Chapter 7: Rights and Responsibilities
Originally published by Henry Holt and Company 1999. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 15, 2003.
WHY
. . . should things think?
the rights of people are routinely
infringed by things, and
vice versa
•
dumb computers can't be fixed
by smart descriptions alone
•
useful machine intelligence requires
experience as well as
reasoning
•
we need to be able to use all of our
senses to make sense
of the world
Telemarketing. Thirteen unlucky letters that can inflame the most
ill-tempered rage in otherwise well-behaved people. The modern bane
of dinnertime: "click . . . uhh . . . Hello . . . Mr. Gersdenfull,
how are you today?" Much worse than I was a few minutes ago. The
most private times and places are invaded by calls flogging goods
that have an unblemished record of being irrelevant, useless, or
suspicious. Answering these calls is a pointless interruption, listening
to the answering machine pick them up is almost as bad, and shutting
off the phone eliminates the calls that I do care about.
Who's responsible for this unhappy state of affairs? I don't blame
the poor person at the other end of the line who is stuck trying
to make a living by being subjected to other people's ire. And I
don't really fault their bosses, who are doing what they are supposed
to do in a free market, taking advantage of a perceived commercial
opportunity. I blame the telephone, and Pope Leo X.
If modern information technology dates from Gutenberg's development
of movable metal type in the 1450s, then Martin Luther was the first
master of the new medium, and Leo X the first opponent of its personalization.
At the time in Europe the Church had a monopoly on divine communication,
which had to use its format of a Latin Bible, available only through
the word of priests who were its authorized trained representatives.
Popes Julius II and then Leo X took advantage of the monopoly to
fund an ambitious building program for St. Peter's Cathedral by
selling indulgences. These handy letters offered the remission of
sins, and a shorter period in purgatory along the way to guaranteed
eternal salvation. Johann Tetzel, the monk whose territory for selling
indulgences included Luther's community, was particularly creative
in marketing them. On his convenient price list murder cost eight
ducats; witchcraft was a bargain at two ducats. He even offered
indulgences to help save family and friends who had already passed
away. Such a deal.
Luther's disgust at this venal corruption of the principles of
the Church drove him in 1517 to post a complaint on the local BBS
of the day, the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. His Ninety-five
Theses (Luther 95?) argued that salvation must come from personal
faith and deeds, not purchase of papal authority. His story might
have ended there, but for a difference in responding to the affordances
of a new medium. Luther recognized that the printing press enabled
one-to-many communications. Before movable metal type, hand-copied
books had been so expensive that only the wealthy or the Church
had direct access to them; by 1500 there were millions of printed
books in circulation. Within weeks of its original posting, Luther's
Theses had been copied and spread throughout Europe. Leo in turn
understood the threat that widespread printing posed to the authority
of the Church. He tried to restore central control by issuing a
papal bull to require certification from the Church before book
publication, and in 1521 excommunicated Luther, forbidding the printing,
selling, reading, or quoting of his writings. After Luther responded
by burning the bull of excommunication, Leo had him summoned for
judgment to the tastefully named Diet of Worms, where he was exiled.
Luther won. His brief exile gave him a chance to translate the
New Testament into German, and his excommunication gave his book
sales a great boost, bending the Church's propaganda apparatus into
creating PR for him. The Reformation sprang from Luther's Theses.
He and his fellow authors understood that they were writing for
the printing press and hence produced short tracts that were easily
duplicated—the first sound bites. The authors of the Counter-Reformation
didn't appreciate this change, writing hefty tomes in the old style
that were hard to distribute.
The Reformation message fell on the fertile soil of a laity fed
up with a clergy that forced divine interactions through their preferred
means, demanded meaningless ritual observances, and introduced self-serving
modifications into the liturgy. The availability of vernacular (non-Latin)
Bibles let ordinary people evaluate and then question the claim
of privileged papal authority. From here grew the modern concept
of personal freedoms distinct from communal responsibility.
Fast-forward now a few centuries. I had just received a new laptop,
one of the most powerful models of its generation. I wanted to use
it to make a presentation, but for the life of me I couldn't find
any way to turn on the external video connection. Resorting to the
ignominy of reading the manual, I found this gem of technical writing
explaining how to get into the machine's setup program to switch
the video output:
1. Make sure that the computer
is turned off.
2. Remove any diskette
from the diskette drive.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Watch closely the flashing
cursor in the top-left corner of the screen. When the cursor jumps
to the top-right corner of the screen, press and hold Ctrl+Alt,
then press Insert. You must do this while the cursor is
at the top -right of the screen. Release the keys.
Performing this feat requires three fingers and split-second timing.
Even the Roman Catholic Church couldn't top this for imposing nonsensical
rituals onto sane people. And, like the Church, the computer industry
forces most people's interactions to go through one approved means
(windows, keyboard, mouse), and it sells salvation through upgrades
that are better at generating revenue than delivering observable
benefits in this lifetime. The Reformation was a revolt, enabled
by the spread of information technology, against the tyranny of
central authority. I'm increasingly concerned about the tyranny
of the information technology itself. In many ways we're still fighting
the Reformation battle to establish access to printing presses,
when we should be worrying about the access of the printing presses
to us.
Luther's Ninety-five Theses and Leo's response helped to inspire
the English Bill of Rights after King James II was deposed in 1688.
Among other sins, James had abused the ultimate line-item veto,
the royal Dispensing Power that let him make exceptions to laws,
to try to place Catholics throughout the government and military.
In 1689 his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William of Orange
and Mary, were crowned King and Queen (thanks, Dad). Parliament
handled the sticky question of the authority to do this by presenting
William and Mary with what became the Bill of Rights. This established
the grounds upon which James was deemed to have forfeited his right
to rule, and then took the remarkable step of listing thirteen new
rights that the monarchy would have to accept, including freedom
of speech in the Parliament.
The U.S. Constitution in 1787 did not explicitly include a Bill
of Rights, a source of widespread dissatisfaction. People didn't
trust the Federalist argument that they had nothing to worry about
since the Constitution didn't give the government authority over
individual rights. This was remedied by the first act of the first
Congress, passing the amendments that were ratified by the states
in 1791 to create the U.S. Bill of Rights, modeled on and in some
places copied from the English Bill of Rights. The First Amendment,
of course, extended the freedom of speech and the press to everyone.
The importance of widespread access to the means of communications
was echoed in the Communications Act of 1934, the bill that established
the FCC to regulate the emerging radio and telephone services. It
states its purpose to be ". . . to make available, so far as possible,
to all the people of the United States a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide,
and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate
facilities at reasonable charges. . ." The telephone system was
to be managed privately as a common carrier that could not arbitrarily
deny service to anyone, and would be permitted to cross-subsidize
local phone service to keep it affordable. The result has been the
arrival of telephones in 94 percent of U.S. households.
Today the successors to the printing press remain as essential
as ever in helping distributed groups of people respond to the excesses
of central authority, whether by photocopied samizdat in Russia
or faxes to Tiananmen Square demonstrators. Such communication enables
a kind of political parallel processing that is a very clear threat
to efforts to keep political programming centralized. National attempts
to limit and regulate Internet access are increasingly doomed, as
the means to send and receive bits gets simpler and the available
channels proliferate. Borders are just too permeable to bits. While
China was busy worrying about whether to allow official Internet
access, packets were already being sent through a satellite link
that had been set up for high-energy physics experiments.
Now constellations of low-earth-orbit satellites are being launched
that will bring the convenience of a cell-phone network everywhere
on the globe. Motorola's Iridium system comprises sixty-six such
satellites. (It was originally named after the seventy-seventh element,
iridium, because it was going to have seventy-seven satellites,
but when it was reduced to sixty-six satellites the name wasn't
changed because the sixty-sixth element is dysprosium.) Governments,
and private companies, are launching spy satellites for commercial
applications. These satellites can almost read a license plate from
space. Soon, the only way to cut a country off from the rest of
the world will be to build a dome over it. The free exchange of
information makes abuses harder to cover up, and knowledge of alternatives
harder to suppress.
We should now worry less about control of the means of communication
and more about control by the means of communication. While we've
been diligently protecting each new medium from manipulation by
latter-day Leos, communications and computing have been merging
so that the medium can not only become the message, it can make
sure that you know it.
A ringing telephone once held the promise that someone was interested
enough in you in particular to look up your number and call you.
The phone numbers themselves were deemed to be public information,
but the telephone companies kept careful control over the databases
used to produce the phone books. This was a stable arrangement until
the advent of cheap personal computers and massive storage on inexpensive
compact disks. It was perfectly legal to ship a PC and a carton
of phone books off to a low-wage country, where the information
was laboriously typed in (a few times, actually, to catch mistakes)
and sent back on a CD. Access to your telephone had been constrained
by the difficulty of any one person using more than a few phone
books; now it became available to anyone with a CD drive.
Phone numbers were just the beginning. Every time you call an 800
number, or use a credit card, you deposit a few bits of personal
information in a computer somewhere. Where you called from, what
you bought, how much you spent. Any one of these records is harmless
enough, but taken together they paint a very personal picture of
you. This is what Lotus and Equifax did in 1990, when they announced
the Marketplace:Households product. By assembling legally available
consumer information, they pieced together a database of 120 million
Americans, giving names, addresses, ages, marital status, spending
habits, estimated incomes. Interested in finding rich widows living
on isolated streets? How about chronic credit-card overspenders?
No problem. This shocking invasion of privacy was perfectly legal;
the only thing that prevented the database from being sold was the
tens of thousands of outraged e-mail complaints that Lotus received.
Lotus's blunder only helped to pave the way for the slightly less
indiscreet direct marketers that followed, cheerfully collecting
and selling your particulars. These are the data that turn a ringing
telephone from an invitation to personal communication to an announcement
that you've been selected as a target demographic.
My wife and I spent a few years getting to know each other before
we moved in together, making sure that we were compatible. I wasn't
nearly so choosy about my telephone, although I certainly wouldn't
tolerate from a spouse many of the things it does. The phone summons
me when I'm in the shower and can't answer it, and when I'm asleep
and don't want to answer it; it preserves universal access to me
for friend and telemarketing foe alike. Letting the phone off the
hook because it has no choice in whether to ring or not is akin
to the military excuse that it's not responsible for its actions
because it's only following orders. Bad people won't go away, but
bad telephones can. A telephone that can't make these distinctions
is not fit for polite company.
If a computer is connected to the telephone it's probably used
for e-mail, and if it's used for e-mail there's probably too much
of it. I get about one hundred messages a day. A surprising amount
of that comes in the middle of the night, sent by a growing population
of nocturnal zombies who arise from their beds to answer their e-mail
before the next day's installment arrives. The computer's printer
will need paper, and more paper, and more paper. In 1980 the United
States consumed 16 million tons of paper for printing and writing;
ten years later that jumped to 25 millions tons. So much for the
paperless society. If you want to carry the computer around with
you it needs batteries; the United States is currently throwing
away 2 billion of them a year, the largest source of heavy metals
in landfills.
There's a very real sense in which the things around us are infringing
a new kind of right that has not needed protection until now. We're
spending more and more time responding to the demands of machines.
While relating religious oppression to poorly designed consumer
electronics might appear to trivialize the former and selfishly
complain about the latter, recognize that regimes that imposed these
kinds of practices on their subjects have generally been overthrown
at the earliest opportunity.
The first step in protecting rights is to articulate them. In keeping
with the deflation from Luther's Ninety-five Theses to the Bill
of Rights' ten amendments, I'd like to propose just three new ones:
BILL OF THINGS USERS' RIGHTS
You have the right to:
- Have information available when you want it, where you want
it, and in the form that you want it
- Be protected from sending or receiving information that you
don't want
- Use technology without attending to its needs
A shoe computer that can get energy from walking instead of needing
batteries, that can communicate through a body instead of requiring
adapter cables, that can deliver a message to eyeglasses or a shirtsleeve
or an earring, that can implement a cryptographic protocol to unobtrusively
authorize a purchase without providing any identifying information,
that can figure out when to speak and when not to, is not really
an unusually good idea; it's just that a laptop that cannot do these
things is an increasingly bad one.
By shifting more authority to people, the Reformation led to a
new morality, a new set of shared standards of rights and responsibilities
that helped define what it means to be civilized. The opportunities
and excesses associated with the digital world now require that
this morality be updated from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
Oppressive machines are as bad as oppressive churches; freedom of
technological expression is as important as freedom of religious
expression.
As market forces drive down the cost of computing and communicating
so that it can become a discretionary purchase for most people,
like buying a TV, universal access is becoming less of a concern.
A new barrier enforcing social stratification is ease of access.
The members of my family have no trouble earning advanced degrees,
yet they struggle to connect a computer to the network, and manage
to find countless ways to lose files they are working on. They rely
on a complex social and technical support network to solve these
problems (me). If a Ph.D. is not sufficient qualification to use
a computer, how can we hope that putting computers in the hands
of more people can help them? Democratizing access to solutions,
rather than technology, is going to require as much concern for
the usability as the availability of the technology.
Our legal system is already straining to cope with the unexpected
implications of connecting smart distributed systems. Establishing
technological rights cannot happen by central command; it must happen
by changing the expectations of both the designers and users of
the new technology. Here, too, the first step is to articulate the
basic requirements needed to meet our demands. With the current
division of labor, neither people nor things can do what they do
best. Accordingly, I would also like to propose three rights for
things.
BILL OF THINGS' RIGHTS
Things have the right to:
My office has ten things that include a clock, and each one reports
a different time with equal confidence. I perform a high-tech equivalent
of marking the solstices by the ritual of navigating through ten
sets of menus to update the time. My annoyance at having to do this
is pointless if these competing clocks are not given the resources
needed to do what I expect of them, which is to tell me the time.
That requires they know something about timekeeping, including determining
where they are to set the time zone, communicating with a time standard
to get the correct time, and even recognizing that most of them
are redundant and don't all need to report the same information.
Taken together, these rights define a new notion of behavior, shared
between people and machines, that is appropriate for a new era.
Along with these rights come new responsibilities; what was suitable
in the sixteenth century is not now. E-mail is a good example of
how social norms suitable for the physical world can outlive their
usefulness in the digital world.
My mother taught me to speak when spoken to. This reasonable instruction
means that each day I should send out one hundred e-mail messages
in response to the hundred or so that I receive from other people.
Of these, about 10 percent need further action that requires initiating
a new message to someone else. At the beginning of the day I had
one hundred messages coming in; at the end I have 110 going out.
If, then, each of my recipients is equally well-behaved, the next
day there will be 121 circulating because of me. If each recipient
remains as courteous, in a week my day's investment in correspondence
will have paid a dividend of 214 messages. This exponential explosion
will continue unabated until either people or networks break down.
Of course some messages naturally don't need a response, but every
day in which you send out more e-mail than you receive, you're responsible
for contributing to e-mail inflation.
The problem stems from an asymmetry between the time it takes to
create and read a message. While most people don't write any faster
than they used to, it takes just moments to paste big stretches
of other texts into a message, or forward messages on to others,
or add many people as recipients to one message. What's not immediately
apparent is the cost in other people's time. If I take a minute
to skim each message I get and then a minute to dash off a hasty
response, I've used up half a working day.
Given this mismatch, the most considerate thing to do is answer
e-mail only if it can't be avoided, and to do so as briefly as possible.
When I arrived in the Media Lab I used to write carefully crafted
e-mail messages that addressed all sides of an issue, patiently,
at length, taking as much space as needed to make sure that I said
everything just right, not missing anything that warranted comment,
or explanation, or observation. My peers' terse or absent responses
left me wondering about their manners, if not their literacy, until
each hour I was adding per day to do e-mail left me wondering about
my sanity. In an era of overcommunication, saying less is more.
This is entirely unlike what is appropriate for handwritten correspondence,
where the effort to send a message exceeds the effort to receive
one.
The spread of computing is making it ever easier to communicate
anywhere, anytime; the challenge now is to make it easier to not
communicate. We've come too far in connecting the world to be able
to switch everything off; we must go further in turning everything
on. Our devices must become smart enough to help us manage as well
as move information.
One of the inspirations for the prevailing windows-and-mice user
interface was Jean Piaget's studies of child development. Windows
and mice represent a stage when infants begin to gesture to identify
things in their environment. This was never meant to last as long
as it has; like infants, interfaces should also grow up. Around
the time that infants start pointing they also start talking. They
practice language by incessant chatter, saying things over and over
again for the pleasure of hearing themselves speak, but not yet
understanding the repercussions of their actions. That's what so
much electronic communication is, growing pains as our social expectations
catch up to the technological means with which we live.
Amid this din, a quiet voice paradoxically cuts through with perhaps
the best insight of all into communication in an Information Age.
The original media hacker, Luther, somewhat grudgingly published
a complete edition of his Latin works in 1545 to correct the errors
that had accumulated in earlier copies. In the preface, he explains
his hesitation to release one more contribution to his society's
information overload: "I wanted all my books to be buried in perpetual
oblivion, that thus there might be room for better books."
WHEN THINGS START TO THINK by Neil Gershenfeld. ©1998 by
Neil A. Gershenfeld. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and
Company, LLC.
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