From netfuture-owner@online.ora.comFri Jun 21 16:43:47 1996 Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 08:51:27 -0400 From: O'Reilly & Associates NETFUTURE Owner Reply to: netfuture@online.ora.com To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: NETFUTURE #22 NETFUTURE Technology and Human Responsibility for the Future -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #22 Copyright 1996 O'Reilly & Associates June 20, 1996 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opinions expressed here belong to the authors, not O'Reilly & Associates. Editor: Stephen L. Talbott NETFUTURE on the Web: http://www.ora.com/staff/stevet/netfuture/ CONTENTS: *** Editor's note *** An antidote to computer-thinking (Valdemar W. Setzer) Cultivate the arts *** The future of freedom (Steve Talbott) Technological determinism is an ambiguous affair *** About this newsletter -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *** An antidote to computer-thinking (134 lines) >From Valdemar W. Setzer [Valdemar Setzer, with 32 years of teaching and research experience, is a professor of computer science, University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. He is author of the book, Computers in Education, published in Great Britain by Floris Books. What follows below is an edited-down version of the considerably longer piece he submitted to NETFUTURE. You will find a pointer to the original version on his home page: http://www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer. SLT] Computers are abstract machines that transform data. Data and information are not part of the concrete world; they cannot be weighed, measured, ingested as food, or used for clothing; we can't even build a computer with them. They are, in fact, thoughts. The same applies to programs, which are also pieces of data. What the computer does when it interprets a program is to simulate exactly the thoughts we had when we inserted them into the program. Given a program and input data, we can simulate the computer's interpretation mentally or with pencil and paper. This is not so with other machines: simulating a bicycle with pencil and paper does not take me from here to there. Computers cannot be used as transportation devices, their result cannot be used as food or clothing, they do not produce anything real. They produce restricted kinds of thoughts -- data. Computers are thus completely alienated from "reality" (taken in a naive sense). They are abstract, mathematical, logical-symbolic machines. So what does a programmer do? To produce a program, he or she has to think in a special way, using a special language. This language is absolutely formal, expressed through logical-symbolic elements. It may be fully described in mathematical terms, using what is called "formal grammar" and "formal semantics." So the programmer is forced to think in a very narrow way. I would like to mention here an example which is already quite old, from Computational Linguistics. Once upon a time, during the 60's, some linguists decided to use the computer to discover literary styles or characteristics of each author. They reduced the style to certain numeric or statistical properties, as for instance how many times words such as "war", "peace", "love" would appear in a text. They would also count the "distance" (measured in number of words) between pairs of keywords. Obviously, they did not use as a criterion the attention, the tension, or the joy a text would produce in its readers. These feelings cannot be reckoned with by computers, unless they are quantified. (There is a discipline called Psychometrics that deals with quantifying feelings, desires, etc.) Here we see another characteristic of computers: they tend to impoverish the content of whatever they transform. I like to characterize the kind of alienated, formal thinking programmers have to exercise as "dirty thoughts." They are dead, abstract thoughts not having anything to do with reality. I think they are probably one of the main causes for what is called the "programmers' syndrome": stress, insomnia, lack of appetite, difficulties with social relations, and other miseries. I don't think programmers should quit their profession, except in some extreme cases. If there is a job for them, society needs them. The question is how to balance such unilateral, dirty thinking. In lectures I give to professionals on the subject (titled "The Misery of Data Processing"), some people suggest sports as a therapy. But in order to play physical sports, you have to act with automatic reflexes in a subconscious way; thoughts are too slow and, if applied to the movements you have to perform and muscles you have to use, they produce paralysis. (You can confirm this by trying to make conscious every movement you have to make in grabbing a pencil). The question here is not to eliminate thinking; it is to balance the dirty programming thinking with a "live- thinking." To make it short, I consider artistic activities as the ideal antidote to the dirty machine-thinking exercised by programmers. When you actively practice an art, you do not think in an abstract, formal way. (I am not referring here to "computer art"!) You do not even think in conceptual terms. Nevertheless, there is a kind of mental activity going on, intimately connected to esthetic feelings. To produce a real work of art, you cannot plan way ahead what you are going to do; improvisation together with observation of the results and the feelings they produce are essential for success. If a work of art is completely planned and foreseen in advance, it becomes science. Likewise, if a work of art is approached with abstract thoughts, it loses its life. Among all forms of active art, is there one most suitable one for computer programmers? I think any actively done art can help us achieve balance. Theater playing develops an acute social sensibility, because the actor has to pay attention to his peers, and do lots of improvisations. Not every movement or intonation should be planned; otherwise, the play loses its spontaneity. Moreover, the play has to flow according to the way the actors feel the audience. All this has a balancing effect in relation to the social isolation that the programming activity produces. Nevertheless, the script has to be followed, so the activity is reasonably restricted. Sculpture deals with a material which is too earthly--it would do good for someone who has to develop some inner form; but the programmer already has too much form in his/her thinking. And so on, for other arts. So here is my recommendation, based upon my own experience: I consider the ideal antidote to be watercolor painting wet-on-wet, that is, on wet paper. In this form of painting, one uses transparent, that is, not rigid, colors; the wet paper makes it easy to produce fine, unforeseen color transitions, and it is almost impossible to produce sharp contours. It is always possible to change to some extent what one has already put on paper, mixing colors on it, feeling whether one has reached some satisfactory result. I use only the basic colors, yellow, red and blue, two hues of each. It is fascinating to produce with them all sorts of green hues, as well as gray and brown. One may mix them on a white wall tile, but using them one over the other directly on paper give unexpected colors, aiding the therapeutic effect. Improvising colors and forms should be preferred over trying to reproduce works by famous artists. There are other possible recommendations for programmers, such as doing as little on-line programming as possible--that is, going back to developing programs using low-tech instruments like pencil, rubber, and paper, limiting the amount of consecutive on-line time. The advice here applies not just to programmers. Whenever a person is using *any* software, commands have to be given to the computer. These commands are in many ways similar to programming language instructions. They are part of a formal, logical-symbolic language, their effect is deterministic, they have to be given in a fully conscious way, and so on. Thus, the same need for artistic activities to counterbalance the deadening of thought life applies to heavy users of computers in general. The antidote has certainly worked if a programmer or heavy computer user starts to recognize the truth of the following statement: "Nature is not a scientist, it is an artist." To understand it, we have to complement scientific, formal knowledge with the ability to enter artistically into the world around us. Valdemar W.Setzer vwsetzer@ime.usp.br http://www.ime.usp.br/~vwsetzer Dept. of Computer Science University of Sao Paulo, Brazil --------------------------------------------------------------------------