[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Book Review: "Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines"

[John W.]

I thought some of you might be interested in this.

John



>Michael J. Ross and Dan Sisson write "In our increasingly mechanized 
>world, we repeatedly hear promises that every new digital product, 
>computerized service, or other form of technology, will make our lives 
>easier — bestowing greater leisure, health, and happiness. Yet are any of 
>those promises being fulfilled? Are we not instead becoming slaves to the 
>very "conveniences" that we struggle to master? These weighty questions 
>are addressed by Steve Talbott in his book Devices of the Soul: Battling 
>for Our Selves in an Age of Machines." Read below for the rest of Michael 
>and Dan's review.
>
>Devices of the Soul
>author  Steve Talbott
>pages 281
>publisher O'Reilly Media
>rating 7
>reviewer Michael J. Ross and Dan Sisson
>ISBN 0596526806
>summary A passionate warning against technology overtaking our lives
>
>
>Published by O'Reilly Media in April 2007, under ISBNs 0596526806 and 
>978-0596526801, Devices of the Soul argues that we are now blindly 
>accepting technology with little or no countervailing efforts or even 
>awareness, and we are paying a terrible toll, both individually and as a 
>society.
>
> From the day a child of the 21st century begins his education, he is 
> confronted with mind-numbing statistics, numbers, and facts via the 
> computer — which he must accept. Perhaps even more important, he must 
> master its "techniques" as the sine qua non tool to be successful in 
> life. This is not a voyage of self-discovery; it is a demand by "the 
> system" that the individual accept a way of viewing the world that 
> invades, conquers, and ultimately controls his life. The child will learn 
> most of what he knows with it, play with it, talk with it, and allow his 
> thinking to be ruled by it — all because it is the magical machine that 
> gives him access to the world's knowledge, e.g., the Internet.
>
>By the time this child makes the transition from high school to college, 
>he will be required to accept a curriculum that too often lacks meaning 
>and content, that fails to allow him to satisfy his own curiosity about 
>the challenges facing humanity, and is, moreover, expensive and will 
>likely lead to indebtedness. There are few alternatives to this gauntlet, 
>especially if one wishes to belong to the 'credentialed society', which 
>determines modern man's measure of success.
>
>Education is only the first stage in the numbing of our consciousness. 
>What follows is built upon this edifice. Our acceptance of machines - 
>ubiquitous in our everyday lives - provides our food, transportation, 
>entertainment, information, and prestige - in sum, everything we need to 
>function in modern society.
>
>Talbott shows how the machines we use create a grand illusion, namely, 
>that by having every technological gadget, we will save time and money, 
>and be able to spend more time with our family and loved ones. However, 
>that leisure time never materializes. The technology costs more, not less. 
>Consequently, we find ourselves in a perpetual struggle to preserve a bare 
>minimum of human emotions and instincts.
>
>The next stage in the individual's life is integration into the mature 
>world of the computerized economy, i.e., when he becomes a "stakeholder." 
>He accepts a world that does away with human values and subordinates him 
>to "market values." Furthermore, he is bound to lose his sense of privacy.
>
>It follows that almost everyone willingly accepts that advancement in life 
>and career increasingly requires having electronic conversations with 
>machines - and eventually robots - that will never ask us what our 
>personal assumptions and/or values are, and have no intentions of doing 
>so. In short, our resistance to the machine fades. It is "far easier to 
>assign the intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out those 
>tortured pathways" to the human urges within us. Society itself, not just 
>the individual, says Talbott, "is unsurprisingly assuming the character of 
>our technology."
>
>The outcome is grim: "Historically, there appears to be an element of 
>tragedy in all this. We stumble along in ignorance and, by the time we 
>realize the subtle ways our actions have caught up with us, the damage and 
>loss are already irrevocable."
>
>Technology expresses itself in numbers and computations divorced from 
>human values. Efficiency is nearly the sole criterion by which modern 
>corporations make decisions, and it is no accident that these two ideas, 
>human values versus efficiency, are mutually exclusive. In objecting to 
>the mess we humans have created, Talbott notes: "If you want human values, 
>if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs 
>must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The 
>minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to 
>get back from there to the qualitative world."
>
>Despite these tragic overtones, he argues that we can and must return to 
>that qualitative world where we can realize our deepest human qualities. 
>We can retain our humanity in connection to the natural world, despite 
>using tools skillfully, as exemplified by the wily trickster Odysseus, as 
>well as Tomo, a member of the Waorani Indians in the Amazon jungles of 
>Ecuador who demonstrated phenomenal knowledge of his world.
>
>His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age also 
>includes developing a strong sense of history. We must realize how other 
>humans expressed their individuality, and realized their hopes and dreams. 
>Despite the fact that Americans generally have little appreciation for or 
>cognizance of history, there may come a time when reading history may be 
>the only place to find models of human behavior that went against the 
>technophilic grain.
>
>Interspersed throughout his analysis, Talbott offers suggestions to arrest 
>this headlong rush into a mechanized future. They tend to be general in 
>nature, such as urging us to seek a sense of "place," and to engage in 
>conversations with our fellow men (and even our machines) to remind them 
>of our human needs. Echoing Edward Abbey, who attempted to alert us to the 
>environmental disasters of the 1960's with books like The Monkey Wrench 
>Gang, Talbott writes, "This may at times require us to throw a wrench into 
>the machinery in order to serve the worthy human intentions behind it."
>
>Despite Talbott's skills as a writer, the book, sadly, has some 
>substantial flaws. Two of the most obvious are the overly long digressions 
>into the stories of Jacques Lusseyran and Martha Beck, which admittedly 
>are fascinating, but delay the presentation of more topical material. 
>Furthermore, they suggest that Talbott is misidentifying the emotional 
>power of those stories as proof of his arguments, and thus committing the 
>common error of anecdotal evidence. Even worse, they border on 
>romanticizing blindness and Down syndrome, respectively.
>
>He also fails to address a major factor in our growing discontent with the 
>Information Age: the nonstop ratcheting up of our expectations, driven 
>largely by marketing on the seller side, and a lack of philosophic 
>questioning on the consumer side.
>
>A common pattern in the book is a deep criticism of any given aspect or 
>consequence of technology, to the extent that Talbott appears to be 
>arguing that we should do away with it completely. But he often then wraps 
>up his analysis by briefly contradicting the earlier implication, and 
>stating that he does not believe the phenomenon at issue should be 
>eradicated. This schizophrenic reasoning mixes bold, blanket criticisms 
>with assurances to the contrary. Yet one may argue that, with so much of 
>current social discourse failing to question technology, its critics must 
>never err with overly cautious warnings.
>
>There are other problems in his analysis: He invests much hope in what he 
>terms "conversation," "meaning," and "value" — not clearly specified, and 
>yet spoken of highly. He fears machine intelligence (and perhaps rightly 
>so), and doubts its viability, but fails to understand its potential for 
>emergence. Even though a former computer programmer, he does not seem to 
>understand the value of abstraction, and the possibility that it can be 
>used beneficially, without being considered the only source of important 
>knowledge. Lastly, it is odd that he does not cite the pioneering work of 
>a well-known predecessor, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological Society.
>
>Nonetheless, the issues that Talbott raises are of critical importance - 
>so much so that they make his lapses of logic that much more maddening. 
>Because so much is at stake, our efforts at analyzing, understanding, and 
>solving these problems, must be proportionally energetic and effective. 
>Technophiles may dismiss his entire effort based upon the book's 
>weaknesses, and consequently miss out on the valuable gist of his 
>viewpoint. Similarly, impatient readers in our age of limited attention 
>spans, might not make it through the aforesaid tangents, and likewise miss 
>out.
>
>The issues that he discusses should be raised more often and more loudly, 
>with broader acceptance and expansion of the debate and its importance. 
>Otherwise, we will continue our robotic march deeper into a future that is 
>controlled more by soulless devices, and less by skeptical humans. If we 
>fail completely to change course, we may be saddled with a life that is 
>intolerable to the human spirit.
>
>Devices of the Soul is an insightful, disturbing, imperfect, eloquent, and 
>important contribution to what may ultimately become the most critical 
>debate in the intensifying conflict between humans and our technological 
>creations: Humans may survive, but will our humanity?
>
>Michael J. Ross is a <http://www.ross.ws/>Web developer, freelance writer, 
>and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free 
><http://www.pristineplanet.com/newsletter/>newsletter. Dan Sisson is an 
>adjunct professor at Eastern Washington University, where he has taught 
>technology courses for the past eight years; he is an authority on Thomas 
>Jefferson, is author of The American Revolution of 1800, and is currently 
>building and living in a replica of Monticello.
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