Friday 7 October 2022

Beware technological determinism!

Dmitry-Kostyukov: Zora-the-Robot-Care-Giver-Wellcome-Photography-Prize
 

‘Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which humans are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control.  Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely. This is one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that the technologies themselves largely determine the shape that human societies will take for centuries to come – or at least until the next abrupt and unexpected breakthrough comes along to change everything again.
        Now, we are hardly about to deny that technologies play an important role in shaping society. Obviously technologies are important: each new invention opens up social possibilities that had not existed before. At the same time, it’s very easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of social change.’ (David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 2021, pp498-499)

Tuesday 16 August 2022

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness












Finally fulfilled a long term ambition to see Derek Jarman’s cottage and it’s garden on the weird shingle expanses of Dungeness, on the edge of Romney Marsh. Strange he should have included the poem by Donne (see my last post from ages ago) - this seems much more like a piece of deliberate artifice, whereas the other features, though clearly carefully arranged, appear much more to be found objects.

 

Saturday 8 May 2021

No Man is an Iland....

 

‘No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;  if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were;  any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ (Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1624)

Iron and Nickel


 

Recently I re-read two 'stories', Iron and Nickel, from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table – I can’t remember how long ago it was that I last read this book – I didn’t have a clear recollection of either story, so I must have read them too quickly.  The book was a very early edition given to me by a house-mate in about 1983.  Both stories in different ways are absolutely wonderful, essential reading for everyone, as Saul Bellow says on the cover.  Nickel is interesting but Iron is both moving and inspiring. The two stories, in different ways, bear on my focus of interest these days, about practice being the point of interaction between humans and the world, and the (for Levi, always moral) implications of this for the way we understand what happens to us, what we decide to do, and how we make the best of things.  The name Nickel comes from the German for ‘little devil’…. – this section reminds me of an powerful episode in the amazing tour de force historical novel by Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver, an episode which takes place in the silver mines of Germany at the dawn of the modern age, and that the word dollar comes from thaler, one of the early modern currencies, that name deriving from the German word for valley (thal).

The Invincible: Lem's tale of one possible process of technological evolution

 


I have just re-read The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem, one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris.  It was written in the early 1960s, and is structured as either a detective story or, if you prefer, a report of a scientific investigation concerning the unexplained loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet.  It’s told from the perspective of the commanders and crew of a second space ship, called The Invincible, similar to the first, which has been sent to investigate the disappearance.  It reads as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style ofTthe Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and some of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.    

As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, hypothesising that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it recognises through their electrical activity.  Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land.  The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew.  Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility.  And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’.  The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet.  



Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world, and of the MSc module I'm teaching this term on AI, Work and Learning, about the developing social impacts of AI on workplaces, with my colleague David Guile. It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned.  At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black.  Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and always proceed according to protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male.


An interesting attempt to imagine the tiny 'robotic' devices encountered by Horpach, Rohan and their colleagues on Regis 111 - but they look much bigger than I imagine them.  There are hints on the web of an animated film of The Invincible being in the pipeline, but nothing definite that I can find.

Tuesday 7 January 2020

Lifelong Learning policy at a turning point in the UK?



(This piece was published on the UCL Institute of Education blog on 12th December 2019)

Exactly 100 years ago, it was argued in the 1919 Report, published by the Government Ministry for Reconstruction after World War 1, that Adult Education was essential for a confident, fair and democratic society. Its central recommendation was:

‘Adult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there… but a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong’.

Three separate Commissions on Lifelong Learning have published their reports in the last few weeks, and a fourth, a Parliamentary Inquiry, published its oral and written evidence in October.  The timing of these reports – by the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and also a politically-independent Centenary Commission, is striking. Rates of participation in learning activities among adults have fallen dramatically over the last decade, and the decline is sharpest among those who have benefitted least from their schooling

We have also had research reports on the impact of adult learning from nearly 40,000 UNISON workers and from more than 5,000 Workers Education Association students; and if that isn’t enough, UNESCO’s 4th Global Report on Adult Learning and Education was also published last week.

The trends they reveal are part of the broader decline in the social and cultural fabric over the past decade. They are a key issue in the general election, but they emerged first in the 1990s, when successive governments decided that public funds should be focussed on education for employment and for formal qualifications.  Tightly-focussed outcomes and test results, rather than participation, became the primary indicator of value for money, and as a result much of the loose network of community organisations and local authority services which directly or indirectly supported adult learning lost its funding. Alison Wolf argued against these trends in 2002:

‘We have almost forgotten that education ever had any purpose other than to promote growth. To read government documents of even fifty years ago…gives one a shock. Of course their authors recognized that education had relevance to people’s livelihoods and success, and to the nation’s prosperity. But their concern was as much, or more, with values, citizenship, the nature of a good society, the intrinsic benefits of learning.’

However, things got steadily worse: since 2010, government funding for adult education has been cut by 40%, and nearly 500 public libraries have closed during the same period as a result of the policy of austerity.

The original 1919 Report, and its 2019 descendant, both argue explicitly and cogently that the whole social and cultural infrastructure, including clubs, theatres, libraries, allotments, parks and museums, all of which have suffered funding cuts, needs to be understood as supporting opportunities for adults to learn. This is because much of the most significant learning is informal, incidental and takes place as a result of participation in a wide range of activities, none of which need necessarily to be purposefully or wholly educational. They maintain that a broad and generous conception of adult education and its social value, and its integration with more or less all the organisations and institutions of civil society, is desperately needed now, no less than it was in 1919.

The UNESCO report also sees adult learning infrastructure as a central feature of a healthy democracy, as a central element of the ‘safety net’ supporting individuals at risk, for example, of homelessness or loneliness, as well as a stepping stone to more formal and certificated learning leading to improved employment prospects. It assesses progress made by 159 countries (sadly not the UK, which did not take part) against 30 Recommendations for Adult Learning and Education published in 2015, which support the Belem Framework for Action on ‘Harnessing the Power and Potential of Adult Education’ adopted by UNESCO exactly ten years ago.

For me, the most encouraging aspect of this sequence of global policy documents on Lifelong Learning is that they highlight clearly and explicitly the importance of informal networks for learning, not simply provision of formal courses; and of participation as the key goal for productive policy frameworks, rather than narrowly-defined commodifiable outcomes. The value of informal learning in supporting broad social, political and economic goals within a participatory and informed democracy, has not been taken seriously enough since 1919 to warrant much attention from policymakers, but I for one hope that December 2019 may be turning point for Lifelong Learning in the UK.