🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7008@ut-sally.UUCP>, andres@ut-sally.UUCP (Bennett Andres) writes:
> The "Connections" book is much the same as the show.I personally like
> Burke very much because he has the intelligence to worry about where all
> this technical wizardry may be leading us,but I think he overestimates
> the power of these silly machines we're all so familiar with.

[Author's note: I just got into the writing mood here, so this turned
out a lot longer than I expected it would. Don't take all this too
seriously, even if it sounds like the mad ravings of a gloom and doom
lunactic - I'd like to think that I'm not.]

Burke's work has been, for the most part, a classic refutation of the "Great
Man Theory of Innovation," where little schoolchildren are taught (and
expected to remember) personal tidbits about the people who Made Technology
What It Is Today. Burke demonstrates that many of the REAL innovations were
made by people who have been nearly forgotten in the history books, who were
often quite forgettable because they weren't Great Men at all, but were
simply in the right place at the right time.  In many cases, some Great Man
comes along who picks up the innovation from a Little Man, and gains further
fame and fortune by his ability to provide "marketing support." A corrolary
of the argument is that if this particular Little Man hadn't come along,
some other Little Man would have done so at nearly the same time, since the
innovation is the result of exposure to the requisite knowledge.

Where Burke's view start to get controversial is when he draws on the Ever
Increasing Rate of Technological Growth Theory to observe that technology is
too complicated to understand in its entirety at the detailed level.  The
"Connections" series is carefully crafted to make tecnological growth look
complicated and unpredictable, with a lot of fast-talking, forward- and
backward- referencing, and cross-cutting that makes for a Very Entertaining
and Enjoyable Show.

Burke would have you believe that he's doing you a service by telling you
just how complicating all this mucking about with technology has become and
just how dependent you huddled masses are out there on all this
technological stuff.  Now, armed, with this knowledge about how hideously
complicated it all is, you should go right out there and become members of
the Amateur Technology Assessment League, telling the politicians out there
what kind of technology you want to have and what you don't want to have.

But the primary part of his argument, the refutation of the Great Man
Theory, should result in the conclusion that the growth of technology is
simply the inexorable result of the combination of the existing bits of the
technology matrix.  The only way to stop it is to keep the bits of the
technology matrix from being combined, which would amount to classification,
censorship and limitations on the distribution of technological knowledge.
But technological knowledge is already widely distributed, and unless a
Fahrenheit 451 society is in the cards, this won't be happening. Even if you
tried to limit it, you couldn't figure out how the pieces would fit together
so as to control the next step of technological innovation.

Yep. Technological growth is out of control. You won't know where the next
new invention will come from. However, when Burke shows you how complicated
some ordinary household item really is inside and in it's history, he
glosses over the fact that it usually doesn't matter how it's made inside,
so long as it works and continues to work.  He'd like to get worried that it
will stop working, but the nice thing about technology is that even the bits
of it that you don't understand will keep working the same way forever. So
you can safely ignore the complexity of existing technology.

What you can be worried about this that the complexification and
stratification of technology makes it harder for people whether working
individually or as a group, to put it all together and make innovation out
of it. We can worry that the rate of technological innovation is/will be
slowing down, and that has important economic considerations for us all.
After all, the businesses of manufacturing technological items are dependent
on having a new bit of technology that the consumers don't already have. The
automobile industry is in the pits because new cars don't go faster, look
better, or fall apart slower than the old cars - there's nothing but useless
complexity and marketing hype in this years models. Similar comparisons can
be drawn on the computer industry where even though the rate of
technological change has been great, the delivery of advantages to consumers
of the technology has not kept pace. If you look carefully, you can spot
"Limits to Growth" problems developing in many areas, not so much due to a
lack of raw materials, as the Club of Rome reports forecasted, but due to
the increasing complexity of technology and society.

Burke's and my disagreement (of course, he hasn't even heard of me) can be
likened to the expanding universe versus the contracting universe
disagreement - we may not know which one is right, but there ain't much we
can do to change the outcome.  Burke seems to be worried that technology
will get much too complicated in the future, and I'm worried that it won't.
Let's just wait and find out...For my part, I'm getting prepared for
the service-oriented society by working on the intonation of the phrase
"Would you like fries wid dat?"

-- 

Craig Hansen			|	 "Evahthun' tastes
MIPS Computer Systems		|	 bettah when it
...decwrl!mips!hansen		|	 sits on a RISC"