Kurzweil speaks about the laws of technological evolution. What are these laws? How are they enforced? Kurzweil mentions competition (it is not clear if the laws are enforced by competition in this talk. If so, that would be Marx's basic view, but it is only under capitalist social relations that competition is orgianzed and universalized). Kurzweil seems to argue that technologival change is a given rather than a social product.
Kurzweil use the trem "research pressure." Where does this pressure come from?
In our study group we also discussed some of the questions raised by rapid technological change in the context of Marx's theory of tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Simply stated: the amount of human labor in each commodity is reduced by technological innovations which develop labors productivity. This causes the price of the commodity to fall and th3 rate of profit to decline. Here is a paragraph from the Grundrisse where Max talks about technological changed and the end of capitalism.
"To the degree that labour time -- the mere quantity of labour -- is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production -- of the creation of use values -- and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side -- a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production."
So I would also ask what are the barriers that capitalist social relationships pose to the development technology and labors' productive power and how can we find ways to explain the obstacles posed by capitalism?
It would be great if we can begin a discussion here, and do further research, discuss it at study group, write it up notes from the discussion as a blog post for those who can't make it to study cirle.
I found the talk very interesting. Here are some scattered thoughts.
ReplyDeleteKurzweil early in the talk says "humanity is a technology creating animal" and throughout the talk he erradicates the distinction between natural history and social history. Is there no difference between political/social/cultural history and natural history (evolution)?
I didn't think he eradicated the distinction so much as left human political and social history out of the equation all together.
As far as I can tell, we cannot explain human technological and cultural development from a biological point of view. I gave an example of that last night with the revolution in the Upper Paleolithic. Biological humans with brains and bodies identical to ours were around for well over 3/4 (250,000 years) of their existence before they came up with religion, art, symbolic representation in general, and a language, the rudiments of which were just as sophisticated as ours. Before 50,000 years ago, none of these things existed. Yet they form the building blocks of all higher human civilization.
Yet once this revolution takes place, it is an "explosion". It appears to develop at an exponential rate. Humans and neanderthals coexisted for 250,000 years, but then a mere 20,000 years after the Upper Paleolithic revolution, neanderthals disappear. No one knows why for certain, but the developments of the Upper Paleolithic probably had something to do with it. It's another 40,000 years before writing comes into existence, but then only another 2,000 years pass before all the monotheistic religions come into existence. Socrates is executed in the 4th century B.C. - which may as well be yesterday on this scale - and yet from that time until the present we see exponential growth in all areas of human culture and practice.
This development is not one of natural history. I don't get the impression Kurzweil thinks it is natural history, either. What he thinks is that there is a law inherent to technological growth and the way information is organized. (Actually, he makes a comparison to RNA and DNA in there, so maybe he does understand it in a purely causal, biological manner, I don't know.) I think what's a little mystifying in this is that it appears as though technology is a thing existing in itself that has its own laws unconnected to the laws of development of anything else. So the rise in worker productivity from $30/hr to $150/hr is presented as a segment of this larger, exponential development in technology. In fact Marx investigated this phenomenon in a lot of detail in volume 1 of Capital, showing how rising productivity is a result of (1) the profit motive, (2) worker resistance, and (3) legislation limiting the length of the working day.
Now this raises a very deep, difficult questions. What is Kurzweil really identifying here? What is the actual thing he is talking about? What do we see the development of? Are we talking about human tool-making? Are we talking about the way information is organized over the millenia? Are we including cultural practices in here, too? Are we including politics? Are we including the formations and struggles between classes? Are we talking about all of this, in one big bundle, such that we can describe all of human civilization, going back to the invention of complex symbology and agriculture, as developing in accordance with this exponential pattern? Or are we privileging certain aspects over others, so that, for example, cultural and political development is reduced to technological change?
It raises crucial questions about the philosophy of history, the question of what history is and whether it follows some intelligible and necessary trajectory or whether it happens accidentally. Hegel and Marx both formulated coherent (though different) accounts of history, according to which the changes we see from one epoch to the next are necessary and caused. That is, we can look at history, and we can explain why it is that one form of society crumbles and gives way to another. We can explain why are here, now, the particular way we are, and we can explain where we're going. Philosophy of history means identifying the underlying causes of historical change.
This point of view is extremely unpopular now. Extremely unpopular. I can't emphasize that enough. Even most Marxists hate it. I happen to think there's a lot more to it than people give it credit for.
However, such philosophies of history always sound a lot better when you put them down on what appears to be a natural scientific basis—rather than a philosophical or normative/economic one, as Hegel and Marx respectively did. Everyone already assumes science is the arbiter of truth. Everyone already assumes philosophy and political-economy should be relegated to the same bin reserved for superstition generally. Everyone already assumes the practicality of science as opposed to philosophy and pipe-dreams about communism. If a natural scientist or an engineer is speaking about the course of history, its underlying causes, then we should pay more attention, because they're experts.
As it turns out, none of these assumptions are rational. Just because an engineer tells us something, it doesn't mean we should take it for granted that it is true. We should bring the same skeptical criticism to bear on messianic theories of technology as we should bring to bear on teleological theories of history. We restrict the application of philosophy or political theory to make room for reality. We have to do the exact same thing in the case of science. Kant argued as much over 200 years ago, and he was largely right.
It comes down to this. What is the theory that tells us where we are now and where we are going tomorrow? I mean this from a political perspective. There is no question as to whether or not we ought to pay attention to developments in technology. We have to. The question is: what role does technology play in the self-awareness and actualization of our freedom as human beings? Marx argued that technology is not a mere thing in itself but rather embodies the class struggle under capitalism. You can create all the technology you want, but unless it is profitable to sell, we cannot do anything with it under capitalism. The fact that information technology gets cheaper and cheaper isn't a fortuitous aspect of the development of technology. That comes from the fact that if it weren't profitable to produce in the first place, we wouldn't have it now. If capitalism went away tomorrow, it would probably accelerate the growth of technology, since we would be producing things to meet human needs and interests rather than to produce a profit. Furthermore, a lot of the information technology we have now is double-edged. We initially had computers in our homes in order to extend the work day. You could go home at the end of the work day and keep doing work from your home office. That's an example both of extending the work day AND raising worker productivity (since the introduction of the computer made us more productive). However, now people use home computers for things other than work. In fact, work becomes a very small part of what you use the computer for—even while you're on the job! Every minute you spend surfing the web, even just to read celebrity gossip, is a minute you have resisted the imposition of labor. That's what I mean when I say technology is a terrain—really an embodiment—of class struggle. Marx wrote this way back in ancient times, in the 1860s.
So I wouldn't necessarily negate anything Kurzweil says in his talk. I would emphasize that we need to reframe it, though. We're not talking about technology in and of itself. We need to look at technology in the context of the forces of production. (Technology is PART of forces of production but not identical with it. Even Stalin pointed this out.) And once we possess a comprehensive understanding of what the forces of production are doing right now and what they're going to do in the coming years, we can conceive of how that is going to influence the relations of production. This in turn gives us openings for revolutionary intervention and dual power.
Kurzweil use the trem "research pressure." Where does this pressure come from?
ReplyDeleteI believe Kurzweil would give you an answer here from the medical industry. There is academic competition and pressure, hospitals competing to win a reputation, doctors making names for themselves. This, I believe can function outside of a neoclassical system. Beyond that, there is pressure from active and vocal groups of patients and familes of disease victims who consistently organize legal, funding, and political movement towards cures and treatments. Again, this largely can function on its own.
Other sectors of IT share some of these factors to a lasser degree. Most of their competition is market based, however. If Intel didn't have Sun and AMD in the mix, yada yada.
So, we expect major (aka, catastrophically world economy killing) job losses. All those people on the streets were once people who would otherwise but computers, and cell phones. When no one but the CEO's and shareholders and enghineers have the cash to buy the microchips that they make by the millions, what happens to development?
This is one visible shift that highlights what the singularity is. It's the near imposible ability to envision what will happpen after certian milestones are passed. I can't fathom what the world will look like when half of productive labor is laid off. This won't be like the English enclosure preceding the industrial revolution. These workers are part of the machine, and they feed it. The machine will starve.
I don;t want to think about Kinshasa in Ziaire. The Congo was one of the poster countries for neoliberal policies. The Kinshasa of today numbers nine million people, where only 5% of that population earns a wage. That is bar none, the worst place to live on the planet. I do not want to see the kinshasification of the world. I haven't the slightest clue what else we're aproaching, however.
"So I would also ask what are the barriers that capitalist social relationships pose to the development technology and labors' productive power and how can we find ways to explain the obstacles posed by capitalism?"
Obviously, the captiol invesment model balks at funding pure reasearch without a clear marketable product at the end of the development cycle. We can talk about the mid 80's "AI winter" which froze investment until only recently. Nanotech is also coming out of a similar slump. Both are hitting a wall of rediculously high funding to make significant progress. In the present climate, investors aren't going to throw $200 mil or more at a questionable product. We're going to see a stall for the next few years as new companies form less often.
Also, Kurzweil stated in that talk that most companies fail because of lack of timing, specifically, the lack of enabling factors for the adoption of a product. The 16mm, LD, Betamax, VHS, DVD adoption history highlights this well. Lets take that idea to the article you linked about newspapers.
Newspapers have a certain advantage over internet options that the new technology has failed to truly overcome. Newspapers are ubiquitus. You can't turn a major street corner without seeing a newstand or box drop. Hawkers can conversate in directly involving ways.
The internet is not so ubiquitus. It is not so directly social. WTF am I saying? These two factors are exactly what the internet is supposed to excell in.
Online news is easy to get to if you know what you're looking for. You can be very social if that's what you're looking for. But the internet is not sufficiently visceral to do both of these things at the same time. Online news is less engaging, it's isolating. You're not going to waste your batteries staring at a tiny screen to read the "The People's E-Mag" on the bus. No one will walk up to you and ask about the front page story, because you are not performing any visible act of being an engaged news reader.
Now, lets take your hawker, attending a rally with a super blackberry, and everyone has super blackberries. He starts talking about his e-mag, if he finds someone interested, they just touch blackberries and the lastest issue is exchanged. The new user can read it and subscribe if they want.
Immersive user interfaces with sensory simulation would allow that person to walk to the park and perform the reading of the paper in a social context. If they want, they can visit an author and chat about the articles, all online. The current internet architecture allows some of these capabilities, you can track down a journalist and maybe get them into IRC or what have you, but it is not ubiquitus. It is not engagingly social.
See, e-mags, while already killing newspapers, haven't replaced them. The timing just isn;t right. They have to be available, commin, easy to use, and then provide superior capabilities that jsut aren't quite out of the oven yet.
I heard a replay of an interview w/Paul Smalera on NPR this morning. He was discussing the Boxee - an interface that aggregates digital/online media for TV use. Not surprisingly, networks and cable have been ambivalent at best (after trying to kill it completely).
ReplyDeleteSmalera predicts "convergence" - the ability to synch up all content (e.g. laptop-TV-music-Netflix widget-PDA) - by the end of 2010.
links:
http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/impressions/2009/02/23/throwing-voodoo-hulu?page=0,0
http://www.smalera.com/p/2009/02/27/on-the-media-boxed-in-february-27-2009/
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/02/27/07
http://www.boxee.tv/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwQG-4kT7FE