Potential Solutions to Technological Problems

“It has become fashionable to say that where science and technology have created problems, it is only more scientific understanding and better technology that can carry us past them. The cure for bad management is more management. The cure for specialised research is more costly interdisciplinary research […] The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm present problems by the production of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation”.  

Illich, I 1973 Tools for Conviviality, Fontana/Collins.

I start by looking at EF Schumacher on Technology for a Democractic Society (printed in McRobie, 1981) talking about the Concorde project at that time (late 1970’s):

“The proper question to ask is, “Is it a very intelligent development in terms of the energy situation of the world? You have to give the answer, I don’t. Because that is a big problem. Is it a good thing in terms of environmental quality? It may be, of course; people may say the environment is greatly improved by the sonic boom. Is it appropriate technology in terms of fighting world poverty? Does it help the poor? Is it an appropriate technology from a democratic point of view? Perhaps getting a greater equality among people? You can take every single problem of this society, and you have to ask, is the technological development appropriate? Or is it some sort of little boy’s engineer dream? We can do it, so lets do it.”  (Pp 8-9) 

  (In a modern context this may also bring to mind the motivation for Facebook as portrayed in the film ‘Social Network”).

Schumacher goes on to recommend an extension of the “technology assessment” conducted by organisations, which often looks at questions such as whether technologies are profitable etc.  He proposes that a question be added along the lines of: “Is it relevant to the real problems of mankind?” Of course, it appears that these days such questions are even more difficult to answer, as their adoption and use patterns are unpredictable (Harford, 2011). It might be a useful technology, but not take off. Or it might not be intended to address problems of mankind, but might end up being used in that way in any case (for example, Twitter’s role in the Arab spring, YouTube as a means of documenting and spreading news of barbarous acts by governments etc; Doctorow 2012). But of course, even in these cases, once a beneficial use is identified, more might be done to assist in dealing with the “problems of mankind”. Such as ensuring better protections of whistleblowers and those documenting atrocities from the subsequent tracking down using the histories and links provided by the technological tools they use (Doctorow, 2012). 

Schumacher thinks real genius makes things (such as technology and production) simpler, not more complex (which is easily done in his opinion). It certainly seems that coming up with simplicity is a rare skill. Apple’s success is arguably due to its ability to make technology simple to use.  Facebook, when first released was a remarkably simple and basic tool with a very simple interface. This has of course become more complex over time, perhaps highlighting Schumacher’s point that anyone can make something more complex, and many are now doing this to Facebook. Schumacher also links complicated technology and processes with many other social problems. The need for large numbers of highly specialised experts tends to force work and development into large cities, stripping other areas of both opportunity and talent as well as contributing to all the congestion and related problems in cities (McRobie 1981). Of course, technology does offer the potential to telecommute.  But this also has its critics, who attribute some problems, including major industrial disasters, to some degree, to physical distances. Take for example the thoughts of Heffernan (2011):

"Technology can maintain relationships but it wont build them. Conference calls, with teams of executives huddled around speaker phones, fail to convey personality, mood and nuance. You may start to develop rapport with a person who speaks the most - or take an instant dislike to them. But you'll never know why. Nor will you perceive the silent critic scowling a thousand miles away. Video conferencing distracts all its participants, who spend too much time worrying about their hair and whether they are looking fat, uncomfortable at seeing themselves on screen. The nervous smalltalk about the weather - its snowing there? Its hot and sunny here - betrays the anxiety about the vast differences that the technology attempts to mask." (pg 220)

"Physical distance isn't easily bridged, no matter how refined the technology. Instead we delude ourselves that, because so many words are exchanged - email, notes and reports - somehow communication has taken place. But that requires, in the first instance that the words be read, that they are understood and that the recipient knows enough to read with discernment and empathy […] It's extremely hard to communicate well with people you don't really know whose concerns you cannot see." (pg 220)

Heffernan (2011) strengthens this point by drawing on recent psychological research that demonstrates how various distances negatively affect judgments and empathy. Heffernan (2011) continues to talk about the problems of managing our organisations more generally as follows:

"Why do we build institutions and corporations so large and so complex that we can't see how they work? In part, it is because we can. Human hubris makes us believe that if we can imagine something; and if we can build it, we can understand it. We are so delighted with our own ingenuity and intelligence it gives us a sense of mastery and power. But the power is problematic as it takes us further and further from the reality we have built. Like Daedalus, we build labyrinths of such cunning complexity that we cannot find our own way out. And we are blind to the blindness these complex structures necessarily confer. So we forget all about it." (pg 239).

Heffernan’s theme in the above seems to be that we have created something we can longer control. Illich (1973) has a similar take on this but relates the problem as one closely linked to technology:

 “The Hypothesis was that machines could replace slaves.  The evidence shows that, used for this purpose, machines enslave men.  Neither a dictatorial proletariat, nor a leisured mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.” (pg 23)

Illich (1973) proposes a solution similar to that mooted by Schumacher (of “intermediate” technology):

“People need new tools that ‘work’ for them. They need technology to make the most of the energy and imagination each has, rather than more well-programmed energy slaves.” (pg 23)

Illich (1973) continues on to relate this ‘enslavement’ to society more generally:

“People who have climbed up the ladder of schooling know where they have dropped out and how uneducated they are. Once they accept the authority of an agency to define and measure their level of knowledge, they easily go on to accept the level of appropriate health or mobility. It is difficult for them to identify the structural corruption of our major institutions. Just as they come to believe in the ‘knowledge stock’ they acquired in school, so they come to believe that higher speeds save time and that income levels define well-being, or, as an alternative, that the production of more services, rather than more goods increases the quality of life”. (pp 32-33).

Illich (1973)’s argument now starts to converge more closely to the final quote of Heffernan (2011) above:

“The institutional definition of values has made it difficult to focus our attention on the deep structure of social means. It is hard to imagine that the division of sciences, of labour and of professions has gone too far.  It is difficult to conceive of higher social effectiveness with lower industrial efficiency.” (pg 33)

Interestingly, Illich (1973) describes the types of tools that he thinks are ‘convivial’ (desirable) as follows:

“Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action”. (pg 35)

This concept of a ‘convivial tool’ as one which is available to anyone as often or seldom as desired is in direct contradiction to the concepts of property which typically apply to tools, such as exclusive use and ownership. Illich (1973) also links his discussion quite clearly to concerns around social organisation and another author, more recently, raises these same themes in relation to Open Source development. Weber (2004) opens his book on Open Source Development with the following statement:

“This is a book about property and how it underpins the social organisation of cooperation and production in a digital era. I mean “property” in a broad sense – not only who owns what, but what it means to own something, what rights and responsibilities property confers and from where those ideas come from and how they spread.” (pg 1)

Having established that he is looking at Open Source as set of issues about property and social organisation more generally, Weber (2004) explains his notions of property as follows:

 “The conventional notion of property is, of course, the right to exclude you from using something that belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the exclusion view of property really is.” (pg 1)

Weber (2010) elaborates his broad perspective on Open Source as follows:

“Open source is an experiment in building a political economy – that is a system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanisms”

In relation to what insights open source offers on society, and organisations in particular, Weber (2004) contrasts the established mindset with the challenges presented by the digital economy by describing some counter-intuitive phenomena around Open-Source software development (eg: Linux as "the impossible public good" Smith and Kollock (1999)). He talks about how ideas on organising production are largely about ideology. The standard answer on how to organise large complex projects is to arrange a large centralised, hierarchical firm with formal structures of authority (i.e a bureaucracy). However, such industrial-style organisation has the problems of the expense and awkwardness of moving information and knowledge around as well as monitoring the actions of individuals and enforcing decisions. He then suggests that the software produced by such an organisation is buggy and expensive - more buggy and more expensive (to the final user) than many popular Open-source software products.

Weber (2004) continues on to compare the traditional firm with an "ideal type" of open source project and notes the following contrast: "Each person is free to choose what he wishes to work on or to contribute. There is no consciously organised or enforced division of labour" (pg 62). One interesting point here is that in practice there seems to be no "one-way" of organising and running a successful, large scale open-source project. The organisational structures and decision making processes vary considerably across projects, compare for example the organisation and process around Apache (the most predominant web-server on the internet) with those around Linux (the very popular and reliable operating system). One is highly structured with a large group of leaders (the core) versus the less structured, more organic Linux project based around the leadership of Linus Torvalds, which is accepted voluntarily by the members of the project, although there is nothing to prevent anyone starting their own Linux project using what is already available. So to what then can the success of Open-source be attributed?.

References:

Doctorow, C. 2012. The internet is the best place for dissent to start. The Guardian, 3 Jan. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2012/jan/03/the-internet-best-dissent-start>

Harford, T 2011. Adapt: Why Success always starts with failure. Little, Brown

Heffernan, M. 2011. Wilful Blindness: Why we Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. Simon & Schuster.

Illich, I 1973 Tools for Conviviality, Fontana/Collins.

Mc Robie, G. 1981. Small is Possible. Abacus.

Smith, M.A & Kollock, P. 1999. (eds) Communities in Cyberspace. Routledge, London. p. 230.

Weber, S 2004. The Success of Open Source. Harvard University Press