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``` Some notes on site-specific information services and the year 2000, plus follow-ups and URL's.
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With 2001 coming up, let's do the numbers on a seriously strange year. In the year 2000, RRE distributed about 215 messages, which is toward the low end historically. But it also distributed 900 URL's about the elections, 1000 URL's about everything else, references for 1300 books, about 300 pages' worth of notes, and 10 excerpted book chapters. All of those numbers are much higher than any other year of the list. The list still has about 5000 subscribers, with about a third of that total having turned over in the course of the year, which is typical. So there you go.
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Last week, in writing about public design, I recommended that you go looking for ideas about institutional forces in the world, and then imagine what it would be like for information technology to amplify those forces. The ideas should feel like levers: they should feel like they pry the lid off a whole area of social life. I gave one example of such a lever-idea, the role of peer review in research and other professions. Information technology might amplify the role of peer review in two ways: by intensifying the dynamics of existing professional communities, and by generalizing the institutions of peer review to other kinds of communities. Of course, it's not information technology as such that effects these changes. In an existing peer-review profession, the incentives created by the institution motivate people to appropriate the new tools to do more of the things they already want to do. In a newly created peer-review community, some kind of institutional design has to happen, whether by visionary leadership, top-down lawmaking, or bottom-up organizing. Whether the new institution takes hold will depend on a lot more than technology.
Several other institutional lever-ideas are found in the short piece called "Imagining the Wired University" that I sent in early October.
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/newcastle.html
One such idea is economies of scale. It's an old idea, of course, but it has always been the shadow side of modern economics, given the tendency of economies of scale to produce monopolies. Most industries would be monopolistic in a homogeneous world, but the world has been heterogeneous enough that monopolies are not a problem in most areas. Economists often talk as if a market with completely uniform products and customers could be stably organized as large numbers of small suppliers, but in most real cases different companies serve different markets, or overlapping ones. Information technology amplifies economies of scale in two ways: by making it easier to monitor and control uniform activities across a wide geographic area, and by helping to standardize the world. It does not logically follow that every industry will become a monopoly, but it's certainly a matter of some concern.
The "wired university" paper also summarized an earlier argument about modularity: as electronic distance eduction programs enable students to assemble their own degree programs from courses offered by various different universities, pressure grows to standardize the courses and the frameworks into which they fit. This force for modularization is already present, and the University of California goes to some lengths to allow students to transfer from community colleges, bringing their credits with them. But transfers are nothing compared to the kind of modularization that is envisioned by distance education enthusiasts. The consequences for institutional and intellectual diversity are not promising. This argument is different from the one about economies of scale, which is indifferent to the granularity of units over which the global systems of monitoring and control operate. Economies of scale depend on uniformity of substance; modularization is about uniformity of the framework within which the substance is organized. The force that drives modularity also drives unbundling in several other areas, for example banking. Because no organization can excel at everything, the technology-enhanced ability of individuals to shop around for each element of the bundle separately creates a pressure toward a uniform framework for assembling modules, which then creates a pressure -- maybe largely unintended -- for homogenity of the modules themselves.
Another institutional lever-idea is found in the draft paper about context-aware computing that I sent out the other day: the mapping between institutions and the buildings that accommodate them. In the case of context-aware computing, information technology has its effect in a different way, by allowing the logic of each institution to spill into places that had not been built for it, and conversely by frustrating each institution's efforts to protect against incursions into its territory by other social logics. Institutions bind us all together whether we are actively tending to them or not; we all have bank accounts even when we're in the gym, and families even when we're at work, and careers even when we're at the movies. Architecture and urban design had formerly more or less partitioned these institutional concerns, but now they all of them can happen everywhere all the time. My paper sketched some of the consequences for the design of computing systems, but consequences obviously follow as well for architecture.
Following on the theme of architecture, I want to talk about another institutional force affecting the structure of the built environment and the ways that information technology can help to amplify it. The story begins with what sociologists Walter Powell and Paul DiMaggio call "institutional isomorphism". This is a range of institutional forces that encourage all the organizations in a given institutional field to converge toward a single model of operation. Some of these forces are legal (regulations that apply to everyone in the industry). Another force is the tendency of organizations to hire one another's employees, which makes sense because an employee who learns all of the knowledge available in a given organization becomes much more valuable to a competitor, and so changing sides is often a good career move. Employees cycle among the organizations in an institutional field all the time for this reason, and this tends to average out the knowledge and skills, and thus the practices and strategies across the field.
Something important follows from the various dynamics of isomorphism. It is often remarked that the manufacturing department of competing companies can usually communicate with one another more readily than either manufacturing department can communicate with its own marketing department, and the same goes for most of the specialities in any organization. Isomorphism, in other words, creates a kind of matrix structure, with professions along one axis and organizations along the other. Some theories treat organizations as organic wholes, but in fact (as Powell and DiMaggio point out) most organizations are loosely assembled from more or less standardized elements, each corresponding to one of the professions within it. The finance people have their way of doing things, as do the research people, the technical people, the legal people, and so on. A strong organization will have a kind of culture that cross-cuts the disciplinary cultures, but that is only a matter of degree. In no way is even the strongest organization any sort of holistic organism.
What does this have to do with architecture? Recall that architecture has historically been driven in large degree by a mapping between institutions and places. An architect's job, much like the business executive's is to make each building into some kind of organic whole. And since it's mostly architects who tell the history of architecture, we tend to assume that they have succeeded. But another way to look at it is quite different: that buildings, like organizations, are in practice loose assemblies of standardized elements that are embedded in different institutional logics. Now, to some degree this problem is overcome by the simple expedient of putting different institutions in different buildings: the hospital in one building, the market in another, the bank in another, and so on. And this does mean by Powell and DiMaggio's point applies to cities, despite the best (usually not very effective) efforts of urban planners.
But Powell and DiMaggio's point also applies to a great extent even within individual buildings. Even though we speak of a hospital (for example) as "an institution", any given hospital-building will contain quite a number of diverse activities, each with its own connections to its counterparts in other hospitals. The medical records department is a whole different deal than the neonatal unit. Why mix all of the different functions together in one building? Several reasons, none of them terribly compelling on its own, together with the lack of any strong reason not to. For example, even though the various medical specialities are institutionally somewhat separate from one another, medical training emphasizes cross-training doctors in several fields, not least so they can postpone their decision as to which field to specialize in. The specialties can also share support services that are not specialized, and the medical fact is that patients (who refuse to conform to institutional categories of any sort) are often sick in multiple ways at once. The hospital building, in short, reflects the loose articulation of a variety of sub-institutions.
To understand what information technology "does" to the buildings that support institutions such as hospitals, the right place to start is with the forces already operating within those institutions. Thus, for example, the forces that push the medical system toward a degree of unbundling, such as specialized oncology centers, are facilitated by technologies that make medical records more portable, or that allow paperwork-related activities to be done at more of a distance from the treating of patients. The general point, as articulated by Mitchell's new book, "E-topia", is that information technology loosens some of the bonds that had formerly kept different activities in nearby places, thus allowing other bonds to be strengthened, in this case bonds such as proximity to patient populations or parking facilities. Of course, one could not begin to understand the medical system or the uses it makes of information technology without looking at the dynamics of institutions like Medicaid and HMO's. That's the point.
Instead, I want to look at the problem from another angle. We have a kind of matrix structure, organizations on one axis and professions on another. We have a mapping within each institution between activities and places. We have a tendency for the corresponding activities within different organizations, and different buildings, to be related to one another. And we have the tendency of information technology to amplify all of this. I want to try out the radical suggestion that the notion of place changes as a result. We need a new word: let us say that a "site" consists of all of those places where a particular institutionally defined activity customarily takes place. (So I am talking about physical places, not Web sites, much less places in virtual reality.) All of the hospital reception desks in the world are a single site, as are all of the gas stations, flower shops, college physics labs, train stations, or mayors' offices. The radical suggestion is that in a wired world every site -- that is to say, every set of places where analogous activities take place -- becomes steadily more interconnected.
This is a fancy suggestion, and it should be qualified. First, the "interconnection" among the various places that comprise a site will differ from one institution to the next. The places might get audio or video links, or perhaps the connections will all be mediated by a headquarters or other central location. Think, for example, about the site that consists of the world's train stations. These places are connected in the sense that they are places for the practice of a profession, or perhaps several professions. Whenever you have a profession, you have knowledge being shuffled back and forth; you have benchmarking, notes being compared, experiments being watched, disasters learned from, and so on. The people who design and run the stations presumably travel among the stations every chance they get for these purposes. The people who sell things to train stations probably make directories of them, and they want to stay connected to them for the same reason any business wants (to the extent it's economically possible) to keep a continual eye on the market. The stations are also interconnected for operational purposes; trains that run late at one station will have consequences for people and activities in other stations.
All these kinds of interconnection are driven by the incentives of the institution, and as the technology of interconnection improves, the same incentives will naturally amplify the interconnections. Of course, the interconnections won't increase by magic; there will presumably be politics and consensus-building and early experiments that fail and late adopters who wait around for standards. Each of the experiments in advanced interconnection will run into unexpected kinds of hetereogeneity that nobody had thought about before -- for example, differences of language, climate, organizational culture, or legal environment. Turf wars will presumably shape the trajectory of the interconnection architecture as well. "Interconnection" can mean a million different things, and it will be the fine details of history that determine what form the interconnection will take. The only generalization we can make is that it will happen.
Train stations are obviously an easy case; railway people have been coordinating their activities for centuries, and were early adopters of the telegraph and computer. But similar dynamics apply to a wide range of sites -- transfer of knowledge, surveillance of the market, operational coordination, and so on -- and you can easily spell out similar analyses for any other institutionally defined place you can imagine. In some cases the results may not seem compelling, but that might simply be the result of our own ignorance. How much knowledge can there possibly be to transfer between different gas stations or hospital reception desks? Probably a lot more than we know.
But I would suggest that the idea is unsatisfactory for a different reason. Notice the following analogy between sites and communities of practice: a site consists of all those places where certain activities in an institution take place, and a community of practice consists of all those people who occupy a certain role in an institution. What's important about a site is largely that a community of practice lives there. Train station managers spend most of the day in their train stations, but the station managers' community happens in other places as well, such as the hotels where they have their annual conferences. The community is analytically related to the site, but it is not stuck there. So the question arises: when should we think of places being interconnected, and when should we think of people being interconnected? In particular, when should information be delivered to a place, and when should it be delivered to a person? The information displayed on train station arrival/departure boards is meant for individuals who have specific relations to those trains: intending to depart on them or meeting someone arriving on them. Perhaps we should forget about the arrival/departure board, and instead identify the individuals who play those specific roles in the institution. Likewise, the station managers might want to remain in real-time contact wherever they are, whether for operational purposes, or to share knowledge, or to gossip.
Okay, then, why should information ever be delivered to places? Why not deliver all information to personal information devices attached to individual people? I can think of several reasons. Because of the mapping between institutions and buildings, and between activities and places, your current location narrows down the information you are likely to need. Once you are standing in the train station, putting the departure information on an overhead board versus your PDA is not that big a decision. It's an interface question. The information may not be simple, and the overhead board has the advantage of being big. Perhaps the information will be routinely available in both forms. Your PDA need only display your own train's departure time, but that assumes that your PDA knows what train you are on, either because you have an e-ticket (and the e-ticket system is interoperable with the appropriate piece of software on the PDA) or because you have entered the information by hand. On the other hand, you have reasons to want to know about your train when you are located in places other than the train station, for example when you're traveling to the station and want to know if your train is going to be delayed, or indeed earlier in the day when information becomes available about track conditions.
Information about the scheduled and expected departure time of your train, then, is only loosely coupled to a particular place: you will need that information at the station, but you will also need it along a whole trajectory from place to place. Other information, however, is more strongly rooted in a particular place. I need to take apart the starter motor of my car this week, but I won't need information about how to do that until I have my tools out and the hood open. Then it would be nice to have an augmented reality scheme to project the necessary diagrams onto the actual motor. The Haynes manual with its step-by-step photographs is a good thing, but the motor will be covered with grime, partly obstructed by hoses, and generally hard to reconcile with the photographs in the Haynes manual. I do need some information before I get to the car, such as the list of tools that will be required. I actually wouldn't actually need that information except in the car, since I don't have a hardware store within walking distance. But I'd prefer to have it at some point in time before the repairs are about to begin.
The same analysis applies to my (ahem, apprentice) membership in the community of auto mechanics; if I could have another mechanic looking electronically over my shoulder while I was working on the car then that would be great, maybe pointing to things in my augmented-reality display. That would be a hybrid: an informational connection between community members that is predicated on one of us being located in a certain place. On the other hand, informational connections among the cars themselves can be useful. Some junk yards make a fleet of dead cars available for cannibalism by mechanics, but it would be nice to know ahead of time whether the parts you're looking for are available. A teleoperated Webcam in each car wouldn't be as hard as all that, or else an inventory of the available parts like they have at Wal-Mart. And we could have a club: every Saturday at 10am Pacific Time, every Honda Accord owner who's planning repairs can get on the party line. Football games and carburetors can be discussed, and anybody who needs help can ask the others to dial up real-time video of what they're seeing. The whole world's fleet of Honda Accords -- model year by model year -- is thus an excellent example of an interconnected site.
Notice the institution: the amateur auto mechanics' club. This is not the sort of institution that's going to evolve a large bureaucracy or inspire a lot of dues-paying. The train station managers have had their professional association for a long time (Al Chandler observes that it was the railroad occupations who started the modern wave of professionalization in the late 19th century), and they can mobilize the organization and resources they need for cooperative projects. Amateur auto mechanics are another story. The necessary institution might grow out of enthusiast car clubs, which have historically been limited to the really hard-core hobbyists, or out of the Auto Club. But if the component technologies are all standardized and universally deployed, then the Saturday-morning amateur mechanics' club could be a much more spontaneous affair, much like the online discussion groups that are made tolerably easy by AOL or egroups. Institution-building is thus related to standards dynamics: the more standards you have, the less of a special-purpose stovepipe the institution has to build and keep alive. But this also means that site-specific interconnection technologies can't be as site-specific as all that. The analysis will need to be done separately for every site, given the specific activities, kinds of information, and community dynamics that are happening there.
This kind of analytical framework has many advantages, and one of them is heuristic. Start with a list of institutions (research university, medical system, kids' sports leagues, investment banking, labor unions, treaty organizations, emergency dispatch services, contract law, music industry, technical standards), then spell out the various roles that people play within them (student, nurse, coach, borrower, shop steward, office manager, paramedic, appellate judge, A&R, committee chair, etc), list the various activities that people in those roles engage in, list the places where they customarily engage in them, identify the genres of documents and interactions that they use to exchange information, investigate the cognitive workings of the communities of practice that go with each role (the world's students, nurses, coaches, borrowers, and so on), watch how they fulfill the various generic purposes that community members can have for interacting with one another (transfer of knowledge, surveillance of the market, operational coordination), and pretty soon you will have a long list of quite specific proposals for new systems and services that wire the communities and sites more thoroughly, together with plausible explanations of why these proposals ought to work in practice, including a general indication of the kinds of standards that each of them will require before they are practical. If you spell out a hundred such proposals, then one of them might work.
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Gosh darn, I haven't seen one conference assessing the predictions for the year 2000. Not one! What do you suppose happened? Maybe not enough advance notice?
Well, we can't let the year 2000 go past without considering the most important of all the year-2000 prediction projects:
Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, Macmillan, 1967.
As with the issue of The Futurist that I described back in July, the Kahn/Wiener book was very much part of the state-centered right-wing culture of the Cold War. As such it seems impossibly anachronistic today. It is a huge and ambitious book, and assessing it as a whole would be an equally ambitious project. Suffice it to say that among all of their numerous scenarios they couldn't even imagine the fall of the Soviet Union. They've got holographic television (page 104) and all of the other yesterday's tomorrows as well. I just want to focus on a small part of their book, the discussion of information technology over a couple of small subsections totalling ten pages. This discussion is fascinating, obviously, for the window it provides onto a very different time. But more important is the window it provides onto our own time. We've gotten beyond some of the more superficial misunderstandings that plagued that long-gone era, but I want to argue that we are still plagued by some deeper assumptions that the technocratic fundamentalism of the Cold War took for granted.
Kahn and Wiener first ask how powerful computers are likely to be in 2000, and they extrapolate from the improvements in the technology to date. They clearly understand that the technology was improving exponentially, and they ask about the rate of exponential growth and how long it will last. (We think of these as modern assumptions, but they are already clearly present here in 1967, though the precise formula of Moore's Law comes later.) Here are some quotes:
If one uses as a standard of measurement the size of the memory space divided by the basic "add time" of the computer ... then over the past fifteen years this basic criterion of computer performance has increased by a factor of ten every two or three years (this is a conservative estimate) (page 88).
I want to remark in passing on their formulation of the exponential growth law. People without mathematical training will be puzzled by the quotient. What is memory space divided by add time supposed to measure? But anybody who works with math every day will understand what they are doing. They are really using two separate performance measures, increase of memory density and decrease of the time it takes to execute an operation. To combine these measures, they take the inverse of the "add time", in other words number of math operations per second -- this is the thing we measure in "flops". They believe that both measures will increase exponentially, and so it makes sense to multiply them. By formulating their measure in this way, they assumed that their reader was part of the Cold War technocratic culture centered on natural science and engineering. No culture of information technology had arisen yet as distinct from that larger world -- computer science uses discrete math, formal language and automata theory, and that sort of thing -- so those natural-science mathematical ways of thinking were taken for granted.
In any case, here we have the authors' clearest statement of their predictions for the increasing power of computers:
If computer capacities were to continue to increase by a factor of ten every two or three years until the end of the century ... then all current concepts about computer limitations will have to be reconsidered. If we add [advances in other areas] these estimates of improvement may be wildly conservative. And even if the rate of change slows down by several factors, there would still be room in the next thirty-three years for an overall improvement of some five to ten orders of magnitude (page 89).
This is pretty good, considering the information they had available. They were not right about the factor of ten every two or three years. It was more like every five years, which in exponential terms across thirty-three years makes a big difference. But their low-end estimate of five to ten orders of magnitude by the year 2000 was correct. They also had a decent sense of the factors that would affect the rate of technological improvement, but they had a poor understanding of which factors would end up making a difference. Like most people at that time, they greatly overemphasized the kind of data-parallelism used on the ILLIAC, an error that I attribute to the kind of systems thinking that assumes that all problems from aircraft design to urban planning can be reduced to matrix manipulation. They were also overconfident to a humorous degree about "large-scale improvement in the present 'soft-ware crisis' in programming language" (page 88). Improvements in precisely defined hardware functionality measures are a whole different problem, it turns out, than improvements in semantics, management, and politics. The "soft-ware crisis" is still very much with us, except that now it's an everyday nuisance for everyone.
Having issued their quantitative predictions about the improvements in basic computer speed, they launch without a paragraph break into this:
Therefore, it is necessary to be skeptical of any sweeping but often meaningless or nonrigorous statements such as 'a computer is limited by the designer -- it cannot create anything he does not put in', or that 'a computer cannot be truly creative or original'. By the year 2000, computers are likely to match, simulate, or surpass some of man's most 'human-like' intellectual abilities, including perhaps some of his aesthetic and creative capacities, in addition to having some new kinds of capabilities that human beings do not have. These computer capacities are not certain; however, it is an open question what inherent limitations computers have. If it turns out that they cannot duplicate or exceed certain characteristically human capabilities, that will be one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century (page 89).
Needless to say, none of this happened -- not even the part about it being one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century that it didn't. We didn't so much disprove these predictions as get over them. But here is where the bad assumptions still hang around. Implicit in this paragraph is the idea that intelligence is simply a matter of processing capacity: the computer is the same sort of thing as the mind, and if you just turn up the knob sufficiently then it becomes as smart as we are. Of course, the argument is a little bit more sophisticated than this: the mind is an information processing device, and so once we figure out how the mind works, all we have to do is wait for the hardware to get fast enough, program a simulation of the mental software, and presto.
But with all respect to the smart people who have spent their lives on this problem, it hasn't worked out that way. Our computers may have been improving exponentially, but our knowledge of the mind has not. Indeed a major discovery of AI, openly admitted by people like Marvin Minsky (who, don't get me wrong, is a genius), is that even though we know a little bit about how to reproduce a few of the advanced intellectual kinds of thinking, the ones that can be formalized and constrained in a very tight way, we haven't the slightest idea how people do things that six-year-olds can do. Neurophysiologists also know some things, and they are now publishing impressive books (e.g., Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt Brace, 1999). But we have an awfully long way to go. Another problem is that we have learned just how deeply human intelligence is embedded in the social world and in embodied activity; it's not just a matter of constructing a disembodied software mind. Yet the emphasis on disembodiment was one of the defining features of Cold War culture. Those people lived in their heads.
On the other hand, they also say this:
In addition to this possibility of independent intelligent activities, computers are being used increasingly as a helpful flexible tool for more or less individual needs -- at times in such close cooperation that one can speak in terms of a man-machine symbiosis. Eventually there will probably be computer consoles in every home, perhaps linked to a public utility computers and permitting each user his private file space in a central computer, for uses such as consulting the Library of Congress, keeping individual records, preparing income tax returns from these records, obtaining consumer information, etc.
They got this from J. C. R. Licklider, whose generally very accurate predictions I have already quoted. They clearly don't foresee the rise of personal computers, but then I'm not so sure that the rise of personal computers was such a good thing. If you read the paragraph again, you can see them predicting the rise of so-called application service providers that do most of the heavy storage and processing on Web sites, and not on your personal computer. Despite some premature hype, ASP's make all kinds of sense for small business computing if not other kinds, and I expect we'll see more of it.
But then you have this:
Computers will also presumably be used as teaching aids, with one computer giving simultaneous individual instruction to hundreds of students, each at his own console and topic, at any level from elementary to graduate school; eventually the system will probably be designed to maximize the individuality of the learning process (page 90).
As with Licklider's predictions, we see here the tendency to combine accurate predictions involving ubiquitous information services with false predictions about artificial intelligence. People in these authors' culture simply assumed that computers would become more intelligent in some human sense, and that the future functionality of computers would accordingly map onto traditional human tasks. This hasn't happened. If we factor out the AI aspects of this prediction, we get the universal online university, which has been predicted in pretty much its currently hyped form for almost forty years. And we see here the characteristic shortcomings of these predictions: the lack of emphasis on education as socialization into a professional culture, the neglect of topics such as dance and experimental science that have to be learned in person, the desire to automate teachers completely rather than providing teachers with advanced tools, the individualistic picture of the learning process, and so on. On the other hand, this prediction has certainly come true in some specific niches, and there are real corporate training systems today that fit the authors' description, provided that we are willing to describe those systems in anthropomorphic terms as "providing instruction".
Their next topic is the impact of automation on manufacturing, and especially on employment. They observe that the enthusiasts' hype on the subject appears to have no basis in fact, but they also provide a lame argument about the persistence of unskilled jobs. The reality here is that neither the enthusiasts' nor the skeptics' predictions have come true. Automation has not produced massive unemployement, and neither has it produced a paradise of leisure. Unskilled jobs really are disappearing, both because of automation and because of the technologies and political conditions that allow them to be moved offshore. The United States today experiences both labor shortages and unemployment, but that's largely a failure of the educational system and not a problem with technology. Assessing the hype about automation, however, the authors have something interesting to say:
This seems to be one of those quite common situations in which early in the innovation period many exaggerated claims are made, then there is disillusionment and a swing to overconservative prediction and a general pessimism and skepticism, then finally when a reasonable degree of development has been obtained and a learning period navigated, many -- if not all -- of the early "ridiculous" exaggerations and expectations are greatly exceeded. It is particularly clear that if, as suggested in the last section, computers improve by five, ten, or more orders of magnitude over the next thirty-three years this is almost certain to happen (page 93).
The rhetorical trick in this passage may not be clear until you read it a few times. They begin by staking out a stand of common sense, setting themselves against both the extremists of exaggerated claims and the extremists of exaggerated skepticism. They place themselves outside of this fray by claiming to identify a recurring historical pattern of alternation between the extreme views. But then, somehow, by the end of the sentence -- all of this action happens in a single sentence -- they have repositioned themselves as being more extreme than the extreme optimists. These neo-optimists regard even the most ridiculous predictions to be nigh-unto-inevitable under even their most conservative estimates of improved computing. Clearly they are talking through their hats here, because they had enough information to realize that their most ridiculous claims would not come true if computers improved by only five orders of magnitude.
Moving along, the authors proceed to date themselves something awful with this passage:
Automation and cybernation may be extended to the home also. The idea of moderately priced robots doing most of the housework by the year 2000 may be difficult to accept at first. According to an enthusiast, Meredith Wooldridge Thring, professor of mechanical engineering at Queen Mary College in London, "within 10 to 20 years' time we could have a robot that will completely eliminate all routine operations around the house and remove the drudgery from human life". [long quote from Thring] His description of robot household capabilities and widespread use seems most reasonable by the year 2000. We shall have to ponder the double impact within the next thirty-three years of widespread industrial and household automation (page 94).
This hasn't happened either. The problem here is slightly different. Industrial and household automation, it has turned out, are different problems. Lacking common sense, automation requires a controlled environment, and that's what a factory is. You have probably seen videotapes of anthropomorphic robot "arms" doing factory work; what you don't see is the elaborate system of jigs and fixtures that hold the parts in known locations to enable those arms to do their work, or the fancy special-purpose machines that orient the parts correctly. You don't see the structured light that is required for almost all industrial vision systems. And you don't see the constraints that automated manufacturing has placed on the design of the products themselves. All of that is missing in household environments: you have unpredictable children and guests, you have unstandardized stuff lying around, you have animals, you have soft things like carpets and pillows whose movements are hard to model mathematically and that do not lend themselves to interacting with robots whose sensors are very crude. You don't get the train the people, and you have a different liability regime for potential accidents. In short, in the household you have the worst possible environment for autonomous computer-driven machinery.
This is why it matters so much that the authors' casual predictions for AI didn't come true: AI isn't just an extra set of functionalities or a philosophical discussion-topic. "Intelligence" is the difference between computers that can function in uncontrolled environments and computers that cannot. And blurring the element of control in their plans for the world is precisely the ideology of systems rationalism. The need for control, moreover, is not just a matter of the physical environment. It's also about data. If a computer is going to add two numbers and get a meaningful result, then those numbers need to be commensurable. They need to have a uniform semantics. And it's not just two numbers, of course, but the thousands, millions, or trillions of numbers that high-end computers requires. If the results of that processing are going to be meaningful, then the world needs to be made out of uniform sorts of things, and it has to be represented and measured in uniform ways. This condition is satisfied in some natural sciences contexts, for example in space. And in fact AI systems work great in space, where the environment is just as uniform as it could possibly be. But when the meanings represented in the computer come from the human world, then you start to have a problem. The problem is obvious enough when computers are supposed to participate in human conversations, but it is also serious when the scientific community brings together numbers that scientists in different fields gather in different parts of the world according to different practices and under different assumptions; see Geof Bowker's paper "Biodiversity Datadiversity": .
So let's reconceptualize the history of computing. Maybe factors such as the size of the memory and the power of the processor, while important, are secondary. Maybe the crucial factor in the growth of computing is the construction of niches in the real world where large amounts of commensurable data can be found. That means data models to make explicit the semantics of the data; it means standardized procedures for identifying, classifying, and measuring the things in the world that the data represents; it means technologies for moving all of the results of those identifications, classifications, and measurements into one place; it also means standardizing the things themselves so that they can be described in consistent terms despite the potentially great differences in their contexts; and it means administrative procedures to manage all those standards. Maybe, in short, 90% of the history of computing lies outside of computers, in what we might call the data-world. The data-world is not simply the world as we happen to stumble across it. Quite the contrary, it is a highly administered place -- like the controlled environment of the factory, except that the methods of control are adapted to the needs of a particular context, a particular profession and culture, particular institutions, and particular goals. The great unwritten history of computing is the construction of the data-world, and yet for Kahn and Wiener, that whole history does not even exist. Enabling them to ignore that history is the function that AI plays in their predictions. Now I don't imagine that they covered up 90% of the problem of computing on purpose; in these ten pages about computing their 600+ page book they were simply recording the conventional wisdom of their places and times.
The issue becomes significant right away in their discussion of the future of information storage and retrieval:
The problems of putting something like the Library of Congress conveniently at the fingertips of any user anywhere are dependent on our understanding and simulation of the ways in which people make associations and value judgements. ... Humans must identify those records that deal with a common area of interest, and must analyze each record or document to decide what specific topics it covers, and the other areas with which it should be associated. ... It is impossible to predict how far along we will be by the year 2000 in simulating in computers analytical abilities that require decades and vast amounts of experience for humans to acquire, but thirty-three years of continuing work should be enough to surpass any current expectations that have been seriously and explicitly formulated (page 95).
They were certainly correct to anticipate that the society of 2000 would use networked computing to retrieve large amounts of information from library-like databases. They got this from Licklider as well. Note that they assume that people are getting their online information from the Library of Congress. This reflects their government-centric Cold War vision, but it also reflects their neglect of (in Bowker's term) datadiversity: the diverse ways in which data, including natural sciences data of course, but also documents, are gathered and stored. They are aware that the cataloguing of documents requires human effort, but they are confident that increasing computer power will automate this effort to a degree that is not even worth trying to imagine.
In this case as well, sheer increases in computing power have turned out to be an orthogonal issue from the diversity of data. Documents are diverse. They are generated by diverse institutions by authors with diverse worldviews. They employ many genres, and document genres turn out to be very different sorts of things than data types. For example, genres are made to be flouted, and even the most genre-bound detective novel will be found to get much of its effect by playing off against the expectations that the detective-novel genre creates, as well as taking up complex stances such as irony toward other genres. Because of the datadiversity of documents, automation has not played an important role in the cataloguing of documents, except in the sense that the catalog itself and the editing tools that people use to create and maintain the catalog are all computerized. The cataloguing itself is done by people. Now, some authorities (such as Bill Arms) maintain that cataloguing is history because ultrapowerful computers can search and sort huge collections of documents in brute force ways based on crude textual searches (like Web search engines) and advanced document comparison schemes (find me the documents that are most like this one, summarize this document, etc). Whether that's true or not, it's not what Kahn and Wiener are predicting.
One element of their prediction was basically true:
Within about fifteen years, data-transmission costs are likely to be reduced so much that information storage and retrieval will become a runaway success (page 96).
Useful information storage and retrieval systems did exist by 1980, although I'm not sure that the "runaway success" part was unambiguously true until 1995. In the prediction business, though, being off by a factor of two is not so bad.
Cold War assumptions of centralized data are also on display here:
The current proposal for a National Data Center being debated in Congress, in which the records of some twenty or more government organizations will be amalgamated in one place is an example of things to come. [Concerns have been raised about abuse] but almost all agree that the system or one like it will soon be operating (page 96).
This proposal, of course, was the object of a major civil liberties fight, one that established the precedent that the federal government would not centralize its dossiers about individual citizens. The pressure toward such centralization always exists, of course, and the Census Bureau negotiates it every day. But the authors' bland note of inevitability did not match the history. It should be said that civil liberties concerns were not the only reason: amalgamating all data into a centralized database is easily said, but because of datadiversity it is not easily done.
To really remind us of what was going on in 1967, and following on from the social concerns that have begun to creep into their text, the authors proceed as follows:
... a future President of the United States might easily have command and control systems that involve having many television cameras in a future "Vietnam" or domestic trouble spot. Since he would be likely to have multiple screens, he would be able to scan many TV cameras simultaneously. In order to save space, some of the screens would be quite small and would be used only for gross surveillance, while others might be very large, in order to allow examination of detail. Paul Nitze, the present Secretary of the Navy, has made the suggestion that similar capabilities might be made available to the public media or even the public directly. This would certainly be a mixed blessing. Obviously such capabilities can give a misleading psychological impression of a greater awareness, knowledge, and sensitivity to local conditions and issues than really exists. This in turn could lead to an excessive degree of central control. This last may be an important problem for executives generally (page 97).
The peculiar focus on the President, and the equally peculiar absence of the whole bureaucratic system that provides a command structure with its information, is vintage Cold War thinking. As they observe themselves, remote video cameras provide the illusion of knowledge -- at least knowledge about complex social phenomena -- rather than the real thing. Yet this image of walls of video screens used to monitor a social or political crisis has become a lasting part of the culture. The film "Enemy of the State" portrays the NSA (whose real appearance is, of course, unknown to anyone except its employees) as a cavernous room that is dominated by video screens whose displays of mayhem the film never needs to explain. What is more, the idea that the network of video cameras would be made available to everyone is also found in David Brin's "Transparent Society" book, among other places. The authors claim to understand the illusions of immediate representation, and yet they completely fall prey to them as well. They are aware of the inherently problematic nature of data, but they do not understand the problem well enough to avoid reproducing it.
The civil liberties concerns grow apace with this:
There are also important possibilities in the field of law enforcement. New York State has already tried an experiment in which the police read the license plates of cars going over a bridge into Manhattan and had a computer check these licenses against its files of scofflaws. The police were able to arrest a number of surprised drivers before they got to the other side of the bridge. (Some of the drivers seemed to feel that this was like shooting quail on the ground.)
Such systems could be made completely automatic. Indeed it would be no trick at all, if the license plates were written in some suitable computer alphabet, to have them read by a television camera that was mounted on an automatic scanner. We can almost assume that toll booths or other convenient spots will be so equipped at some later date. It would then not be difficult to place these records of automobile movements in a computer memory or permanent file as an aid to traffic-flow planning, crime detection, or other investigations (as is done with taxicab trip reports in many cities today). One can even imagine fairly large-scale records of all license plates (or other identification) passing various checkpoints being kept for many streets and routes (page 97).
This scenario, too, has become part of the culture. In working on the privacy issues associated with highway toll collection, I encounter these scenarios all the time, both in the planning documents of the relevant authorities and in the folklore that the technology brings to people's consciousness. It is both useful and scary to realize just how little the scenarios have changed in 33 years.
A final commonplace scenario in Kahn and Wiener's book, itself deeply part of the culture, is the automatic electronic monitoring of all telephone conversations for key words. The discourse of "terrorism" did not exist at that time, and so their list of sample words is instructively dated: "bet", "horserace", "subvert", "revolution", "kill", "infiltrate", "Black Power", "organize", and "oppose" (pages 97-98). Being quite aware of the civil liberties concern, but being unable to imagine the technology producing those concerns as anything but inevitable, they observe that "[n]ew legal doctrines will need to be developed to regulate these new possibilities" (page 97-98).
So there we have it: the definitive 1967 imagination of computing in the year 2000. We have the faster processors and bigger memories that the experts predicted, and we have more or less the access to large collections of online documents that they predicted as well. But we do not have any of the functionalities that require computers to be the slightest bit intelligent. And the problem of intelligence turns out, on examination, to be a stand-in for something deeper. We still live in a world that is out of control: that is inherently diverse and whose order is inherently local. The authoritarian tendencies of the Cold War technocratic mindset are certainly still with us, as the inherent logic of the conventional practice of computing continually encourages one organization or another to institute a world of total surveillance and control. Yet that world has not come. The reason for that postponement is partially political -- we don't believe in the centralized world of the Cold War. But the major reason has to do with the world itself: that's just not how reality is. Yet still we have decisions to make, as ten thousand forces push new kinds of standardization on us. We can't wish those forces away by the intransigence of our politics. We have to reinvent the technology that abets them, and the imagination that makes them seem inevitable.
**
Back in July I observed that Texas executes more people than any other state, and I said that as far as I knew, Texas led the world. In fact the worldwide death penalty record is held, and by a large margin, by China. Don't tell them in Texas.
**
One indignant individual denied that the Supreme Court's decision in Alden vs. Maine represented a significant change in citizens' abilities to sue their state governments. For any who might be in doubt on the matter, here are a couple of explanations:
Erwin Chemerinsky, High court wrongly lets states off hook, Los Angeles Times, 25 June 1999, page B9.
Edward P. Lazarus, Court plays the "states' rights" card, Los Angeles Times, 27 June 1999, page M1.
**
I complained the other day that the public schools in LA only have students who speak 140 different languages. I have been assured, however, that that number simply represents the limits of the school system's ability to differentiate among languages. I am also assured that the students who speak Spanish and Chinese also speak plenty of other first languages. I am relieved.
**
I also misspelled the names of Tom Daschle and Slobodan Milosevic. The first was brain fog; the second fast typing.
**
Some URL's.
election
Absentee Ballot Fraud in Six Florida Counties http://www.campaignwatch.org/
US Election Systems Subject to De Facto Regulatory Cartel http://www.tbtf.com/roving_reporter/#13
Right-Wing Coup that Shames America http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,415346,00.html
Now It's Unofficial: Gore Did Win Florida http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,415400,00.html
A Different Florida Vote in Hindsight http://www.latimes.com/print/20001224/t000122562.html
Errors Plagued Election Night Polling Service http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39089-2000Dec21.html
conferences
International Conference on Supporting Group Work, Boulder, October 2001 http://www.acm.org/sigs/siggroup/conferences/group01/
European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Bonn, Sept 2001 http://ecscw2001.gmd.de/
Libraries in the Digital Age, Dubrovnik, 23-27 May 2001 http://www.ffzg.hr/infoz/lida/
design
Scandinavian Design: On Participation and Skill http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/ilt/papers/Ehn.html
Urban Design Quarterly http://www2.rudi.net/ej/udq/udq.html
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems http://iris.informatik.gu.se/sjis/
User Participation and Democracy http://iris.informatik.gu.se/sjis/magazine/vol7no2/BJERKN~1.htm
Design, Deliberation, and Democracy http://www.law.columbia.edu/sabel/papers/Design.html
technology
Malicious Code Moves to Mobile Devices http://computer.org/computer/binary/Dec/TechNews/
highly useful wireless system for real-time bus arrival information http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/stopSelector.shtml http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32555-2000Oct7.html
Quantum Computation with Calcium Ions in a Linear Paul Trap http://heart-c704.uibk.ac.at/quantumcomputation.html
The Physics of Quantum Information http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540667784/
Secret Project May Be Microsoft's Next Big Deal http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-201-4243862-0.html
everything else
cool composite image of earth lights from space http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg
War of Resistance Rises in Cuba http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50029-2000Dec25.html
Learning from Social Informatics http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI/Arts/SI_report_Aug_14.pdf
Ole Hanseth's publications on corporate information infrastructure http://www.ifi.uio.no/~oleha/Publications/
Boxmind: The Online Library http://www.boxmind.com/
papers from Constitutional Design 2000 http://www.nd.edu/~kellogg/CD.html
Canada Strengthens Internet Privacy http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/23/technology/23PRIV.html
Understanding AOL's Grand Unified Theory of the Media Cosmos http://www.fortune.com/fortune/2001/01/08/mer.html
Privacy Heats Up but Doesn't Boil Over http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4238135.html
Today's Political Ideals in Historical Perspective http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_schudson_nashville.html
Global Film School http://www.globalfilmschool.com/
Virginia Beach Sends Microsoft a Check for Software Use http://www.pilotonline.com/business/bz1130pay.html
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