Ranting Back at the Engineers of Interconnected Ignorance

Charlie Rose just had one of those fascinating and infuriating group interview shows on what’s next in technology and society, global economics and the U.S. These people---like the head cheese of Cisco systems, president of Stanford U., John Doerr and Ether Dyson who have so many titles for so many entities (virtual or not) that they should have extra names---are undoubtedly smart, and they make a lot of sense on a number of issues. Doerr has a list for immediate needs, like a commitment to 100,000 new engineers from U.S. schools (and the end of idiotic Homeland Security laws that chase away foreign students) in four years, U.S. energy independence in five years, commitment to dealing with pandemics, plus real broadband, real health care, actual education in schools, etc. These priorities (many being widely shared among technology celebrities and ceos) are inarguable.

How far the U.S. has fallen behind in Internet related technology, in producing scientists and engineers, as well as in supporting a decent society with good public health, health insurance, education and respect for learning---it's all an immense and depressing scandal.But some of the rah rah for innovations that technology will and should create, especially via the Internet, are a lot more troublesome. Some are the product of the limitations of scientific and engineering thinking. Some are just dumb.

For example, the idea that all information will be and should be digital, because it makes it accessible to more people. This is part of the Internet=Everything approach, so typical of a new technology yet in this case particularly dangerous because it’s possible. In ten years, says Ether Dyson, the Internet will be like electricity---you won’t even think about it, you’ll just think about what you can do with it. It’s got a McLuhanesque prophetic non sequiter ring to it, and it’s also functionally insane. Because a great many of our real problems today are due to the fact that we don’t think about electricity, the infrastructure that delivers it, the costs to individuals and the planet of how we deliver it and especially the energy used.

On a practical level, it’s very easy for me to focus on this because I’ve just gone for 36 hours without electricity---and people I know who live within a couple of miles went 3 or 4 days, and within15 or 20 miles went 6 days without it. But 36 hours was enough to teach the lessons that we are more and more dependent on electricity---even for (as I mentioned in previous posts) things that didn’t used to be, like gas heating and cooking. So there are a lot of people around here talking about getting blowers for woodstoves that are powered by the heat of the stove itself, or kicking themselves for throwing out their manual typewriters.

The lesson may be forgotten, but fried systems and downed lines due to storms (which are likely to increase in many places in the next decade) or supply and demand problems and other infrastructure difficulties are both real and indicative. The same fossil fuel energy that is fueling those storms through global heating, is the energy that is running out. Local disruptions are likely to increase as the problems of supply and infrastructure grow. And though technologists don’t like to point it out, the tremendous growth of the Internet has accounted for a large percentage of the growth in energy use.

And don’t bother me about wireless—microwave technologies are quite vulnerable, and also depend on the physical world of structures with transmitters, as well as energy sources.

I ask you, who in their right mind would discard multiple ways of storing and presenting “information” in favor of a single highly vulnerable system? Scientists and engineers and people who would make a lot of money creating such a system, apparently.

Unless and until highly portable, decentralized, highly efficient, sustainable and renewable energy systems are widely and cheaply available as part of every electronic device, linked to a digital distribution infrastructure that is impervious to physical or software sabotage or disruption, this Internet as Everything within ten years is a moronic fantasy.

And if you haven’t accomplished this and a lot more in ten or maybe twenty years, it’s unlikely that anyone is going to have this fantasy ever again, at least in this millennium.

The urge to digitize entire libraries is supposed to supplant the need for those libraries, which the president of Stanford characterized as imprisoning information within walls. That’s very attractive to schools like Humboldt State, strapped for cash, which has already gone two years without buying a single new book for its library, apparently with little complaint.

I don’t see libraries as imprisoning information; I see libraries as protecting information. Make it accessible, of course. But don’t destroy it. (I can hear them objecting now—of course, we didn’t mean burn the books. Well, wake up, dreamers. They’ve already burned the card catalogues. Now in a brownout nobody can find anything. Of course, you burn the books. The San Francisco Library did when it went digital. I suspect the practice is widespread, even before digitizing those destroyed books was affordable. Who can afford to store them? And pretty soon, who can afford to print more? Sure, this is a broad question with many individual solutions, but the prediction was also broad.)

Then there’s the knotty problem of who is going to pay “content providers” in this new digital world. There are real problems involved, but the solutions I heard proposed show the fundamental idiocy embedded in the very vocabulary used to discuss these matters.We have to find a way to “pay content providers” so they will have “incentive to create content.” The Cisco Kid said that the wave of the future would be to pay not for information or access but for interaction. His two examples were: you don’t pay the doctor to take your blood pressure. You take it online yourself. You pay the doctor to interpret it, along with other medical information; you can instantly get three or four opinions on the same information. Second, you don’t pay somebody to write something, you pay them to answer questions about it.

The practicality of getting four competent doctors to comment on the same trivial case aside, the writer example gave me chills, perhaps because it revived every fear sweated into me by some of my English lit professors who took the Leavis side over C.P. Snow in the perennial Two Cultures debate, particularly on the cultural cluelessness of engineers.

I presume some of these “content providers” are artists, musicians and literary writers. First of all, they don’t need to be paid as “incentive.” They need to be paid so they can a) live and b) write, not necessarily in that order. Incentive is not the problem.

Secondly, this seems to propose that you don’t pay Doris Lessing or Gabriel Garcia Marquez for writing their books. You pay them for answering questions about them.

In some ways, this is only an extension of what’s been happening for the past two decades, which is writers like Doris Lessing are forced to go on book tours and promote their books in order to get paid. Now writers must do Internet chats, etc. or their publishers may very well refuse to publish them. Agents are more interested in your marketing plan than your words. (Whereas nobody seems to care about the expertise at writing of a marketing expert.) This is due to the marriage of technology and business. And this might be a real rather than prophetic example of the Cisco Kid’s belief that “technology will dictate business strategy.”

But promotion makes celebrities, not writers. And only someone who doesn’t have the foggiest notion of what a literary work is, who possibly has never read a literary novel or even a short poem of Rumi, could possibly suggest that the proper job of literary writers is explaining what they write.

By all means give us 100,000 new engineers, and teach them Chinese while you’re at it. But you’d better pay some attention to developing 100,000 new literature majors if you want a society in which humans can be human. And make a few new portable typewriters while you’re at it.

Tirhas Habtegiris: Death and Its Strange Bedfellows

There's a little flurry of interest on the web, notably on skeptical community.com, concerning the death by hospital decision of Tirhas Habtegiris, who I wrote about here. It seems to have been prompted by a commentary in Slate by Steven E. Landsburg.

This column is obtuse in the extreme. There is no paragraph after the opening one in which Landsburg gets the point.

The opening graph however is interesting in how he decides to summarize the case:

Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.

The facts reproduce those in the two TV station reports, the only reporting I've seen. But he goes farther than those reports in stating categorically that Habtegiris was taken off life support because her bills weren't paid.But then Landsburg goes off on a bizarre riff about the relative value of ventilator insurance and a quart of milk to a poor person. In countering a blogger's claim that pulling the plug on a conscious person wasn't "compassionate", he lectures thusly:

Now let me remind you what "compassion" means. According to Merriam-Webster Online (which, by virtue of being online, really ought to be easily accessible to bloggers), compassion is the "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." By that definition, there is nothing particularly compassionate about giving ventilator insurance to a person who really feels a more urgent need for milk or eggs. One might even say that choosing to ignore the major sources of others' distress is precisely the opposite of sympathetic consciousness.

It takes a very active if deformed imagination to interpret the act of compassion the blogger--or any other non-deluded person--meant as providing this woman with ventilator insurance (whatever that may be I personally have never seen it offered.)Landsburg doesn't even bother to spell out his premise, as if we all share it with him: that if someone doesn't have ventilator insurance, or some other means to pay, then naturally they deserve to die.

Let's stipulate that there are some moral ambiguities in this situation, particularly in the fact that this woman would not live without the intervention of a ventilator machine. But it can be argued---and it seems to me---that this is a distinction in degree and not in kind, from any sort of life-saving care. If someone is denied medication to avoid an oncoming heart attack--if you refuse to go get the pills--how different is that?

To most reasonable people, the compassion referred to here is in continuing to provide care to a conscious living person, to abide by her wishes to continue living, and work out who is going to pay for it later (as if there aren't a thousand ways to manage that.) At minimum, to keep her on the ventilator until her final wish is granted: to die in the arms of her mother, then in Africa and unable to get to the hospital in Texas within the 10 day to death sentence.

That's the "compassion" argument.But there is an even more fundamental issue, which is: justice. How is this different from murder? This is reportedly a conscious person. Can you define keeping a machine on for the time it takes for her to die as extraordinary means? Yes, the woman was defined as terminally ill. But death is certain for everyone, though the time it will occur is generally uncertain. Everyone who is murdered is therefore dead "before their time," if that time might be 60 years or 60 seconds.

There are laws and rules about allowing certain terminally ill patients to die by withdrawing life support, but as far as I know, these require the patient to be persistently unconscious, or "brain-dead." In other words, the person as a person is already dead. There is an argument for "mercy killing" if the patient wishes to die rather than suffer prolonged pain leading directly to death.

But neither of these seems to have been the situation. She was conscious, and not asking to be relieved of her life. The fact is that this woman's death at that time required an act: turning off the machine. Under the circumstances as we know them so far, how is that different in kind from hitting her in the head with a pipe?

And if a conscious person is denied life because she can't pay her bills, how is this different from murder for money?

My first concern here is that there has been no serious reporting on this situation. Until we know the facts in more detail--what the true situation in the hospital was, what the law was and what it says that was applied to her case, along with some idea of the laws and rules and ethics that bear on this situation, we're all just speculating.

However, if Landsburg's commentary is all we get, we're all in big trouble. Behind all our concerns is the spectre of you or me in that hospital bed. Maybe Landsburg is well fixed enough to not worry. Few of us are.

Blow It Up, Blow the Money, Go Home

If you need any further evidence of the complete bankruptcy of the Bushwar in Iraq, there is this from the Washington Post: [my interpolations in blue]

The Bush administration does not intend to seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction in the budget request going before Congress in February, officials say. The decision signals the winding down of an $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort in which roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein.

Of course, this doesn't count the billions in bribes, kickbacks, fraud and excessive profits by Halliburton and other Bushcorpse pals. Iraq still doesn't have reliable electricity, water or sewage; except for the right to get purple on your finger every few months, Iraqi daily life is worse off than it was under Saddam, apart from thousands of violent deaths.

As for Saddam's trial, the evidence of his torturing people is at this point a highly embarrassing reminder of Bushcorpse torturing people, and not just in Iraq as Saddam did, but in secret prisons throughout Europe and Asia, and at Guantanamo.

AND Iraqis are still be tortured by their government, or rogue elements of it. A month or so ago we had the extraordinary complaint of the country's president that the police or militias or the army (who knows which is which?) were torturing lots of people. Just like the good old days.

Just under 20 percent of the reconstruction package remains unallocated. When the last of the $18.4 billion is spent, U.S. officials in Baghdad have made clear, other foreign donors and the fledgling Iraqi government will have to take up what authorities say is tens of billions of dollars of work yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq's 26 million people.

"The U.S. never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," Brig. Gen. William McCoy, the Army Corps of Engineers commander overseeing the work, told reporters at a recent news conference. In an interview this past week, McCoy said: "This was just supposed to be a jump-start."

When the U.S. began the "reconstruction," they employed big U.S. firms, all Bushcorpse pals, instead of contracting with Iraqis who had built the infrastructure in the first place. These companies brought in cheap foreign labor to increase their profits, and Iraqi men had something like a 50% unemployment rate. That act of stupidity, corruption and paternalism led to complete failure, and now that the place is in utter chaos, Bushcorpse decides to leave it to the people they should have financed in the beginning.