…Now What Do You Compute?

Ah the joys of being a polymath; in these days, it has been very revealing to watch in quick succession ‘Triumph of the Nerds‘ (a documentary on the story of home computing), and then an interview with the intellectual and guru Krishnamurti (you can find the video below).

First things first: ‘Triumph Of The Nerds’ tells us the story of how computers came to rule the world, from hobbyists with acne who assembled their machines in garages, to gazillionaire empires.

As for Krishnamurti, he speaks of a lot of interesting things, but it is his overview of modern world what comes to mind here; he sees current world (the interview is from the ’60s, but it is all way down from there) as equipped with the best of tools, and yet with moral responses still stuck in a primitive age.

One sees Jobs, Gates and the like boasting their achievements, and something does not quite go well in there; one has to agree that a computer is perhaps the biggest human invention ever. And you can also believe the sincerity of their intent; they want to provide users with the best tool available.

But what do they mean by ‘users’? And what is the tool for? The uneasiness comes because one sees the achievement is great, you cannot deny that, but it is limited to a technical nature; morally, it is void. So one leg is too short for the other. ‘The user’, for a technician, is only an abstract entity, and those developers do not care if there is an army of Hitlers out there. Of course they are right in doing so: their responsibility is delivering the best equipment to whomever wants it. It is out of their range assuring the moral quality of people. But then, whose responsibility is it?

It’s kind of a moving target. ‘Skills can be learned, values cannot’, said once Peter Drucker. So everybody stick to skills and leaves ‘values’ to ‘someone else’. Skills grant an easy sense of achievement: either you succeed or not. Moral is always muddy, and there is seldom a simple ‘right’ answer.

This such of balance seems to be the one of the signs of modern age (in addition to Krishnamurti, a lot of great thinkers have warned about it; Einstein for instance).

Take movies, for instance. They usually make you go wow technically (when they do), but present us with patronizing, paternalistic, passive, childish, morals and dilemmas, usually solved in a simplistic and primitive way. Just another sign that the moral level of our species does not live up to the technology we’ve created.

Movies are an example out of many here, and by the way, I’m not meaning here that all films should discuss profound questions. Superior mental functions need their days off just like anything else; but one of the roles of human narrative, of stories, has always been hinting options, inspiring with new ways of doing things, showing the variety of human experience, the contradictions and dilemmas sometimes implied in being human (have you seen ‘A Dangerous Method‘ lately?)

One film that really got right this technology/ethic lack of balance was ‘Idiocracy’. The film is about a future world in which the population has gradually become ultra-dumb, but at the same time they count with incredible machines, capable, for example, to read the barcodes tattooed in the prisoners’ arms even while they are driving their cars. Maximum technology for small-minded purposes. In that world, the superhit movie is a thing called ‘Ass’, and it consists of an hour and a half of a close-up of such part of the human body, which now and then does what an ass is intended to do, making the whole audience laugh their aforementioned off. (‘Idiocracy‘ was released in 2005, so they still do not wear 3D glasses. Maybe a remake is needed, soon. :p)

So the takeaway: yeah right, you have a computer. A machine to compute. But what are you computing? What is it that you are doing right now? In which way will it improve your life or another human being’s?

Unless you can answer that question, and answer it often, you won’t have fully earned for yourself the right to call yourself ‘civilized’.