Reflections on Technology and Society

[originally published September 2004] One of the special pleasures of the Harry Potter stories is their send-up of modern consumer culture - from Bertie Botts' Every Flavour Beans (and they do mean every flavor) to Chocolate Frogs, which come complete with a collectible card featuring a celebrity witch or wizard. Potter's creator, J.K. Rowling, pokes fun at contemporary marketing and advertising with tongue-in-cheek warmth that manages to make her simultaneously attractive to Madison Avenue and the rest of us - a remarkable achievement. Down the Rabbit Hole Max Barry's Jennifer Government , the satirical successor to his well-received first novel Syrup , takes a different angle on the consumer-marketing-gone-mad theme. Although Rowling's products are entirely fanciful, they're unmistakably patterned on things we all instantly recognize. Barry, however, doesn't make up the company names he uses: rather, he includes a defensive paragraph at the front of his novel...

[originally published July 2004] What happens if the artificial intelligence community, in its quest to build intelligent systems, succeeds too well and creates an AI whose intelligence exceeds the threshold marked out by our own? Up to now, it is humans who develop the software and hardware and who drive all progress in capability. After crossing the threshold, however, the AI itself will rapidly augment its own capabilities. What's the intuition here? Although we use technology to help us conceptualize, design, and build today's computers and software (and other technological artifacts such as airliners and skyscrapers), there's no doubt that we remain in the driver's seat. But imagine the software design process reaching a level of complexity at which human designers exert only executive oversight. Most practitioners can't really see us getting to this point anytime soon, but remember that compilers astonished assembler programmers in the late 1950s and early 196...

[originally published May 2004] In this installment of Biblio Tech, we'll look at some science fiction cult classics that challenge classification. Each is a perennial favorite with the SF community, and several have become fixtures in the computer science community. Two of these works, Dark Star and Alien , are movies, while the other, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , began as a radio show whose universe and characters have taken on lives of their own. What turns these kinds of works into cult classics? Is it some particularly strong appeal to a preexisting community, or is it some intrinsic merit that creates the community? In Space No One Can Hear You Scream Alien is the movie that made Sigourney Weaver a star in 1979, a year that otherwise featured movies like Apocalypse Now , Kramer vs. Kramer , and The China Syndrome . The US withdrawal from Saigon had occurred four years earlier, and Hollywood movies were either very much about Vietnam or very much not about Vietn...

[originally published March 2004] In the same way that Windows introduced the masses to mice and graphical user interfaces without having invented them, Dan Brown's books explore for the general public some important themes in security and privacy and their sensitivity to technological change. These are themes that we've usually only seen treated in the more rarified zone of hard science fiction. This installment of Biblio Tech departs from the normal pattern of examining more obscure, idea-driven books and stories to focus on the works of a contemporary best-selling author. This departure is unusual because neither this department nor this magazine is part of the star-making machinery behind the popular book. By choosing to look at current popular fiction we run the risk of discovering later that we should have delved deeper. Nevertheless, these works are going to be broadly influential, so let's look at them. Blending Popular Fiction With Science Fiction Each of Dan Brown...

[originally published January 2004] Security and privacy are twin social goods that exist in perpetual tension: our society has debated the trade-offs between them ever since the first days of social organization. Over the ages, the border between security and privacy has moved back and forth as first one side and then the other made bold steps forward impelled by events in ideas, economics, technology, and warfare. At present, privacy appears to be in retreat under the threat of terrorism; it seems at times as if we ourselves are destroying the very freedom that terrorists find so threatening. In this issue, we'll look at some radical views of privacy's future through the eyes of several influential science fiction writers. In The Light of Other Days and The Transparent Society , we see two radical visions of a world in which privacy as we know it has entirely ceased to be. Unlike George Orwell's 1984 , in which despotism armed with two-way television eradicates privacy, ...

[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...