Introduction

Reconnecting handwork, brainwork and heartwork

The brain explores the ways nature works. The hands explore ways to 'work' nature. The heart strives to do the best it can regardless.

Carpenter, surgeon, architect, baker, software engineer, mystic - all seek to impose mind on matter and produce the best they can.

When mind is composed and focused, the results can be elegant: the bicycle, the original Ford Mustang, the Macintosh operating system, Chartres cathedral, the Ode to Joy.

When the mind is anxious or wobbly, or the heart is two sizes too small, the results can be disastrous: crash-prone software, nutrition-less food, weapons of mass destruction.

Nature can bite back too: dams bust, bridges fall, patients die… and our hearts break.

This amazing drama has been going on for two million years since our ancestors discovered they could grasp and manipulate objects, and so became Homo habilis, handy man.

By the Classical Age - 2,500 years ago - humans had advanced to doing science to discover truth, and technology to make the beautiful and to do good. Science and technology were understood as the mean to attain beauty, truth and goodness.

We've lost that connection. Today science and technology are ends in themselves. If a corporate scientist or academic researcher or high-tech CEO said her mission was to seek beauty, truth and goodness, she would soon be seeking employment elsewhere. Issues of meaning and value are expressly forbidden in scientific and technical literature.

We've so effectively decoupled brainwork from heartwork that we need specialists to deal with the separate domains. Physicians treat with MRIs, antibiotics and surgical steel. The clergy talk of grace, redemption and enlightenment. And they can't coordinate their treatments because they lack a common language.

This is an enormous subject and many are dealing with it in various ways. My focus is how, even as we become more reliant on technology, we don't seem to recognize and teach technology as the cultural force it is: how tool-use has brought us to where we are, and what cultural necessities mothered invention. We are increasingly embedded in the culture of technology, and increasingly ignorant of its effects on us.

Of course, we teach specialists and consumers about gears and gadgets, with tech manuals, spec sheets, and Windows for Dummies. But technology is seldom presented as this great drama of humans attempting to manipulate nature (for instance with Moore's Law), and nature's ongoing efforts to teach us humility (Murphy's Law).

The impact of technology on society, and vice versa, is not an issue for geeks and gear-heads alone. This website looks at that world-drama, especially in our time. The more elaborate, complex and invasive our tools become, the more our reliance on them - and their vulnerability to outside forces - grows.

This site is arranged in three parts. Part One [COMING SOON] deals with handwork and attempts to serve as a primer for technology literacy. This is not about programming clocks on DVDs, but about increasing awareness of, appreciation of, and guidelines to critique, the technology all around us.

Part Two [ALSO COMING SOON] deals with brainwork. Because technology is the practical application of principles discovered through science, we'll consider how the revelations of new science require us to re-think our place in the cosmos, and how they advance or frustrate our sense of being at home in the universe.

Part Three deals with heartwork. As the digital and virtual increasingly replace the analog and authentic, it's worth considering the trade-offs, and how we might reconnect our technology with our humanity - tech-knowledge with self-knowledge; capability with responsibility - to be more mindful of our role in 'the great work of the world.'

Tom-I-Am

I was educated in the humanities but I've been writing about technology for 30+ years, most of that time in Silicon Valley.

After completing studies to be a filmmaker in the early 1970s, I set out to produce a sample reel of work in order to get more work. But I was only mildly interested when I heard a local computer company in St. Paul, Minnesota was looking for someone to make an industrial film. Like many students from the '60s, I still saw computers as a threat: Do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate.

That same week, I heard about a new book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written by a tech writer at this same company. I called Robert M. Pirsig who lived nearby, and we had a long conversation one afternoon in the spring of 1974. I was deeply impressed by his ability to harmonize thoughtfulness and technology. I thought: if it had been done, it can be done.

So I bid on the contract and got it. And just as the microprocessor was being introduced, a career track seemed to open up for me: learn about electrons and bits, and then explore how these relate to the humanities and the arts I was familiar with.

Talk about square pegs and round holes; I looked in vain for common ground between sonnets and SRAMs; between sea moss and CMOS.

So over the next 20 years, while I worked as a tech writer and publicist for technology companies, I went back to re-read what I'd had to read in school: literature, philosophy, biology, history, economics, theology.

But this was no longer a school assignment. Now I was on a mission: to see how technology and the humanities - the how as well as the why -- had shaped, and been shaped by, each other through history. I wanted to know why and how had they come apart, and what could reconnect them.

Though we've been conditioned to think of engineering as ethically neutral, in fact every technical piece and process comes with a set of values, expressed or implied. Everything is made for a reason and has consequences, intended or not.

The cultural environment shapes the use of tools, as much as the tools shape the cultural environment. It took me 20 years of study to learn that self-evident sentence. And then the dots began to connect. If the automobile, which is very straightforward technology, can reconfigure society within a century from suburban developments to drive-by shootings, what effects will electronic and genetic engineering have on us, separately and in combination?

So, after my 20 year reading assignment, I spent the next ten years traveling around, alone and with others, meeting with several thousand people in nearly a hundred venues about what new technology meant to them.

It was a disturbing experience. I'd been a technology evangelist in my worklife. I never expected to hear so many people express such fear and frustration over their perceived loss of control. Most surprising, much of it came from engineers themselves.

This document summarizes that 30 year research project: a look at the ongoing human effort to impose reason, order and design on nature - by force if necessary - and what we have both gained and lost by that effort. And what we might do to leverage the gains and minimize the loses going forward.

Of Moore's Law … and Murphy's Too

Moore's Law is a very insightful technical prediction made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore. But over time it became the 11^th Commandment in electronics: every year or so transistor density must double, thereby doubling processing power. In layman's terms, that means that we must double the pace of our lives annually to keep up with our ingenuity.

And even as our lives accelerate because of technology, there are no courses on technical literacy. Likewise, even as most of the information on what to buy and how to vote comes now from visual images, schools teach only verbal, not visual, literacy.

Maybe if we had some techlit and vizlit, we'd make better sense of what's going on around us.

• We now have tennis shoes with microprocessors embedded in them. Who knew 'dumb sneakers' was a problem?
• A new PC today has more processing power than all of NASA's computers combined when Neil Armstrong went to the moon in 1969. Yet while 95 percent of computer use now is simple word processing and email you will still be told you need an upgrade next year.
• My new TV has a control panel with 60 keys and a user manual the size of a novel. If I wanted to read that much, I wouldn't buy a TV. And the programs did not get better after moving from rabbit-ears to cable.
• The Department of Homeland Security insists our lives should be transparent to it, on grounds of national security, while its decisions are opaque to us.

We now exist inside our technology. The fastest growing crime is identity theft whereby a hacker literally becomes someone else: traveling, eating, sleeping, purchasing and accruing debts in the victim's name.

And it can take years for the victim to clear his name with credit bureaus that are now more powerful than secret police. New technology lets the thief become the victim, and the victim is guilty until proven innocent.

When I began writing about technology in the early '70s, my clients insisted I stress the social benefit of their new computers: making air travel safer, health care more affordable, education more accessible.

Today there's little pretense of social benefits. The expression now is 'cool stuff,' implying that many devices serve no useful purpose. And many electronic engineers - professional problem solvers and descendants of those who built roads, bridges and dams in the past - feel betrayed that their training and passion has been reduced to this.

A structural engineer today can show his granddaughter the bridge he built fifty years ago. Today's double-e can show his kid sister a landfill of beige boxes.

We're hemorrhaging time and talent to find solutions where there are no problems (smart sneakers), while diverting resources from problems desperate for solutions.

A century ago consumption was a fatal disease; now we've built our civilization on it.

This isn't a criticism of engineers. In fact, there's a growing anger on their part at spending careers designing devices that are obsolete within a year, then tossed aside like the engineers who are asked to cram a lifetime of work into 15 years, only to burn out at 40 or get outsourced.

This is Murphy's Law writ large: disasters befall those whose profession is to forestall disaster. (Actually it says, "If anything can go wrong, it will". Named for Air Force Capt. Edward A. Murphy in 1949, it has many corollaries)

I have a great appreciation for the engineering enterprise: relieving the danger of much physical work; making food supplies more reliable, travel more affordable, and opening up a wider world. I was born with a life-threatening condition, and am alive due to medical technology.

But having been at ground zero of the technology revolution - and having written the first published novel set in Silicon Valley and an award-winning non-fiction book about the place - I've also noticed over time that ever-higher technology is increasingly controlled by ever-fewer people, while more fall further behind.

Engineers have satisfied our needs in the developed world. But now instead of addressing needs elsewhere, the global business model is to focus ingenuity on creating and satisfying wants - like smart sneakers.

All tool use reflects and shapes values. But increasingly our ingenuity is spent on the trivial and the deadly ('cool stuff' and 'smart bombs'), not the humane and the balanced. This is no future on this path.

We can blame others for this, but Gandhi, the engineer of Indian independence, correctly observed the world is not as it is because of the actions of wicked people, but rather the inaction of good people.

The fault lies not with our tools, but with ourselves. We've had it good for a long time, but now the piper demands to be paid. We are increasingly subsumed into the systems we created to serve us, but which now demand that we serve them. Windows for Dummies is mis-titled. The dummies are those who make such complicated, unintuitive and unstable software, not the users.

And the boxes we throw away every 18 months carry a lot of toxins into the environment.

We need to be more critical of our technology if we expect to maintain (or reclaim) a handhold on our systems - mechanical, automotive, electrical, electronic, genetic - before they reduce us to an irrelevancy. And still there are no programs promoting widespread technology literacy. This is a recipe for catastrophe.

(On that possibility, see Bill Joy's provocative and prophetic essay in the April 2000 issue of Wired Magazine, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us'. Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, says that the most powerful 21^st century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology - threaten to make humans an endangered species.

(His essay was a response to Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines which approvingly sees the man-machine interface disappearing over the 21^st Century, as we become more like our machines, and they like us. Agree with him or not, Kurzweil has an unprecedented track record for predicting technical advances long before they happen.)

Early in the 20^th Century, Frederick W. Taylor, the father of modern industrial efficiency, observed that in the past man came first, but in the future systems must be first. It is the great irony of the Information Age that in our human effort to master nature we've created systems that increasingly master us, or frustrate us like the answering systems that branch out to infinity without providing any access to a human operator.

We 'get' how hammers work. With a little effort we can 'get' how internal combustion engines work. But nobody really 'gets' how microprocessors work because nobody fully understand 'quantum weirdness.'

How much do any of us need to know about these complex systems on which we're now utterly dependent and into which we are increasingly absorbed? Aren't they best left to experts? Maybe, but increasingly the experts are artificially intelligent expert systems themselves, overseeing other systems. We should understand the tradeoffs: as systems increase in complexity, they increase in vulnerability. A point not lost on terrorists.

Technical literacy and visual literacy are huge subjects that have barely begun to be explored. This website isn't exhaustive on either, but I hope it makes a small contribution to advancing both.

(Not every link on these pages will remain active indefinitely. If a link fails, any good search engine will find more information, but look especially for sites that end in .edu. Also, some of the linked sites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not specifically been authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those with an interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. For information on Fair Use see: www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you use copyrighted material for purposes of your own, going beyond "fair use," obtain permission from the copyright owner.)