John Miedema

Robots and Readers, Pt. 3

As a reader of this web post, chances are you like technology more than you dislike it. There are some who love technology, envisioning a blissful future in which it solves all our problems. Others hate it, foreseeing the grim demise of humanity and the earth. Most of us find a balance in favour of technology for the advantages it gives us, and only get irritated with it on occasion.

Frustration with technology is nothing new. In Information Ecologies, Nardi and O’Day describe the seventy-year-old film, Metropolis, in which slaves labour beneath the earth to run machines for the masters living above. The slaves are incited to violence against the machines by a master seeking justification to replace them with robots. One is reminded of the Luddites, a group of artisans who protested the changes caused by the industrial revolution, often by destroying the machinery they worked on. In I, Robot, the Society for Humanity lobbies for a simpler world and succeeds in banishing robots from earth. Their clandestine acts ultimately succeed in causing the machines to sabotage themselves.

At the core of our frustration with technology is the deepest kind of prejudice, a prejudice against machine life. We do not think about our technology when it is working well. It is only when our hammer breaks that the spell of our task is broken, and we become mindful our the automatic hammering. When I try to read a book on a cell phone, the little screen does not contain enough text to let me visually compare two passages at once. When I write or program, background save operations interrupt my thought process. Network problems prevent me from searching the web, revealing the emptiness of my head. The more I depend on technology for intellectual processes, the more its failings show how small an object my brain is. What if these technologies I depend on for my thinking should evolve into machines that have a mind and life of their own. Could I even try to resist them? If I could, I might try to control this technology, make it serve me again. I might burn into its design a set of rules like the Three Laws of Robotics which subordinate its will to humans. The failings of technology teach me my own limitations, my own object-like nature, a chilling lesson. Is it not the nature of all prejudice that a fear is based on a seemingly fixed property like skin colour or sex? The fear of machine life is the last prejudice because it is the fear of objects themselves, of lifelessness, both outside and inside us.

The prejudice against machines provides insight into present day thought about reading. There is ongoing hype about how the web will displace the traditional technologies of reading, that of libraries and books. Hype is a kind of mindlessness, the kind that turns into irrational acts of prejudice when the hyped ideas fail. Libraries and schools of librarianship will be closed, people will purchase e-books instead of print books, interest will wane in reading research, and people will scan the web and count it reading. When these events are long behind us, we will wake up one day, angry that our quality of life has not improved. To be called a Luddite today is considered an insult, an accusation of ignorance and deluded backwardness. In Rebels Against the Future, Sale provided a needed correction to this perception, showing that the Luddites represented critical evaluation of the consequences of technology on their lives, a scarce and valuable skill in the modern world. I count myself a Luddite. That declaration fits easily with my identity as a reader, but it is no contradiction with my identity as a techie, a geek, a digital enthusiast even. With critical evaluation, I will find the technologies that actually enhance my ability to read.

IMDB. Metropolis. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/. Versus Negroponte’s Being Digital. “Utopia with electronic butlers, robot secretaries, and fleets of digital assistants” (pg 10 of Information Ecologies).