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Gene genie

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There was considerable sense and occasional nonsense on tap last night at a panel discussion at UC/Berkeley inspired by a new essay collection titled “Living with the Genie: Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery.” (One of the book’s editors, Christina Desser, moderated.) The premise, as presented by panel introducer Michael Pollan, is that “we are on the threshold of vast technological changes” — in areas such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology and advanced computing — that will alter “what it means to be alive and to be human.”

Our reactions to the prospect of these changes tend to fall into two categories, Pollan said: Either “it’s never gonna happen” or “it’s inevitable, it’s just a matter of time and the market.” Both reactions foster a passive stance; instead of the “ossified debate between techno-utopians and neoluddites,” can we “take the dialectic someplace new?”

Pollan’s challenge was a useful one. Howard Rheingold took it up by reminding us that the Internet as an open platform isn’t something we can or should take for granted: it needs to be actively defended, as digital rights management schemes and “trusted computing” checks begin to be baked into the hardware that we rely on to access the network.

Investigative reporter (and longtime Salon friend and contributor) Mark Schapiro suggested that as genetic manipulation becomes more widespread, it is outstripping our existing legal and political institutions — for instance, a maritime system that evolved to deal with 18th-century needs leaves us today in the position where no one bears responsibility when a ship full of deadly cargo founders.

Denise Caruso, who has spent recent years building the Hybrid Vigor Institute, said that as we “increase the complexity of our environment exponentially,” “innovation at any cost” is no longer defensible. She called for a new focus on active risk assessment. The appalling status quo is that most biotech innovations are released into the natural world with little care or forethought: Caruso cited the example of bioengineered, Monsanto-produced Bt Corn, which received government approval without any studies considering its impact on “non-target species” (like Monarch butterflies).

“This is not just hysterical Luddism,” she said. But it’s an uphill battle, because “government and industry like things the way they are right now.”

I found Caruso’s rigor and Rheingold’s speculative imagination provocative and helpful — particularly in contrast to the Panglossian presence of inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, the final panelist. Kurzweil was actually videoconferenced in from his Massachusetts home, and his larger-than-life image hung peculiarly over the proceedings, disembodied and disengaged. (Christian Crumlish has blogged a photo so you can see what I mean.)

Kurzweil’s speech was laden with statements like “Human knowledge in general is doubling every year” and “The rate of progress itself is doubling every decade.” Like some blinkered throwback to high-Victorian cockiness, Kurzweil blithely assured us that “continued progress is inevitable.” I understood he was referring to empirical measurements of processor speed, storage, telecommunications bandwidth and the like. (You can read a detailed exposition of Kurzweil’s notions of the coming “singularity,” in which artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain, here.)

But there’s a deep chasm between the notion of precisely-measured technical advancement and the subjective concept of qualitative “progress.” Evidently, Kurzweil — like some Bugs Bunny character who’s charged off the edge of a cliff but hasn’t yet realized there’s air under his feet — has failed to notice this divide. That leaves his vision of the future as disconnected from the messy, intractable realities of human behavior as the speaker himself was from the ebb and flow of last night’s conversation, by virtue of his own virtuality.

When someone coming from such a rhetorical perspective starts talking about “expanding our knowledge” through “intimate merger with our technology,” you want to run to the wash room and toss water on your face. In such company, the clarity of skeptical optimists like Caruso and Rheingold helps keep us sane.

Once more, into the bubble?

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With Google’s IPO filing Silicon Valley is crossing its fingers, praying that the event marks one of those epochal turns of the boom/bust cycle (like Netscape’s 1995 public offering) signalling a new technology-industry bonanza. Never mind the destructive consequences of the last turn of this wheel; everybody strap on your belts and jump on for another wild ride — after all, maybe you, too, will get rich!

I love using Google; I’m still proud to have been among the first technology writers to recommend it to my readers, back in late 1998, and for a long time I got e-mail from people thanking me for turning them on to it.

I’m also happy to see that Google has chosen to use a “Dutch auction” approach to pricing its IPO. Those of you with long memories may recall that Salon used a similar method in its 1999 IPO. (A Dutch auction IPO allows the stock offering’s price to be set by a complex but fair market process rather than by bankers sitting in a closed room trying to figure out how to price the stock so as to best enrich their pals.)

Google is a wildly different company from ours in many ways — and a lot more successful as a business! But the basic arguments they cite for the Dutch auction — the desire to level the playing field, to give small investors a chance to participate, and to avoid the sort of cronyism that gave boom-era IPOs a bad name once the market turned south — are the same ones that persuaded us to go that route five years ago. Salon took a lot of brickbats for the choice back then, so it’s nice to receive this kind of after-the-fact endorsement of our decision from such a significant player.

All that said, I’m kind of amazed at how eagerly some corners of the Valley seem to be anticipating a return to boom-era insanity. I’m crossing my fingers, too — praying that a successful Google IPO, which I certainly think it deserves, doesn’t spark a new round of stupid investments and “we’ll figure out the business model later” startups.

In the ’90s, many people had the excuse of youth and inexperience — they were building their first companies, and they’d never experienced a downturn. Today, the scars of the bust are still fresh. No one can plead ignorance. If we fail to make smart choices and build sustainable businesses that can support innovation rather than fuel get-rich-quick dreams, we have no one else to blame. Certainly not Google.

Mainframe mania

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Last night I drove down to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to hear Frederick Brooks, Jr., Bob Evans and other veterans of the IBM System 360 project celebrate its 40th anniversary.

System 360, rolled out in 1964 as IBM’s $5 billion, all-in-one, bet-the-company New Thing, became the core of modern computing. It powered the original SABRE airline reservation system and the NASA program, and drove the rise of information technology as an engine of business change. Its amibitions were vast: It aimed to meet “every need of every user” (!). Its name referred to the 360 degrees of a circle. It was intended to be literally all-encompassing. And — after some rocky initial months — it was phenomenally successful, so successful that it became the ultimate symbol of the computing establishment. That has also made it, ever since, into a target for revolutionary cudgels. (Apple’s famous 1984 ad didn’t actually depict an IBM computer; it didn’t have to — everyone knew who Big Blue Brother was.)

Today, System 360’s mainframe technology has been repeatedly superseded by succeeding generations: first came the minicomputers from Digital, HP and others, bringing the price of computing down, extending its availability and changing its paradigm from batches of cards to “interactive” sessions; then came the microcomputers from Apple, IBM, and eventually everyone else, putting a computer on every desktop and, as the PC visionaries repeatedly told us, changing the world in the process.

What was fascinating to hear on Wednesday night was the number of times the speakers used the phrase “change the world” to describe the impact of the System 360 itself. In 1964, Brooks suggested, the design concepts it embodied were revolutionary in their own right: a single product family, with upward and downward compatibility, so that software that would run on the cheapest model would run on the most expensive, and vice versa; a standard input/output interface allowing for easy swapping of devices; a disk-based operating system; and other fundamentals of computing that we take for granted today.

Brooks, who helmed the software development effort for the 360 and then left IBM for academia, was inspired by his work on the project to write “The Mythical Man-Month” — one of the first and still among the very best explorations of the nature of programming. Someone asked Brooks how he came to write his classic:

“When I was leaving IBM, Tom Watson came to me, we had a very good conversation… He said, you’ve managed the hardware part of a project and you’ve managed the software part of a project. What is the difference from a management point of view between the hardware and the software? Why does software seem to be so much harder to manage? And I said, well, I can’t answer that on the spot, but I’ll think about it. It took five years.”

Though Brooks’ years of though provided us with some valuable answers to these questions, Watson’s pained query still haunts the computer industry, 40 years later.

The users are revolting!

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Rob Glaser of Real Networks, Lisa Gansky of Ofoto and Shane Robison of HP are talking about “user-generated content” here at PC Forum, in a panel moderated by Hank Barry of Napster fame. There’s lots of talk about monetizing content and tools and rights (including some slaps at Steve Jobs for keeping ITunes and the IPod a closed system), but I think they’re all missing the point. Newsweek’s Steven Levy asked, “Are we going to enter a renaissance of alternatives to the media with homegrown stuff, or is it going to be more of an ‘American Idol’ kind of thing?” He didn’t get much of an answer.

Glaser talked about a “shortage of narrative storytelling skills” and a “dearth of creative talent” when it comes to users creating longer-form video content. Technically, perhaps he’s right. But so what? “User-generated content” isn’t about creating some sort of big farm team for the pros. The long-term value of “user-generated content” isn’t in the businesses — not necessarily those on this panel –that no doubt will figure out how ways to generate revenue from it. The value is to individuals, and society, in the sheer number of previously silent voices that will sound, in the previously unheard stories that will be told, to whatever size audience. We’re slowly but steadily increasing the breadth of human experience and expression that is recorded and available to others. Next to that sort of social good, somehow the implementation details of different business models seem trivial.

(These issues have been hashed out for years at the Digital Storytelling Festival.)

As the wheel turns

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Next week I’m heading out for Esther Dyson’s legendary PC Forum conference (March 21-23), to hear people like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Neal Stephenson, AOL’s Jonathan Miller, Steven Johnson and many more.

I interviewed Dyson back in 1997, on the threshold of Internet-investment mania. A lot of people were saying a lot of silly things in those days; a surprisingly high percentage of Dyson’s observations remain not only unembarrassing but actually relevant:

  The point I’m trying to make is not that intellectual property is valueless, but that the price of copies is going down dramatically, so you need to think of other ways to exploit the content. And a creator is now in a much better position than a publisher.

At that moment, Napster had yet to begin haunting music execs’ dreams, Salon’s first story on the MP3 revolution was still three months in the future, and blogs were a concept waiting for software to make real.

So I talked to Dyson again yesterday to preview this year’s conference. I’d just read the 70-page “documentation” — a special edition of Dyson’s “Release 1.0” newsletter in which Dyson personally interviews each of the speakers at her conference. You don’t often find that level of focus and attention at tech conferences, where routine pitches and boilerplate Powerpoint presentations are the norm.

I asked Dyson how the ebb and flow of the tech industry’s fortunes over the last half-decade have made themselves felt at PC Forums past: “There were a few years when it was all business models and eyeballs.” Then the wheel of the tech-industry cycle turned downward. “Last year, it was, ‘you gotta have faith and it’s coming back.’ This year, people are ready to get excited again.”

Does she see any signs of boom-era insanity creeping back into the conversation? Not yet, for the most part. “I think people are getting a little overexcited about Google — which is certainly deserving of love, but it’s human, too. I want people to get excited without losing their heads — rational exuberance.”

Depending on the vagaries of Wi-fi and Radio Userland, I’ll be filing from Scottsdale early next week.

Coping with COPA

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Just in time for the reheating of the culture wars, as the social-issues Right tries to scare ma-and-pa America and media megacorporations run for cover, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) is rearing its head again.

For those of you who don’t remember COPA, here’s the short version: After the original Internet censorship bill, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down as unconstitutional, Congress passed COPA as a dubious successor. It was attached to a big omnibus spending bill that Bill Clinton signed in fall 1998. The ACLU and a group of online-publisher plaintiffs — including, proudly, Salon (here’s our original editorial on the matter) — immediately challenged the law and obtained an injunction against its enforcement. Since then the case has wended a slow path through the Federal judiciary: first, an appeals court upheld the injunction; then the U.S. Supreme Court kicked it back down to the appeals court; then the appeals court, a year ago, offered a more definitive set of reasons why the law is a very bad way to keep kids away from inappropriate material on the Net.

A more sensible administration would have accepted this ruling and gone home. But we’re cursed with John Ashcroft as an attorney general, so the Justice Department is appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court yet again. (The ACLU site offers tons of information.)

The case will be argued on Tuesday, March 2, and I’ll be there for the argument and for a press conference afterwards. The Court isn’t exactly WiFi enabled — in fact, electronic devices are prohibited — so I’ll have to write something up after the fact.

Mario is a rope over an abyss

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Many years ago, in 1991, I wrote about Nintendo’s Mario as an existential hero in an extended essay for the San Francisco Examiner, peppered with Nietzschean epigrams and marked with my own infatuation with these videogames’ worlds.

Now someone has produced a trilogy of short Flash films giving this concept animated life. These shorts rely on the crude pixelated sprites of the early Mario games, and derive their emotional charge mostly from heavy dollops of movie music. The spirit here may be more Ninja than Nietzsche, but I loved ’em.

Part one: The death of Luigi! Part two: Assault on the Mushroom Princess’s castle! Part three: Mario returns! Somehow, all this would sound better in Italian (“Il Ritorno di Mario!”).(Links courtesy Metafilter)

VOIP unchained

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We’re on the threshold of “the most significant change in telecommunications since Alexander Graham Bell called out for Mr. Watson,” according to Kevin Werbach — thanks to voice over IP (VOIP), the Internet-based approach to telephony that’s poised to turn voice telephony into a subset of Internet services.

If you haven’t already invested a little time to understand the issues here, Kevin’s testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee this week makes a great introduction. He makes a good case for keeping VOIP relatively free of the regulatory constraints and outdated layers of charges that hem in the old Bell System successors. If these new technologies are to deliver on their promise, they can’t be tied to the corporate carcasses of the system they are likely to replace.