Genevieve Bell referred to her talk at Stanford University as being about our relationships with, thru, and of technology. And about the construction of the ‘socio-technological imagination’.
Her fast-paced journey thru the last 500 years of history was indeed breathtaking. I loved the fact that her focus was more on what motivates people rather than about technology per se. Her deep background in anthropology gave rich palette to explore the intersections between culture and technology.
It was also refreshing that she spoke not just about the practical aspect of building technologies & systems that comport to humans (making the technology do the work for us and not the other way around), she also talked about how technology shapes the imagination. As she said in her talk it’s not just about physically building things, it’s also about what are the stories we tell about and are told about what the technology does, and our relationships to technology. Bell referred to this as the work of the socio-technical. The work about the imaginary new world we are all talking about and perennially designing for.
Bell referred to William Gibson (author of the Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels) who tweeted about his dream (or nightmare) that took place entirely in Google Maps Streetview. She found it ironic that a man who helped our socio-technical imagination felt trapped by it.
She then referred to the video about a Furbie talking to Apple’s first-generation Siri that captured her. It was appealing to her because it captured a particular moment in our relationship with technology. Bell said the video can be read as being genealogy about (1) talking things (2) Neanderthal-level talking things vs Human-level things (3) talking and listening (the Furbie is just talking; Siri is attempting to also listen not just talk). She sees this as the beginning of moving from human-computer interaction to human-computer relationships. This points to a promise that when a computer listens to us, our needs, it could lead to computers then taking care of us.
Bell then spoke about how when she shared this insight with the engineers at Intel (where she works), their reaction was ‘No’. When she probed further, they replied that she should know what happens when computers become intelligent enough to have a relationship with a human: death. The engineers feared that as soon as machines are smart enough to take care of us then they’ll be smart enough to kill us. Bell said this pointed to another genealogy. That of a genealogy of anxiety about technology. She spent the next 18 months after this encounter with her engineers to understand why it was OK for a machine to talk, still OK for a machine to listen, but when we have relationships with machines, it will lead to death. From Furbie to Siri to SkyNet.
Bell traced it all the way back to the death of magic that came with the invention of three things. The first was the watch (circa 1530) which shaped our relationship to time. Prior to the watch, time was a communal thing that people heard thru chiming of bells in Christian medieval church towers or saw thru Islamic water clocks. The watch made time personal. Something that follows you. Which leads to us being regulated by the time in our watches to fulfil time-based obligations.
The second was the invention of the telescope by Galileo (circa 1608). This led to the de-centring of the Earth. Humans realised that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
The third was the microscope (circa 1618). This led to the exploration of our world by taking things apart. Suddenly, things that previously appeared to be unknowable became in some way becomes infinitely knowable. The confluence of these things started the scientific revolution. A different way of thinking and knowing the world. Humans began to see patterns, to make hypotheses and test them. Bell considered Descartes’ expression ‘I think therefore I am’ marked the nail in the coffin of magic. It marked the transition where the most important thing about being human became our cognitive capacity, our capacity for rational thought.
Bell considered Descartes’ expression ‘I think therefore I am’ (in the year 1636) marked the nail in the coffin of magic. It marked the transition where the most important thing about being human became our cognitive capacity, our capacity for rational thought.
After magic was killed, Bell said there was a proliferation of people building things. Using the gears and winding up technology form making clocks & watches, people began building automatons. She talked about Jacques de Vaucanson who made among other things an automaton that played the flute. To make the flute sound like it was played by a human, Vaucanson put skin (cowhide) on the automaton’s fingers. But it was the Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck (in the year 1739): an automaton duck that walked, flapped its wings, ate and defecated that made Vaucanson famous. He used the first rubber tubing. This was the first attempt to make things real.
Bell said that making things real was a significant intellectual step for humans. She then said that de Vaucanson destroyed the duck and moved on to work in more serious stuff leading to the mechanised looms and punch cards. The making of stuff that looked real reached it uncanny heights with Thomas Edison’s talking doll which according to Bell influenced Sigmund Freud’s study of the uncanny.
Bell then moved on to discussing 1812 when a significant moment where there was a backlash against mechanised looms. The men who destroyed the looms wanted a leader but knew as soon as they had one, the leader would be arrested. So they invented one, General Ned Ludd. This was also the height of romanticism. Playing on the Robin Hood story, they chose Sherwood Forest as where he lived. To distribute Ludd’s manifestos, they invented songs as code instructions on where and how to smash the looms. Springing forward from this, the word ‘Luddites’ carried over to mean anti-technology up to today.
During an 18 month period before the Luddite movement dissipated, all England was talking about was the consequences of introducing new machinery as being machinery about loss, pollution (‘dark Satanic mills’), replacement of human work, labour and meaning.
The next piece of the story where the fear of technology came from was when Lord Byron, his doctor, girlfriend, and friends went travelling to Europe in 1816. When they got holed up in Switzerland, Byron told his friends over dinner that he was bored and ask them to tell him stories. This marked a significant moment according to Bell. Three of the most important tropes of the horror genre was born. Byron’s doctor wrote the first vampire story. Byron’s best friend’s half-sister wrote the first zombie story. Byron’s best friend’s girlfriend, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein. Bell reminded how interesting Mary Shelley was. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft who was the first suffragette in England.
Bell reminded how interesting Mary Shelley was. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft who was the first suffragette in England. MW’s husband was a pre-eminent labour historian in England in 1812 where the dining room conversation when Mary was around 14 was about the Luddites and consequences of machinery. Mary’s husband Percey when they were still courting took Mary to Egypt Hall where she saw early experiments in electricity, vivisection like frogs dissected and made to move with electricity. She saw how things can be taken apart then put back not that well. This could have inspired to write Frankenstein.
This story to Bell is deeply embedded in our consciousness of where our playing with technology and life can lead to our own nightmares and end.
Bell moved the story to the abstraction made by Babbage inspired by mechanised looms. Babbage then met with Lady Ada Lovelace (Byron’s daughter) was the first computer programmer. Bell then fast forwarded to World War II to Bletchley Park where the first computer was made to crack the Enigma code used by the Germans. This led to the complex story of Alan Turing who was very talented, socially-awkward. Despite his major contribution to computing, Turing was punished and ostracized from his field because he was gay. Despite all these setbacks, Turing published his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence which posed the question: ‘Can a machine think?”. This led to the Turing Test as a way of testing if we’ve created human-level machine intelligence. Essentially testing if a machine could think which links back to Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” characterisation of what it means to be human.
Bell considered that this paper was influential in the way we think about machine intelligence. Particularly in science fiction. In the movie Blade Runner (based on Philip K Dick’s novella: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), the replicants (human-like machines used for outer space colonies) thwart a system to prove whether they’re human or not by not having the capacity to think but by having emotions, memories, a moral core. Dick read the Turing’s paper as not about asking if machines could think but a deeper question of what makes us human.
Blade Runner reinforces the fear of machines. If thinking is what makes us human and if machines can think then what does that say about us?
Bell then explains that this fear of thinking machines in the west is the result of a multi-layered process: from science, science fiction, literary tropes, and political histories. All which encode a particular set of ideas. Not all of them rational but ideas that have lived in our collective imaginations in really dramatic ways that haunt us.
Bell then pivots to say that the foregoing is a very particular history as narrow as the west, the enlightenment, technologies of the west, industrial revolution et al. She proceeded to look if, given the same set of technologies, one can see the same anxieties in other cultures.
She said one can look scientific and engineering literature of Islam like the Book of Ingenious Mechanical Devices that had water clocks, and other mechanised objects that did things. Bell said none of them was aiming at simulacrum or trying to copy real things like de Vaucanson. They were beautiful objects that like a peacock shaped water vessel used to pour water for religious rituals.
Bell wanted to go further in looking at exactly the same technology as de Vaucanson. She told the story of how a surplus of clocks became gift items that reached all the way to China where there was initial interest. After a while, they became less interesting to the Chinese who re-gifted them to other people until they reached Japan. The clocks were promptly taken apart and reversed engineered.
The Japanese took the parts of the clocks to make their own automatons like the Karakuri, which are little people that moved gracefully to do things like pouring tea or fire a bow and arrow. Unlike with de Vaucanson, the clockwork machinery was used not about recreating things that already exist but for curiosity, wonder, beauty and aesthetic pleasure.
According to Bell, the same trajectory of technology happened to Japan. They had mechanised looms but there was no Luddite moment. She noticed how robots in current day Japan are not feared like in the west. To the Japanese robots are our friends. This is deeply embedded in Japanese history, political discourse, iconography, pop culture such as in anime like Astroboy. Technology is understood as part of Japanese psyche, landscape and not as a replacement. Robots in Japan are in industry, homes and schools.
To Bell, it was the same technology, same origins but different cultural discourses and stories. She then mentioned that even locally not all technologies produce the same fear. She talked about the early history of introducing electricity in America. In the early days, people drove from the MidWest to literally see the lights in New York. Bell reminded us that electricity when it was first introduced
Bell reminded us that electricity when it was first introduced to homes, was a hard sell. It was an infrastructure with only the light bulb as its killer app and people already had light in their homes. A man who had surplus electricity, to sell it used women to show how women can safely light a bulb by running it through their bodies. It was a time when electricity was still at low voltage. London had doorbell ladies that also glowed with electricity. To Bell, this was a time when technology was seen as something wonderful, a spectacle.
She then contrasted it to the story of radium which was first hailed as eternal sunshine because it glowed all the time. People used it everywhere like nail polishes, clock faces, in performances until they discovered that the radiation it emitted was harmful to health.
Bell then looped back to say that when we first encounter a technology for the first time, it’s like encountering magic. They are moments of wonder. She considers that designing for wonder and magic is hugely important. Not just how to design for practical reasons.
Bell modified Arthur C Clarke’s third law to say that any sufficiently advanced technology should deliver magic. It should aim to deliver that moment of wonder, surprise and delight. It’s not always about being practical, pragmatic, and solving problems.
She said that the drive to make technology more real, more lifelike as possible can lead to that state where for example in robotics where robots become almost quite human but not quite, the uncanny valley that makes us feel very uncomfortable. Bell asks maybe instead of just aiming for efficiency or simulacrum we could also aim to elicit delight and glee.
More importantly, Bell reminds us that it is not just about things we design, it is also about the stories we tell about what we design. It’s the stories we tell about what those designs will be. It’s the worlds we shape through our actions, our words, our visioning of the future that is hugely important. It’s not just about the work we do, it’s also about the stories we tell. The stories we tell should be a little about wonder, mystery, and magic.
Exploring our sexual futures 