When a Change for the Better Makes Things Worse

Today's Al Jazeera English Web site has an article by Dinouk Colombage about the formation of an orchestra of Sinhalese and Tamil children recently formed in Sri Lanka. Since the participating children are poor, the Venezuelan "El Sistema" was cited as a precedent. However, the title of the article was "Can music lead to social harmony in Sri Lanka?," suggesting that trying to ease tensions between Sinhalese and Tamil cultures was also a major issue. In that respect a more appropriate precedent might be Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was formed to provide an opportunity for musicians of both Arab and Israeli backgrounds to come together for the sake of making music. (It should be noted for the record that this ensemble is based in Seville, rather than anywhere in the Middle East.)

I have great admiration for Barenboim's project. However, it is somewhat interesting to think about what has happened on a global scale since its formation in 1999. Over the course of about fifteen years, the world has experienced a radical increase in acts of inter-cultural violence; and there is no sign of the trend reversing. (I have made it a point not to single out any particular cultures in making that observation.) This has led be to entertain the conjecture that social harmony is bad for politics. This conjecture may be approached from the opposite direction by taking Max Weber as a point of departure: Politics is all about legitimizing the exercise of power. Thus, it is only natural that it is driven by opposing blocs, each of which seeks to hold more power than the others. As a result, we can find social harmony in an orchestra because making music involves getting beyond the idea that life is all about having more power than those around you. The problem is that both the members of the orchestra and those in the audience have to go back to the real world after the concert has concluded; and we now live in a real world in which "social harmony" is treated as an impediment to political maneuvering rather than as asset for society as a whole.

Who Knows What about Me?

I still maintain my print subscription to The New York Review. It is one of only two such subscriptions. (The other is to Consumer Reports due to a lifetime membership as a result of a donation I have many years ago.) I also track the RSS feed for The New York Review, this alerts me to both blog posts and article in the next issue that I have not yet received. I usually gloss over the latter; but I could not resist a "sneak preview" peek at Sue Halpern's "Partial Disclosure" about Edward Snowden and the consequences (including recently published books) of his actions.

Like just about everything I have read by Halpern, this was a well-written and deeply-thought piece. In other words it was representative of why I continue to read The New York Review. However, the end of it left me with an uneasy feeling about the whole issue of intrusiveness she was discussing. There are any number of ways that my government knows about my subscription. Nevertheless, because I receive it in physical form, I am relatively confident that what I read in it is my own business. On the other hand the government probably knows by now that I clicked on the URL for her article (which I reproduced in the above hyperlink for those willing to feel adventurous)!

I am reminded of what happened when the Internet came to Singapore, since I was living there at the time. A few months after Singapore had set up its own Internet Service Provider, everyone with a .sg electronic mail address received a message about pornography on the Internet. The message basically said that the technical crew was still working on the best way to block such content but, at the present time, it was not being blocked. It advised all readers to maintain the honor system in such matters but then closed with the sinister statement directed that those not willing to voluntarily filter their Internet activities: We know who you are!

I have not tried to hide from my government who I am or what my opinions are. For now, at least, I do not feel at risk. I just wonder when certain instincts for self-censorship may kick in and whether I will be aware of them when they do so.

An Unexpected Consequence of Snowden's Actions

Beyond David Cole's sobering discussion of whistle-blowing, which I discussed this past Tuesday, it occurred to me that there is at least one unexpected consequence of Edward Snowden's actions that has received almost no attention. I would stipulated that his whistle-blowing has made him a primary magnet for right-wing hate speech, which has even penetrated the "comment space" on CNET News. What this may mean is that, as long as Snowden remains a major figure in what the media thinks constitutes news, he will deflect some (probably much) of that hate speech away from Barack Obama. This, in turn, may make it easier for the White House to get its work done with less hassle.

A Deeper Analysis of Whistle-Blowing from David Cole

I began this month with a post entitled "Recognizing the Need to Blow the Whistle," written in support of the editorial in The New York Times supporting the actions of Edward Snowden. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, David Cole has a more extended article entitled "The Three Leakers and What to Do About Them." Perhaps the most important thing about this piece is how skillfully Cole demonstrates how such a simple question cannot be resolved by a simple answer. He begins by trying the establish separate categories of legitimate and illegitimate leaks, from which he then delves into all the complexities involved in trying to tell one from the other.

When the Federalist Papers were written to convince the voters of what had been the original thirteen colonies that ratifying the Constitution was a good idea, one of the most important "selling points" was the way in which the Constitution established a system of checks and balances, under which no individual component of the government would be able to exercise total authoritarian control. It is thus no surprise that those who have tried to defend the actions of the National Security Administration (NSA) tried to make the case that they were as subject to such checks and balances as any other part of the Federal Government. This is where Cole makes one of his strongest points:

The only parties kept out of the “checks and balances” so often lauded by the NSA’s defenders were the American and global publics—in other words, the people whose privacy was at stake.

In other words, while there was a "regulatory chain of command" for reviewing NSA activities, those who most needed to express their offense at having been violated by those activities had no path through which to make their concern heard. Even if the the member of the House of Representatives elected to for their district was sympathetic, his/her hands were tied by the strands of the bureaucratic spider web woven by the wording of NSA regulations.

This, it is not only personal privacy that has been undermined and would well have gone unnoticed were it not for Snowden's whistle-blowing, it is that set of "principles of operation" according to which our government works, as it was explained to the first citizens of our country by the authors of the Federalist Papers.

Extreme Weather

Watching the news over the last few days, I am beginning to feel as if I am in one of the few parts of the country where the temperature is tolerable. If I expand to the global scale, I also realize that we are also not in jeopardy of severe flooding due to either storms or tidal activity. Fortunately, it doesn't take much for me to remember that we are, instead, facing the prospect of extreme drought conditions. Between our fatuous efforts to try to control everything and our self-indulgent pigheadedness when it comes to recognizing environmental problems, Mother Nature still seems to hang in there and make sure there is enough misery to be distributed to too!

Profiles in Cowardice

This past Wednesday, Gary Wills put up a particularly caustic post on NYRBlog entitle "Back Door Secession." By taking a historical point of view, he could compare current TEA Party activities, which I have previously called "politics by terrorism," to those of the secessionists in Congress prior to secession itself and the Civil War that followed. His point was that, in both cases, an extremist minority could hold the more moderate majority in check. He further claimed that the minority had such power because of the cowardice of the majority.

I think he has a good point, but it is not a particularly novel one. Politics is not about governance. It is about acquiring and keeping power, and that is not achieved through courageous acts. That is that made John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage book so interesting (and, at the time, so inspiring). We cannot expect any elected official, regardless of position, to be anything other than an abject coward. After all, if "get elected" is the most important rule of politics, the second most important rule is "stay elected." When that is all that matter, the office-holder will yield meekly to all sorts of threatening situations.

From the String Quartet to Representative Government

I just finished reading a fascinating reprint from Administrative Science Quarterly that basically examined the behavior of a string quartet as a model for an "intense work group" (the sort of group that might, for example, be involved in making high-level policy decisions for a large organization). The paper ended with the requisite "lessons learned" section, suggesting that such work groups did, indeed, have something to learn from the work practices of string quartets (at least the successful ones). The sentence that really stuck with me from this section of the paper was the following:

When facing conflict, groups might (a) leave hot topics alone to give everyone a chance to cool off (Pruitt, 1981; Ury, Brett, and Goldberg, 1988); (b) never settle for majority rule which, at a minimum, engenders minority dissatisfaction; and (c) know each other well enough to know what can't be said, i.e., ignore unavoidable dissimilarities and let policies evolve without raising issues explicitly.

One of the key conclusions was the conflict was inevitable. However, good string quartets accept that inevitability as axiomatic and, as a result, are more interested in getting on with making music than with trying to resolve those conflicts.

It is hard to resist reading that quoted sentence without thinking of the currently crippled state of our government. After all, one of the reasons why the TEA Party has come as far as they have through what I recently called "politics by terrorism" is that their leaders appreciate the advantage of keeping hot topics as hot as possible and avoiding any efforts concerned only with cooling down the heat of the situation. Indeed, those steering the TEA Party probably know full well that their group will never assume a controlling majority but can still work the hell out of "minority dissatisfaction." Unfortunately, our President still embraces the virtues of rational efforts to resolve conflicts, not realizing that, from the very beginning, all the TEA Party ever wanted was to keep the government from "getting on with making music;" and they seem to have succeeded on an impressive scale.

Politics by Terrorism?

One of the more interesting issues raised by HBO's The Newsroom involved the decision of the news anchor character to refer to the TEA Party as the "American Taliban." This was his way of venting his disgust at the way in which a well-financed minority had succeeded in hijacking what had previously been a rather wide class of values embraced by those who called themselves Republicans. The script for The Newsroom made it clear that the financing is in the hands of a few individuals who cared little for the values of TEA Party constituents themselves but simply (and selfishly) realized that those individual would be the perfect pawns for the large game they wished to play. Indeed, as has been recently observed, the best way to get the pawns to move is to exploit their feelings of "racial resentment."

There was thus some justification to that Taliban metaphor. The implication was that power was all that matters, not only having it but also exercising it for self-interest "by any means necessary." As I write this, the shutdown of the United States Government has pretty much been written off as inevitable. However, by following this story through the BBC, I realized that such terrorist tactics were also jeopardizing basic principles of representative government on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in Italy. There we have Silvio Berlusconi, convicted guilty of tax-fraud, about to bring down the current government because, regardless of his criminal status, he still maintains control over what had been the ruling coalition.

Is it any wonder that there are so many people out there struggling to make ends meet who are now doubting whether or not the public good is really being served by the principles of government itself?

The Reality of the Natural World

Daisy Bowie-Sell offered up an interesting comment that David Attenenborough apparently made to the London Telegraph:

The United Nations has said that 50 per cent of the population of Planet Earth is urbanised. That means half the people, probably more, are out of touch with the natural world. Some probably don’t see a living wild thing from one day to the next, unless it’s a rat or a pigeon.

This makes me curious as to whether or not Attenborough has had a chance to look at Jim Sterba's recent book Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds, reviewed by Russell Baker in the February 21 New York Review. Sterba's backyards are not strictly urban. However, if we follow the logic of his book, then the efforts of the natural world to reclaim suburban backyards will eventually move into the realm of city parks and perhaps even less "natural" urban settings. (San Francisco has had hawks nest in skyscrapers in the Financial District.)

One point on which Sterba and Attenborough appear to agree is that most of the public is out of touch with how this "natural world" works. Unfortunately, too many of the images from Attenborough's own programs tend to overstress the cuteness factor. (Look at the photograph on Bowie-Sell's article for a perfect example.) Russell Baker had a nice way of trying to reorient the natural world away from a "peaceable kingdom" of cute denizens:

Bambi and Lassie are two of the best-known practically human specimens that warm the popular heart. Those who seek something closer to Darwinian reality may prefer Bugs Bunny.

Sterba's principal point is that Darwinian fitness is not obliged to accommodate the human race, whether in suburban, exurban, or urban settings. We should not think that our scientific thinking can always control how selection works. Thus, we may need to prepare ourselves for new residents in the neighborhood!

Comparing Points of View to See How Things have Broken

Those wondering how it is that the American political system has become as ineffective as it appears to be might do will to compare two opinions on the matter. The first comes from a post to NYRBlog by Gary Wills entitled “The Curse of Political Purity.” This is a response to a video uploaded by Harvard Law School Professor Robert Mangabeira Unger, who taught two of the courses Barack Obama took at Harvard. As Wills describes the video:

His message is that “Obama must be defeated” for failing to advance the progressive agenda.

Wills admires Unger for his principles but he argues that our political system is such that there is little significance in voting for any individual. Rather, one should vote for the party and the constituency supported by that party. This leads him to draw the following distinction:

To vote for a Democrat means, now, to vote for the party’s influential members—for unions (including public unions of teachers, firemen, and policemen), for black and Latino minorities, for independent women. These will none of them get their way, exactly; but they will get more of a hearing and attention—“pandering,” if you want to call it that—than they would get in a Republican administration.
 To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

If we then turn to “Getting Away with It,” the latest contribution to The New York of Books by Paul Krugman, we discover that this distinction is, at best, out of date and, as a result, tragically misconstrued:

But while the economy now may bear a strong resemblance to that of the 1930s, the political scene does not, because neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are what once they were. Coming into the Obama presidency, much of the Democratic Party was close to, one might almost say captured by, the very financial interests that brought on the crisis; and … some of the party still is. Meanwhile, Republicans have become extremists in a way they weren’t three generations ago; contrast the total opposition Obama has faced on economic issues with the fact that most Republicans in Congress voted for, not against, FDR’s crowning achievement, the Social Security Act of 1935. 

This is basically a latter-day version of Gore Vidal’s assertion that the United States has only one political party, which is the Party of Wealth. A more recent source of this insight was The American Ruling Class, both the book by Lewis Lapham and the documentary by John Kirby, both of which have the same punch line:

Why change City Hall when you can buy it?

So, while Max Weber theorized that politics is basically the legitimation of the exercise of power, our own political system has now devolved to a state where the only power that matters is wealth. This may be better than the brute military force that keeps a dictatorship in power, but it is a far cry from any conception of democracy. It is also the world in which 99% of the population are those at the mercy of the 1% who control the wealth, no matter what system of laws may be managed by government. In other words the Occupy movement was an attempt to refute Wills’ distinction and make clear that 99% of the American people cannot count themselves as constituents of either political party; but, because wealth is all that matters, neither party particularly cares that the practice of politics come to this state of affairs.

Our Global Constitution

As the debate continues over how to deal with social software where social unrest is concerned, I was struck by the following text in a report on today’s BBC News Web site:

BlackBerry has offered to co-operate with police investigating the riots - prompting attacks by hackers angry that the company could be prepared to hand over user data to authorities.

Asked what BlackBerry's co-operation would involve, [Acting London Metropolitan Police Commissioner] Mr [Tim] Godwin asked to "plead the fifth", adding: "I would rather not answer that question as it is an investigative strategy."

That “fifth” is, of course, the Fifth Amendment to our own Constitution.  Godwin’s usage is not quite consistent with “original intent;”  but the phrase has a more general connotation of refusing to answer a question for a legitimate reason.

Godwin clearly was not appealing to our own Federal Law as a guideline for his actions.  However, the phrase probably entered his working vocabulary through the abundance of “law and order” narratives, both fiction and non-fiction, available through entertainment media.  As a result, consciousness of the Fifth Amendment has acquired a level of global awareness, meaning that crime stories may do more to further an appreciation of our democratic processes than any of our more “official” approaches to propaganda!

The Open Society and its New Enemies

I find it interesting that the name of Karl Popper has not come up in the recent discussions of the role of social media in mass protests, whether violent or nonviolent.  Popper will be remembered for many achievements, including a ten-minute argument with Ludwig Wittgenstein that David Edmonds and John Eidinow turned into a book of almost 350 pages, Wittgenstein’s Poker.  In this particular case, however, Popper’s relevant achievement is his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, whose Acknowledgements page includes “deeply indebted” recognition of Friedrich Hayek.  This is one of those books more talked about than read, particularly due to its influence on George Soros and Soros’ particular approach to philanthropy.

Popper’s “enemies list” is a short one, consisting essentially of Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx, each of whom believed that “social order” had to be prescribed, rather than being allowed to evolve through a natural unfolding of events.  Plato tops this list for the advocacy of a controlled society that goes back to his “Republic;”  and Popper begins his book in terms of an imaginary debate between Plato and Pericles, the latter represented by the following sentence:

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

One can appreciate the sympathetic alliance between Popper and Hayek, since it is probably the case that Hayek was working on The Road to Serfdom at the same time that Popper was completing the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, the one that focuses almost entirely on Plato.

There is a tendency to frame the open society concept as an early endorsement of radical libertarianism bordering on anarchy.  This explains much of the current debate, since cyberspace remains an anarchic “place” (to the extent that we can call it a place at all).  There are those who have tried to talk about governance, but those who talk the most about the concept tend to be those who have studied the concept the least and are just shooting from the hip.  They are countered by those who believe that the public should be deprived of any resource that can be used for sociopathic purposes, even if most of the uses of that resource are innocuous and some may actually be beneficial.  David Cameron seems to be the current cheerleader for this latter position;  and conditions in the United Kingdom are such that he has all three parties in the British Parliament joining in the cheers.  It is a little bit like the bipartisan enthusiasm for military action over here in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

When everyone is cheering the same thing, it is important to remember the wisdom of The Money Game, whose author published under the pseudonym “Adam Smith.”  The most important sentence in this book expresses the precept:

The crowd is always wrong.

Where the dangers of social software are concerned, Chris Matyszczyk has come up with a useful corollary in his Technically Incorrect blog on the CNET Blog Network:

I don't remember--before the advent of these heinous social media tools--plotters being blocked from using telephones. I don't remember conspirators or looters being prevented from, say, frequenting a pub or a Turkish bath because that's where they conducted their conspiring.

I know that this is very much in the same vein as the National Rifle Association’s favorite motto:

Guns don’t kill people;  people kill people.

Nevertheless, those who promote blocking the latest generation of digital technologies to support communication are doing nothing more that seeking out the most convenient scapegoat.

Those “happy few” with a sense of history can relate the current uproar to the debate over the Communications Decency Act during the Clinton Administration.  For those unaware of the reference, this was the first concerted effort on the part of our Congress to impose a framework for censoring Internet content.  It was a passionate debate;  and, as is almost always the case, the increase in passion was matched by an increase of silly propositions.  Diane Feinstein went as far as to declare that the Internet was hazardous because anyone could go there and learn how to build a bomb.  This left me wondering whether or not her next move would be to shut down all public libraries across the United States.

Popper made the right call by tracing it all back to Pericles.  Each of us is capable of judging the policies under which we live.  Our judgments may not always be properly informed;  but, for better or worse, they are embedded in our respective mindsets.  Back when I was deep in the throes of knowledge management research, a lot of evangelists liked to talk about a new world of “shared understanding.”  Ultimately, I realized that this was a fool’s errand, simply because that concept is inconsistent with the social axioms behind an open society.  Understanding may be negotiated to a point where opposing parties can live with each other’s difference, and that will always be far more realistic than aspiring to everyone embracing a common point of view.

How does this relate to mass protest?  When opinions differ, the worst thing that one side can do is exercise power to a point where any opposing side will “pass unnoticed.”  Social software makes it easier for those who hold a minority opinion to discover each other and to unite to an extent to which it is harder for them to pass unnoticed by the majority.  Once they become noticed, their opposition can try to shut them down (which is almost always counterproductive);  or it can recognize the need to establish negotiated understanding.  Unfortunately, those with power tend to prefer the former option, lest any negotiation lead to giving up some of that power that takes priority over all other values.

I'll Believe It When I See It

Of course it is encouraging to open up the Insight section of today’s San Francisco Chronicle and find a sentence like the following:

The much-vaunted Republican pledge not to raise any taxes is crumbling.

The only problem is that the author of this sentence is Robert Reich.  It is not that I dislike Reich.  To the contrary, I find him to be one of the most reasoned voices trying to address the nature of an economic crisis that prevails no matter how many institutions try to declare its demise.

However, that is precisely the source of my difficulty.  Reich has never really come to grips with the fact that rationality cannot stand up to assault from those who always place domination ahead of signification.  Invoking Max Weber, I recently wrote than “politics is ultimately all about power and who gets to exercise how much of it;”  and anything that politicians do ultimately comes down to matters of power, regardless of what does or does not make sense through even the most elementary forms of logical reasoning.  Indeed, as I observed the in the context of the above quote, the most accessible model for understanding Weber may be the Peanuts character Lucy van Pelt, who once delivered the now classic line:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

The Republicans may be on the ropes right now;  but, like Rocky Balboa, they may still be able to recover enough strength to come out swinging.  Until the rich actually start paying something like a fair share in the interest of getting this country back on a more secure fiscal standing, it is hard for me to have much confidence in any forecasting based solely on principles of rationality.

Rational Government?

Elizabeth Drew had a post ready for NYRBlog almost as soon as an agreement on the budget had been reached to prevent the shutdown of the United States Government.  As usual, she did an excellent job in providing a “post-game” analysis, with both recent and historical context to put the week’s antics in their proper perspective.  I find it ironic that Donald Trump seems to have taken the closure of these follies as a cue to start testing the waters for his own run for the Presidency, and I can only imagine that Drew is warming up her fingers for her next assault on her keyboard.

Nevertheless, that irony is also a reflection of one of the key assertions in Drew’s Friday post.  Reviewing the who production of political theater over the budget, she concludes that it raises the question of “whether in the current political circumstances, this country can be governed in any rational way.”  That appeal to rationality strikes me as a bit naïve, coming from someone with so much experience in watching politicians at work.  One would have thought that Drew would have recognized Max Weber’s precept that politics is ultimately all about power and who gets to exercise how much of it.  Furthermore, issues of power are situated along the “dimension of domination” in Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, which Giddens identified as “orthogonal” (my word, not his) to the dimension of “signification,” along which we engage rational thinking to make sense of the world.  To play with words a bit, there may be a rationale behind actions taken over matters of power;  but the motives behind those actions need not necessarily be rational!

Even our Founding Fathers realized that the new country that had just emerged would not (and probably could not) be “governed in any rational way.”  This is why separation of powers and the need for checks and balances played such a significant role in the Constitution that was drafted.  It was also why “selling” those concepts was a major “selling point” in The Federalist, those papers published and circulated to encourage the ratification of that Constitution by all thirteen newly-formed states.  Even Peanuts recognized the inadequacy of rationality in the face of power.  In the words of Lucy van Pelt:

He was beginning to make sense, so I hit him.

RIP Knut

These days I find myself doing more obituary writing;  but it is almost always about musicians on my national site for Examiner.com, such as a recent piece about Eugene Fodor that attracted more attention than I anticipated.  However, on this site I feel it appropriate to acknowledge today’s BBC report on the death of the polar bear Knut at the Berlin Zoo.  Cause of death has yet to be determined;  and I suppose there will be many who take the position that Knut was nothing but the object of a media circus.  I prefer to assume the more positive view that I try to maintain about zoos in general.  Knut was one small agent in trying to remind us that we are custodians of this planet, rather than its rulers.  This is reason enough to mourn his passing.

Recognizing the Interests of Peace

It now seems to be official, at least according to Declan McCullagh.  In his Privacy Inc. column for CNET News, he reported this morning that WikiLeaks is among the 241 nominees for the 2011 Nobel Prize.  In fairness McCullagh also reported that it does not take much to get a nomination:

Nominations for the Nobel Peace Price may come from any professor of "social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology," in addition to national governments and former Nobel Peace Prize recipients, under the rules of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Nevertheless, as I observed last December, the nomination itself throws an ironic light on the attitude of large and powerful governments towards the Nobel Peace Prize:

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.

At a time when our commitment to peace is under considerable scrutiny by many on the world stage, this nomination puts us in an awkward position regarding our desire to prosecute Julian Assange.

McCullagh also reported that the Internet itself had been nominated for the roles in has been playing in revolts against authoritarian governments in the Arab world.  This one strikes me as more of a stretch.  It amounts to a confusion between agents (who would qualify as nominees) and agencies, which simply serve as tools for those agents doing things worthy of winning the award.  As I see it, the day we start thinking of the Internet as an agent is the day we “officially” elect to disregard those social qualities that make us the humans we are.

Does that argument not also apply to WikiLeaks?  While I grant that possibility, I am also willing to entertain the hypothesis that WikiLeaks amounts to a community of like-minded individuals who use the Internet as their primary agency.  I doubt that anyone would view the Internet in its entirety as a “community of like-minded individuals!”

Do We Need a Sociology of Robots?

It took me a while to appreciate that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics were not primarily about engineering.  Rather, they presumed that, because robots shared the social world with humans, robot-makers should strive to endow them with a code of normative behavior.  Whether or not such a “normative code” could be “engineered” into “software code” remains a debatable issue (one for which Lawrence Lessig has had much to say);  but, since Asimov had confined himself to fiction, he could presume this to be the case and then use his stories and novels to pursue the likely consequences.

Dr. Markus Waibel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is not interested in the world of fiction.  He is interested in a decidedly likely future in which robots will be part of everyday human life.  What will that part be?  Waibel plans to approach that question through a project called RoboEarth, which he described to Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, in a story posted this morning:

"Most current robots see the world their own way and there's very little standardisation going on," he said. Most researchers using robots typically develop their own way for that machine to build up a corpus of data about the world.

This, said Dr Waibel, made it very difficult for roboticists to share knowledge or for the field to advance rapidly because everyone started off solving the same problems.

By contrast, RoboEarth hopes to start showing how the information that robots discover about the world can be defined so any other robot can find it and use it.

RoboEarth will be a communication system and a database, he said.

In the database will be maps of places that robots work, descriptions of objects they encounter and instructions for how to complete distinct actions.

The human equivalent would be Wikipedia, said Dr Waibel.

"Wikipedia is something that humans use to share knowledge, that everyone can edit, contribute knowledge to and access," he said. "Something like that does not exist for robots."

Waibel clearly has some sorting-out to do.  He does not seem to appreciate the distinction that social theorists draw that separates objective, subjective, and social worlds;  so Waibel thinks he can reduce everything to storing and communicating data.  Thus, it is unclear whether his verb phrase “see the world” is merely an overly-enthusiastic metaphor or a serious failure to grasp the subtleties behind bringing order to sensory signals.  Similarly, he seems to view Wikipedia as a data resource maintained by multiple individuals, rather than an ongoing process of social interactions that sometime take a turn for the pathological.

Asimov projected a future that remains beyond our grasp.  However, in writing the history of that future, so to speak, he envisaged agents who anticipated serious consequences and tried to plan for them.  This made him far more utopian than, for example, Lessig, who recognizes, along with James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton), that men are not angels and are definitely not the puppets of a benevolent author.  Thus far at least, his speculations have not led him onto the turf of social theory;  but, in the face of Waibel’s aspirations, it is probably time to start exploring that turf.  After all, the question is not whether robots are capable of sharing data as self-motivated agents;  clearly they can do this,  The more important question is what they will do with that capability, and it is about time for those in “real-world” robotics to take that question as serious as Asimov did.

Who Stands with China?

In the spirit of that “dispassionate “external control” that owes allegiance to no institution, governmental or corporate,” which I just attributed to WikiLeaks, it seems appropriate to name those countries that will join the People’s Republic of China in boycotting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony.  This information was recently provided in a report by Bjoern H. Amland and Anita Chang of the Associated Press.  Here is their summary of those countries:

Countries that have turned down an invitation to Friday's ceremony include Chinese allies Pakistan, Venezuela and Cuba, Chinese neighbors such as Russia, the Philippines and Kazakhstan, and Chinese business partners such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Other countries not appearing at the Oslo City Hall ceremony include Ukraine, Colombia, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Serbia and Morocco.

In this case we do not have to resort to WikiLeaks.  This is a matter of public record.  If there was any “editorial mediation,” it resides solely in the “category labels” assigned to the countries in the first paragraph.  The conclusions that any individual chooses to draw about any of these countries is entirely his/her own affair.

WikiLeaks CHUTZPAH

As the quantity of news surrounding the current tribulations of both WikiLeaks and its director Julian Assange continues to increase, I find that I am more inclined to attach the positive connotation of chutzpah to the Chutzpah of the Week award I granted to Assange at the end of November.  At the very least this morning’s Associated Press dispatch by Cassandra Vinograd and Raphael G. Satter makes it clear that Assange recognizes the limitations of his own editorial capacities.  This is why he has been playing out the documents to five major newspapers, “outsourcing” editorial judgments to their respective staffs.  WikiLeaks is thus not the direct conduit from a whistle-blower to the World Wide Web that I originally took it to be.  Rather, the organization recognizes the need for a mediating role and appears to have chosen a perfectly viable way to address that need.

Meanwhile, it is interesting to see how the media have been dealing with public reaction to the current flood of leaks.  For the most part the media have sided with those whose oxen have been gored by the revelations;  and, of course, most of those oxen happen to be American.  Thus, we seem to get no end of reports of inflammatory reactions, many of which have taken this as an opportunity to resume hurling accusations of terrorism at anyone who happens to embrace a “thought that we hate,” to appropriate from the title of Anthony Lewis’ recent book on the First Amendment.  This leads me to wonder about the extent to which the efforts to prosecute Assange in Sweden (and in the United Kingdom for extradition) have been motivated by heavy-handed pressure tactics coming from our own country.  Thus, while I appreciate the potential for damage resulting from some of the WikiLeaks releases, I worry that there will be those who will make political gain through collateral damage to the foundations of our government, particularly where the Bill of Rights is concerned.

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.  However, while the situation in China has a lot to do with the stability of a prevailing culture (which, face it, most of us do not understand in the slightest), the WikiLeaks affair may well influence the future of the Internet, particularly where questions of governance are concerned.  As I have observed in the past, most of those who develop, maintain, and evangelize the Internet tend to overlook matters of governance and may even see the Internet as a refuge from such matters.  Then something ugly happens (as was the case with the death threats directed at Kathy Sierra);  and we get a lot of throat-clearing and a paucity of clear thinking.

Once again we are back on the turf of Number 51 of The Federalist:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

WikiLeaks is a dispassionate “external control” that owes allegiance to no institution, governmental or corporate.  In effect it uses the Internet as an “insurance policy” against the fact that none of us are angels.  Unfortunately, this carries the corollary that those in government are not angels either, but they happen to be vested with considerable authority and the powers to exercise that authority.  We now face a “clear and present danger” that the very governance of the Internet, deemed unnecessary by most of those who gave us that technology in the first place, will be brought to heel by those determined to thwart any exercise of “external control.”

An Inconvenient Truth about Cyclists

Last May I decided to write a post about the “defiance culture” of cyclists, particularly in urban settings.  It was a response to an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times by Chris Raschka, “Braking Away,” having to do with respecting traffic laws while cycling;  but my own piece also drew upon several comments on the piece addressing both sides of the question behind Raschka’s topic.  I offer this as context for a piece by Gina Kolata in today’s New York Times, which begins with a personal account of a recent bicycle accident (on a country road, rather than in Manhattan).  However, because Kolata is a science writer, she used the incident as a point of departure for a highly informative examination of risk analysis as it pertains to cyclists.

Kolata’s “hook” came from an interview she had previously conducted with exercise physiologist Michael Berry:

With cycling, he said, it’s not if you crash, it’s when.

From this she could proceed to an examination of how individual cyclists perceive the likelihood of an accident, the results of which were remarkably (and perhaps sadly) consistent with the data I drew from Raschka’s piece and its subsequent comments.

Kolata’s primary source for her examination of accident risk in today’s piece is George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in both economics and psychology.  Loewenstein’s primary point is that individual risk assessment depends heavily on that individual’s feeling of being in control.  (This strikes me as highly consistent with a technocentric society, which sees technology as the ultimate means for control in any situation.)  The problem is that the bicycle itself offers little by way of control, whether it involves rocks on a country road or a busy city street congested with motor vehicles and pedestrians.  However, the cyclist who accepts the illusion of control is likely to take any number of risks, even when it involves “threading a needle” through those motor vehicles and pedestrians.

Thus, my own conclusion from Kolata’s report is that the greatest hazard that cyclists present in city traffic is their delusional attitude.  By assuming they have more control than they actually do in a dense social setting, they pose a danger to all those around them, motorists, pedestrians, and probably other cyclists.  Sadly, this is not a problem that can be solved by putting in more bike lanes, since the constraints imposed by those bike lanes do not figure in the cyclist’s personal sense of risk any more than traffic lights do.  The real difficulty is that no large American city has been designed for the “peaceful coexistence” of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists;  and the result is that the pendulum swings from “acceptance of the other” to defiant rage on all parts.  About a month after my post on Rascha’s piece, San Francisco experienced a particularly extreme manifestation of that rage involving a motorist and four cyclists.  Kolata’s piece tended to concentrate on the personal psychology of the cyclist and what happens when an accident refutes that illusory sense of control.  Perhaps her next study should deal with the social side of this story as it pertains to the coexistence of these different modes of transportation on city streets.