IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 72

Commentary

(continued from page 63)

are driving, it may already have run
head on into a wall."
I thought of that quote as I read
the accounts of Wall Street's "Flash
Crash" in May of 2010, when averages on American stock exchanges
mysteriously plunged nearly 1000
points in a matter of minutes, a
chain reaction later blamed on computerized trading programs. Meanwhile millions of gallons of oil were
still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico
after the explosion two weeks earlier
of the Deepwater Horizon offshore
oil rig, and no one was yet sure they
knew how to stop it. A year after that
a tsunami flooded the Fukushima
nuclear reactors in Japan, precipitating a series of events that made me
think of a comment from Wiener's
previous book, The Human Use of
Human Beings: "It is not necessary
to bring in the consideration of war,"
he said, "for us to see how much
more naked we lie to disaster than
at any time before" [2, p. 41].
It's not only speed that causes us
to lose control of our technologies as
they mature. Wiener recognized that
while information is the ballast that
enables machines and organisms
to maintain homeostasis and resist
entropy, gluts of information and the
corruption of information can have
the opposite effect. In Cybernetics
he identified the control of media
by corporate executives, politicians,
and "hucksters" as the most "antihomeostatic" factor in modern society (quoted in [21, p. 180].

A Shadow Wantonly Evoked
The counter-tradition to the dream
of mastery suggests that the technological project as a whole may
have become anti-homeostatic.

As out of control as our technologies might be, the survival
of civilization as we know it literally depends on them. We can't
bring ourselves to surrender the
technologies that are destroying
the planet because the disruption
required to do so would destroy
us. Langdon Winner calls these
intractable commitments "the
technological imperative." In my
book I call them evidence of "de
facto technological autonomy."
The most obv ious autono mous technologies are the artificial intelligence systems Wiener
pioneered, which are daily becoming ever-more-capable of running
themselves. Wiener was keenly
aware that by crossing the boundary between machine and organism, his work increasingly came to
resemble the building of the golem.
Like Frankenstein, the golem is a
creature capable of acting for reasons of its own, and it doesn't
always follow directions.
"It may be seen," Wiener wrote in
the Science article, "that the result
of a programming technique of
automatization is to remove from the
mind of the designer and operator
an effective understanding of many
of the stages by which the machine
comes to its conclusions and of what
the real tactical intentions of many
of its operations may be...To avoid
a disastrous consequence, it is not
enough that some action on our part
should be sufficient to change the
course of the machine, because it is
quite possible that we lack information on which to base consideration
of such an action."
This brings to mind a comment by the Scottish essay ist

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Thomas Carlyle, another eccentric who represented with distinction the counter-tradition to the
dream of mastery:
"The shadow we have wantonly
evoked stands terrible before us, and
will not depart at our bidding" [9].

Author Information
Doug Hill is an independent scholar
who lives in Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
He blogs about technology at http://
thequestionconcerningtechnology.
blogspot.com and can be followed
on Twitter at @DougHill25. His
book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice
About Technology, is currently
being reviewed for publication by a
university press in the United States.
He can be reached by email at
doug.hill25@gmail.com.

References
[1] D. Hill, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice
About Technology, to be published.
[2] N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human
Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1950, p. 16.
[3] S. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the
Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1980, p. 343.
[4] F. Conway and J. Siegelman, Dark Hero
of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics.
New York, NY: Basic, 2005, p. 16.
[5] N. Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The
Later Life of a Prodigy. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.
Press, 1964, (originally published 1956). p. 324.
[6] L. Winner, Autonomous Technology:
Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme
in Political Thought (MIT Press, 1977),
pp. 70-71.
[7] H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958,
p. 190.
[8] N. Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A
Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge,
MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964, pp. 63-64.
[9] T. Carlyle, "A mechanical age," Edinburgh Rev., 1829.

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