA sequencing are some of the first few Moira threads we've teased out in our short history in the accelerated technium. There must be others still to be uncovered by tools not yet invented. These “laws” are reflexes of the technium that kick in regardless of the social climate. They, too, will spawn progress and inspire new powers and new desires as they unroll in ordered sequence. Perhaps these self-governing dynamics will appear in genetics, or in pharmaceuticals, or in cognition. Once a growth dynamic is launched and made visible, the fuels of finance, competition, and markets will push the law to its limits and keep it riding along that curve until it has consumed its potential.

Our choice, and it is significant, is to prepare for the gift—and the problems it will also bring. We can choose to get better at anticipating these inevitable surges. We can choose to educate ourselves and our children to become intelligently literate and wise in their employment. And we can choose to modify our legal and political and economic assumptions to meet the ordained trajectories ahead. But we cannot escape from them.

When we spy our technological fate in the distance, we should not reel back in horror of its inevitability; rather, we should lurch forward in preparation.

9

Ionce saw our future technological fate myself. In 1964 I visited the New York World's Fair as a wide-eyed, slack-jawed kid. The inevitable future was on display, and I swallowed it up in great gulps. At the AT&T pavilion they had a working picture phone. The idea of a videophone had been circulating in science fiction for a hundred years, in a clear case of prophetic foreshadowing. Now here was one that actually worked. Although I was able to see it, I didn't get to use it, but photos of how it would enliven our suburban lives ran in the pages of
Popular Science
and other magazines. We all expected it to appear in our lives any day. Well, the other day, 45 years later, I was using a picture phone just like the one predicted way back in 1964. As my wife and I gathered in our California den to lean toward a curved white screen displaying the moving image of our daughter in Shanghai, we mirrored the old magazine's illustration of a family crowded around a picture phone. While our daughter watched us on her screen in China, we chatted leisurely about unimportant family matters. Our picture phone was exactly what everyone imagined it to be, except in three significant ways: the device was not exactly a phone, it was our iMac and her laptop; the call was free (via Skype, not AT&T); and despite being perfectly useable, and free, picture-phoning has not become common—even for us. So unlike the earlier futuristic vision, the inevitable picture phone has not become the standard modern way of communicating.

First Glimpse of the Picture Phone.
From Bell Telephone's pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

So was the picture phone inevitable? There are two senses of “inevitable” when used with regard to technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every realizable technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills—in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule, not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be reinvented.

The second, more substantial sense of “inevitable” demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.

The picture phone was imagined in sufficient detail a number of times, in different eras and different economic regimes. It really wanted to happen. One artist sketched out a fantasy of it in 1878, only two years after the telephone was patented. A series of working prototypes were demoed by the German post office in 1938. Commercial versions, called Picturephones, were installed in public phone booths on the streets in New York City after the 1964 World's Fair, but AT&T canceled the product ten years later due to lack of interest. At its peak the Picturephone had only 500 or so paid subscribers, even though nearly everyone recognized the vision. One could argue that rather than being inevitable progress, this was an invention battling its own inevitable bypass.

Yet today it is back. Perhaps it is more inevitable over a 50-year span. Maybe it was too early back then, and the necessary supporting technology absent and social dynamics not ripe. In this respect the repeated earlier tries can be taken as evidence of its inevitability, its relentless urge to be born. And perhaps it is still being born. There may be other innovations yet to be invented that could make the videophone more common. Such needed innovations as ways to direct the gaze of the speaker into your eyes instead of toward the off-center camera or methods for the screen to switch gazes among multiple parties in the conversation.

The hesitant arrival of the picture phone is evidence for both arguments: (a) that it clearly had to happen and (b) that it clearly does not have to happen. That brings up the question: Does any technology lurch forward on its own inertia as “a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow,” in the words of technology critic Langdon Winner, or do we have clear free-will choice in the sequence of technological change, a stance that makes us (individually or corporately) responsible for each step?

I'd like to suggest an analogy.

Who you are is determined in part by your genes. Every single day scientists identify new genes that code for a particular trait in humans, revealing the ways in which inherited “software” drives your body and brain. We now know that behaviors such as addiction, ambition, risk-taking, shyness, and many others have strong genetic components. At the same time, “who you are” is clearly determined by your environment and upbringing. Every day science uncovers more evidence of the ways in which our family, peers, and cultural background shape our being. The strength of what others believe about us is enormous. And more recently we have increasing proof that environmental factors can influence genes, so that these two factors are cofactors in the strongest sense of the word—they determine each other. Your environment (like what you eat) can affect your genetic code, and your code will steer you into certain environments—making untangling the two influences a conundrum.

Last, who you are in the richest sense of the word—your character, your spirit, what you do with your life—is determined by what you choose. An awful lot of the shape of your life is given to you and is beyond your control, but your freedom to choose within those givens is huge and significant. The course of your life within the constraints of your genes and environment is up to you. You decide whether to speak the truth at any trial, even if you have a genetic or familial propensity to lie. You decide whether or not to risk befriending a stranger, no matter your genetic or cultural bias toward shyness. You decide beyond your inherent tendencies or conditioning. Your freedom is far from total. It is not your choice alone whether to be the fastest runner in the world (your genetics and upbringing play a large role), but you can choose to be faster than you have been. Your inheritance and education at home and school set the outer boundaries of how smart or generous or sneaky you can be, but you choose whether you will be smarter, more generous, or sneakier today than yesterday. You may inhabit a body and brain that wants to be lazy or sloppy or imaginative, but you choose to what degree those qualities progress (even if you aren't inherently decisive).

Curiously, this freely chosen aspect of ourselves is what other people remember about us. How we handle life's cascade of real choices within the larger cages of our birth and background is what makes us who we are. It is what people talk about when we are gone. Not the given, but the choices we made.

It is the same with technology. The technium is in some part preordained by its inherent nature—which is the larger theme of this book. Just as our genes drive the inevitable unfolding of human development, starting from a fertilized egg, proceeding to an embryo, then to a fetus, an infant, a toddler, a kid, and a teenager, so, too, the largest trends of technology unroll in developmental stages.

In our lives we have no choice about becoming teenagers. The strange hormones will flow, and our bodies and minds must morph. Civilizations follow a similar developmental pathway, although their outlines are less certain because we have witnessed fewer of them. But we can discern a necessary ordering: A society must control fire first, then metalworking before electricity, and electricity before global communications. We might disagree on what exactly is sequenced, but a sequence there is.

At the same time, history matters. Technological systems gain their own momentum and become so complex and self-aggregating that they form a reciprocal environment for other technologies. The infrastructure built to support the gasoline automobile is so extensive that after a century of expansion it now affects technologies outside of transportation. For instance, the invention of air-conditioning in concert with the highway system encouraged subtropical suburbs. The invention of cheap refrigerated air altered the landscape of the American South and South-west. If air-conditioning had been implemented in a nonauto society, its pattern of consequences would have been different, even though air-cooling systems contain their own technological momentum and inherencies. So every new development in the technium is contingent upon the historical antecedents of previous technologies. In biology this effect is called coevolution, and it means that the “environment” of one species is the ecosystem of all the other species it interacts with, all of them in flux. For example, prey and predator evolve together, and evolve each other, in a never-ending arms race. Host and parasite become one duet as they try to outdo each other, and an ecosystem will adapt to the moving target of a new species adapting to it.

Within the borders laid out by inevitable forces, our choices unleash consequences that gain momentum over time until these contingencies harden into technological necessities and become nearly unchangeable in future generations. There's an old story about the long reach of early choices that is basically true: Ordinary Roman carts were constructed to match the width of imperial Roman war chariots because it was easier to follow the ruts in the road left by the war chariots. The chariots were sized to accommodate the width of two large warhorses, which translates into our English measurement of 4' 8.5”. Roads throughout the vast Roman Empire were built to this specification. When the legions of Rome marched into Britain, they constructed long-distance imperial roads 4' 8.5” wide. When the English started building tram-ways, they used the same width so the same horse carriages could be used. And when they started building railways with horseless carriages, naturally the rails were 4' 8.5” wide. Imported laborers from the British Isles built the first railways in the Americas using the same tools and jigs they were used to. Fast-forward to the U.S. space shuttle, which is built in parts around the country and assembled in Florida. Because the two large solid-fuel rocket engines on the side of the launch shuttle were sent by railroad from Utah, and that line traversed a tunnel not much wider than the standard track, the rockets themselves could not be much wider in diameter than 4' 8.5”. As one wag concluded: “So, a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of two horses' arse.” More or less, this is how technology constrains itself over time.