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“A lot of education institutions . . . has [sic] bad monkeys in ‘em”
Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, (maker of the popular educational program Canvas) at the 2012 Investor Conference
More students are logging in. More teachers are checking out.
It’s distance education. Or on-line learning. Or whatever they’re calling it these days. Whatever it is, it amounts to the erosion of the traditional face-to-face classroom.
What would Joseph Weizenbaum Say? Weizenbaum, an early inventor of artificial intelligence, wrote the seminal Computer Power and Human Reason in 1976, a powerful treatise against the dangers of computers. A humanist who’d lived through the Nazi era,Weizenbaum soon grew alarmed at the computers growing cultural domination. He advised outlawing “all projects that substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding, and love.” In a brilliant riposte that has resonance today he called computers, ”a solution looking for a problem.” The craft of teaching face-to-face is increasingly cornered, forced to justify its relevance in the face of its high tech replacement. Joanna Bejus, a former English Professor and computer critic argues that “with the move to online learning, another massive expropriation of social space will have succeeded. And let’s not kid ourselves; this will not happen because online learning is better. It will happen because it is yet another way to guarantee profits and to fragment and isolate the working class.” She adds that, “Online learning makes the structure of domination absolute, the prospect of appeal, unrealistic, and the likelihood of universal surveillance, a sure bet” (Bejus 2013a).
Where does the instrumental logic of on-line curricula take us?
Why bother being with other humans at all? According to some proponents, the Occupy Movement was a glorious waste of time. Avirtual sit-in – in Cyberspace – would have fit the bill.
Massive Invasion of Universities
As the BIG 3 automakers cravenly eye China, the e-learning behemoth is licking its chops at the classroom. On May 14, major industry officials announced their study showing the “enormous potential for the future of the e-learning market.” IBIS Capital and the Edxus Group, said that “While education as a whole is triple the size of the media and entertainment industry at $4.2 trillion, digital education is currently only 20% of the size of the digital media market. Since education is undergoing the same disruptive effects of digitalization that the media industry has seen in recent years, they expect to see fifteen fold growth in the e-learning market in the next 10 years to represent 30% of the total education market,” reported Pippa Cottrell in Realwire, (Cottrell 2013). IBIS and Edxus have organized a special one day summit in London on June 14, called EdTech Europe (see URL below) that will address the current investment trends in education technology and e-learning in that $ 4.2 trillion goldmine. Attending are Microsoft, Pearson International, McGraw-Hill, InfoMentor, Languagelab, Mendeley, and Iversity which will discuss “a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform cooperating with the best instructors, universities and knowledge-based companies to democratize education.”
Democracy?
Some faculties are not taking this lying down. On April 29 the philosophy faculty of San Jose State University wrote a letter protesting the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in which a Harvard professor’s lecture was taped and disseminated widely for classroom use. The professors refused to teach that philosophy course developed by edX, “saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to ‘replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities’” (Kolowich 2013).
Resistance is Futile, They Say
A leading e-learning corporation, Instructure, is a Utah-based start-up led by the young and flamboyant CEO Josh Coates. From its humble beginnings in 2008 it has grown to encompass over 200 employees and more than 400 colleges and universities includingBrown, Auburn, New Mexico State, the University of Utah and Utah State University. It is currently being rolled out at the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, and at my place of employment, the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
Among its “premier partners” are Pearson and McGraw Hill, noted above.
Instructure, like their competitors, is very concerned about faculty resistance to their encroachments. They have all learned from past battles not to challenge faculty directly. Instead they are taking a soft approach. A revelatory 2009 article “Resistance is Futile” (O’Hanlon 2009) spells out the general strategy. ”It all starts with how you communicate with teachers,” Barbara Dunn told journalist Charlene O’Hanlon. Dunn is the vice president of the Remediation and Training Institute in Alexandria, VA. “You can position technology as, ‘This is what it does,’ etc., and that’s fine,” said Dunn, “but when you say, ‘You must use it,’ that’s where the resistance comes. And when you impose a deadline, it becomes another compliance thing rather than a way to enhance learning,” reported O’Hanlon. “Don’t try to cram it down everybody’s throat,” David Roh, general manager for Follett Digital Resources told O’Hanlon. “The trick is to position a technology tool not just as strictly voluntary, but also as something that actually will make their jobs more interesting,” said O’Hanlon. In stage two a small core of “digital settlers” master the technology and sing its praises, attracting more recruits. If all else fails there’s stage Three: the carrots.
My university is at Stage Two.
Instructure CEO Coates Instructs us about Monkeys
In a very illuminating 40 minute video of Instructure CEO Josh Coates to 600+ stakeholders in January 2012, we get his view of the conflict. I’m not sure why he would let this be posted on-line. In his multi-media presentation, jammed with rock music, James Bond imagery and military tanks firing shells (he owns a tank), the emphasis was a story about monkeys and bananas.
The screen behind him was dotted with five monkeys, with a ladder in the middle and a stack of bananas on top. Coates projected a reference to a scholarly 1966 article and said the story he was about to tell was roughly based on it. The article was titled, “Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys,” by G.R. Stephenson (Stephenson 1966).
As Coates told it, a monkey went to the stairs and started to climb towards the bananas, as monkeys are wont to do. As soon as he started up the stairs, the psychologists sprayed all of the monkeys with cold water. Soon whenever a given monkey attempted to ascend the stairs he was viciously beaten by the other monkeys (via operant conditioning, not wanting the pain of the cold water to return). “True story,” he interjected. Over time, one by one, new monkeys were introduced to this environment (with the beckoning ladder and bananas), and eventually no monkey ever took the risk, Why not? He surmised from his own experience in educational environments that the (people) would say, “We don’t know. That’s just how we do things around here.”
“A lot of education institutions . . . has [sic] bad monkeys in ‘em,” said Coates.
“But it’s something no one is this room has to worry about,” he said, speaking to the face-to-face gathering of Instructure investors, consumers and techies. “Because you guys are awesome. You’re innovators, pioneers, creators and visionaries. You guys are here because you got the bananas.”
In other words, universities are like zoos of bickering professors who gang up on innovators, throttling them when they step out of line. Over time, they are often clueless as to why they are attacking the rational monkey (the one who wants the banana, i.e., the educational technology). Fortunately the Instructure team (James Bond and the technology warriors) are there to save the day. “We’ll not let you down.”
It turns out that that monkey study, as he described it, never happened (see URL of Stephenson 1966 below). There were no bananas and no ladder and the monkeys did not attack anyone. His story is a great distortion and draws the wrong conclusions. Evolutionary biologist Dario Maestripieri, (2011) read the original study and reported his findings (see Maestripiera URL below). In the original study the rhesus monkeys were “punished with an air blast each time it started to manipulate a [“novel’] object,” and as a consequence, some showed a fear response when others went near it. Reports Maestripiere, “In reviewing Stephenson’s study, psychologist Susan Mineka [1980] noted that when female subjects were used, Stephenson found opposite results: previously fearful models lost their fear as a result of watching the nonfearful behavior of their observers.” So, unlike Coates, one could draw opposite conclusion, some monkeys did indeed eventually get the object without the intervention of a savior.
No Matter. Truth is apparently beside the point for this instructor from Instructure.
Upon viewing the video Carl Maida, an anthropologist who teaches with experiential learning methods, commented, “Techies rock; faculty will clearly become the new class of ‘technopeasants’ and the universities are fast becoming the new Latifundia” (Maida 2013).
The stakes are incredibly high. But most faculties across the country seem in the dark. “Pedagogy as an intellectual, moral and political practice is now based on measurements of value derived from market Competition,” argues educational theorist Henry Giroux, “Mathematical utility has now replaced critical dialogue, debate, risk-taking, the power of imaginative leaps and learning for the sake of learning. A crude instrumental rationality now governs the form and content of curricula, and where content has the potential to open up the possibility of critical thinking, it is quickly shut down. This is a pedagogy that has led to the abandonment of democratic impulses, analytic thinking, and social responsibility.
Giroux is right. He’s not speaking against educational technology or social media (he is the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies and uses much educational technology). He’s against the imposition of given curricula, forms of pedagogy, modes of technology and evaluation from above in the academic-industrial-communication complex.
Anthropologists are increasingly employing e-learning. At the University of North Texas you can get your entire MA or MS in Applied Anthropology on line (UNT 2013). You are only required to go to campus twelve times over the three year program. In England you can get, “An Archaeology PhD by eMail” (Hirst ca: 2006) through Leicester University’s Distance Learning Program. They have been running it since 2001. It’s “suitable for those with a developed career or other commitments who can’t afford to give up the day job!” they say on their website. Many more anthropology departments offer on-line courses (while still requiring campus courses). It’s argued that it makes education more accessible across time and space and provides the flexibility for busy parents and workers. Some professors at my university tell me that they prefer the hours or that they simply want to avoid colleagues on campus.
Unfortunately, many professors across the country are being pressured or required to do e-teaching.
Ten arguments for the Opposition
We need to construct a language to describe the “common sense” nonsense behind this high tech hurrah. Here is a beginning.
1. Trojan Horse of Capital. I’ve touched on this above. Teachers and professors need to shine the light on the shadows behind thenew learning management system infrastructure that is magically appearing at their schools and universities. How is the technology being introduced? Is the decision making democratic? Who benefits? What are the trends?
2. Deskilling Professors. A rereading of Harry Braverman’s classic, Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974:1998) is necessary. Braverman conducted an ethnographic analysis of the labor process and revealed how capital 1) appropriates all historical knowledge from the craftsmen
2) separate conception from execution and 3) employs the new found monopoly of knowledge to control every step of the labor process and hire unskilled workers who are interchangeable and cheap. It’s called Taylorization, or scientific management. The new technology makes this amazingly simple. Joanne Bujes points out one aspect of this invasion: “they will pick 100 teachers and get them on tape for e-learning. And then professors will be reduced to grad students leading a discussion section once a week. Are people going to go into debt half their lives for this?”
3. The Surveillance State. Here’s what historian of science David Noble wrote in Digital Diploma Mills, ”Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically. At the same time, the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously accessible. The technology also allows for much more careful administrative monitoring of faculty availability, activities, and responsiveness” (Noble 1998). With the introduction of advanced corporate learning platforms many teachers will watch what they say in class. There are topics and dialogic digressions that many will not want recorded and made available for administrators to scrutinize.
4. Less Touch, Less Trust. Trust is fundamental for education. Trust is a byproduct of working through struggle with others. Education is itself a struggle, a struggle over meaning. You learn to trust others through small reciprocities over time. You share knowledge and intimacies and form a bond. In struggle you absorb the breadth of another’s character, their force of being. Most of this is done non-verbally, informally, and unconsciously. It is tactile and sensual. It takes place in the presence of another. Tran van Dinh, poet and Vietnamese activist, once told me that the Vietnamese called this the Three Togethers: eat together, work together, fight together. Similarly, Vygotsky talked about education as entering “the zone of proximal development,” the difference between what a person can do unaided and what they can do with help. This education is best done face-to-face, of course.
5. Informal Communication on the Backburner. To understand the importance of informality in education, Richard Sennett’s recent book Together (2012) is essential. Sennett draws from the work of Saul Alinsky and Jane Addams as part of a wide ranging exploration of why people have to be face to face. Alinsky promoted “dialogical exchange with a vengeance,” getting people together who have rarely talked, providing them with facts that they didn’t know, and suggesting methods for the community organizer to sustain dialogue. In this he was channeling Jane Addams, settlement house leader who founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889. She built cooperation by focusing on everyday life: schooling, shopping and parenting, not by enacting policy formulas. Addams thought the values of [settlement houses] first and foremost to be places of refuge; a strict schedule of social activities modeled on those of a cruise line was to be avoided” (Sennett 2012:52-53). A good college is just that, a refuge where students of different backgrounds can gather and interact informally.
6. Waning of Cooperation. Sennett asserts “modern society is ‘deskilling’ people in practicing cooperation” (Sennett 2012:8). By this he means that “people are losing skills to deal with intractable differences as material inequality isolates them, short-term labor makes their social contacts more superficial and activates anxiety about the Other” (Sennett 2012:9). The book makes the point splendidly, but I want to draw attention to the following story. He tells how he took part in a beta testing group with Google Corporation to test the online communication effectiveness with GoogleWave, a complex email and visual product. Distant participants used this system to improve their cooperation abilities. It failed miserably and was taken off the market. Says Sennett, “One large reason for its failure may be that the program mistook information sharing for communication.” In email exchanges responses tend to get stripped down to a bare minimum and with GoogleWave the visual tended to dominate, he said. “Communication as opposed to information, mines the realm of suggestion and connotation . . . it conveys irony and doubt” in a way GoogleWave could not do. In the end the group got on airplanes to meet in person!
7. Erosion of the Eros Effect (and Dancing in the Streets). There is a real excitement in the classroom encounter. It’s visceral, highly charged and joyous when done well. It can be like a festival. The classroom is a sacred liminal space, a refuge for thinking. It’s a vital human experience and it is being threatened. Joanna Bujes says this face to face relationship was paramount to her learning. “To think of learning as the relationship between a learner and some given subject matter is profoundly distorting. Learning is first and foremost a relationship between two people. Although teaching institutions are often built around hierarchies, dominance, and obedience, there is still in the experience of the classroom the reality as experienced by the students versus the reality of the teacher. And though it might not be expressed openly, and though it might not change teaching practice, there is an infinitely higher chance that it will change reality with face-to-face learning than with distance learning. At the very least, the political aspect of education is much more visible with the traditional model than with the online model.” After our interview Joanna sent me the link of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2006 book Dancing in the Streets, A history of Collective Joy to better understand “the energy of groups.” “Have you ever noticed that you exercise is much better with someone else than alone?” Ehrenreich investigated humanity’s desire for ecstatic ritual (drawing from scores of anthropologists). These ecstatic rituals have been effectively suppressed by civilizations, she argues. But they are fundamental for education as well. In fact they are education. There is a drive for humans to be with others in ecstasy from Marti Gras to Occupy to the classroom itself.
8. Collapse of the commons. Primitive accumulation – wars, violence, enclosures and privatization – is a chief means by which capitalism appropriates the commons. Universities are a kind of commons, an essential bulwark for creating an alert democracy to address these monumental social problems. But today, with widespread corporate and military contracts and with the introduction of capital intensive technology to supplant teacher autonomy, universities are fast becoming capitalist knowledge factories, a central tier of Eisenhower’s feared military industrial academic complex. This is also evident in one of my focal areas: Indians of North America. The Bullfrog Film Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Resistance illustrates the continued destruction of the Indian commons. Gail Small, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe in Lame Deer, is profiled. “You put in 75,000 methane gas wells around our reservation, you take our ground water, pollute our air, destroy our rivers, the Cheyenne here will probably not be able to survive. We’ll have a wasteland here. That’s what’s at stake here. Where will the Cheyenne go?”
9. “Techno-utopia” arrives just in time as state falters. Zygmunt Bauman puts it well . . .” ‘the techno-utopia is an ideological weapon in an ongoing traffic of influence under the aegis of free trade [Mattelart 1997].’ It is part and parcel of the discourse in which the state is represented as the evil enemy of the true freedom of a politics-free ‘civil society’ of sovereign individuals. But, in actual fact, the dismantling of state political constraints and controls, far from making ‘civil society’ free and truly autonomous, opens it to the unabashed rule of market forces which members of that society, now left to their own devices, have no means nor power to resist” (Bauman 2001:138-139).
10. Attack on Critical Pedagogy. As leading critical pedagogy theorist Henry Giroux describes it, “Overworked and largely isolated, faculty are now rewarded for intellectual activities privileged as entrepreneurial . . . faculty are asked to spend more time in larger classrooms while they are simultaneously expected to learn and use new instructional technologies such as PowerPoint, the web, and various multimedia pedagogical activities. . . .corporate time reworks faculty loyalties. Faculty interaction is structured less around collective solidarities built upon practices which offer a particular relationship to public life than through corporate imposed rituals of competition and production” (Giroux 2012:116-117).
Epilogue: Education for What?
We are witnessing the collapse of the public sphere and the colonization of the commons by predatory corporations. We gasp at the loss of jobs and the deskilling of most jobs that remain. Are we also glimpsing the end of education as we know it to the e-learning-industrial-academic complex?
Anthropologist Carl Maida thinks so. “The new model corporate university will constitute a ‘knowledge plantation’ economy, somewhat like California Central Valley agricultural enterprises with their part-time seasonal farmworkers — as long as it moves toward hiring predominantly part-time adjunct employees and scores of lab techies to keep that farm running.”
Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason is more pertinent today than when he wrote it in 1976. Education is cantankerous, unruly, artistic and troublemaking – in a word democratic.
It’s different from schooling. Schooling is about order. Education is about questioning. It’s rebellious, even revolutionary.
It’s not about getting rid of bad monkeys.
Brian McKenna is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and can be reached at mckenna193@aol.com
A version of this article was originally published in the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter, Vol. 24:2, May 31, 2013. Tim Wallace, editor.
References
Bauman, Zygmunt and Keith Tester (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge:Polity.
Bejus, Joanna (2013a) “Online learning” Progressive Economists listserv
(pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu). May 9.
Bejus, Joanna (2013b) Personal Interview. May 10.
Braverman, Harry (1974:1998) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York:Monthly Review.
Cottrall, Pippa (2013) “Digitalisation of Education Will Result in Fifteen Fold Growth for E-Learning Market Over the Next Decade.” Realwire. May 14.
Coates, Josh (2012) “InstructureCon12 Keynote, Josh Coates, CEO, Instructure.” See:
http://help.instructure.com/entries/21648583-instructurecon12-keynote-josh-coates-ceo-instructure
Coates, Josh (2013) “Solving Education Problems with Canvas Solutions.” Bloomberg Business Week Videos. February 25.
http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2013-02-25/solving-education-problems-with-canvas-solutions
Edtech Europe (2013) http://edtecheurope2013.eventbrite.co.uk/
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2006) Dancing in the Streets, A History of Collective Joy. New York:Metropolitan.
Giroux, Henry (2010) On Critical Pedagogy. New York:Continuum.
Hirst, K. Krist (ca 2006) “An Archaeology Ph.D. by Email” About.com Archaeology
http://archaeology.about.com/cs/onlinecourses/a/leicester.htm
Kolowich, Steve (2013) “Why Professors at San Jose State Won’t Use a Harvard Professor’s MOOC.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 2.
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Professors-at-San-Jose/138941/
Maestripiere, Dario (2012) “What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Human Behavior: From Facts to Fiction, When creativity crosses the line.” Psychology Today. March 20. See:
Mineka, Susan, Keir, Richard and Price, Veda (1980) “Fear of snakes in wild- and laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta)” Animal Learning and Behavior. December 8(4): 653-663.
Noble, David (1998) “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” First Monday 3(1-5) January.
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/569/490
O’Hanlon, Charlene (2009) :
http://thejournal.com/articles/2009/03/01/resistance-is-futile.aspx
Perelman, Michael (2000) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Duke University Press.
Radical Teacher (2013) Call for Proposals: The Professions. RT is now on line. See latest issue on Occupy and Education.http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher
Sennett, Richard (2012) Together, The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale.
Stephenson, G. R. (1966) “Cultural acquisition of a specific learned response among rhesus monkeys.” In: Starek, D., Schneider, R., and Kuhn, H. J. (eds.), Progress in Primatology, Stuttgart: Fischer, pp. 279-288. See:
University of Leicester, School of Archaeology and Ancient History (accessed 5/16/13) http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/archaeology/dl/postgraduate/phd
University of Northern Texas Anthropology Online Website
http://anthropology.unt.edu/grad-online.php
Weizenbaum, Joseph (1976) Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. New York:W. H. Freeman.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/03/the-predatory-pedagogy-of-on-line-education/
Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason is 33 years old now, out of print and yet nonetheless consistently referred to in discussions about AI. This is because, unlike many predictive tech books, Weizenbaum’s book holds up well, mostly because he focuses on the human issues around technology that haven’t really changed since publication.
He was prompted to write the book after his horrified reaction to the over-enthusiastic adoption of his creation, ELIZA, the therapy chatbot he’d created as “a parody of a Rogerian therapist.” A number of psychiatrists hailed ELIZA as a breakthrough, what one called a potential “therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists.” Weizenbaum was also “startled” at how quickly “how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR [ELIZA] became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it.” He was concerned that people ascribed more powers to ELIZA than it actually possessed, based on the “enormously exaggerated attributions an even well-educated audience is capable of making, even strives to make, to a technology it does not understand…if, as appeared to be the case, the public’s attributions are wildly misconceived, then public decisions are bound to be misguided and often wrong.”
Weizenbaum lays his concerns out in three points: 1, possibly less relevant now in our more “holistic” (and more computer-savvy) era, his concern that “man has finally been recognized as nothing but a clock-work,” that even a therapist is nothing but a rules-application machine. B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity was only six years old when Weizenbaum wrote, its themes of “cultural engineering” and “operant conditioning” reflecting the then-popular idea that man was a machine, programmable and modifiable. Our vastly increased scientific knowledge has taught us much more about the complexity of life, especially the human brain, and experience has taught us that “cultural engineering” (“spreading freedom” to societies that wish only to bag and bind their women) is a miserable failure. However, in his day, Weizenbaum’s fears were well-founded.
2 and 3 run together, as Weizenbaum expressed his concern about human autonomy – he accepts that people bind emotionally to machines since we have always attached to our tools, and “one would expect man to cathect more intensely to instruments that would couple directly to his own intellectual, cognitive and emotional functions than to machines that merely extend the power of his muscles.” However, he is concerned that the machine has become the intermediary between man and the world, that man cannot act in the world without machines. Moreover, we’ve surrendered our autonomy to “machines that operate for long periods of time entirely on the basis of their own internal realities,” be that the bank’s computers, the nuclear missile system, or Twitter, panic ensuing when any of these systems break down.
Man’s separation from nature began with the first technological intermediary – the clock, on which Weizenbaum quotes Lewis Mumford:
The clouds that could paralyze the sundial…were no longer obstacles to time-keeping…the bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence. Time-keeping passed into time-serving and time-accounting and time-rationing. As this took place, Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions.
This paved the path for a world view in which man ceased eating when he was hungry and ceased working when the sun set, and instead ate at noon and worked till 5. Weizenbaum argues that this started us on the path of “rejection…of direct experiences,” that we began to, as they’d say it in Neoconese, create our own reality. I have a hard time agreeing with him here; to me, the fact that “experiences of reality had to be representable as numbers” is part of our inborn need to divide and classify those experiences within a framework which language can’t provide – say, our desire to know the answer to “how hot is it out there?” The answers “hot, really hot, super hot” are so relative to the speaker as to be useless to the listener, whereas “91 degrees” can mean “pleasant weather” to one person and “oh god crank up the AC” to another. Without the numbers to divide “late afternoon” into 5 o’clock for the night owl and 3 o’clock for the morning person, we’re unable to communicate tangible knowledge in a common framework.
Weizenbaum is good on how the computer became “indispensable,” mostly because our society was engineered on a permanently expansionistic basis. Had computers not come along to make it easy to expand banking into arcane lines of business, for instance, or set assembly lines to making more cars at an ever-faster rate of production, the “inability to act” in that fashion “might in some other historical situation have been an incentive for modifying the task to be accomplished, perhaps doing away with it altogether, or for restructuring the human organizations whose inherent limitations were, after all, seen as the root of the trouble.” Instead, the ease with which computers allowed production to boom postponed the day when we would have to question the underlying ever-expansionist production/consumption model, allowed us to ignore alternatives (i.e. light rail/high speed rail vs. the automobile). And, of course, once a massive system is in place and in motion, with so many people and economies invested in it, only catastrophe can stop its momentum. As Weizenbaum puts it, “A person falling into a manhole is rarely helped by making it possible for him to fall faster or more efficiently.”
However, time has proven him wrong in his setting of computers alongside mass media as one-way channels of communication. Rather than the isolated, priesthood-managed mainframe of his time, we have the PC, the Internet, “social media,” “crowdsourcing, the “netroots,” etc. No doubt in too many cases we’ve still (as in the financial industry) “turned the processing of information on which decisions must be based over to enormously complex computer systems.” Yet today, we tell the computer what to do more than it tells us.
Weizenbaum discusses language as a “game,” in that it has a set of rules like chess, with some “moves” being legal and others not (i.e., “I am for the making with you of the computer” is illegal, even though a human can extract the meaning of it from the Palinese). A computer (as we’ve seen since Weizenbaum’s time) can indeed “play master-class chess,” because the rules are set and the possible moves in any situation, though large, are finite, and the known outcomes of the move, contained in a database of past games, can predict the probability of the outcome of the move in the current game. A chess master may work from intuition, from “just knowing” what the next move is, and as Weizenbaum says, “knows more than he can tell.”
But the language problem is one of “knowing,” i.e., the human mind operates on a system which chooses what to say next based on a vast realm of knowledge and, more importantly, motive, which we have not yet been able to codify into “telling” a machine how to do it. “The question of what we can get a computer to do is, in the final analysis, the question of what we can bring a computer to know.”
http://orlandoutland.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/computer-power-and-human-reason-part-1/
Weizenbaum devotes a good deal of space in the book to a chapter called “How Computers Work,” a useful introduction to programming for anyone who comes into his book with no tech background. Some of the most famous (or notorious) quotes from the book stem from Weizenbaum’s description of programming, and programmers. Discussing high-level programming languages, he notes that most programmers “have no knowledge whatsoever of their computer’s machine language or of the content and structure of the translators that mediate between them and their computers.” Weizenbaum notes that, rather than being the perfect transcription of mathematical principles, programming is “like any form of writing, more often than not experimental. One programs, just as one writes, not because one understands, but in order to come to understand.”
And he devotes a chapter to the “compulsive programmer,” a type we’re all familiar with now:
Wherever computer centers have become established…bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice…they work until they drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near the computer…their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. They are an international phenomenon.
The only thing that has changed in the intervening decades has been the relocation of the console from the university computer center to the dark basement or bedroom. Weizenbaum notes the difference between the compulsive programmer and the “dedicated, hard-working professional”: The professional has a problem to solve, uses the tool at hand and moves on, “whereas the compulsive programmer sees the problem mainly as an opportunity to interact with the computer.” Still, there’s no doubt many discoveries and inventions have come about because of some hacker tinkering endlessly with registries and routines, which the workaday programmer would never have discovered or created. But Weizenbaum’s argument is valid – to wall one’s self off into a “hard-coded” world where, say, everyone has a PhD in math, engineering or computer science, and design problems which should be handed to “creatives” are left instead to microgranular analysis of preference polls of thousands of Pantone shades, is to deny “the whole man,” to declare that problems which can’t be solved with pure science are not interesting or relevant.
Moreover, it’s just as dangerous when a Science that is really more of a Humanity, such as psychology, attempts to become “scientific,” to convert human behavior into codifiable rules (see for instance the creation of new “illnesses” for the DSM-V like “apathy disorder” and “parental alienation syndrome” so that all human problems can be assigned a billing code – and a prescription).
Weizenbaum is openly disdainful of the AI research of his time, using the unpleasantly Stalinist term “artificial intelligentsia” to describe its proponents. He lays out the now well-known linguistic problems with AI, i.e. “the house blew it” is a statement which the human mind can decode by using context – “the house” is often used to refer to a casino, and if the conversation is about gambling, the listener may glean the meaning even without having heard the phrase before.
Weizenbaum’s concern is that even a system like ELIZA, which isn’t the greatest conversationalist, provokes a willing suspension of disbelief in many of its users. Even in our interpersonal dealings, we bring a “working hypothesis” about the other person, usually based on first impressions – i.e., I see a fat old man getting out of a car with a RUSH IS RIGHT sticker, and I fill out my “conceptual framework” on that person with my prediction of what he’s going to think and say. These “acts of induction” are automatic and probably instinctive, and they come into play whenever we interact with another, whether that other is man or machine. Weizenbaum seems off the mark when he says that people conversing with ELIZA “cling to the belief that they are being understood” not because of our lifelong habit of infilling detail on new people, but because they don’t understand the science behind it, and that “it is therefore clothed in the magical mantle of Science and all of Science’s well known powers may be attributed to it.”
Next post: the conclusion of my review.
http://orlandoutland.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/computer-power-and-human-reason-part-2/
In sum, Weizenbaum’s arguments hold up against a certain school of thought, that which believes judges and psychiatrists could be handily replaced with artificial intelligences. But this feels like a straw man thirty years later; we have learned the hard way that technocratic solutions to human problems, imposed top-down, almost always fail, be they the regime changes of our last administration or the forced sterilization program of Indira Gandhi’s India which occurred around the time of the publication of this book. It’s Weizenbaum’s criticisms not of technology but of our uses and abuses of it that hold up after thirty years – his portrait of the “compulsive programmer” still paints a true picture of your average “Otaku”; his (and via quotation Minsky’s) assertion that our programs become increasingly unknowable to a single programmer the more complex and amended they become; his assertion that our “right brain” or intuitive side is what makes us superior decision makers to any pure “reasoning” machine (two years before Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain introduced “right brain” thinking to the general public).
We can’t criticize anyone from the past for failing to see the future, especially in the technology realm. Weizenbaum was forward-thinking in acknowledging that AI could, and might, be able to reproduce a number of “human” decision making processes; though he sometimes loses sight of the possible, such as when he acknowledges that it is “possible, in principle” to build a chess grandmaster AI, but dismisses the idea since calculating all potential games and moves “would take eons to complete on the fastest computers imaginable.” He was wrong in seeing computers as “instrument[s] for the destruction of history,” a case he makes based on the discarding of information in “incompatible formats.” In fact, rather than annihilating “history, memory itself,” the creation of “’data’ that are in ‘one standard format’ and that ‘can easily be told to the machine’” has actually preserved history, spread copies of once-obscure documents to hard drives in thousands if not millions of far-flung places, preserved out of print books from oblivion, saved the memories of witnesses to history which might have moldered and crumbled in their family’s attics. And, as noted in part 1 of this review, the “one-way” media stream he abhorred has been exploded by social media, YouTube, you name it.
Where Weizenbaum was accurate then, but mercifully wrong now, was in his take on people and their relation to science – the difference in the public grasp of general knowledge in the last 30 years is awesome to think about. He is openly disdainful of the public who accepts science as their forebears accepted magic; with no understanding of and no interest in the mechanics. Back then, without a doubt, a shot of a man in a white coat endorsing the low-tar cigarette was reason enough to believe, but in the mean time the gap between “us” and “them” has narrowed significantly – not just in that the priesthood has been tarnished by those among it who sold out to corporate interests (insisting global warming was a hoax at the behest of Exxon; fabricating clinical trial results at the behest of Big Pharma), but because the layman’s interest in, and access to, scientific data has increased vastly. How well would a book about the history of zero or the neuroscience behind great art have fared thirty years ago?
So how do his philosophical statements hold up? In his summary, he states “there are two kinds of computer applications that either ought not to be undertaken at all, or, if they are contemplated, should be approached with utmost caution.” In the first group, the kind he calls “simply obscene,” he includes the proposal “that an animal’s visual system and brain be coupled to computers,” hopefully because he objects to the damage done to the animal. In this group he also puts “all projects that propose to substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love…respect, understanding and love are not technical problems.” Of course, creating a virtual model of such a system is what my book is all about, so I disagree – not with the argument that emotions can’t be outsourced to computers, but with the argument that no artificial intelligence can take the place of human counseling. Based on experience, most patients can vouch that a good model of a good doctor is far preferable to a real, apathetic, ineffective or damage-increasing person. At the very least, the artificial therapist or physician can be counted on to “First, do no harm,” to bring no prejudices, never to dash through five-minute billing-mill visits. No doubt, there is no artificial substitute for the warm and nurturing relationship one develops with a great doctor; but while you are kissing frogs to find one, it would help to have at least a competent baseline AI to sustain you. In fact, I’d argue that the baseline of competency established by a well-functioning AI could be the litmus test which we could use to reduce the number of incompetent teachers, doctors, and other placeholders protected by their own kind and administrative inertia.
His second set of objections hold more weight, as they focus on computer programs “which can easily be seen to have irreversible and not entirely foreseeable side effects.” He cites computer speech recognition as such a problem – and, eerily, foreshadows our own national security state:
Such listening machines , could they be made, will make monitoring of voice communication very much easier than it now is. Perhaps the only reason that there is very little government monitoring of telephone conversations in many countries of the world is that such surveillance takes so much manpower…speech recognition machines could delete all ‘uninteresting’ conversations and present transcripts of only the remaining ones to their masters.
Which, unfortunately, is exactly where we are now. As P. W. Singer noted in Wired For War, many technologists don’t focus on the end uses of their technologies, only on the “coolness” of the problem to be solved and its various solutions.
Maybe the real “singularity” has already been reached:
Until recently society could always meet the unwanted and dangerous effects of its new inventions by, in a sense, reorganizing itself to undo or to minimize these effects. The density of cities could be reduced by geographically expanding the city. An individual could avoid the terrible effects of the industrial revolution in England by moving to America. And America could escape many of the consequences of the increasing power of military weapons by retreating behind its two oceanic moats. But those days are gone. The scientist and the technologist can no longer avoid the responsibility for what he does by appealing to the infinite powers of society to transform itself in response to new realities and to heal the wounds he inflicts on it.
Scientists must take responsibility for their creations, accept that their creations aren’t just “elegant solutions” to mathematical problems but affect other human beings in powerful ways every day. If, thirty years after this book, we still don’t have “truly safe automobiles, decent television, decent housing for everyone, or comfortable, safe and widely distributed mass transit,” it’s because “people have chosen to make and to have just exactly the things we have made and do have,” the SUVs and McMansions and financial instruments we chose so recently. In a memorable passage, Weizenbaum takes the example of commercials:
It is hard, when one sees a particularly offensive television commercial, to imagine that adult human beings sometime and somewhere sat around a table and decided to construct exactly that commercial and to have it broadcast hundreds of times. But that is what happens. These things are not the products of anonymous forces. They are the products of groups of men who have agreed among themselves that this pollution of the consciousness of the people serves their purposes.
It’s this call that survives the test of time, that outlives the anachronisms and contemporary anxieties of 1977, this idea that we are responsible for what we make and do, that we cannot shrug our Rumsfeldian shoulders and say “stuff happens.” Like voice recognition, AI will bring curses as well as blessings – i.e., a software agent powerful enough to function as a therapist could also be used as an interrogator. The book has served me most in this fashion, to remind me how great new technologies are always both used and misused, and I’ll write part 2 accordingly.
http://orlandoutland.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/computer-power-and-human-reason-conclusion/
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