digitaldust

Ed pointed me at this post by Dave Pollard yesterday. It’s all about how technology has ultimately made things worse for humanity. Every supposedly good thing that comes along has an even worse dark cloud with it. Now this is not a new meme, it comes up again and again, usually as some sort of support for returning to a more glorious time before we invented [insert recent technology here], where everyone lived in harmony. But I remember reading texts when I did Egyptology where 5000 years ago the egyptians were saying the same thing.

The other thing that always comes out (as it does in the comments) is the opinion that technology is not inherently evil, it’s the people who use it. “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

All of this I think is a bit naive. Now I’ve been thinking quite a lot about technology recently for various reasons, and one certain thing that I am now a firm believer in is that any discussion about technology as a concept is inseparable from a discussion about ethics. I say unfortunately because ethics is a messy business and I would much rather be thinking about some kind of clean ontology of technology.

Technology is what defines us as human beings, without it we wouldn’t be human. Our species and the ones leading up to us used their knowledge in practical ways, and with ever increasing sophistication. It’s as much a part of us as breathing and eating. So trying to simplify the ethical debate down to a discussion of whether guns kill people or people do is wrong. The separation is both wrong and distracting. Technology and humanity are a unity, not separable phenomena to be examined.

This is also massively a question about viewpoint. It’s easy to sit in a comfy office and write on a computer that technology is evil. Whereas right now 6 billion or more people are actively engaged in various forms of technology use to survive, and most of them are not thinking about their actions or their own ethical stance when using it. Also from who’s viewpoint is it bad? From the viewpoint of other human beings? From the viewpoint of someone holding a gun? From the viewpoint of someone on the receiving end of the gun? (For gun read any other technology, from slavery up through concentration camps and up to nuclear weapons). Or is it from the viewpoint of the planetary ecosystem? It’s very easy to anthropomorphism the planet and wish for a world where we didn’t exist, but this doesn’t solve the problems of the here and now.

If you look at this from an empirical viewpoint then technology must be good, because it has helped us support an ever increasing population (a bubble that may burst), where there are more people alive today than have ever lived. So all the death dealing technologies are massively outweighed by the power of agriculture and medicine. This simplification is not something I buy because it’s purely historic and has no concept of possible future occurrences, also it in no way takes into account people’s personal perspective.

I’m reminded of of Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which was a human and intentional evolution of Schopenhauer’s Will to Survive. I think that this intentional approach to survival and effecting the world around you is what we see in technology. It is also therefor an intrinsically ethical and intrinsically personal activity. Just as a note the Will to Power can be misread as either a desire for power or as something about dominating other people. It’s not, very simply it’s about being able to affect the world around you and see effects of that.

I have always found this Nietzschean approach profoundly invigorating. Coupled with the inseparableness of humanity and technology this puts us firmly in control and also firmly in the world we inhabit. Technology is not inherently evil, it’s inherently what makes us human, but through this we can exert more control over the world around us. And that activity will also impinge on other people because we all live on the same planet, so that activity must be controlled by some ethical standpoint. So ethics and technology, no matter if that tech is seemingly harmless (and none of them are), go hand in hand. Damn, that makes it messy, I’ll have to go back to meta-physics to get some nice clean philosophy.

Just gave my talk on Quantum Mechanics and Web Design, at Reboot. It all starts with particle physics and ends up with phenomenology, sociology and linguistics in there.

It felt like it started off a bit shaky, but I got into it. Said quite a bit, left out quite a lot, but I think I got the message across. Riccardo said I spent too long on the phenomenology, but hey, it’s what I was trying to get across.

The Engineer magazine reports on direct brain interfaces for controlling prosthetics and wheelchairs (is a wheel chair a type of prosthetic or not?).

In the longer term, a future adaptive asynchronous BCI system could have applications in the gaming or entertainment industry or could even be used to control vehicles, claimed Roberts.

Several third parties, ranging from the military to Playstation, have shown interest in the work, but for the time being the researchers’ focus remains firmly fixed on the medical applications of the technology.

And the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mag Spectrum has a great review of the current state of exoskeletons.

Today, in Japan and the United States, engineers are finally putting some practical exoskeletons through their paces outside of laboratories. But don’t look for these remarkable new systems to bust bricks or spew lightning. The very first commercially available exoskeleton, scheduled to hit the market in Japan next month, is designed to help elderly and disabled people walk, climb stairs, and carry things around. Built by Cyberdyne Inc., in Tsukuba, Japan, this exoskeleton, called HAL-5, will cost about 1.5 million yen (around US $13 800)

Isn’t it jinxing it a bit to call a technology product that you’re going to wrap a human being in after a murderous (or misguided) fictional AI. Let alone their company after another fictional, genocidal, robot company. Perhaps these Japanese engineers dont watch scifi, or more likley have a great sense of irony.

Japan, with almost half the world’s nearly 1 million industrial robots, is likely to be the place where adoption of exoskeletons will first take hold. The country’s rapidly aging population—one in four Japanese will be 65 or older by 2015—and its ambivalence toward admitting foreign laborers have created a shortage of caregivers, and some believe robotic-aided nursing care could be the solution.

Perhaps they’ve also watched Roujin Z.

The exoskeleton has also undergone a major face-lift. It now incorporates smaller dc motor actuators, which are positioned at the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees. This improvement, along with the addition of the plastic casing that covers and strengthens the frame, means the new suit has shed the knobby, bare-bones look that characterized HAL-3 in favor of a sleek appearance resembling outfits seen on “Star Trek.”

These guys at www.izmojuki.com look like they get to design fictional robots for a living. Very cool looking comped RL shots of their CG’ed robots. Very, very Armored Core inspired stuff or wait… maybe they were the Armored Core designers.

Here’s a collection of PDFs and PSes of Physics, Maths and Computer Science books. Lots of big gzipped tar files. Very heavy slant on the Physics and Mathematical physics. Some older out of copy right stuff but still a lot of more recent books too. From father to be Matt.

I found this article about wi-fi access points on motos cruising around rural Cambodia (via boingboing).

While I was there and in the rest of SE Asia about 4 years ago I sensed that the locals were doing all they could to boot strap themselves online. In the two months between successive visits to Bangkok the number of internet cafes along Kho San Rd had doubled. While that’s admittedly touristy and not reflective of the general public I did seem plenty of Thais there. While I was in Udon Thani I only saw a couple of white people and I hung out in some internet places and a PSX arcade and was the only white person.

One of the lasting memories of Vientiane is the spaghetti of multicolored wiring strung between buildings. In some places the phone, power and whatever else almost lent a festival air to the roads with their decoration.

But speaking about old skool methods of physical transport… Heather and I joined lovefilm.com. For £10 pounds a month they send us DVDs as fast as we can watch them. There’s a bit of a lag due to the British postal system, but the turnaround is good. It beats trying to download them via the internet, not that I would try and do that of course. And it’s less than half the price of a broadband connect.

Just like tape swapping or keen file rippers swapping DVDs through the post. Personally safer, reliable bandwidth, cheap and easy.

I’m sitting here again listening to the Today programme - my god that’s starting to sound like a litany - and heard the usual mile high piece on viruses, spurred on by the latest and particularly virulent Mydoom strain.

They strayed off viruses themselves and talked a bit about hackers/crackers and the mindset of people who write them. The usual questions came up about whether we could ever have systems that were un-crackable, and it was interesting to hear from the interviewer that they completely understood that it was an ongoing and escalating battle between crackers and security folks.

Many views of security are that one should put in lots of effort to make whatever it is as secure as possible. My view is that all you need to do is make things slightly more secure but visibly more secure.

If I want to lock up my bicycle I can’t ever make it secure enough that it wont get stolen. A van full of power tools can cruise up and even with the best locks that money can buy they’ll have my bike in 5 minutes, or even worse just take off with bits. The only way to make it fully secure is to cement the whole thing 5 feet under the ground. Computer security is similar. To make it completely secure is to actually make it unusable, if people can get at it then by definition it’s unsecure.

But no bike is an island - unless it’s been thrown in a canal. If you make your bike more secure than its neighbours, and visibly more secure than its neighbours then prospective tea leafs will choose easier pickings. Computer security should work on the same principles of competition to ensure that they personally don’t get broken into, and play the principle by making sure that you only need to be more secure than easy pickings, and somehow communicate this to prospective crackers. Maybe they should send back a list of easier IPs to hack with every exploratory ping.

Now of course this doesn’t apply to viruses which are indiscriminate. And it wont help if your bike is much much nicer than the ones around it. Tall poppies need very strong stems.

Yep we’re going back to the moon, well that’s us as in US and the free world behind them. I’m sceptical like Gavin, or any other right thinking person in the world.

So Bush is commiting a few billion to the Mars race, these are not numbers he fears, he’s a big spender, he’s had well over US$100bn for his wars, he got US$50bn for Afghanistan and US$68bn for Iraq as well as his beefed up defense budget and all the money he’s spending on “homeland security”.

Spend a couple of hundred billion Bush and we could fly to Mars and have money to solve some other problems that bombs and landmines are causing us. In fact lets spend a few billion getting everyone up into space and then no kids will have to step on landmines, only a few lost goats.

The Edge is in my opinion one of the best reads on the web. A nice little e-zine with all the talking heads you could possibly think of. All those scientific, technological and cultural thinkers, the movers and shakers of the intellectual world.

Anyway, the publisher is now putting old video footage online. Now you can see those talking heads talk.

The New Scientist has an article about a new PC based unit that’s the size of a pack of cards.

The Modular Computing Core is being launched on 7 November by Antelope Technologies, a Colorado-based start-up. The device is a single portable unit into which all the essential computing components are crammed. At 76 by 127 by 19 millimetres (5 x 3 x 3/4 inches), the MCC is not much bigger than a deck of cards.

This core unit can then either be slotted into a docking station to be used with a screen and keyboard as a desktop computer, or into small portable “shell” with a touch-sensitive screen, turning it into a handheld computer.

Inside the MCC is a 1GHz microprocessor, 256 MB of RAM and a 10 or 15 GB hard drive. It will also run a full version of Microsoft’s XP operating system, instead of the stripped-down operating systems used by handheld computers.

Like an iPod for applications. Or if it had a little hi-powered graphics card you could use it for a very portable games machine. Though then you wouldn’t want to stick it in your shirt pocket as it would probably burn your nipples.