(vii) Introduction

Computers doen niet wat wij doen, zelfs niet als ze twee bij twee optellen.

"In the computer’s case, the mechanics of addition involve no motivation, no consciousness of the task, no mobilization of the will, no metabolic activity, no imagination. And its performance brings neither the satisfaction of accomplishment nor the strengthening of practical skills and cognitive capacities. How is it, then, that we can so easily think of the computer as doing the same thing we do? Only because nearly the entire content of our own activity has fallen from view." [mijn nadruk] (vii)

"The computer’s automatic logic, necessary and valuable though it may be, sucks all these flesh-and-blood concerns into a vortex of wonderfully effective calculation — so wonderful and so effective that only what is calculable may survive in our awareness.(...) And so we move in lockstep with an ever more closely woven web of programmed logic."(viii)

"In particular, we had to enter into our own potentials for programmed, automatic thought and action before we could build automatons of silicon, plastic, and metal. Not only did the machine originate with us, and not only does it live in us, but now it has a massive external and objective presence in our lives. We can interact with all this machinery only by shaping ourselves to its requirements."(ix)

"The danger of self-forgetfulness, then, is the danger that we will descend to the level of the computational devices we have engineered — not merely imagining ever new and more sophisticated automatons, but reducing ourselves to automatons. So first and most fundamentally, it’s not the objective mechanical entity we should worry about, but rather our own participation in it. There is, however, positive hope in this, because our participation is, or can be, a long way from machine-like. Yes, in one way or another we must adapt ourselves to the machine’s requirements, but how we do so — and when, and in what context — leaves a lot of room for expressing our own purposes." [mijn nadruk] (ix)

"Fundamental change must be rooted in a transformation of the individual self."(xi)

[Mooi begin.]

(1) Part I - Technology, Nature, and the Human Prospect

(3) Chapter 1 - The Deceiving Virtues of Technology

Het hoofdstuk begint met het verhaal van Odysseus en Polyphemus. Talbott wijst op de wonderlijke associatie tussen techniek en bedrog.

"The Greek techne, from which our own word “technology” derives, meant “craft, skill, cunning, art, or device” — all referring without discrimination to what we would call either an objective construction or a subjective capacity or maneuver."(5)

"Likewise, the Greek mechane, the source of our “machine,” “mechanism,” and “machination,” designates with equal ease a machine or engine of war, on the one hand, or a contrivance, trick, or cunning wile, on the other."(6)

"These traits, as any psychologist will point out, are closely associated with the birth of the self-conscious individual. The ability to harbor secrets — the discovery and preservation of a private place within oneself where one can concoct schemes, deceive others, contrive plans, invent devices — is an inescapable part of every child’s growing up."(6)

"What I want to suggest is that, to begin with, technology was a prime instrument for the historical birth of the individual self.(...) It requires a separate, individual self to calculate a deceit."(7)

"The external gifts of techne come, in the end, only through the strengthening of the techne of our own consciousness. When you look today at the mesmerized preoccupation with the sweetly sung promises of salvation through digital information, you realize that our own culture honors the Sirens far more than it does the healthy respect for risk, the self-discipline, and the inner cunning of Odysseus, man of many devices."(9)

[Het idee is dat je je niet moet laten meeslepen door de technologie die je verleidt, omdat dat riskant is. En dat het dus belangrijk is om tegenover die verleiding zelfdiscipline op te brengen. Maar:]

"What we see, in fact, almost looks like a reversal."(12)

"The contrivings and devisings of techne, as we have seen, served Odysseus well in his striving toward self-realization and escape from anonymity. But now note the reversal: as Neil Postman has famously elaborated in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and other works, today it is technology that cocoons us and promises us endless entertainment, distraction, and freedom from cares. There is scarcely a need to elaborate this point. Just watch the advertisements on television for half an hour."(12)

Talbott bekritiseert het idealiseren van technologische ontwikkeling, geeft een paar voorbeelden.

"Call this, if you will, “Evolution for Dummies” or “Plug-and- Play Evolution.” Just add connections and — presto! — a quantum leap in consciousness. What easy excitements we revel in! But our excitement is not for the potentials of our own growth; what we anticipate, rather, is our sudden rapture by the god of technology." [mijn nadruk] (13)

"We have invested only certain automatic, mechanical, and computational aspects of our intelligence in the equipment of the digital age, and it is these aspects of ourselves that are in turn reinforced by the external apparatus. In other words, you see here what engineers will insist on calling a “positive feedback loop,” a loop almost guaranteeing one-sidedness in our intelligent functioning.(...) All this can be summarized by saying, “Technology is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy, but as our friend, it will destroy us.”" [mijn nadruk] (14)

[Dat is voorwaar een mooie uitspraak.]

"Our primary task is to discover the potentials within ourselves that are not merely mechanical, not merely automatic, not reducible to computation. And the machine is a gift to us precisely because the peril in its siding with our one-sidedness forces us to strengthen the opposite side — at least it does if we recognize the peril and accept its challenge. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be much recognition yet. In fact, in many quarters there is nothing but an exhilarated embrace of one-sidedness." [mijn nadruk] (14-15)

"All this suggests to me that if we are to escape the smothering technological cocoon, our techne today must, in a sense, be directed against itself. Our trickery must be aimed at overcoming the constraints imposed by our previous tricks. What we must outwit is our own glib, technical wit." [mijn nadruk] (15)

"We are being asked to become Nobodies again — not as a ruse devised by our awakening selves, but as a denial of ourselves. Nevertheless, the invitation toward self-dissolution is always at the same time an opportunity to seize ourselves at a higher level than ever before, just as Odysseus did in the cave. Everything depends upon our response. Odysseus managed to rouse himself. Our own choice is not yet clear."(17)

(19) Chapter 2 - Hold a Blossom to the Light

"... the history of technology is a history of walking away from ourselves."(21)

De blaaspijp vraagt eindeloos veel meer vaardigheden dan een geweer, toch willen mensen een geweer en vervreemden van die vaardigheden.

"In mastering the blowgun, Tomo learned stealth and many physical skills. He learned great care, whether in preparing his poisons or notching his dart or avoiding what we like to call “collateral damage.” He learned patience and focused attention. But above all, he learned to read his environment through a resonant inner connection with it: only by understanding the ways of the forest, the character and likely movements of his prey, the meanings carried upon the ceaseless symphony of sounds enlivening the jungle — only so could he find success in the hunt using a weapon such as the blowgun."(22)

Dat is 'kwalitatieve invoelende ervaringskennis', wat fundamenteel anders is dan 'informatie hebben over'.

"The ability to read nature in this qualitative sense, to know its phenomena from the inside, is not restricted to primitive cultures. While we may not know how to reconcile this ability with the canonized procedures of science, we do often recognize it as a mark of scientific genius."(23)

"We in fact exercise such powers of recognition all the time; without them there would be no science. Yet a science that long ago disavowed any concern with the qualities of things has steadily pushed our acts of recognition to the periphery."(24)

"The tribes of the Amazon present numerous riddles that are surely related to the difference between a qualitative and analytic understanding."(24-25)

Maar hoe komen ze aan die bijzondere kennis die ze hebben over de chemische werking van planten, bijvoorbeeld in het maken van hallucinerende drankjes of giftige smeersels? Wetenschappers zeggen dan: dat is 'trial-and-error'. Maar ligt het zo simpel?

"Perhaps the trial-and-error hypothesis simply reflects a long habit of ignoring the knowledge potentials of an attention to the qualities of our environment. Such attention on the Indians’ part could be quite remarkable."(26)

Misschien gaat het eerder om die kwalitatieve aandacht voor en kennis van hun omgeving.

"It is a long way from the mechanics of information processing to the pursuit of a new vision — a new manner of seeing. But what I am suggesting is that we urgently need to combine this pursuit of a new, qualitative manner of seeing with our more technical ambitions if we are to counter the unhealthy one-sidedness of the latter."(27)

"To read the significance of our activities rather than being lulled by the blank expressions of our machines — this is the skill and art demanded of us today."(28)

"None of this is to say that we could get by in today’s world without the newer technologies. But it is to say that we cannot get by without recognizing the disciplines we must work ever harder to develop in order to invest the ubiquitous programming with our own purposes. And we also need to realize when our preoccupation with technology is just plain fickle."(30)

"All growth has a tragic element. Something is lost."(32)

"So we have a choice: simply to accept that the human being in this case is now little more than a “dumb assistant” to “intelligent machinery,” or else to tackle the huge task of re-visioning employees’ jobs, and the business itself, along more humane lines. The challenge in all this — if we accept it — puts us into continual tension with the machines surrounding us."(33)

"A qualitative and sensitive openness to our environment today — the kind of openness where we move beyond technical information about people and things to a qualitative meeting with them, learning to recognize their characteristic expressions and gestures, learning what it is like to be in that other place, what are the poisonous and the curative elements in our surroundings — this is not so much a negation of Tomo’s skills as an extension of them. And in cultivating these skills we will find not only that our relations to the technologized world become healthier, but so also our relations to the natural world that sustains us."(33)

[Probleem is alleen dat die opvatting vaag blijft en dat duidelijk moet worden wat mensen concreet zouden moeten doen om die kwalitatieve houding en kennis te ontwikkelen.]

(35) Chapter 3 - Toward an Ecological Conversation

Een voorbeeld van het bijvoeren van dieren met ongewenste zijeffecten. Dat roept de vraag op wat we moeten vinden van het temmen / domesticeren van dieren. Twee extremen:

"On one side, with an eye to the devastation of ecosystems worldwide, we can simply try to rid nature of all human influence. The sole ideal is pristine, untouched wilderness. The human being, viewed as a kind of disease organism within the biosphere, should be quarantined as far as possible. Call this radical preservationism.
On the other side, impressed by our society’s growing technical sophistication, we can urge the virtues of scientific management to counter the various ongoing threats to nature. Higher-yielding, genetically engineered vegetables, fruits, grains, live- stock, fish, and trees — intensively monocropped and cultivated with industrial precision — can, we’re told, supply human needs on reduced acreages, with less environmental impact. Cloning technologies may save endangered species or even bring back extinct ones. Clever chemical experimentation upon the atmosphere could change the dynamic of global warming or ozone depletion."(36)

"The problem with scientific management, founded as it is on the hope of successful prediction and control, is that complex natural systems have proven notoriously unpredictable and uncontrollable."(36)

[Dat denk ik ook. En de verleiding wordt dan om de zaken te versimpelen naar allerlei vormen van reductionisme, waardoor de toepassing van resultaten in die nog steeds even complexe werkelijkheid riskant wordt.]

"We can never perfectly know the consequences of our actions because we are not dealing with machines. We are called to live between knowledge and ignorance, and it is as dangerous to make ignorance the excuse for radical inaction as it is to found action upon the boast of perfect knowledge." [mijn nadruk] (38)

Talbott denkt dat er een derde weg is die lijkt op hoe we met mensen omgaan. Ook mensen zijn onvoorspelbaar en moeilijk te controleren. Toch zien we niet af van handelen of proberen we te handelen met anderen zonder dat we zekere kennis op de achtergrond hebben. We hebben daar een manier voor: het gesprek. Talbott denkt dat we op een dergelijke manier in gesprek moeten met de natuurlijke omgeving.

"We cannot predict or control the exact course of a conversation, nor do we feel any such need — not, at least, if we are looking for a good conversation. Revelations and surprises lend our exchanges much of their savor. We don’t want predictability; we want respect, meaning, and coherence. A satisfying conversation is neither rigidly programmed nor chaotic; somewhere between perfect order and total surprise we look for a creative tension, a progressive and mutual deepening of insight, a sense that we are getting somewhere worthwhile." [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Het fundamentele verschil is dat mensen in die conversatie in principe gelijkwaardig zijn aan elkaar en in die conversatie samen ook taal kunnen gebruiken, terwijl de natuurlijke omgeving niet echt spreekt en alleen maar reageert. En wat nu als mensen die reacties niet zien of anders zien en door zo'n slechte 'conversatie' toch weer de natuurlijke omgeving naar onze hand zetten op een manier die helemaal niet past bij de reacties van die omgeving? Ja, respect voor de natuur is goed, zeker. Een vragende open houding lijkt me prima. Niet in abstracties blijven hangen en dingen in hun organische context zien ook. Holistisch kennen en handelen en niet alleen maar mechanistisch ook. Een gevoel van verantwoordelijkheid voor de natuur ook. Allemaal waar, Talbott legt het goed uit, en toch blijft onduidelijk hoe wederzijds die hele conversatie tussen mensen en de natuurlijke omgeving kan zijn en hoe groot dus de beperkingen aan die conversatie zijn.]

"Most dramatically, we had to have quit asking it by the time genetic engineers, borrowing from the philosophy of the assembly line, began treating organisms as arbitrary collections of interchangeable mechanisms. There is no conversing with a random assemblage of parts. So it is hardly surprising, even if morally debilitating, that the engineer is not required to live alongside the organisms whose destiny he casually scrambles. He is engaged, not in a conversation, but a mad, free-associating soliloquy." [mijn nadruk] (45)

"But claiming incomprehension of the speech of the Other is not the only way to stifle the ecological conversation. We can, from the side of conventional science, deny the existence of any speech to be understood. We can say, “There is no one there, no coherent unity in nature and its creatures of the sort one could speak with. Nature has no interior.” But this will not do either. To begin with, we ourselves belong to nature, and we certainly communicate with one another."(46)

"Remember: the science that denies an interior to nature is the same science that was finally driven by its own logic (for example, in behaviorism) to deny the interior in man — a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one. The same oversight accounts for both denials — namely, the neglect of qualities, which are the bearers of expression in both the world and the human being. Where there is genuine qualitative expression, something is expressing itself."(47)

"But this much needs saying: a science that long ago decided to have nothing to do with qualities is not in a good position to tell those who do attend to qualities what they may or may not discover.(...) What those who are receptive to the world’s qualities consistently discover is a conversational partner."(47)

"We are the place within nature where willing openness to the Other becomes the necessary foundation of our own life."(48)

"The point is not to pronounce any landscape good or bad, but to ask after the integrity of the conversation it represents."(51)

"The very first — and perhaps the most important — conversational step we can take may be to acknowledge how we have so far failed to assume a respectful conversational stance."(52)

[Maar al die opmerkingen gaan vooralsnog voorbij aan het probleem dat ik beschreef. De aard van die gewenste conversatie tussen mensen en natuurlijke omgeving blijft vaag. Het is zelfs opvallend dat het hele taalgebruik hier in het vage blijft hangen. Het zou kunnen helpen om hier over de grenzen aan kennis en wetenschap te praten, om het over perspectief en horizon en interpretatie te hebben, of uitgebreider over de betekenis die de natuur voor ons heeft en hoe dat ons handelen beïnvloedt.]

(55) Part II - Extraordinary Lives

(57) Chapter 4 - Can Technology Make the Handicapped Whole?

Wat kan techniek betekenen voor de mensen met een handicap?

"Eventually, he [Kurzweil in The age of spiritual machines - GdG] assures us, we will replace the entire human body and its intelligence with vastly more capable digital technologies. Kurzweil displays remarkably little interest in the possibilities of human choice. These possibilities, however, are exactly my own interest"(57)

"The chapter takes the form of commentary on a book, And There Was Light, by Jacques Lusseyran (1998). The book was originally written in 1953, and does not mention computers. Nevertheless, I do not know any work more germane to the matter at hand. And I count the book among the handful of the most significant productions of the past century."(58)

"The remarkable thing is that Lusseyran could not see. He had totally lost his sight in an accident when he was between seven and eight years old. It was to a blind youth that his comrades in the Resistance entrusted their fate, and it was the same blind youth who found the hidden resources to survive the horrors of Buchenwald."(60)

Lusseyran leerde "zien" ondanks zijn handicap, omdat niemand hem behandelde als iemand met een handicap waardoor hij dingen niet zou kunnen.

"He tells how objects in his environment would come to life on his “inner canvas,” how his senses of hearing, smell, and touch gained revelatory qualities that departed in wildly unexpected ways from the “normal” performance of these senses, and how all objects exert a kind of “pressure” even from a distance — a pressure one can respond to in an intimate sensory dance that blurs the visually enforced boundaries commonly felt between object and perceiver."(65)

"All this stands to reason. If the organism is a unity, a whole in the deepest sense, then every effort precisely to define a deficit — a missing piece or a missing function — is problematic. Given a true organism, you can, to one degree or another, without predefined limit, arrive at the whole through any of its parts, because the whole is immanent in each of the parts. All our senses form a unity that can be gotten at — with more or less success depending on our inner resources — through any combination of them.
Today we are strongly inclined to technologize every disability, conceiving it as wholly defined by a specific malfunction of a piece of machinery, and immediately setting about the task of “fixing” the malfunction, as if that were the whole story. What Lusseyran’s experience suggests is that this is only part of the story — and perhaps the least important part. By restricting our notion of “seeing” to the narrowest of mechanisms — the eyeball understood as a camera — we close ourselves off to many of life’s richest possibilities." [mijn nadruk] (67)

"In general, I suspect that if the imaginations and perceptions of childhood — above all, the perceptions of ensouled nature that come so naturally to children — were not systematically suppressed by adult obtuseness, we would live in a radically different world today."(68)

"If only we allowed ourselves more such redeeming illnesses today as we confront the deeply embedded, systemic ills of our society! But, as our readiness to submit ourselves to mass vaccination campaigns for every minor malady suggests, we can’t easily accept that illness might be necessary and beneficial — that in the end we might pay more in bodily and social damage for its absence than for its presence." [mijn nadruk] (70)

[Naïef. Het punt is natuurlijk dat "might". Het zou kunnen, maar het zou ook heel goed niet kunnen. Je kunt hoe dan ook alleen voor jezelf besluiten om je niet tegen ziekte te beschermen door bijvoorbeeld vaccinatie, en dan nog alleen als je zeker weet dat je niet een gevaar vormt voor anderen (die daar wie weet niet voor kiezen) en je er bewust van afziet dat anderen (de gezondheidszorg, je relaties) de brokken moeten opruimen als je ineens merkt dat je wel heel erg veel last krijgt van die ziekte of er zelfs aan dood gaat.]

[Naïef ook omdat Lusseyran misschien iemand was met een intelligentie en talenten die andere mensen met een handicap helemaal niet hebben. Werken met zo'n - in zekere zin begenadigd - voorbeeld heeft zijn beperkingen, je kunt niet zo maar generaliseren.]

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, let me repeat myself. It is not for you or me to say to anyone: use, or do not use, this prosthesis. Continually new devices will be, and ought to be, taken up by those who can benefit from them. But if we don’t at the same time sweat those drops of blood — if we don’t cultivate with all the powers at our disposal the kind of inner light that Lusseyran was forever running toward — then Kurzweil and all his kin will have been right: we will become machines."(71)

(79) Chapter 5 - The Many Voices of Destiny

"Science has steadily pulled back from the fullness of our experience, contracting into a subtle and pinched search for reliable mechanisms, abstract and remote. In the face of this science, it is difficult to hold onto any conviction that we bring a resolve or task or destiny with us to earth and that we converse with this destiny through all the circumstances of our lives."(79)

Bespreking van het thema 'lot' aan de hand van Martha Beck's boek Expecting Adam over het krijgen van een kind met het Downsyndroom.

"One needn’t hold any of the established views on abortion to realize that, in a society where aborting “defective” fetuses is the norm, the Adamic graces are not the ones we are particularly looking for or opening ourselves up to."(88)

"So there are far more miracles in our lives today than in the past; it’s just that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice them. But they are there to be noticed. And many of us will find it easier to begin the noticing with the extraordinary help of a little Down syndrome boy named Adam. Proffering this help may well have been the task Adam brought to earth. Can any of the rest of us claim a more noble task?"(89)

[Ook dit vind ik nogal naïef. Hoe eerlijk is zo'n boek als dat van Beck? En kun je dat echtpaar wel als leidraad nemen, mensen met voldoende intelligentie en geld om er iets moois van te maken - althans die indruk krijg ik hier? En deden ze een en ander vanuit religieuze motieven? Hoe het ook zij: het blijft zo dat er sprake is van een genetisch defect. Waarom zou je dat accepteren als abortus mogelijk is? Waarom zou je in algemene zin niet streven naar manieren om dat soort defecten te voorkomen? Ik denk dat bijvoorbeeld vrouwen met een genetische aanleg voor borstkanker daar anders over denken. En vele andere mensen die moeten leven met de gevolgen van genetische defecten. Hier wordt gesproken van je '(nood)lot', andere mensen hebben het over 'gods wil', wat is het verschil?]

"Few, I suspect, who appreciate Martha Beck’s Expecting Adam will find it possible to contemplate these pronouncements about genetic engineering by leading intellectuals without yielding to disgust or fury." [mijn nadruk] (92-93)

"The genetic engineers and cheerleaders quoted above seem remarkably confident that they have mastered what the rest of us have not: namely, what it means to be human. This is odd considering that most or all of them would profess discomfort with the language of meaning as opposed to the instrumental language of science. Without hesitation they talk about making human beings better, as if this gave us an obvious roadmap for the re-engineering task. Rarely do they make their own road- maps explicit, but you can be sure that, on their maps, their own lives count as better and more meaningful than Adam Beck’s."(93)

"Who is so all-knowing as to tell us that the satisfaction and achievements of Harvard professors are more valuable for the race, more worthy of being granted existence, than those of Adam? As to the sufferings of Down syndrome children, aren’t most of these inflicted by the rest of us — that is, by our inability or unwillingness to overcome our own insecurities and discomfort in the presence of people who seem deformed? This does not put us in a great position to talk magnanimously about putting them out of their pain. Maybe we should just stop inflicting the pain.
To say that there is inevitable pain in great limitation may be a half-truth. But this is to ignore the age-old wisdom that overcoming our limitations comes close to being the essence of human life. Certainly it is the source of many of our deepest satisfactions. Probably the most truly handicapped people on earth are those who imagine themselves most free of limitation — mentors for a new race of supermen. Lacking acknowledged limitations, they have ceased even the common struggles that might have made them into men." [mijn nadruk] (95)

[Het is zeker waar dat veel mensen enorm veel moeite hebben met iedereen die afwijkt. Daar kun je een bibliotheek over vol schrijven. Desondanks is dit een drogredenering van Talbott die niet op het probleem ingaat van het voorkomen van genetische defecten. En je mag ook een hoop vragen stellen bij vrouwen (en misschien ook mannen) die een zwangerschap doorzetten ook al weten ze van die defecten. Beslissingen op basis van emoties en irrationaliteit, op basis van religieuze opvattingen bijvoorbeeld, waarbij je ook beslist over hoe het leven van je kind er uit gaat zien. Waar zadel je je kind mee op? Waar zadel je jezelf mee op? Je hoeft niet een 'supermens' te willen, wanneer je een kind wil dat biologisch zo veel mogelijk normaal is.]

(99) Chapter 6 - On Forgetting to Wear Boots

"Whenever friends visit my wife, Phyllis, and me, one of our favorite places to take them is the nearby Camphill village in Copake, New York. The village is part of a thriving, worldwide movement for the care of people with special needs. You will find here villagers with Down syndrome and a great variety of other mental handicaps — all pursuing their lives in a beautiful, restful, productive, socially supportive, and artistically rich setting. If there is a place that can bring healing to a high-tech society, surely this is it."(99)

[Dat is nogal een ondoordachte bewering, lijkt me. Er zijn zo'n honderd van die gemeenschappen. Zijn die gemeenschappen eigenlijk 'self-supporting' of kunnen ze alleen maar bestaan door subsidies / giften / liefdadigheid van buiten? En is het eigenlijk zo fantastistisch dat ze buiten de normale samenleving lijken te bestaan en dat mensen met een handicap binnen de normale samenleving blijkbaar niet kunnen bestaan?]

"Camphill villages spring from the same roots as Waldorf education, and they share the Waldorf emphasis upon an artistically shaped life."(100)

[Karl König is de stichter van de Camphill beweging. De beweging heeft een antroposofische achtergrond.]

"You will find throughout the Camphill movement a strong sense that people with special needs bring special gifts to the planet — perhaps exactly the needful gifts in our time. These folks can teach us the virtues our culture has largely disregarded — for example, the virtue of attending fully to the person immediately in front of us."(103)

[Aandacht hebben voor de mensen met wie we te maken hebben vind ook ik belangrijk. Maar waarom zouden we die attitude per se moeten leren van mensen in de Camphill beweging die zich in heel uitzonderlijke omstandigheden bevinden?]

"Whose life is not a broken song? Camphills are a testimony to the conviction that even the most troubled songs need singing — and more, that these may be, in their own way, songs of genius, giving voice to some of the most critical melodies and counterpoints in the sung destiny of earth itself.(107)"

[Ja, mooi hoor, maar erg vaag en nietszeggend.]

(109) Part III - From Information to Education

(111) Chapter 7 - Why Is the Moon Getting Farther Away?

"Home, of course, is where every child belongs. But a world that feels like home is increasingly what we deny our children — this despite the televisions and Internet connections that bring the world into the intimacy of their bedrooms. Such devices, I would argue, only accentuate the central educational challenge: how do we help the child find his own connections to the world?"(112)

"None of this reflects a shortage of information. The problem is that today something is substituting for the child’s intimacy with the world. And if you want to know the nature of the substitution, consider the lenses, video screens, instrument panels, windows, phones, loudspeakers, books, faxes, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and various protected environments through which we gauge our relations to the world. How can the child possibly feel that the natural world counts for much of anything at all?"(114)

"Now, I happen to believe that the construction of truly human environments is no bad thing. In fact, it is one of our highest callings. But there is no denying that what we have constructed so far is more an assault upon the world and a fragmentation of it than a crowning of it."(115)

"Certainly computer-mediated communica- tion has not seemed to encourage development of our more subtle conversational potentials!"(117)

"Something in our culture works powerfully against a sensitive, participative understanding of the world, often obliterating that understanding wherever it does arise. I believe that a primary task of education today is to counter this one-sided-ness."(118)

"Once we recognize this, we can hardly avoid the uncomfortable sense that our society has gone quite out of its mind in making the computer the tool of choice for connecting young students to “sources of information.” The computer undeniably inserts a distance between people that must be overcome. As a result it is much easier for us to objectify others — to treat them in terms of our own needs. It disconnects words from the speaker, ignores much of our nonverbal communication, and occludes the larger environment that is always speaking and being spoken through us." [mijn nadruk] (119)

[Tja, in de natuur opgroeien en daar alle mogelijke dingen ontdekken is niet meer weggelegd voor de meeste mensen. Dat lijkt me onoplosbaar en dus is wat hier verteld wordt weer ver weg van de realiteit van alledag voor de meeste mensen.]

(123) Chapter 8 - Failure to Connect

"In her disturbing book Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds—For Better and Worse, Healy offers numerous such stories based on her remarkably extensive observation of computer-based education around the country. The stories range from good to bad to ugly — with the great majority being decidedly ugly. It’s enough to make any sober-minded reader despair of the American educational system."(124)

"If I had to lodge one complaint, it would be that Healy does not follow up on her repeated observation that most successful projects would prove just as successful without the computer. That is, she does not spend much time helping us to imagine the alternatives."(126)

"Given the endless opportunities of the sort David Sobel describes, why do we work so hard to make the task more difficult? Do you realize what we could do in the way of nature education if we diverted even a modest portion of current computer expenditures toward real-world engagement?"(129)

(133) Chapter 9 - Educational Provocations

"I have, in the following collection of short statements, attempted to gather some thoughts that could usefully stimulate discussion among school board members, parents, and teachers, as well as students in the upper grades." [mijn nadruk] (133)

[Dit is dus een vervolg op de verhaal in het vorige hoofdstuk over het kritiekloze gebruik van computers in het basisonderwijs resp. het geïdealiseer van ICT.]

(139) Chapter 10 - Three Notes: On Baby Walkers, Video Games, and Sex

"The decisive point here ought to be shouted from the roof- tops: Devices intended to speed up development of a child’s legs and improve locomotor performance can turn out to have exactly the opposite effect. In a society obsessed with giving its children a head start, this truth flies directly and rudely in our faces."(140)

"It is also remarkable that, after trying to force the development of the infant’s muscles and legs before they are ready, we turn around and set the growing boy and girl — who now desperately need vigorous movement and active play — in front of video screens where they remain nearly immobile for countless hours. And in this we contribute further to an epidemic of obesity. There is probably no tool that offers a wider variety of ways to distort and “force” the normal processes of growing up than the computer."(141)

[Inderdaad. Goed gezien.]

"This always puzzles me. Why is it so difficult to see that protecting children is exactly what we must do? In fact, the need to shield the child from the fatal consequences of premature exposure to the world — and to do so for an extraordinarily long time — is one of the things that distinguishes humans from animals."(146)

[Niet goed gezien. Het beschermen van kinderen op die manier is heel wat anders dan kinderen weerbaar maken binnen de werkelijkheid waarmee ze nu eenmaal te maken hebben.]

(149) Chapter 11 - Who’s Killing Higher Education? (Or Is It Suicide?)

"When the emerging Internet began re-shaping the public consciousness during the 1990s, a strong consensus within the online community held that the new information technologies would bring an end to higher education as we have known it. I suspect this was true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end — the final perfection and dead-end extreme — of the old regime’s shortcomings."(149)

Dat laatste slaat op de reductie naar informatieoverdracht die in het onderwijs heeft plaatsgevonden.

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation’s crushing solicitude. I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business — already attuned to such computationally rigorous training — will far outperform the university."(151)

"It is one of the revealing facts about the Information Age that it is the supreme Age of Credentials. Not just credentials as such (about which I have no complaint), but wooden credentials — degrees, certificates, diplomas, and licenses based solely on “measurable outcomes,” such as credit hours and standardized test grades, with scarcely any reference whatever to the actual inner accomplishment and capability of the certificate bearer."(153)

"The central focus of information technology upon the reliable, precise, and quantifiable transmission of well-defined bits from one place to another, and the emphasis upon algorithmic procedures for manipulating this information, accord perfectly with
• the “shoveling facts” style of education;
• the increasingly cosy relationship between education and businesses, whose primary concern has more to do with operational effectiveness than with depth of understanding;
• the rigid “credentialization” and standardization of society, which, in turn, amount to a denial of the distinctive life and gifts of the individual. But, in the end, this model of education leaves little room for schools or, ultimately, students."(156)

"If, as I indicated above, standardization tends to obliterate everything individual, the principle we need to set against standardization in order to hold the balance is recognition of the individual. Every individual follows a unique path through this world, and the teacher’s failure to enter upon that path with the student is a failure to teach. This failure also makes any profound assessment of the student’s performance impossible.
Inevitably, though, the objection is voiced that an individual, qualitative assessment of students is not even desirable, since it eventuates in merely subjective and often biased judgments. After all, who has not heard of doctoral students suffering irremediable loss at the hands of willfully antagonistic thesis advisers?
Nothing is more symptomatic of our age than this objection, with its implicit argument for unmitigated standardization. It would eliminate from consideration everything not measurable, which is to say, everything qualitative, which is to say, everything giving individual character to the human being.
Yes, educators can lose their objectivity; they can yield to biases of one sort or another. But in no domain do we solve this by denaturing human relationships so that the opportunity for bias and subjective error does not arise. We can overcome our subjective limitations only by . . . overcoming them, only by seeing more truly, more deeply."(157-158)

Volgt een kritiek op het gebruik van het woord 'informatie' dat ineens te pas en te onpas in allerlei contexten opduikt zonder dat duidelijk is wat het woord zelfs maar inhoudt.

[Ik ben het erg eens met wat hij hier beschrijft. ]

(163) Part IV - On Socializing Our Machines

(165) Chapter 12 - Conversing with Ella

Gaat over Turingtests en conversaties met computers (zoals die 'Ella').

"It’s just that we should now and then remind ourselves how startlingly primitive the state of the art is today compared to the titillating predictions that we are entering an “age of spiritual machines.” It’s an extremely safe bet that in Ray Kurzweil’s landmark year of 2030 (when machines are supposed to start leaving human intelligence hopelessly behind), there will be no supercomputer on earth that can be relied upon to deliver two successive and coherent responses in a truly open-ended, fertile conversation."(167)

[Dat is iets te pessimistisch gebleken, maar is principieel gezien wel juist.]

(171) Chapter 13 - Flesh and Machines: The Mere Assertions of Rodney Brooks

"In Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (2002) robotics guru Rodney Brooks informs us that “we are nothing more than a highly ordered collection of biomolecules” ..."(171)

Volgens Brooks zijn mensen niet meer dan machines.

"The “we are nothing but” claim takes countless forms and comes at us from many sides."(176)

"Why do we so often encounter today the assaultive reductionist assertions, “the human being is only . . . ,” “we are nothing more than . . . ,” “we are merely . . . ”? The vacuity of the claims together with the characteristic aggressiveness of the authors certainly raises some interesting questions." [mijn nadruk] (177)

[Vind ik ook. Het is een taalgebruik dat mensen omlaag wil halen naar het niveau van machines zodat daarna gezegd kan worden dat machines belangrijker zijn dan mensen.]

"We may wonder, then, what is behind this sense of being reduced. Whence arises this feeling of inferiority requiring the use of pejorative and reductive language?" [mijn nadruk] (177)

(183) Chapter 14 - From HAL to Kismet

Meer kritiek op Brooks, deze keer op het idealiseren van de Kismet-robot.

"We are led back, then, to Brooks’ observation that “Kismet is alive. Or may as well be. People treat it that way.” This, as nearly as I can tell, is just about the entire substance of his argument that robots are living creatures. He periodically acknowledges that his own robots currently lack certain creaturely capacities, but, hell, people sure seem to regard them as alive, so what’s the difference?" [mijn nadruk] (185)

"He seems reluctant to state his answer directly, but his argument throughout Flesh and Machines makes it clear that he equates “life-like” with “alive,” even if that means, rather mysteriously, “alive in a different way.”" [mijn nadruk] (185)

"“If it feels like one, it must be one” seems to be how the argument goes. Not much interest in distinctions here. Nor much timidity."(186)

[Ik ben het met hem eens. Het is bijzonder gemakzuchtig en kritiekloos om zo te praten over machines.]

(191) Chapter 15 - Invisible Tools or Emotionally Supportive Pals?

Over het onzichtbaar maken van (computer)technologie.

"But then, invisibility itself is also problematic. As information technologies become ever more sophisticated reflections of our own intelligence, it seems fair to say that our thoughts and assumptions get built into them in increasingly powerful ways."(192)

"So . . . the fact that we meet human intentions in our machines is already reason enough for caution. Do we really want all those strivings and contrivings — all those thoughts and assumptions someone has cleverly etched into the hardware and software we are using — to remain invisible?"(192)

"The alternative would be for the machine to influence or control us beneath the threshold of awareness."(193)

[Met andere woorden: in feite maken we dan onszelf dan onzichtbaar? Is dit niet een kwestie van verwarrend taalgebruik?]

"If we cannot accept the ideal of machine invisibility in any absolute sense, neither can we accept the ideal of machine personality. The problem with both ideals, at root, comes from the same source: a failure to reckon adequately with the computer as a human expression." [mijn nadruk] (194)

[Dat vind ik wel een mooie uitspraak. Een machine / computer is nooit iets op zichzelf, een robot ook niet, maar een verlengstuk van menselijke inzichten, waarderingen en handelingen.]

"To celebrate the machine in its own right is like celebrating the letters or the ink on the page, or the grammatical structure of a great literary text, rather than the human expression they are all caught up in."(195)

[Ook. ]

" ... our conversation with the machine is, in the end, a conversation among ourselves ..."(197)

(199) Part V - On Mechanizing Society

(201) Chapter 16 - Evil

"The whole idea of technology, really, is this externalization of part of ourselves — our muscular activity, our speech, our logical constructions. This is perfectly fine as long as we recognize these projections for what they are — mechanistic aspects of ourselves — and as long as we bear responsibility for them. This, however, is exactly what we are not doing when we are looking for good and evil outside ourselves." [mijn nadruk] (202)

Chapter 17 - The Threat of Technology That Works Well

"The gains in safety and convenience from such an electronic system seem obvious. Of course, as most people realize, there are also risks. What happens when the bracelet or alarm system fails? Or when the patient figures out, accidentally or otherwise, how to neutralize the bracelet? Suddenly the staff’s convenient habit of ignoring him poses an extraordinary danger.
But what if the system continues to work exactly as hoped? Might that possibility pose the greatest danger of all? In particular, do those wrist bracelets, by increasing the efficiency of the nursing home operation, make it an even more inhuman terror for aging folks than it already is? Do family members or neighbors or staff members ever take that old man through the forbidden doors and outside, where he can experience grass, tree, and sun for a few minutes? Or, now that he is so well watched after by technology, do they increasingly forget him?" [mijn nadruk] (203)

"It is not an overload of information so much as a deficit of meaning we suffer from, not a lack of proper filters so much as the loss of mental focus — an inadequate power of sustained attention to what is important."(207)

"What I do believe is that, with our technologies in hand, we are given the freedom to construct a hellish, counter-human, machine-like society, or else a humane society in which the machine, by being held in its place, reflects back to us our own inner powers of mastery. And the difference between these antithetical movements is the difference between focusing more on the human dimensions of whatever domain we are concerned with, or on the technological dimensions." [mijn nadruk] (208)

"I can’t say what our technological trajectory would look like if we were fully conscious of the issues; but it is certain that, with our attention upon the things that count, the trajectory would be radically different — which is not the same as saying we should “halt all technological progress.” The point, rather, is to escape the mindset that sees progress primarily in terms of technology."(209)

"Technologies pose a riddle for us. If, as we use our new inventions, we are not also looking deeper than the immediate uses, if we are not addressing their riddle, then we can be pretty certain we are cooperating in the production of some very unhappy consequences."(212)

"This, then, is the Great Technological Deceit. Confusing the technical and human levels of a problem, we assure ourselves that technical advances will improve the situation, whereas in fact they ensnare us (as long as we are unaware of the problem) ever more securely. There is a kind of rampaging technological aggrandizement at work here, and we have not yet shown, as a society, that we have a clue about managing it." [mijn nadruk] (214-215)

(217) Chapter 18 - The Ideal of Ubiquitous Technology

Over allerlei onzinnig onderzoek naar nieuwe technologische snufjes en gadgets.

"In the first place, the likelihood of serendipitous benefits is not a convincing justification for trivializing the immediate application of millions of research dollars. No one would argue that non-trivial research is less likely to produce valuable offshoots than trivial research, so why start with triviality? In the second place, the Media Lab researchers voice their comic lines with a strange seriousness and fervor, devoid of the detachment underlying a true spirit of play."(218)

"Those sponsors must love it. Where else but in an academic computing laboratory could they possibly find adult human beings seriously willing to propose such laughable things in order to start creating an artificial need where none was recognized before? By slow degrees the laughable becomes conventional."(218)

"Thirdly, there are signs of a pathological flight from reality in all this."(219)

"No, the kind of fluff the Media Lab all too often advertises is not really comic. Looked at in its social context, it is sick and obscene. It is sick because of the amount of money spent on superficialities; it is sick because of the way corporate sponsors have been able to buy themselves an “academic” facility at a major educational institution to act as their “Consumer Preparation Department”; and it is sick because a straight-faced press corps slavishly reports these “inventions of the future” without ever administering the derisive smile so much of this stuff begs for." [mijn nadruk] (219)

[Erg mooi neergezet. ]

"You also cannot pronounce a tool desirable (or worth the investment of substantial resources) apart from a context of desirability. Things are desirable only insofar as a matrix of needs, capacities, yearnings, practical constraints, and wise judgment confirms them."(221)

"One way to express an ideal of ubiquitous computing is to say, “Anything we do that can be automated should be automated.” It’s a principle that appeals to the common sense of many people today, and complements the notion that machines can unburden us of the more tedious and mechanized work, leaving us free to occupy ourselves with “higher” and more “human” tasks. Appealing as this may be, I’m convinced that it readily promotes an unhealthy relation to technology."(226)

"When we yield ourselves to automatisms, we become sleepwalkers. But if instead they serve as foils for our own increased wakefulness, then they will have performed a high service."(229)

(233) Chapter 19 - Privacy in an Age of Data

"If a decent sense of privacy does not apply, in the first instance, to the socially embedded individual — if it does not first flourish as an ideal in intimate, personal spaces — it cannot flourish in cyberspace. Privacy is inseparable from a certain willingness to lower one’s eyes and to hold sacred what one knows or chooses not to know about the other person. When it has become a mere drive toward anonymity, it necessarily vanishes as a meaningful standard for our life together, signaling instead our disconnection."(233)

"There is, then [zie Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities - GdG] — or at least was on the streets of this healthy neighborhood in East Harlem — a vital balance between public exposure and personal privacy, between having to do with each other in manifold ways and leaving each other respectfully alone, between building a public environment of trust and enjoying, within that secure environment, one’s private circle."(237-238)

"Issues of personal respect don’t arise between packets of data, nor between information processing programs. Data and programs are not caught up in the kind of street life Jacobs describes, and they do not have “respect me” written all over them in the way that people do. They do not inhabit public spaces. Within the global information system every piece of data is perilously close to being globally exposed, and there is no local “community of data” to play a buffering and protecting role. Therefore privacy advocates are, with good reason, trying to write “it’s none of your business” all over every data packet.
But we should realize that this technical protection, neces- sary though it may be, has little positive relation to any privacy truly conceived. Moreover, it readily contributes to the depersonalization of transactions, thereby further reducing the public spaces where respect for privacy can grow. This is why technologies like public key cryptography, biometric encryption, and digital pseudonyms offer us ambiguous hope at best."(238-239)

"The delicate balance Jacobs describes in the public life of the sidewalk cannot be lightly manufactured; it grows up in real places, among real presences."(239)

(241) Chapter 20 - A Taste for Number Magic

"It’s one thing to work toward a worthwhile goal, pursuing it in an economically disciplined and profitable fashion. It’s quite another thing to make profit your primary goal and the measure of everything else.
Society’s welfare hangs upon the difference. The difference, moreover, is immediately recognizable in all concrete human contexts where people are actually paying attention to each other. It’s the difference between serving each other’s needs as effectively as possible, and using each other. And yet, the concerted drive of economic theory and commercial practice has been to obliterate the distinction. To succeed in this would be to obliterate ourselves.
It’s a strange and pernicious notion that has been foisted upon Western society by economists: you and I, they tell us, by giving free rein to greed, selfishness, competitive malice, and megalomania, perform a valuable public service. We can spend our days pitting ourselves against the welfare and livelihood of others, and then trust “the market” to transform our venality into a public good." [mijn nadruk] (241)

[Mijn idee ... ]

"No, capitalism does not harness greed and turn it into good. What it harnesses is diverse individual choice and initiative, which it weaves, without central planning, into a collective tapestry. This is its great and absolutely essential virtue. But the virtue in no way obviates the fact that the tapestry, beautiful or soiled, depends on those individual choices, beautiful or soiled. When the choices are driven more and more by greed, society sickens — precisely because capitalism grounds society so fundamentally upon the free individual’s choices." [mijn nadruk] (245)

"So please understand that I am not about to set off on a rant against capitalism and the market. I am talking only about how you and I, as free moral individuals, choose to behave in the marketplace, a consideration largely absent from respectable economic thinking." [mijn nadruk] (245)

[Ja, stel je voor, dat mag natuurlijk niet in de VS, stel je voor dat je voor communist versleten wordt ... Het punt is dat het kapitalisme als systeem gericht is winst etc. en dat slechte morele gedrag van individuele mensen op alle fronten stimuleert en beloont. De vraag is dan ook of het werkelijk zo gericht is op individuele keuze en initiatief zoals Talbott zegt.]

"The flight into mathematics and other abstractions does not necessarily lure us into a fantasy world. Everything depends upon whether we keep firmly in mind the full-fleshed reality from which the abstractions were drawn. But the tendency, it seems, is all the other way."(246)

[Dat denk ik ook. En ik ben het ook met hem eens dat je niet over vrijheid of vrijheden kunt praten zonder tegelijkertijd te praten over verantwoordelijkheid. zoals Talbott hierna uitwerkt.]

"We seem eager to cultivate our freedoms, and equally eager to point out the very real limitations of government in the economic realm, but not eager at all to grant that, well then, an awful lot must be up to us. And the Invisible Hand provides the perfect excuse for disavowing responsibility: the mechanisms of the market will take care of everything despite our worst intentions."(249)

"So I am not trying to trash the market. In a critical sense the market is never wrong — no more than a valid equation or proposition of logic is ever wrong. It’s just that, understood as a mathematical abstraction, the market does not give us a single certainty about human welfare — and the assumption that it does inevitably leads us away from human welfare." [mijn nadruk] (250)

[Hm, te weinig kritisch over het idee 'markt' in het algemeen, vind ik.]

"Clearly, any economists who felt obliged to look at the real world would have to reckon with the qualities of things, and therefore would be unable to remain wholly within the neat abstractions that lend so much elegance to their theoretical habitations. There’s the rub for a discipline whose self-image depends much more on mathematical rigor and scientific respectability than on the understanding of reality."(253)

"Try to scan your radio dial without stumbling across a financial-advice program; but how often do you find such a program whose focus is the health of society rather than maximization of return?" [mijn nadruk] (254)

(257) Chapter 21 - The Internet: Reflections on Our Present Discontents

"There are not many happy campers on the Internet these days— or, at least, not many idealistic happy campers. Malicious worms and viruses, an ever-rising tide of spam, commercialism in its crassest forms, lawsuits over Internet filters in libraries, nag- ging questions about privacy in the face of governmental and corporate surveillance, the apparent success of gambling, pornography, and every scam imaginable, monopolistic software of poor quality, the ubiquitous frustrations of employees dealing with crotchety tools they have no hope of understanding, nasty battles over copyright — none of this is calculated to make one feel warmly about the online experience."(257)

[Prachtig samengevat.]

"Digital networks continue and dramatically accentuate a longstanding trend toward depersonalized transactions in modern society. The trend is inescapable in an ever more complexly organized world. But this is not to say we’ve managed it healthily. Everything depends on our ability to find occasions for more deeply personalized transactions to counter the ever more pervasive mechanized ones, thereby keeping a grip upon our humanity." [mijn nadruk] (261)