Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
The computer-networked, digital world poses enormous threats to humanity that no government, no matter how totalitarian, can stop. A fully open society is our best chance for survival.
Mar 31, 2003 | I've been talking to computers for over a decade. At the MIT Media Lab in the early '90s, I was a test subject in a doctoral research project on voice navigation. As I went about my weekly duties as a programmer in the Speech Group, I used a tool called xspeak to switch between windows on the desktop. Sometimes I did this in front of a camera, so my first encounter with voice-recognition had an element of glamour. The program had a vocabulary of only a few dozen words, but I enjoyed the novelty and not having to grab the mouse every 20 seconds.
I didn't consider using voice-recognition at home, however, until a couple of years later when I developed tendinitis in my wrists. I was paying the rent as a programmer and just didn't have the hands anymore to work on my fiction during the off-hours. In those pre-Pentium days, you had to pause a half-second between each word -- what's called "discrete speech." Even so, I was so impressed by the accuracy of the Kurzweil product of the time that I coughed up a month's pay to Kurzweil and dictated most of my novel "Demiurge" into my computer one word at a time. In my spare hours, I made intricate Buddhist mandalas from colored sand and then wiped them away in order to cultivate patience and detachment.
These days I am able to dictate continuously and script my own functionality. While writing for the computer game Deus Ex, I built a complete set of scripts in Dragon NaturallySpeaking to drive ConEdit, Ion Storm's proprietary conversation editor. I dictated over 8,000 lines of dialogue in a weird proto-language that sounded like this: "Placeholder speech. Replace speech. They're lying <period >. All they want is to study your tissues <period>. Update and close. Move up one. Camera shoulders left." I was a long way from chatting with Hal, but I was also a long way from when all I could say was the name of a window.
I have come to view all computer interaction as speech, whether I am speaking or clicking. If I voice-navigate to a car-dealer's Web site and spec out a new van, then for me it is literally true that my voice can express my longing for shag carpeting and a swank curtained bed -- and express it in precise terms to the industrial mechanisms necessary to bring such fantasies to life. I am restrained to a crude sign language and a limited vocabulary, but the software is improving. A generation of engineers is working hard to give me a formal yet versatile new language for such transactions.
The trend of all software applications is toward greater fluidity of expression because computers are symbol-processing machines. At Ion Storm, for example, we tie ourselves in knots to give game-players multiple solutions to problems, customizable characters, and branching or "multiform" story lines. We believe that a good computer narrative allows players to drive meaningful developments in the game world. To put that another way, we think that players should be able to participate in writing the story. The fact that our ideal in computer entertainment is the empowerment of end users to compose their own experiences is no accident. This ideal is common to every software application from PhotoShop to the pages of the World Wide Web. The freedom of expression in a 3-D world like Deus Ex -- the freedom to customize the self -- is a preview of the godlike powers of creation we will all have when the human-machine language progresses beyond crude signs to a true language of choice and customization.
With power, however, comes potential danger. We have no reason to fear new fathers who color-correct their baby photos, but what will we do when DNA and nanoscale machinery are just as easy to manipulate, when each of us is a potential terrorist able to compose a new viral genome with drag-and-drop? Given the nature of the Web and file-sharing, would we have a prayer of suppressing dangerous knowledge that could be turned into novel weapons of mass destruction? What I argue below is that we don't have to suppress knowledge at all. The open pursuit of knowledge is actually our greatest weapon against the dangers taking shape around us.
I believe that the coming "self-replicating" threats described by Bill Joy and others are real dangers. I believe that individuals will someday trade the secrets of mass death as easily as the Magic players of today trade playing cards. Nevertheless, I am prepared to live with such a future. In fact, I believe that an open society like ours would be better equipped to deal with these threats than even the most efficient police apparatus.
I am alarmed by the ease with which our society is being frightened into abandoning its hard-won openness. Numerous ideas currently in circulation, taken together, foretell a future which might shock our late-capitalist sensibilities, but which could very well become our reality, by degrees, if we don't take the time now to ask fundamental questions about what we value as a people.
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If the last two centuries can broadly be characterized as the Age of Machinery, then this century might be called the Age of Fashion, in all senses of the word. Fashion drives a market when choices multiply, and the new technologies are all about choice. Just as the player in a computer game fashions the story from increasingly fine-grained choices, so will real human beings fashion their lives from increasingly diverse and customizable materials.
The all-digital world of computer games is an exaggeration of the consumer paradise we are promising to build for ourselves. In Deus Ex, the player can select his race as though he is picking out something to wear. Other games, including the upcoming Deus Ex: Invisible War, let you pick your sex, Ultima VII being another memorable example. In real life, we are already able to select the sex of a child, and it won't be long before we can select a healthy child, then a child with perfect eyesight, then who knows. We will be able to fashion a human being with software built upon the twin-shuffle microcode of DNA, perhaps with friendly applications like "The Gene Construction Kit" by Textco or "Visual Cloning" by Redasoft, software currently used to visualize and design plasmid vectors. The deep language of Nature will reveal itself through simple menus on medical Web sites.
We are no longer content that science devise formal languages to describe natural phenomena; we want those languages digitally encoded and accessible from our PCs. Engineers and scientists are already comfortable using computers to access and manipulate the formal knowledge of their professions. Genetics, mentioned above, is the most obvious example. The Human Genome Project would have been unthinkable without the microcomputer. Chip design itself is leaving behind mechanical tasks like positioning wires and logic gates in favor of languages like Verilog and C++.
"Eventually you'll just be able to write in C++ (or C++ with hardware extensions) and convert it directly into a chip," says former 3dfx Senior Hardware Architect Wade Walker, adding that the technology still has a ways to go. The world of mechanical engineering is further behind but moving in the same direction with CAD/CAM and 3D printers. No one is going to "print" a working automobile anytime soon, but companies like Daimler Chrysler and BMW routinely print out prototypes of individual components. Designers at Adidas print prototypes of their shoe soles. Other companies prototype toys, dinnerware, bottles, golf clubs, jet skis, and so on. A future generation of the technology might print functional components, down the road replacing manufacturing with the process of printing many copies of a CAD file. In almost every industry, people are conspiring to represent their products as data that can be altered, tested, and transmitted rapidly.
As the computer becomes the central tool for research and development, scientific knowledge takes on a new character. Like software, it becomes primarily functional rather than descriptive. During the age of the printing press -- which brought with it dictionaries, encyclopedias, tables, journals, proofs, and the modern community of scientists -- the project of science appeared to be the "understanding" or "description" of the natural world, which was conceived of as a clockwork set in motion by God. The engineer meanwhile peered into this vast, static field of knowledge and applied the insights that were useful for a particular problem. Now it seems that the project of science is not primarily to represent the natural world with language but to reconfigure the natural world as language, so that it can be composed, transformed, and manipulated in the ways our minds are equipped to operate upon knowledge itself.
Increasingly, an idea in one's head will map directly to a product on-screen. Just as our sexual perversions have been reduced to shorthand notations such as "shemale posers," "older spreads," and "a peeing blonde," which lead to immediate gratification, so will our other desires be expressible in tiny coded epithets, icons, and services. Consumerism got a bad rap in the 20th century because our choices were so limited. We all ended up driving the same SUVs and thinking that plaid Bermuda shorts are a neat idea. In a few decades, consumerism might well mature into a fine art of self-expression. The souls of our yuppies might yet be saved.
In the near future, perhaps we will all use software like CADTERNS Pro to custom-design the clothes we wear -- or we will go to online archives of millions of designs, pick what we want, and order a hard copy of the clothes from a print shop. Punk-ass teenagers will still choose to wear T-shirts from corporation-created rock bands, but conceivably they will have the option of downloading a file and modifying the imagery, the cut, the material. Even our mass-media-derived identities will acquire a personal flair. It will be the Age of Fashion, not because image-makers will rule the market, but because we will all be able to communicate our identities more exactly with customizable products.
While writing represents language, the computer embodies language functions, and thanks to the popularity of the Internet these functions are rapidly being integrated with economic production. The power of our voices to reshape materials to suit our pleasure will soon be limited only by our salaries.
But as advanced language-processing technology frees us as consumers, will it also make us free in more fundamental ways, as citizens, artists, parents, employees? Or will its functional nature -- and, by extension, its users -- be seen as a danger that needs to be regulated? The blueprint of a nuclear bomb is a dangerous thing, but without a nuclear reactor, easily visible in a satellite photo, the blueprint is just a blueprint. A DNA sequence that can be synthesized with the touch of a key is an entirely different matter. When knowledge itself becomes the immediate danger, we may not be so eager to let it operate freely.
Just like the spread of printing in the 18th century, the spread of computation will have an impact that is not just economic but also social, political, and ideological. Historians remember the 18th century as the Age of Enlightenment, a time of radical ideas, increasing freedom, and the rise of "the empire of public opinion," which gradually acquired a power sufficient to topple monarchies and lay the foundations of modern democracy. Some contemporary thinkers hail the computer as the next great leap forward for expression, freedom, and democracy. The computer is seen in quantitative terms, as a large dose of the exact ideas brought about by the print revolution three centuries ago.
The possibility exists, however, that computers and computer networks are creating a new situation entirely, one that may or may not be friendly to the old ideology. The current trend of opinion may in fact be cutting in the opposite direction. If we look carefully at what leading scientists, judges, lawmakers, and academics have been saying during the last few years, we might be surprised. We should ask whether these fragmentary opinions, reinforced by changing technology, might in fact collect into a coherent ideology, one that drifts away from the ideals of liberty and equality developed during the last great advance in communication.
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