Wikipedia Sucks!

....in the pages of The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/blame-the-computer-pein

Rips Computer "Science", picks up on criticisms of cybernetics and computers put forward by the creators/big names of the field (Joseph Weizenbaum, Norbert Wiener) before the Internet came along and the Big Dumb hit electrical engineering (as a field of study), computers (as machines), and everything else attached to digital logic systems. Related to Wikipedia on a metalevel:

The conventional wisdom in his field held that society relied upon computers to solve increasingly complex problems created by burgeoning populations and new technologies—especially nuclear weapons. It was said that computers had arrived “just in time” to help capitalist society cope with rapidly increasing complexity. “Yes, the computer did arrive ‘just in time,’” Weizenbaum wrote. “But in time for what? In time to save—and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize—social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.”

Weizenbaum believed computers were standing in the way of necessary revolution. He grew disgusted by his colleagues’ amoral servility before power. And he was unwilling to let them off the hook for enabling monstrous abuses by the powers that be, especially warmongers like Robert McNamara, who carpet-bombed Southeast Asian peasants with statistical perfection. “The scientist and the technologist can no longer avoid the responsibility for what he does,” Weizenbaum wrote.

Weizenbaum was also among the first thinkers in the field to recognize that code was ideology. He saw computers as the natural product of an imperialistic process that had corrupted and “reduced reason itself to only its role in the domination of things, man, and, finally, nature.” In this flattened-out world of instrumental reason, every stroke of the keyboard is an offering to the war machine, and every swipe of the touchscreen is a little prayer of thanks to the Pentagon, which made it all possible.

Meanwhile, as Weizenbaum observed, computers served as dispensers of moral indulgences for powerful decision-makers. “The computer, as presently used by the technological elite, is not a cause of anything. It is rather an instrument pressed into the service of rationalizing, supporting, and sustaining the most conservative, indeed, reactionary, ideological components of the current Zeitgeist,” he wrote. Computerization meant that no one had any incentive to take responsibility for difficult decisions—and, by the same token, no one could be held accountable for bad ones. Sound familiar?

Wow, that's a read and a half. A couple more passages relevant to Wikipedia....

As digitization has polluted our conception of reality by shifting our focus to inferior models, it has crippled our imaginations by restricting what we consider legitimate “input”: if it’s not online, it doesn’t exist.

Defenders of the field maintain that this myopic concentration of collective effort is a feature, not a bug—and, what’s more, that anything that exists outside the machine can be input and modeled inside it.

Overall, a good read, and he makes compelling arguments about the many evil aspects of technology and the enduring problems of a lack of public understanding of its limitations.

I have a few issues with his broad concepts though. It's tempting to focus on the problems introduced by technology, but it is surely undeniable that CS has led to broad improvements in poverty, health, safety and indeed general knowledge. Some of that has been the use of computers as mere tools, and yet a lot has only been possible through pushing the envelope and asking not how a computer can be used as a tool, but how it can actually do things that simply weren't possible in the analogue age.

I also think he overstates just how much of this is genuinely unknown - if computer "science" as a field of study has concluded anything, it is surely that humans are always the weak link, that most problems can always be traced to poor design or a lack of genuine insight. The people who arguably least appreciate computers are for the most part just tools, with inherent limitations and their own freaky failure modes, are not the experts, its the users/procurers. Capitalism has perhaps led to bad things by magnifying this, but the issue there is capitalism, not CS per se.

I was only reading a piece last year about how most technological advancement is essentially publicly funded, then exploited by evil corporations. So this is known. Pretty sure that was the case pre-CS though, suggesting it is also a broader issue of capitalism.

He's overstating a few of the problems too - workers in the gig economy have of course found that it is still possible to ogrganise and use the traditional means of politics and law to mitigate the effects of technology on the nature of their employment. People in general really do overstate the damage wrought on the working stiff by technology. They seem to forget that working in a mine, or a smelter, or in the fields, was no walk in the park, and seismic shifts in conditions are more often than not stimulated by technological leaps.

He also doesn't seem to be aware of the cutting edge of CS - the whole point of AI, at least the academic study of it, is about breaking the chains of binary choice, and a clear end point goal is some attempt to replicate human approaches to problem solving. That opens scarey new problems, but the developments specifically in the ethical study of CS means we have a pretty good handle on what they are.

And for years, a major field of study has indeed been nature - the use of tech to test whether our theories of how nature works and then feeding those findings back to improve our own tech, essentially benefiting technology with the problem solving of evolution. You can't really make a persuasive case that the people involved in these disciplines are unscientific code monkeys.

He really would also benefit from recognising all the current uses of technology - the wonderful things being done to enhance the quality of life of people with terribly limiting conditions, or the work being done in search/rescue/relief etc, and even stuff being done purely for art. I have a hard time believing these uses of CS fit into his greed/profit/servitude dystopia, and I also have some difficulty seeing it as a problem that these users likely have no clue how it all works.

CrowsNest wrote:[W]orkers in the gig economy have of course found that it is still possible to organise and use the traditional means of politics and law to mitigate the effects of technology on the nature of their employment.

Color me a bit dubious. Still, if you have an interesting long read on über-busting, I'd read it.

It's courageous taking this guy's article on. (I found the story about Fein really interesting.) I wonder what percentage of coders work in insurance, finance, ballistics, statistics.... ( speaking of bootcamp... ) and what percentage in rescue, medicine & robotics.

CrowsNest wrote: seismic shifts.... and technological leaps

the radiated reindeer, fish & sheep(s).

I have a hard time believing that people who lived through Syria or Yemen are going to be great fans of technology.. Don't really know what the incarcerated think about it, either. Does Wikipedia do outreach in prisons?

CrowsNest wrote:I also think he overstates just how much of this is genuinely unknown - if computer "science" as a field of study has concluded anything, it is surely that humans are always the weak link, that most problems can always be traced to poor design or a lack of genuine insight. The people who arguably least appreciate computers are for the most part just tools, with inherent limitations and their own freaky failure modes, are not the experts, its the users/procurers. Capitalism has perhaps led to bad things by magnifying this, but the issue there is capitalism, not CS per se.

Don't start me on the twisted way computer programming languages are "designed". It often resembles those old jokes about Christian scholars arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The most common ones today were usually invented by one "expert" or a small group who commonly have a lot of political clout in the CS world. And usually the design of a language is made with NO input from others. Not even the people who will be using the language to actually write code.

The control freak in me finds nothing wring with languages designed by just one person. And let's be honest, if users had a real, genuine say in how a language would be designed, it would either never see the light of day, or be complete rubbish. Wikipedia is a perfect example of the chaos that ensues when you ask the users what they want. A good designer knows how to canvass users in a way that is both useful but also doesn't supplant their role as the actual designer.

But my comment is more about systems design, where choice of language should be less of an issue that figuring out what the system is meant to he doing.

Sashi, in conflict death terms, I think the world might actually be safer since the age of the computer (which parallels the age of the nuke, obviously), no? And in principle at least, smart weapons should be minimizing civilian casualties (accepting that there is always a third choice, beyond smart bomb or dumb bomb).

I think people are missing the forest for the trees....the point was that computers propped up American capitalism from the 1970s onward and that the system would have gone in other directions without it, but we will never know. The other element is simplistic software design which doesn't allow for double checking that Yes, the user wants to flip that virtual switch, and that the system doesn't allow for manual override to stop processes if they are begun by accident. It's annoying when you accidentally download some stupid app on your smartphone, but it's lethally dumb to let software push missileers into a nuclear launch from a mistaken radar "bogey" at NORAD. Pein uses erroneous Civil Defense alerts as an example, but a major element of the article is that computational automation encourages intellectual laziness on bureaucratic levels (Joseph Weizenbaum's view more-or-less), and thus you are in a box without even knowing it. My own example comes from Apollo 11: NASA had programmed the computer on Lunar Excursion Module (aka the "lunar lander") Eagle to manage the speed of descent and orientation during the landing. The machine got overloaded and steered the craft towards a crater surrounded by car-sized boulders. Niel Armstrong took over and he and Buzz Aldrin (reading off the instruments to Armstrong) flew the LEM to a smooth spot and landed it so gently that neither astronaut felt the touchdown. They had thirty seconds of fuel in the base of the lander, and due to the landing the legs didn't compress on the struts like NASA had planned, so there was this three-foot drop between the final rung of the ladder and the lunar surface.

Transcending the limitations of digital technology, not getting suckered into seeing computers as a "science" unto themselves, that's what this article is about.

No, I got all that. I agree with most of his points, particularly about how capitalists exploited this new fangled thing. But that really isn't an argument about computers, that has happened with other inventions/technology - it's an argument against capitalist greed.

If anything, that is what undermines this argument that society might have developed differently had computers never been elevated into something they are not. Post-war American society was seemingly always going to be doomed to low wages, inequality and a substandard welfare state, due to their particular brand of capitalism and other cultural factors. Arguably the greatest barrier was the American system of politics. The same effects weren't really seen in capitalist democratic Europe, even though they also saw the same developments of the 'science'.

The point about poorly designed systems is well taken, but I just have a really hard time blaming the science rather than the humans who failed to properly design their systems - none of these things would or should be part of a well designed system, and it is surely the approach to computers as a discipline which we have to thank for that. A simple decision tree would have identified the problem with the nuclear warning system, and indeed a properly designed UI would have prevented it happening it at all.

It isn't a science granted, but it is analagous to engineering. Maybe these departments should have been cast as part of the Engineering faculties? Maybe my scepticism around bits of this article is precisely because my background is in engineering, not CS. Advances in engineering haven't seemingly stifled the human capacity for outside the box thinking - although huge mistakes are still made, but I would argue they are attributable to the downsides of capitalism/politics than any fundamental aspect of engineering as a human endeavour.