The Future of Society

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The Future of Society
We are engaged in a revolution a technological
revolution. We have commenced an era where
computers, databases, and the internet handle
tasks formally completed by the human hand and
mind. We live in and at our computers. We do not
have to leave the comfort of our own computer
station any longer. Everything imaginable can be
found on the internet from research, to
shopping, to business transactions, to love. It
is not us that makes technology obsolete, it is
our technology which is making us obsolete. We
are the computers, the computers are us.

• http//www.uvm.edu/artclass/cyborg/NateCloutier.h
  tml

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The Future of Society

• Think of your life before the answering machine,
  the ATM, e-mail. Think of your grandparents'
  lives before the television and the airplane.
  Think of your great-grandparents' lives before
  the telephone. All told, the shift will be that
  substantial. Machines will recognize our faces
  and our fingerprints. They will watch out for
  swimmers in distress, for radioactivity- and
  germ-laden terrorists, for red-light runners and
  highway speeders, for diabetics and heart
  patients.
• Imagine devices that monitor the breathing
  rhythms of infants in cribs, watch toddlers at
  day care, and track children as they go to and
  from school that can keep an eye on our home
  supply of orange juice and let us know when the
  milk is sour. Machines might watch our calorie
  intake and burn-off, monitor air quality in our
  homes, and look out for mice and bugs.
• Envision sensors as large as walls and as small
  as molecules in your bloodstream sending quiet
  signals to nearby computers, which will process
  and relay information to you, your doctor, your
  lawyer, your grocer, your building manager, your
  car mechanic, your local fire or police
  department. As time and technology march on, less
  and less will escape the attention of
  sophisticated machines. They'll have us covered.
• http//magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0311/featu
  re1/index.html

http//www.janis-purucker.de/3dgallery/utopia.jpg

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Who controls who?
We shape our buildings and afterwards they
shape us. Winston Churchill.
www.hasekamp.net/thailand/thailand1.jpg
www.tickintsofcentralohio.org/images/Historical/Ho
rseless_carriage_ca._1915.jpg
4
What was the role of (information) technology in
Sept 11th?
http//www.ptb.be/scripts/center.phtml?sectionA1A
AAABS
http//media.guardian.co.uk/gallery/image/0,8560,-
10904255171,00.html
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What is he talking about?

• We have one here at Cambridge there is one in
  Manchester and there ought to be one in Scotland
  as well but that is about all.
• Douglas Hartree 1947 quoted in The Dream Machine
  p 8.

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Growth in technology.
Manchester Mark I www.man.ac.uk/Science_Engineerin
g/CHSTM/nahc.htm
7
http//foodman123.com/ibm709.htm
IBM 709 1955
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DEC 2060 Early 1980s
DEC 2060 with 1 million 36-bit words of MOS
memory, PDP-11 front end, PDP-11 sync
communications, 1 RP06 176 MB disk, 2 RP07 498MB
disks. Running TOPS-20 with FORTRAN-20,
COBOL-68/74, BASIC-PLUS-2, CPL-20, and MS (a mail
system). http//www.hawaii.edu/infobits/s2000/ima
ges/dec2.jpg
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Moores Law
Moore's law (rule of thumb) - processor power
doubles every 2 years List of Intel
Processorshttp//www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/qui
ckrefyr.htm
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Developments
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Computers in Towson in 2008

• How many computers will there be in Towson when
  you graduate?
• How powerful will they be processor, memory,
  etc.
• What will the situation be in 2018?

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The future of technology.

• Early in the next millennium your right and left
  cuff links or earrings may communicate with each
  other by low orbiting earth satellites and have
  more computing power than your present PC. Your
  telephone wont ring indiscriminately it will
  receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your
  incoming calls like a well trained English
  butler.
• Being Digital. N. Negroponte, 1995.

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The Home of The Future

• Changing Places/House_n The MIT Home of the
  Future Consortium - architecture.mit.edu/house_n/
  
• Welcome to the Broadband Home of the Future Wired
  Magazine article January 2004 www.wired.com/wired/
  archive/12.01/wiredhome_1.html

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Cybernetics

• I was born human. But it was an accident of fate
  a condition merely of time and place. I believe
  its something we have the power to change..
• www.kevinwarwick.com

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Impact Of IT Upon Society

• Good Things

• Bad Things

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Convergence!
Communications
IT
Convergence
Computers
Communications
Applications
Content
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The Information Society
Communications
IT
The Information Society
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A day in the life..

• Many examples in the press and media of home and
  work in the future..

www.arch.usyd.edu.au/kcdc/vds96/elective/images/nc
.gif
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Technology Society

• NAIVE MODEL OF TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

ART
LAW
Technology
WORK
Set of feasible applications - expanding
LEISURE
ECONOMY
Society
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2 Things to Note
Pervasive ! Important Rate of change
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Rate of Change

• The first steam powered cotton mill in the US
  dated from 1847 - sixty three years after its
  adoption in Britain.
• The first electronic computers were developed in
  the mid forties.
• Fifty years later we have..

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Pervasive

• Not All Pervasive Technologies Are Important
• Zip fasteners and matchsticks are clearly not all
  that important.
• The automobile, radio and TV, electricity and
  printing have greater claims to importance.
• Why is this?

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What does history tell us?

• Technology has always had a huge influence upon
  the development of society.
• Examples?

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Some Previous Technologies Social Change

• Farming
• settled life, villages.
• Industrial revolution.
• Output increased faster than labor input.
• Work centralized in factory units.
• Land declined as the chief source of wealth.
• Urbanization.
• Train network, printing press, sanitation,
  mechanical clocks, the telescope etc. etc.

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The Telegraph

• See The Victorian Internet for a very
  interesting discussion.
• Effects include
• Commerce stock exchange
• The .com phenomenon
• News reporting Crimean War/Florence Nightingale
• World Peace!
• "It brings the worlds together. It joins the
  sundered hemispheres. It unites distant nations,
  making them feel that they are members of one
  great family". Standange 98

• http//www2.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/STARN/scot
  play/SMITH/CARNEGIE/act1.htm

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The Case of the Automobile Kling 96

• Originally promoted as a clean mode of private
  transport.
• Today society is strongly dependent upon the
  private car with accompanying, pollution and
  traffic jams.
• Deaths due to accidents
• 400-500 each holiday weekend in the USA. (Kling)
• Helped give rise to suburbia and the decline of
  urban centers.
• The road infrastructure requires huge on going
  public investment
• Dependence upon oil.
• 1970s oil crisis, the Gulf War (I) and (II), ..

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Neutral

• Technology May Not Be Neutral
• Often With Technology Society Gets More Than It
  Bargained For!

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A Variety of Views
http//www..pensacolabeach.com/ domeofahome/
http//www.filmarchiv.at/events/lang/metropolis.ht
m
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Dawn of a new age.

• Within a few short decades, society
  rearranges itself - its worldview, its basic
  values, its social and political structures, its
  arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later
  there is a new world. And the people born then
  cannot even imagine the world in which their
  grandparents lived and into which their own
  parents were born.
• Peter Drucker. Post Capitalist Society, 1993.

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Negropontes View

• The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and
  unstoppable. P4
• Computing is not about computers any more it is
  about living. P6.
• Early in the next millennium your right and left
  cuff links or earrings may communicate with each
  other by low orbiting earth satellites and have
  more computing power than your present PC. Your
  telephone wont ring indiscriminately it will
  receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your
  incoming calls like a well trained English
  butler. P6.
• On-demand information will dominate digital life.
  We will ask explicitly and implicitly for what we
  want, when we want it. P169.
• The information superhighway is more than a short
  cut to every book in the Library of Congress. It
  is creating a totally new, global social fabric.
  P183.
• Being Digital. N. Negroponte, 1995.

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Chris Evans View (1980)

• In the home in the short term future (early
  1980s) there will be
• speaking bathroom scales, freezers which remind
  you to restock them, cookers which tell how the
  meat is coming along, telephones that tell you
  how many people have rung in your
  absencethermometers which advice you what to
  wear before you get up." (p79)
• The first practical shift will be reflected in a
  cut in the working week to an average of 30
  hours, a retirement option at fifty five or even
  fifty, and annual vacations of at least six
  weeks. (p95)
• Evans C., The Mighty Micro, Cornet, 1979

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Thoreau (1850)

• Technology for Technologys Sake?
• ...so with a hundred other modern improvements
• ..... our inventions are wont to be pretty toys
  which distract our attention from serious things.
  
• They are but an improved means to an unimproved
  end..
• Walden by Henry Thoreau 1818-1862

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Klings View

• The Seductive Equation of Technological Progress
  with Social Progress.
• Social Revolutions are based on changes in ways
  of life, not just changes in equipment..

34
Steve Talbott

• No law seems more certain than this one the
  next generation of computers will be better than
  the last. Yet no law conceals a more socially
  devastating lie. Netfuture, 1, Dec, 1995
• I recently heard an industry pundit say, "As
  voice recognition technology gets more
  sophisticated, we can expect computers to become
  more user-friendly. Self-evidently true? Let's
  consider. Perhaps the most conspicuous
  application of voice recognition today is in
  telephone answering systems. The idea, of course,
  is that better listening skills will enable the
  software to deal more flexibly with your and my
  needs. The notorious klunkiness of the current
  answering systems will yield to friendlier
  capabilities.
• In a sense, this is true. When I call a business
  in the future, the options will be more numerous,
  and I'll be able to negotiate those options with
  voice commands more
• complex than "yes" and "no." But this is to
  ignore an obvious fact about the new
  capabilities their reach will be extended. Where
  earlier software eventually routed you to a human
  operator, the
• "friendlier" version will replace the operator
  with a software agent who will attempt to conduct
  a crude conversation with you.
• So the earlier frustrations will simply be
  repeated -- but at a much more critical level.
  Where once you finally reached a live person, now
  you will reach a machine. And if you thought the
  number-punching phase was irritating, wait until
  you have to communicate the heart of your
  business to a computer with erratic hearing, a
  doubtful vocabulary of 400 words, and the
  compassion of a granite monolith!
• The technical opportunity to become friendlier,
  in other words, is also an opportunity to become
  unfriendly at a more decisive level. This is the
  prevailing law of technological development,
  underlying nearly every claim of progress.
• Netfuture, 1, Dec, 1995, http//www.netfuture.or
  g/1995/Dec1495_1.html3

35
Digital Age Nonsense

• I sometimes wonder whether the folks at the
  M.I.T. Media Lab are pulling our legs. Are they
  stand-up comedians in disguise? It seems that a
  lot of energy at the prestigious lab (which
  claims to be "inventing the future") is going
  into the redesign of the American kitchen. For
  example, one project involves training a glass
  counter top to assemble the ingredients for
  making fudge by reading electronic tags on jars
  of mini-marshmallows and chocolate chips, then
  coordinating their quantities with a recipe on a
  computer and directing a microwave oven to cook
  it.
• Dr. Andrew Lippman, associate director of the
  Media Lab, says that "my dream tablecloth would
  actually move the things on the table. You throw
  the silver down on it, and it sets the table."
• One waits in vain for the punch line. These
  people actually seem to be serious. And the
  millions of dollars they consume look all too
  much like serious money. Then there are the
  corporate sponsors, falling all over themselves
  to throw yet more money at these projects.
• Nowadays this kind of adolescent silliness is
  commonly given the halo of a rationale that has
  become respected dogma.
• Netfuture, 87, March 30, 1999,
  http//www.netfuture.org/1999/Mar3099_87.html2c

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Views of/on Technologists

• Computer Science is the systematic study of
  algorithms. ACM task force quoted in Kling
  p33.
• A man trained in computer science alone is by
  any definition an uneducated man C. Holland,
  The Idea of A University.
• Whether or not it draws upon new scientific
  research, technology is a branch of moral
  philosophy, not of science, Kling, p33.

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Globalisation
Communications
IT
The Information Society is a Global Society
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Charles Handy - Globalisation

• In the large
• Today we are faced with the complexity of the
  global community. Decision makers have to operate
  beyond the traditional limits of national
  boundaries and regulations, beyond the
  conventions of a particular culture.
• In the small
• Life is now horribly confusing. We are mixing up
  home and work, and work is no longer secure.
• Charles Handy

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Essential Argument

• The role of (Digital) Technology in all this
  change, globalisation, information society,
  employment, views of humanity etc. etc.
• The role of Engineers in all this..
• The role of Education in all this..