MALE SPEAKER: Various science
fair projects and sort of
winning them and doing all these
different things, and I
go, what are you doing?
How are you winning these
science fair projects and sort
of best in county and such?
And he said, well, I'm a board
member of this one company
it's called Knowledge Context
and the directive of this
company is it's a grassroots,
it's basically trying to
instill life skills at a very
young age and trying to
educate them on how
to use technology,
what technology is.
So the fact that he was
asking a 10 year-old--
Miguel was asking
a 10 year-old--
to be a part of his company
and direct it was pretty
interesting.
So for the last couple years,
I've been trying to sort of
understand how I can help and
this is one mechanism of doing
that, so I will turn it over
to Miguel who has recently
published a book.
So is that's one of the things
that we're trying to do is
educate people on what he
is trying to teach.
So technology challenged, his
background is various.
It varies from NASA, he's a
teaching professor at various
schools and he basically is
coming in to teach you what
knowledge context is.
MIGUEL AZNAR: Thanks, Patrick.
So how do you understand
technology?
How do you evaluate it once
you understand it?
And how do you take that
knowledge and have it
influence the decisions
you make.
The small decisions, like what
TV do you buy or what kind of
car and then the big decisions
like do you use an
experimental drug.
And then the really big
decisions like what sorts of
technology does our company
or our country
or our society use?
It all boils down to
three points that I
want to make today.
I've got my little crib
sheet here and
I've also got it large.
The three points that I'll make
today and everything else
being just examples and stories
is one, technology
changes the world ever faster.
I obviously don't need to make
a strong case for that here,
you live that.
The second is that we can
understand and evaluate
technology.
And by that, I mean not just
that the technological elite
can understand on a technical
level, but that society at
large can understand enough
about technology on a
contextual level so that they
can be involved, informed,
consciously making decisions
that have technology
underlying them so
we can create
this intentional future.
And then the third point I'd
make is that you can help
society to guide technology.
And that's really
why I'm here.
I was thinking, so I'm coming
to Google, what's the whole
point, how should I
design the talk?
And the point is to evangelize
and I believe this is very
important personally and
societally for our
civilization even, so my intent
is to present these
ideas, hope that they resonate
with you so that you say yeah,
this is important, maybe these
ideas are the way I approach
technology and I would like our
schools to use the same
approaches, these same critical
thinking approaches
so that all people eventually
would be taking that same
thoughtful approach.
I'm starting off with this
slide, a quote from Carl
Sagan, because although the
approach that we take to
understanding technology's
impact on personal levels like
what kind of car do I buy,
I'm really taken by this
conceptual big picture, the
context that's taken place.
So he says, "It might be
a familiar progression
transpiring on many worlds, a
planet formed classically
revolves around a star, life
slowly forms, a kaleidoscopic
procession of creatures evolves;
intelligence emerges
which, at least up to a point,
confers enormous survival
value; and then technology
is invented.
In a flash, they create
world-altering contrivances.
Some planetary civilizations see
their way through, place
limits on what may and what must
not be done, and safely
pass through the
time of perils.
Others, not so lucky or
so prudent, perish."
You probably hear an echo with
Bill Joy, the future does not
need us, if any of you have read
that Wired article that
made a big splash.
Bill Joy was talking about
genetic technology,
nanotechnology and robotics,
saying that there's this
cascading runaway developmental
path which could
very well destroy
civilization.
Well, Sagan was taking similar
approach or taking a similar
view and I like to set this as
the context for why do I even
care about how we understand
and evaluate technology?
This is a depiction, actually
also from a Carl Sagan series
called Cosmos, this is a
depiction of the Library of
Alexandria which at the time,
was the greatest repository of
information ever.
And actually, for a long time
after it was destroyed, it
still held that title.
And I bring this up because
gathering information,
allowing the distribution of
information, is not just a
technology, but it's a driver
of technological change.
At Google, you certainly have an
appreciation for gathering
technology or gathering
information on it.
I borrowed a New Yorker cartoon
which turned the lions
in, facing screens and I put
Google's Book Search Beta on
each of their screens.
So you're creating a world in
which it's ever easier to get
information, to combine it, it's
leading to ever-faster
technological change and it
makes it ever more important
for us to consider, how
do we guide that?
What change do we want?
Do we sit on the sidelines and
let technology take some sort
of fateful path or are we
preparing society to think
about what's good for me?
What's good for my community?
What's good for the
environment?
I'll give a quick background
of the history of our
relationship with technology
just so that we're starting
from the same spot.
If you go back about 2.6 million
years to the first
signs of stone tools, there are
probably tools before then
made out of wood, animal
skins, but
they've rotted away.
So we know at least that our
forebears were creating
technology about 2.5
million years ago.
And you'll notice something,
that the pace of technological
change has been accelerating.
And obviously, there's some
arbitrariness about what
technologies I've put on the
table, but certainly, if you
look at how dense things get
just in the last thousand
years, which I wasn't able to
present other than the solid
white block, there's this clear
sense--and of course we
have it intuitively--
that with microprocessors
doubling in power every 18
months and hard drives doubling
capacity at least
that fast, that the
technological change is
accelerating and so it's
becoming even more important
for us to be able to understand
how it's changing
and how we'd like
to direct that.
Over this period of times,
tools offered survival
advantage and so we used them
and we showed our children.
And certainly those adept at
using them flourished.
If you had good eye hand
coordination so you could
throw a rock, you had a better
chance of your genes getting
into the next generation.
And that meant that generation
after generation, humans
co-evolved with technology
developing newer and better
technology.
It builds on itself, its
auto-catalytic, so the more
technology we have, the quicker
we were able to
develop new technology and
almost unfortunately, the
faster the technology changes,
the more we can become
entranced by specific
technology.
Looking at say, computers, and
thinking, this is the only
thing that is technology instead
of stepping back and
looking for the patterns
in the big picture.
Clearly, it's part of
educational, career, political
and economic choices.
And this is one place where it's
important not to have a
myopic view of technology,
because if you recognize that
technology is part of systems
and protocols and
pharmaceuticals, you'll see them
underlying many of the
major decisions we make.
What do you decide to study in
school given your knowledge
that fiberoptics has made it
inexpensive to move jobs to
India or to China?
Certainly that technology is
influencing a decision you
make in education, influencing
a decision
that you make in career.
And it changes us, starting
back when humans good with
tools had a better shot
at procreating.
The the choo choo train is from
a story about how long
ago, before we had mass transit,
it was typical that
people would marry and procreate
within their own
small village.
Well, with trains, it was much
easier to meet somebody from
far away and spread our genes
and create a greater
diversity of genes.
So actually, there's been a
genetic modification of humans
given something as simple
as the train.
And in the 20th and 21st
century, we're getting to the
point of augmenting humans with
technology, whether by
direct genetic engineering or by
implants, cochlear implants
for improving hearing and
people talking about
augmenting memory, augmenting
processing power.
The very back page of Wired
magazine has artifacts from
the future, and one of them
had effectively a future
Google where people walked
around and they could see
these bubbles popping over all
the people that they walked by
on the street showing them
multiple degrees of
connections for how they related
to those people.
And of course, technology
can exterminate us.
Ever since the atomic bomb,
we've been keenly aware that
we just have the ability to
destroy ourselves and then
more recently with terrorism--
this is smallpox
on the right--
technology allows us to
genetically modify smallpox,
so it's immune to conventional
treatments and it gives us the
ability to distribute it.
This Marshall McLuhan quotes so
captures our relationship
with technology.
"I don't know who discovered
water, but it was not a fish."
I see us as a sea
of technology.
There's so much around us that
it's very difficult for us to
get a sense, to step outside
of the fishbowl and look at
technology and see
the patterns.
We are demanded to understand
more and more about how to
operate technology, how to
interact with it, how to
select it, and oftentimes it
doesn't give us the luxury--
and I hesitate to call
it a luxury--
but the opportunity to reflect,
to step back and
think about what is
that we're doing?
It this the direction
we want to create?
Is this the future that
we want to create?
And sure enough, surrounded by
technology, humans rarely
discover it.
There's been a push for years
that we need to introduce
students to computers earlier
and earlier, and there's also
a push back saying
that they're not
learning how to socialize.
But this cartoon with an infant
already learning how to
use a computer, there's
an extreme example.
At this stage where almost
tacitly we assume that
technology is computers and
understanding equals
operating, if you can get your
children or your friends
children to learn how to operate
a computer younger,
then that must be
a good thing.
But understanding is not the
same as operating, and
computers are just one
of many technologies.
It's not to denigrate operating
computers, I studied
electrical engineering and
computer science, so if
anything, I've got a vested
interest in saying, hey,
operating is good because that
makes me more valuable.
But I believe, in fact, that
it's great to have the
vocational skill, often times
very sophisticated, to use
program design test computers,
but that vocational skill is
very different from
the critical
thinking that we need.
It's technological literacy,
it's critical thinking and
it's looking beyond the trees
to see the forest, or the
example before that I mentioned,
beyond the fishbowl
to see the water.
If computers are one tree,
technology is the forest, and
by stepping back, we're able to
see the patterns that are
going to predict what sorts of
technologies and what sorts of
costs and benefits we'll face in
the future when technology
may not even resemble computers
or computers are so
hidden away that
they go unseen.
William Wolf, the president
of The National Academy of
Engineering had a quote that
the captures this well.
"There's a major difference
between technological
competence and technological
literacy.
Literacy is what
everyone needs.
Competence is what a few people
need in order to do a
job or make a living.
And we need both." For fixing
your car, for operating on a
tumor, obviously you want great
technical competence.
For society, making choices
about what they consume, how
they vote, how they invest,
what's legal, what's promoted,
we need technological
literacy.
And actually, it's completely
unrealistic to think that
society in general could be
technologically competent
across all technologies.
Nobody can be.
Technology is invented ever
faster than we can
keep up with it.
Every so often, I'll look at the
Nature Journal or Science
just to get a good
dose of humility.
I look at the scientific
advances and I don't
understand most of the
words being used.
The jargon is so specialized,
it's well beyond me.
And there are multiple fields in
which it's well beyond me.
So we do have people that
specialize and understand
specific technologies and we
have the opportunity to have
many people, society at large,
understand at a literacy
level, technology.
So technological literacy is
critical thinking, and I
contrast literacy versus
competency.
Literacy, understanding and
evaluating, considering the
big picture, a timeless skill,
critical thinking.
And competency, operating,
designing or fixing, knowing
which buttons to push, specific
to technologies and
it is a technical ability.
So one compliments the other,
it's not a matter of saying
one's better than the other
or replaces it.
Here's an example where
technological literacy may be
much more important than
technological competency, or
at least not matched by it.
If we're evaluating control
versus freedom, and certainly
after 9-11, we were faced with
this balance of how much do we
have technology to
monitor things?
To make sure that there is
security, that terrorists do
not repeat that attack?
And how much do we give up
of our civil liberties?
There isn't any one
answer for this.
If I lived in Baghdad, I would
certainly say control or
security would be paramount.
My freedom wouldn't feel that
meaningful to me, given that I
didn't dare step outside of my
home given the number of
bombings, kidnappings,
murders.
And we make different choices
along the way.
So with technological literacy,
we can recognize
that control and freedom, or
security and liberty are often
things that we trade off.
And different technologies come
along and allow us to
make different trade offs.
so even though we cannot
necessarily understand--
actually, definitely
cannot understand--
every technology that comes out,
if we recognize some of
the patterns that technology is
as a whole from thousands
of years ago allow us to make,
or some of the patterns of
what decisions they allows us
to make, then we'e better
equipped to look at a new
technology and say OK, I like
that technology because it gives
me more of security or
more of freedom, whatever
happens to
be my primary value.
So it's finding patterns that
will be true for tomorrow's
technology.
If you're learning about a
specific technology, that
often times does not translate
to other technologies.
But this kind of thing, this
translates, whether you're
looking at radios when Marconi
first brought the first radio
in the world over to England
from Italy and the customs
agent asked him what it is and
Marconi said, it's a wireless,
it allows you to use a telegraph
even without
stringing wires.
Well the customs agent--
pretty sharp guy-- smashed
it, broke it into pieces.
He recognized that this
technology undermined the
control of the British
government.
It could lead to even the
overthrow of the government.
Ironically, after Marconi went
home and rebuilt it and built
it better, came across and did
not declare it, he formed the
Marconi Radio Company.
And his vision of what a radio
is all about wasn't
broadcasting to many people,
it was the ability to
communicate with
ships offshore.
Well, the British navy found it
so immensely valuable to be
able to communicate with their
ships offshore, they
nationalized the Marconi
Radio Company.
So they went from seeing it
as a threat to see it as
immensely important.
So here's this tradeoff control
versus freedom, and it
applies whether we're using
the Total Information
Awareness which has been renamed
Terrorist Information
Awareness so that no one's
really too worried about it
looking into to our lives or
radios or even earlier
technologies and certainly
future technologies.
So we'e looking for patterns
that are transcending specific
technologies.
So how would you go
about doing this?
In this room and in and this
audience, there's probably a
great deal of technical
knowledge about various
technologies and over time,
you've probably thought about
well, how do I look
at technology?
How do I evaluate it?
We unfortunately are in
a small minority.
How do we get society to a point
where on a broad basis,
we have people that are not
making decisions out of fear
or out of emotion without the
intellectual understanding,
but are making their choices
based on a foundation of
technological literacy?
And one answer is that we teach
young people in schools
and we give them some sort of
timeless tool, a strategy for
understanding and evaluating
technology.
So that's my answer.
Certainly you may come up with
others, you may have heard of
others that maybe even
I don't know about.
But my answer is if we can teach
young people to not just
operate computers, but to think
about and understand and
evaluate technology, then we
are on our way to spreading
this awareness so that we can
make informed, conscious
choices about what sort
of future we want.
And every time I think back
how much technology has
changed our world in say the
last 10,000 years, before
agriculture, before we had
cities and villages, we lived
entirely different lives.
In that period of time, that
10,000 years, the largest
factor that I can see that is
different from then to now is
technology.
We have chosen various
technologies to form cities,
to form organizations,
technologies allow us to
interact, share information--
clearly, as Google shares
information--
and so if we're going to look
into the future, and
everything's happening faster,
so if we look into the future
50 years rather than looking
back 10,000 thousand, we can
be rather sure the technology
will continue
to change our world.
And if we want that change to be
intentional, here's one way
to approach it.
So the nonprofit corporation
that I'm a part of, Knowledge
Context, said how do we teach
young people to think about
technology?
Well, for starters, we don't
know what technology they're
going to be facing when they're
adults, so what if we
have them ask questions?
What if we have them ask
questions that are applicable
whatever the technology is?
And we came up with these
nine questions.
I talked to folks at Oracle
and IBM and Google.
Later Google, we formed pretty
young Google who was just
coming about.
And we asked them, so you
understand technology, what
questions would you
ask in order to
understand and evaluate?
So we start from the bottom
left asking is what is
technology?
Clearly a question you could
ask 10,000 years ago.
And then we ask, why
do we use it?
As it turns out, the reasons why
we use technology has not
been changing all
that rapidly.
Communication, survival,
conflict and warfare,
entertainment, if you understand
some of the reasons
we use technology, when
something new comes along, you
have a tool for understanding
it.
Where does that come from?
How does it work?
I'll go into these in
more detail later.
So these first four questions,
what is technology, why do we
use it, where does it come from,
how does it work, form a
foundation of identity and
certainly this is not the only
way to approach it, but we
thought it was useful to have
them ask questions about what
technology is and based on
that, to build an
understanding of how it changes.
And then, how it changes us
and how we change it.
There's a Simpsons cartoon--
actually I had included it in
the slide and I though gosh,
for copyright reasons, I
certainly don't have the
rights to use it--
but if anybody watches the
Simpsons cartoon series, Moe,
the bartender, decides to go
into the restaurant business.
And so he buys a deep fryer off
of an aircraft carrier and
it'll deep fry a buffalo
in 40 seconds.
Homer is distraught.
He does not want to
wait 40 seconds.
Clearly, technology changes
our expectations.
It changes our perceptions
of what's possible.
With information available
like CNN, Fox News, Al
Jazeera, it changes our
awareness of the world.
That's just a couple examples
of number six,
how it changes us.
How do we change it?
Many different roles that we can
play, not just inventing
it, but managing, investing,
questioning it, educating
about technology.
And once we have this foundation
of identity and
then change, the evaluation
levels, what are
its costs and benefits?
And how do we evaluate it?
So we have these nine questions
and we call them
ICE-9 because it's identity,
change and
evaluation in nine questions.
And there's always somebody who
says, have you read Kurt
Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle?
Here's that the nod.
Actually, we came up with ICE-9
before any of us had
read Cat's Cradle, but in the
story, it's a science fiction
story about a technology that
allow water to freeze at high
temperatures.
This is a dangerous proposition,
because if the
water in our bodies froze,
we would die.
If the water in plants froze,
most of them would die, at
least all of our crops would.
And if you allow this technology
to get away, it
could destroy all of
life as we know it.
So there's a case--
a stellar case--
for when you'd want to
know more than just,
what button do I push?
How do I operate this
technology?
You would want to know, what
are the costs and benefits
based on what values would
we decide to use it?
When the United States was
developing the atomic bomb
towards the end of World War
II, there was discussion at
Los Alamos about whether the
atomic explosion would cause a
chain reaction causing all of
the oxygen in the atmosphere
to burn off.
Would it actually get hot enough
so that the burning
would just spread and it would
envelop the earth in a little
envelope of fire.
Clearly, that would be bad for
not just our foes in World War
II, but also for all
living things.
And the scientists debate about
it, and finally they
came down to a decision that
it was highly unlikely.
But you have this case
of a select group
applying their values--
which may not be your values--
to decide whether the costs
outweigh the benefits.
The more we are able to educate
people to understand
technology and evaluate it, the
more we can have society
involved in those very questions
rather than a select
elite making those choices.
So, given that we've got these
nine questions, which are
rather timeless, we decided we
needed a curriculum for the
schools that would provide some
answers, and the answers
could be nearly as timeless.
Certainly, they would not apply
specifically to computers.
Anyway that we could answer one
of these questions that
applied only to one technology,
we were not
interested.
So we came up with a curriculum
and we're trying to
decide, where to
we target that?
And we decided that in middle
schools, grades five, six,
seven, eight, that's when young
people are starting to
make connections.
They're understanding the
interrelationships of history
and science and the technologies
that play with,
so we said that's where
we're going to put it.
And this is back in '98 when we
first had the glimmer of an
idea that we can teach how to
understand any technology.
And since then, we've not only
provided this curriculum
online for free, teachers can
downloaded and use it, but
it's been adapted by teachers
often unbeknownst to us at the
high school level and
the college level.
And I discovered one of the
college users of our
curriculum when we got a call
asking, how do we get a hold
of your book?
Because I wrote a book called
Technology Challenged, and I
said, well, this is how, but how
did you even hear about it
because it's going to be
printed in two months?
And the person said, oh, I'm
director of new initiatives at
this Becker College
in Massachusetts.
We downloaded your curriculum
last year, adapted it for the
community college level
and we've been
teaching ever since.
So we just want the textbook
to go along with it.
So there are people out there
who are thinking about, how do
I get people to think
about technology?
How do I get that understanding
of that
evaluation?
So to illustrate the ICE-9
questions, I figured we'd
start with the North
Korean radios.
There's the earth at night,
which is also a wonderful
example of technology.
If you went back 10,000
years, none of the
lights would be there.
There might be forest fires, but
not all of these signs of
civilization.
And as we zoom over to the
Eastern Hemisphere and then
zoom in, you'll notice that
there's apparently an island
right next to Japan.
Japan is down here, and the
island inside the circle is
the island of South Korea.
It's not truly and island, it
is actually connected to the
mainland, but it's connected by
North Korea which has very
limited technology.
And so it does not light
up at night, except
for a few small points.
Kind of a scary thing
to see that.
Well, it's scary if you
understand that what's
connected with that is a great
deal of famine and repression.
So I read this article in the
New York Times about how
little disposable
radios are being
smuggled into North Korea.
And I thought, wow, what an
incredible story because it's
this wonderful drama of people
risking their lives to get
radios in and then people
risking their lives
to listen to them.
Because unlike in the United
States, you have to register
your radios in North Korea.
In the United States, we resist
registering handguns
because we're concerned--
or some of us are concerned--
that the government will come
in and take away our guns,
denying us of our
second amendment
privileges, I believe.
Well, in North Korea, radios
must be registered so the
police can verify that they are
tuned only to the North
Korean station.
If you are listening to Radio
Free Asia or any other Western
source, it's grounds for being
taken away to a work camp.
So the radios that you buy in
North Korea have a fixed
tuner, they actually
don't have a tuner.
You turn it on and it brings
in the one station.
And it is possible to buy a
radio and bring it in, but the
turner has to be soldered
in place.
And in the middle of the night,
the police can come to
your door, [KNOCKING]
demand to see your radios and
make sure that they are still
tuned in place and the prospect
of being sent to a
work camp for the next five or
ten years is pretty daunting.
So what do people do?
In South Korea, they've created
disposal radios.
They smuggle them in and they're
so small and cheap
that people can listen to them
for a day or two and then
destroy them, bury them
somewhere where
they'll not be found.
And that limits the risk that
they'll be captured.
So I thought, what if we applied
the ICE-9 questions to
understanding this?
So that's what I've done.
And actually, I've
gone backwards,
because I like backwards.
So we start with
question nine.
How do we evaluate it?
And the whole point of what I'm
going to do in the next
three slides is just to say,
what is this is ICE-9 thing?
This is an example of
how it applies.
So how do we evaluate it?
The government of North Korea
evaluates the radios in terms
of their power.
By promoting dissenting views,
this technology is a threat to
their control.
Now other people evaluate the
radios based upon the values
of liberty or freedom, still
others might evaluate them
economically.
What's interesting is that
different people can agree on
everything but question nine.
They can agree on technology's
identity and change and even
what are the costs and
benefits and come to
diametrically different
conclusions as to whether it's
a good technology or not.
Recently, actually it was
within two weeks--
I've been trying to get the
video for this and I cannot
find it on on the net other than
streamed and I wanted to
capture it--
recently, the Taliban is
experiencing a resurgence in
Afghanistan, and they have
been making videos and
distributing the DVDS in town.
So you wake up in the morning
and on your front step,
there's a DVD and it's got video
of Mullah Omar, it's got
video of Taliban firing rockets,
and they're using
this to promote their cause.
Now what makes this interesting
is that the
Taliban had made television and
satellite dishes and video
illegal in Afghanistan prior to
the United States going in
and overthrowing them.
Why were these things illegal
under their control?
Because their value was very
much the same as North Korea.
It was of control versus
liberty, and televisions and
satellite dishes undermined
their control.
The Taliban has always favored
technology like stinger
missiles, AK-47 rifles and
pickup trucks, because those
supported their power.
And as things changed, their
values may stay the same but
their evaluation of the
technology differs.
So unless we understand how a
person or an organization or a
country evaluates technology,
we may look at their choices
and say, my goodness, they're
dumb or they're stupid, when
in fact, they simply are
employing different values.
And it was Socrates, the Greek
philosopher, who said the
unexamined life is
not worth living.
So I paraphrase by saying,
unexamined values are not
worth applying.
We get people, especially
students, middle schoolers, to
think about what
are my values?
And we start off here
with North Korean
radios to apply it.
So question eight, what are
its costs and benefits?
Like many technologies, radios
offer tradeoffs in such goals
as control and freedom.
In this situation,
radio subvert
control and promote freedom.
In other situations, like
in Rwanda, radios
were used for control.
Disc jockeys in Rwanda during
the slaughter back in the mid
90's were broadcasting where
there were refugees hiding and
they were directing these bands
of killers with machetes
to find the hiding civilians
and actually to kill them.
So there's a gruesome example
of radios having a different
cost and benefit.
So the next three questions
under change, how
do we change it?
Engineers design radios,
activists distribute them,
organizations fund them and
North Korean police hunt them.
Clearly, there are lots of ways
that we're influencing
technology and many more
that we could list.
Number six, how does
it change us?
Independent news sources heard
over the radios change
listeners' conception
of reality.
They discover that starvation
is not normal and that their
nation is not the world's
most powerful.
North Korea receives food aid
and they're told that when
they see these bags of rice
marked USA, that that's a sign
of tribute, that a subservient
United States of America is
offering the more dominant
North Korea.
It's not explained that the
United States has a good deal
more power or even that South
Korea is a far greater
economic powerhouse.
So that knowledge is certainly
changing the entire world view
of the people that are looking
at these bags of rice.
Question five, how
does it change?
Electronic technologies in
particular have become smaller
and less expensive at an
amazing rate, making
disposable radios feasible.
Certainly, if radios were large
and expensive, you could
not do this kind of thing.
And the last four questions.
The foundation.
How does it work?
Many technologies can be
characterized as either
centralized or distributed.
Unlike a large transmitter,
the radios are highly
distributed, so many could fail
or be destroyed without
affecting the rest. So here's
another case of how these
patterns transcend
technologies.
I've got a slide later on that
shows how 1,000 years ago in
England there were about 300
people for each power plants.
And power plants in the 1100s
were water wheels.
Now in England, there are
300,000 thousand people per
power plant, being mostly
nuclear power plants, oil
generators that put in oil
and get out electricity.
So they had a distributed system
of 300 people per power
plant 1,000 years ago, now it's
centralized and you also
see patterns of people putting
solar cells on their roofs,
which is highly distributed.
So we're looking for patterns
that are so broad that as new
technologies come along, people
can look at them and
say oh, I've seen that
come up before, I
understand some of that.
Question three, where
does it come from?
These radios came from
specialization designed by
experts in microelectronics.
Broadcasting, however,
was an accident.
Radio was admitted nearly a
century ago for one-to-one
conversations where telephone
wires could not be run.
The example of communicating
with ships.
Why do we use it?
Communication is one of the
oldest reasons we use
technology and it still drives
such devices such as radio,
satellite, cell phones,
email and so on.
And what is it?
Radio is a tool to extend our
abilities, allowing us to hear
something from far away.
But a physical radio that we can
touch is just the tip of
the iceberg.
Out of sight, of our systems
of technical standards and
networks of energy distribution
and manufacturing
are just as important.
Clearly, when you're using
something like the internet, a
lot of it's invisible and not
just invisible, completely
intangible.
It's the protocol, the
internet protocol.
So in the next 15
minutes or so.
what I'd like to do is step
through the nine questions and
give a few more examples of what
the pattern is, but the
overall intent of the talk
is showing that there are
patterns that virtually anybody
can understand about
technology and then suggest,
welcome you to decide how you
might get involved.
It could be working
with young people,
informing them about this.
It could be getting curriculum
into schools.
It could be promoting online
or through the media these
concepts of how do we understand
and evaluate
technology so that people that
are so fixated on how do I
operate this new thing can get
this more conceptual view.
Or it could even be working
with Knowledge
Context, the nonprofit.
So what I'll do is I'll step
through a few examples.
I had promised a story about
Hawaiian bobtail squid in the
description of the talk,
so here it is.
The Hawaiian bobtail squid
survives by coming out at
night and it doesn't come out
in the daylight because it
would be eaten.
Here's a picture of a Hawaiian
bobtail squid and the problem
that it encounters is that on
moonlit nights, especially
with a full moon, it
casts a shadow.
And as it's floating along
eating, predators may be below
it watching for the
shadow to pass.
So what has the Hawaiian
bobtail squid done?
It's done something amazing.
There is a bacteria called
vibrio fischeri, which is
luminescent, but only when
it's concentrated enough.
So the Hawaiian bobtail squid
ingests this bacteria,
concentrates it, there's a
quorum sensing, a chemical
signaling among the vibrio
fischeri that allow them to
recognize when enough
of them are together
and they start glowing.
The Hawaiian bobtail squid has
evolved shutters, lenses and
filters so that that glowing
bacteria is projected downward
onto the sea floor in the same
color and shape as the moon.
So the predator looking up sees
the moon, sees the moon,
sees the moon, sees simulated
moon, sees the moon, sees the
moon as the Hawaiian bobtail
squid floats by.
When I heard the story,
I thought, this
is absolutely amazing.
Well, I thought, is
this technology?
And it occurred to me that there
are some ways we might
say it's not, well it's not an
external technology, it's not
designed and it's not conscious,
but certainly it is
a way to manipulate
our environment.
And there's another story
related to this, which is
definitely external.
There's a relative of the vibrio
fischeri, which are the
vibrio cholerae.
They're the bacteria that cause
cholera in humans and
other animals.
And what the vibio cholerae
do is they live in water.
When people drink contaminated
water, they go into to the
stomach and they have a really
tough time of it, because
they're not adapted to the
highly acidic environment that
our natural you bacteria,
the good bacteria,
have evolved for.
In fact, only one out of a
million of them survive
because of the intense stomach
acids that we have.
Because there are many, many, of
them, billions, maybe more,
some of them survive and they
attach themselves to the walls
of our stomach.
And then they do something
clever.
They inject a little bit of
toxin into the stomach walls.
That toxin is not enough to
actually hurt us, but our
reaction to the toxin is to
try to flush it away.
So our bodies start flushing
lots and lots of liquids
through the stomach trying to
knock off these bacteria.
Well what happens is, the
bacteria are holding for dear
life onto the walls the stomach
and all of our good
bacteria that are used to
sitting in the stomach juices
are flushed out.
Humans dehydrate, the stomach
gets a very low acidity and
suddenly, the environment
is much
nicer for vibrio cholerae.
Oftentimes, humans die because
of the dehydration, unless
you're given electrolytes
and some
means for staying hydrated.
But this example, as gruesome
as it is, shows the vibrio
choleae changing their
environment in order to get an
environment that's far more
suitable to them.
You might say that they're doing
something technological,
but for my purposes, technology
interests me when
it's changing and when it's
accelerating, and what's
required for that is that it
be designed and conscious,
because then we build
on technology.
So those are interesting
examples and certainly give us
some outlying points to
understand what are the limits
of technology.
It's not technology that
I'm following.
The technology I'm following
is illustrated here.
And we have an iceberg and
a ship approaching it.
Often times, we focus on the
visible part of technology,
like I took an example of a
personal digital assistant,
but it could be anything.
What's not visible below the
surface is all the things that
connect to that technology, and
the ship could easily run
aground if it's unaware
of techniques for use,
applications, wireless
network, maintenance
infrastructure, migration
plan and so on.
So you are very likely aware
of all the elements of
technology the tie in to the
visible artifacts that we use,
but a lot of people aren't.
And in schools, we're teaching
this way of looking at
technology so that when they're
making choices, they
understand there's a lot more
than meets the eye.
In fact, technology are tools
and systems and information.
I'm wearing nanopants today.
They have nanofibers in them.
So what really works well is
like with root beer or
something bright and it
just sheets right off.
Whatever I do pour root beer
on my pants, the custodial
group of wherever I am make
sure I'm not invited back.
So I'm not going to pour root
beer on, but these pants are a
very primitive early form
of nanotechnology.
It's just fibers that stand
up and the dimensions--
the cross dimensions,
not the length--
are down in the several hundred
nanometer scale.
The promise of nanotechnology,
whether we reach it or not, is
assemblers and matter
compilers.
So if we had something like a
microwave oven that allowed us
to download the designs for
something from Napster and
then have it fabricated out of a
feed of very different types
of elements that came in like
we currently get water, gas
and electricity, then you
could manufacture
anything you wanted.
The reason I bring this up is
because of the third bullet of
information.
Technology being almost
synonymous with information
would become pretty clear at
that point because you're not
buying anything except
for a design.
In order to create whatever
you want, the commodity is
whatever is being fed into the
back of your matter compiler.
The interesting stuff
is the design.
Why do we use it?
I mentioned that communication
is a reason that we used
technology for a
very long time.
Here's an example going from
scrolls to the printing press,
the telegraph, the telephone,
then a photograph I took at
the Smithsonian Museum.
This fellow had a Bluetooth
earpiece, and now they're
pretty common, but back when I
was at the Smithsonian, it was
the first one that I'd seen.
So I wanted to get a picture of
him contrasting the statues
in the background with this very
new way to communicate.
And we teach young people lots
of the different reasons why
we use technologies so they
recognize them as new
technologies come out.
Where does it come from?
It comes from a number
of places.
One of them is other tools.
I've just read a short analysis
about YouTube and how
come YouTube came about
and it was based,
obviously, on other tools.
It was based on cheap video
hardware, making it easy to
capture video, cheap video
editing software, web 2.0 and
web 2.0 being built on all
sorts of other tools both
artifacts, protocols,
software.
The examples I have here.
You see a fisherman
down in Australia.
It turns out that dense
populations are rather
important for technology.
A long time ago, Australian
Tasmania, the small island
that's currently just off of its
shore, they were connected
and the technologies of fishing
and needles and so on
that were present on one were
present on the other.
As the ice caps melted and
water rose, Tasmania was
isolated and they actually
lost those technologies.
For thousands of years,
they did not fish and
archaeologists can tell that
they had starvation during
those years, so they certainly
had the motivation to fish,
but they didn't even think about
fish as a food, they
didn't have the technology for
getting it, which raises the
question of how could they
lose the technology?
The best explanation
that I've read--
actually this is from
Jared Diamond in
Guns, Germs and Steel--
was that they had such a small
population that they actually
forgot the technology.
That at some point, there were
only one or two people who
remembered how to create it and
somehow they passed away
without passing it along.
Plan an accident.
I represent that with Napoleon
and the light bulb.
Napoleon was wont to start wars
and in one of his wars,
he discovered that the only
source of graphite was in
England and England was
unfortunately one of his opponents.
So the loss of source of
graphite, which is critical
for pencils, pencils were
critical for the people that
kept the books, all the
accounting that a government
depends upon.
So Napoleon said as a national
priority, I want to substitute
for this pure source
of graphite
which England controls.
And there was a fellow Conte
who discovered that you can
take impure forms of graphite,
mix it with clay and create a
very fine writing implement.
In fact, you can vary the
amounts of clay and graphite
so that you have different
hardnesses.
And now we have the pencils that
have h and hb like the
number two pencils that have
different hardnesses because
you have those mixtures
of clay.
So there was an intention,
a plan, to create a new
technology.
And the light bulb relates
to an accident.
Edison discover that if you
put a third wire into the
light bulb, you can actually
measure how much electricity
is going through the filament.
But he couldn't see why there
was any use for this, so he
patented it and moved on.
And it was someone later on who
figured out that this was
actually a vacuum tube and
allowed you to amplify signals
which led to the transistor,
which led the integrated
circuit and on from there.
So it was actually an accidental
discovery that
brought us to semiconductor
technology.
The vehicle wheel, it was
patented rather recently, not
thousands of years ago, and in
that way, it was done as a
stunt to show that our
patent system is not
working that well.
In some ways, our patent
system does work well.
It does give you the chance
to invest in discovering a
technology and then have the
time to profit from it before
copycats move in.
But it also can give people
the opportunity to simply
squat on ideas and
not develop them.
So we go into the various places
that that information
comes from.
And one other point on dense
population, one reason real
estate prices are expensive in
Silicon Valley is because
there's that benefit of
dense population.
There are people from Google and
the other high techs and
from Stanford and Berkeley and
it's that interaction, that
sharing of ideas that's so
valuable to companies.
How does it work?
Here are a few answers,
patterns, that answer the
question how does
technology work?
I mentioned that in the 11th
century in England you had
roughly 300 people people for
each power plant and currently
in the 21st century in England,
about 300,000 people
for each power plant.
Certainly a centralization.
And also, that we can
decentralize with computers.
We've had centralization with
mainframes, decentralization
with PCs being everywhere,
recentralization with server
farms and there will probably
be continual cycles and
fluctuations.
So centralized versus
distributed is one pattern in
technology that transcends
technologies.
There's also repetition
in layers.
If you look at the example the
bottom left, we have silicon
with impurities, semiconductors
being the
foundation for making
transistors, being a
foundation for making logic
gates which are used to make
microprocessors on which we
run machine languages, on
which we run operating systems,
on which we have
application software.
So we're able to operate or
understand at one level
without having to understand
all the other levels.
And an illustration of why this
is good to know is that
say you're evaluating a
technology, and it's a very
complex technology.
You may have to go to experts to
find out what are the costs
and benefits.
Understanding that experts may
specialize in one layer and
not really understand the other
layers gives you the
caution that maybe they don't
understand how interactions
could lead to costs
or benefits.
So as we build up this the
pyramid, we're building on
this understanding at the
identity and change levels in
order to understand the costs
and the benefits.
In order to understand
how do we evaluate.
There's an example of centibots,
which is a merchant
behavior among lots
of little robots.
I believe this is from SRI.
And control of feedback
algorithms. I won't go into
the details on these, but you
may well recognize how these
patterns underly lots of
different technologies.
So this is the kind of thing
that we can teach young people
that will not become obsolete in
18 months or 36 months when
the applications
that they learn
made may become obsolete.
These are the patterns that will
last throughout the rest
of their lives.
How does it change?
There's the obvious example of
computers becoming smaller,
faster, more ubiquitous.
Four of the answers that we
give in the book, which is
actually aimed at adults and in
the curriculum, necessity's
mother and daughter.
Sometimes there's the saying
that necessity is the mother
of invention, you really need
something so you invent it.
Oftentimes, it's flipped
around that you have
something, so you start looking
for an application.
The microprocessor was
a case in point.
Intel developed a
microprocessor, it was
supposed to go into
a calculator.
It turns out the microprocessor
was far too
expensive to go into these
calculators that Busicom was
trying to, build so Intel had
this technology that they
needed to find an application
for and they went off
evangelizing.
And it turns out that there are
some good applications for
microprocessors other
than calculators.
Advantage, compatibility,
risk, visibility.
I'll get to that in
the next slide.
Autocatalysis, which is
technology feeding off of
itself to create new
technology is an
evolution in means.
The whole meme concept that
Richard Dawkins started is a
fascinating way to look at
how technology changes.
So let's go into advantage,
compatibility, risk and
visibility.
From 1700 BC, there was this
disk called the Phaistos Disc
discovered on an island in the
Mediterranean and apparently
it is the earliest example of
printing, mass printing,
because it had these 45 symbols
which were repeated.
But it never took off, it didn't
take off like printing
did in China, Korea or in
Europe with Gutenberg's
printing press.
And we look at these elements
of advantage, compatibility,
risk and visibility to
understand why the Phaistos
Disc did not take off, why did
it fail as a technology?
Why did it not diffuse?
And if it did not have much of
an advantage because few
people back then could read.
There's no market for printing,
there were no
pocketbooks.
Compatibility.
The people that controlled
writing were in a very
powerful position so they did
not really want a lot of other
people to learn how to write
or to distribute, it would
undermine their position
of power.
There was a risk casting
multiples of 45 symbols and
testing clay mixtures would
require investment and because
there was not much demand, that
risk of investment really
wasn't that justified.
And finally, visibility.
Carving symbols and pressing the
tablet was actually slower
than a stylus so if you were
going into, say, a venture
capital meeting with a Phaistos
Disc, 1700 BC, it
might have been a pretty
hard sell to get them
to invest in it.
And in fact, the venture
capitalists from 3,700 years
ago did not.
How does it change us?
Four ways that it changes us.
Methuselah's burden.
Technology is allowing us to be
healthier, live longer and
changed a lot of the ways that
we interact with our
environment.
How we change education,
actually it
changes crime levels.
It turns out, there's a strong
correlation between suicide
rates and murder rates
and lifespan.
There are crime statistics in
the Domesday Book from England
from the year 1100 and
thereabouts, and it shows that
murder rates were far, far
higher than suicide rates.
And over time, the murder rates
dropped steadily and
suicide rates increased
steadily.
They crossed somewhere in the
19th century and it correlates
very closely to lifespan.
It seems that the longer we
live, the less likely we're
inclined to kill someone and the
more likely we're inclined
to take our own lives.
I don't know why that is, but
it's one way that technology
extending our lives and
extending our health may
affect a lot of things
about society.
This cartoon is an example of
working up the pyramid about
how technology allows
us to do things--
well, actually the cartoon
spoofs it--
but technology does allow us to
work at higher and higher
intellectual levels and allow
the technology to take care of
many of the underlying
routine measures.
And I know we started a bit
late, I'm going to go through
the last few slides quickly so
I can get to the finale and
not delay the next talk
that's coming up.
We do have to stop
for this cartoon.
We're neither software nor
hardware, we're your parents.
Technology changes the way we
look at things and certainly,
here's this young kid who's used
to hardware and software
and everything must fit into
one category or the other,
mustn't it?
We change it in lots
of different ways.
Education is certainly a way
that you can have a broad
impact on changing technology.
Costs and benefits.
This is a picture of from
China where a lot of our
ewaste is sent for recycling.
And this is a picture of a woman
with a hammer about to
knock the yoke off the back of
a cathode ray tube and if
she's lucky, it will not implode
and then explode, but
simply crack easily so she
can take the copper
coil off the back.
Unfortunately, it can do that,
it can explode, and it has
lead on the inside.
The lead protects us from the
electron beams as we're
looking at it, but it will get
into water reservoirs where
it's being broken up,
in this case,
China, and it's a poison.
How do we evaluate it?
In the curriculum, actually,
in the book, we
go around the world.
If you look at all these
different examples from the
Yir Yoront Aboriginals in
Australia evaluating stone
axes and canoes to priests in
water temples and small-scale
agriculture and nuclear power,
lots of different ways that
our values come into play when
we're deciding whether a
technology is good or bad.
We look at these different
value systems, here's an
adaptation of a Far
Side cartoon.
This is not Gary Larson's title,
it's my own caption.
I don't care that we have only
one technology, I vote that we
understand and evaluate it
before it's too late.
Certainly, now we have many
technologies, and we're at the
point where it's valuable to
understand and evaluate.
So the summary is, technology
changes our world ever faster.
We can understand and evaluate
technology and you can help
society to guide technology.
So my appeal to those of you who
have been so kind to come
is reflect on how you
evaluate technology.
And then share your approach
with children and friends.
Use technology to promote
technological literacy.
Use blogs, use whatever
techniques you have for
promoting this idea that's so
important to us choosing an
intentional future.
Promote technological literacy
curriculate schools and, if
you like, help Knowledge
Context, which at
knowledgecontext.org.
If anyone's interested in
talking with me afterwards,
I'll be sticking around
for lunch.
And I thank you very much for
coming to this presentation.
