Rants & Raves
Darwin's Hard Drive
Jaron Lanier's "One-Half of a Manifesto" (Wired 8.12, page 158) was bold in its willingness to repudiate the popular idea of a Terminator-esque future, and astute in its historical and technical analogies.
I was therefore surprised to see him devote space to the absurd question, "How could evolution have made such marvelous feet, claws, fins, and paws, but missed the wheel?" The premise of such a question throws context out the window. Wheels might be a great way to get around when you've got a road to run them on, but has any species spent enough evolutionary time in an environment that is consistently flat, hard, and expansive enough to make wheels more of an asset than a liability? This is akin to wondering why fish haven't developed plugs on their tails.
Dave Hogan
dhogan78@aol.com
For all those who deal with the everyday reality of general-purpose computing, Jaron Lanier's lucid article will strike a deep chord. Too much of our software is going to the dogs in subservience to the fake idol of ever greater computing power. It's time, once again, to attend to the basics and do the simple things well. I don't want AI - just a modern word processor that works.
Joel M. Sciamma
joelsciamma@compuserve.com
As a software engineer, I take offense at these staid, ivory tower generalizations about the nature of software and the people who create it. I go to work every day and write code that is much more flexible and explicit than it is intuitive. That's not to say I don't think about ways to work toward more intuitive behaviors, or about quantum algorithms, or even about downloading the sum total of my knowledge to a hard drive someday. That does not make me a fanatical freak, as Lanier's article may lead the less informed to believe. Lanier generalizes and judges the traits of anyone involved with technology who pushes the current limitations of our understanding.
I agree with Lanier that we should not consider technology as autonomous. Nothing we create - government, money, religion - is removed from the social fabric, but some pretend that it is. I hold the less popular opinion that we are ushers, mentors, masters, and hosts of our creations. Though things we produce may evolve beyond their original scope, the fact remains that these entities would not exist if we had not given them definition. The fact that technology threatens to surpass human intelligence is terrifying in some respects, but the productive response is to do what we do best as a species: adapt. Refusal to comply with changes in an environment - whether it's natural, social, political, economic, or technological - is the first step toward extinction.
Kevin M. Cowan
comments@cytopia.cc
Bill Clinton, Free Agent
Thank you for the refreshingly nonpartisan interview with Bill Clinton in a time of precious little relief (Wired 8.12, page 334). I was impressed by the questions. However, the seemingly inherent inability of the politician to be frank about his ignorance of the subject matter is frightening. This becomes more serious when one considers that the president did not actively preside over the technology-driven economy, yet he rode it and took credit for it as a means to political advantage. Hopefully, the next president will have the sense to quit campaigning once elected. It seems that the issues require it.
Scott Davison
davisonsanchez@aol.com
I was extremely disappointed by the interview with lame-duck president Bill Clinton. Where were the questions about Carnivore, exportable data-encryption, the complete failure of the drug war, and making more of our governmental process available on the Internet? The questions asked were unchallenging, and Clinton seemed to offer political platitudes instead of straight answers. His discussion of Bill Gates and the Internet economy was completely disingenuous, especially given the fact that Gates and Clinton are sometime golfing buddies.
Kent Daniel Bentkowski
kentdb9438@msn.com
Iron Butterfly
"Dumping Iron" (Wired 8.11, page 170) is one of the most accurate presentations of John Martin's ideas I've seen, and it spotlights Martin's key worry: that his science would be viewed as a quick fix for global warming, allowing people to leap into their gas-guzzlers and zoom off to consume yet more. Gasp. This is exactly the sort of behavior that haunted Martin. While he can't speak for himself, those of us who knew him well can stand in. As his wife, I listened to his theories about science for 24 years.
As you point out, Michael Markels and John Martin have common ground in addition to the theory Markels hopes to profit from. Like Markels, Martin loved asparagus and the Cosmos Club, and thought outside the box. Under Martin's New England reserve was a zany sense of humor. The combination was responsible in part for what Wired called his "bold and charismatic personality." He loved to entertain friends with Dr. Strangelove impersonations, promising that people who paid him enough could select the weather on their birthday. But Martin's science was responsible. He would not gamble with complex ecosystems. He believed the open-ocean iron experiments should be done repeatedly with careful scientific monitoring before his half-supertanker of iron was sprinkled.
Martin stressed that science can't provide a quick fix for the destruction we wreak on our environment. We have already engineered our atmosphere accidentally and irresponsibly. He stressed our need to limit global population, cut down on fossil fuel use, and stop chopping down forests - in the first world as well as the third. In fact, he did not think we were capable of acting wisely or expeditiously, so we should explore viable ways to help repair the damage.
Part of the loss with Martin's death is that we can't predict how he would have modified the iron experiments. Certainly our beleaguered planet needs scientists who take risks, ask creative questions, tilt at windmills - and sometimes come up the winner. Whatever Martin's new thinking would have been, it would have been environmentally responsible.
Marlene Martin
mlmartin4@aol.com
Geek Mythology
Great story ("O, Engineers!" Wired 8.12, page 357). You brought back many memories. I'm sitting here looking at a framed black-and-white photograph of the 128 monitors that the 8000 was supposed to light up and drive during the Eagle's Roosevelt Hotel product launch and press conference. The horror story here was that it crashed, and behind the curtain was a bunch of lesser-known backups. What my department - marketing communications - did is described in Tracy Kidder's epilogue. I use his book and my firsthand recollections in the public-relations classes I teach. Now I'll add your postscript to the yarn.
William J. P. Smith Jr.
Former Director of Marketing Communications
Data General Corporation
wjpsjr.@worldnet.att.net
Undo
'N Sync: The Pulsar Spoon UFO chronograph displays metronome beats from 30 to 250 bpm ("Big Pimpin'," Wired 8.12, page 256).
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