Reflections on Technology and Society

[originally published July 2003] William Gibson may regret coining the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer . He received acclaim with the world of the Sprawl, which he created in the short story Johnny Mnemonic . But it was one well-tuned phrase, "... jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix," that helped win him the science-fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards. Now he can't get away from cyberspace, like an actor typecast by a too-successful performance in a role he may no longer love. In this installment of Biblio Tech, we return to cyberpunk, which was very hot in the 1980s and retained considerable power throughout the 1990s. In the first decade of the 21st century, cyberpunk conjures much less, so this is an excellent time to give it a thoughtful look. Specifically, we'll explore a particular theme of Gibson's -- namel...

[originally published May 2003] What area of research, development, and commercial activity owes more of its existence to the arts than robotics does? The word itself comes from an early 20th-century play; less than a decade later, an important film introduced an enduring fantasy concept of what robots look like. Shortly after that, but still before much significant technical research or development occurred in the field, science-fiction writers developed complex theories of robot behavior in stories that are still in print today. In this installment of Biblio Tech, we'll look at some of the arts that have shaped our notions of robots. We will see the deep roots these stories have in far earlier concepts that have little to do with engineering but everything to do with the human race's fascination with creation. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) In 1920, Karel Capek completed his play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots); its first production in 1921 brought Capek worl...

[originally published March 2003] It's curious that post-apocalyptic fantasies are such a popular fictional form. What is the allure of the end of civilization as we know it, and how did our interest in it emerge? Writers have speculated about the end of the world for a long time. In fact, we can trace much of our contemporary vocabulary and imagery about the apocalypse back to the Bible's The Revelation to John. Over the past 50 years, however, we've seen a particularly vigorous upsurge in the production of post-apocalyptic works. In this edition of Biblio Tech, we will look at an example of the post-apocalyptic genre, David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman and the 1997 Kevin Costner movie that it inspired. Dystopia Although the cyberpunk genre, which I mentioned in my last column, focuses on dystopic futures, post-apocalyptic fantasies also tend to present their own dystopias. The difference is the path between the present and the future. In cyberpunk novels, dystopia ...

[originally published January 2003] Over the years, people have explored the broader implications of many seminal ideas in technology through the medium of speculative fiction. Some of these works tremendously influenced the technical community, as evidenced by the broad suffusion of terms into its working vocabulary. When Robert Morris disrupted the burgeoning Internet in 1988, for example, the computer scientists trying to understand and counteract his attack quickly deemed the offending software a "worm," after a term first introduced in John Brunner's seminal 1975 work, The Shockwave Rider . Brunner's book launched several terms that became standard labels for artifacts we see today, including "virus." In future installments of this department we'll look at the important writers, thinkers, works, and ideas in speculative fiction that have got us thinking about the way technological change could affect our lives. This is not to imply that science fict...

Why do art museums exist? To preserve the cultural heritage represented by art objects and educate the public about art, if you examine museum charters. But why do they survive? Or more to the point, how do they survive? Museums are expensive operations and the immediate economic value of the cultural heritage and public education they provide may seem small, at least to the narrow-minded. Nonetheless, museums seem to survive and even thrive, so there is some sort of economic engine operating behind the scenes. What can it be? Well, let's examine the set of players involved in art. There are artists and collectors, of course. Beyond that there is the general public, people who are in the main neither artists nor collectors. Next we have museums, which are different from collectors in the use to which they put their collections. Collectors assemble art for their own enjoyment, while museums do so in order to share it with the general public. There are middlemen like art d...

Back when I was a young scholar there were several things one learned that violated the "never judge a book by its cover" rule. One was that when you saw a disheveled fellow walking down the street talking to himself, you could reliably assume that he was disturbed and probably not taking his medication. And you could assume that a nicely typeset and printed article was worth reading. Things have changed. Now when you see an unshaven fellow in rumpled clothes walking down the street conducting an animated conversation you can't assume that he's off his Chlorpromazine . He might just as well be an investment banker working on a big deal. Why did typesetting signify quality writing? Dating from the days of Aldus Manutius typesetting a book or an article attractively in justified columns using proportionally spaced fonts was a time-consuming task involving expensive skilled labor. Because of that high up-front cost, publishers insisted on strong controls on what ma...

This New Year I resolved to run backups of our computers regularly in 2007. My vague plan was to dump the data to DVDs, since both of our newest machines, a Dell PC running Windows XP Pro and a Mac have DVD burners. What, to my dismay, did I learn when I examined the Properties of my home directory on the PC? It weighs in at over 140 gigabytes. The DVDs hold about 6 gigabytes, so it would take at least 24 DVDs to run a backup. Aside from the cost, managing 24 DVDs sort of defeats the purpose. Before going to plan B, getting an outboard disk drive to use as the backup device, I thought I'd investigate all of this growth in my home directory. Last time I looked, my home directory was less than 10 gigabytes. In the past I've used du from the bash command line to investigate the file system. This is powerful, but it's slow and very painful. What I really wanted was a tree browser that was smart enough to show me the size of each subtree. In a project that I'd worked ...