On Unnecessary Technology

Jimi Heselden, the owner of the company that manufactures the Segway, has died after falling from a cliff while riding one of his machines. Police are still investigating the cause of the accident, but irrespective of whether mechanical failure, driver error, or simple misfortune is to blame, the tragedy illustrates an important point about technology - that the benefits that it brings aren't always worth the attendant risks and other costs. Near as I can tell, all the Segway does is allow people able-bodied people to move at low speeds over somewhat uneven ground while retaining their balance. That's a function easy accomplished by... walking. Heselden didn't need an expensive, complex piece of machinery to enjoy a jaunt along a cliffside walking path on his property - he could have simply gone for a stroll, and it's unlikely he would have gone over the cliff if he had.

This same dynamic plays out countless ways in lower stakes ways in everyday life. In my kitchen, I have a multi-part gadget that, depending on what attachment is being used, can be employed to cut vegetables, grate cheese, slice garlic, and the like. But it takes time to reconfigure it if I want to use it for a different function, the pieces are bulky, and it's a pain in the neck to wash, so it's not as if that versatility saves me any time, space, or effort. And if the cheese grating attachment, say, were to break, it would be more difficult and expensive to obtain a replacement component than merely to buy a new, separate cheese grater. This gadget, no matter its multi-functionality and nifty design, provides me precisely zero additional utility, and I wonder if I wouldn't be much better off with just a kitchen knife and an ordinary grater. Modern life is full of this kind of fundamentally unnecessary technology. Who really needs power windows or doors in a car, for example? It doesn't take much physical effort to turn a hand crank or pop a lock button, and with the old-fashioned option there are no unnecessary wires that can fray or circuits that can short out.

The ultimate goal of technology is to make life easier for ourselves, or to enable us to do things we otherwise couldn't. It should not be to demonstrate our own ingenuity by making things as intricate as possible, or to achieve marginal gains in comfort or convenience at significant risk or cost. Greater complexity is only an advantage if it brings with it greater functionality. If it doesn't, all it means is a greater number of ways in which things can go wrong. The great French aviator, writer, and engineer Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said that "a designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Things like the Segway definitely fall under the heading of things that could safely be taken away.

Does The Internet Make Us Poorer Readers?

Apropos of this Bloggingheads.tv conversation, and the David Brooks column which it references, I'm pondering the question. Reflecting on my own intellectual habits and how they've developed over the past several years, I do note a change, at the very least. I've been an avid reader since elementary school, but when I was younger I was much more likely to get my daily dose of the printed word by spending an hour or two with my nose buried in one kind of written volume or another. In my pre-Internet childhood I plowed through novels, magazines, newspapers, and even my father's old, battered copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica at a prodigious rate, and even once the web came along when I was in high school, and started to really flourish when I hit college, I still did most of my reading this way.

As a result, I did spend a lot of time reading things that required large commitments of time and attention, something which I think has somewhat changed as of late. I read just as much as ever now, but I spend a much higher percentage of my time reading online than I did even five years ago, and I find that has biased me more towards shorter, less consuming forms of reading. I don't know that it's necessarily made me a poorer reader, however.

I do find that for me at least fiction and narrative non-fiction suffer in electronic form - I've tried reading novels, histories, and even short stories online, and have found the temptations and distractions of cyberspace antithetical to the kind of sustained concentration necessary to fully enjoy and profit from them. I find it harder to immerse myself in a world when I'm reading about it on a computer screen for whatever reason. The glare of the monitor starts to bother my eyes after awhile, and it's annoying to have to find my place again in a work that requires multiple sittings if I can't simply flip open to the page in which I've tucked my bookmark. I also find myself missing some of the most relaxing aspects of a lengthy read - the ability to lounge on my side or lie on my back while reading, to go to the kitchen to fix myself a cup of tea with book in hand, even to take a bathroom break without breaking the spell. For these reasons I persist in carrying old-fashioned dead tree reading with me when I go on vacation, and I still have a few bookshelves' worth of volumes around in even my current stripped-down, provisional living arrangement.

This is not so for news stories, expository essays, and other forms of short nonfiction, however. Blogs, electronic media, etc. have a vitality which greatly enhances the appeal and challenge of these sorts of writing; if I read a newspaper column opining on, say, the Affordable Patient Care Act, I'm done after a few paragraphs and regardless of whether I agree or not with the author's perspective have nowhere to go afterwards. Put the same column online, however, and it's likely to come with a comments section featuring numerous provocative responses (and a fair amount of drivel) offered up by other readers, as well as links to other perspectives on the issue, rebuttals, and all the rest. The internet, like a virtual, world-wide university seminar, creates an excellent forum for hashing out ideas with other people, and allows for a richer and more thought-provoking experience in engaging many sorts of intellectual propositions. In those respects, I think that it has the ability to make us better-informed and more engaged readers, not poorer ones.

Ultimately, it's my theory that this dichotomy between the experiences of short-form and long-term reading that explains why computers and the internet are slowly killing off newspapers and print magazines, but it seems unlikely that devices like the Kindle and the iPad will be the demise of print books. For a news article, or an encyclopedia article, a web page may well be a faster, cheaper, and more efficient way of delivering the same content than newsprint or a bound volume, but for a book-length piece of writing it seems unlikely that that will ever be the case. Perhaps rather than making us poorer or better readers, then, the Internet is making us more rounded ones.

Peaks And Valleys

Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey has an interesting article on resource peaks on the magazine's website, which examines not just the much-discussed "peak oil" problem, but also the possible coming peaks in lithium (necessary for manufacturing the currently most commercially viable type of high-capacity battery), neodymium (used in the manufacture of permanent magnets widely used in a variety of electronic and mechanical systems) and phosphorus (the mineral behind the explosion in agricultural productivity the world has experienced over the past 50 years). In each case, Bailey examines the potential economic, social, and environmental consequences of exhausting our supplies of these resources, before suggesting some possible technological workarounds that are either already in existence or currently in development, concluding that whatever problems may result from resource depletion, human ingenuity can likely provide solutions.

I'm certainly far from an expert on the technical aspects of these issues, but I find it difficult to share Bailey's entirely sanguine outlook. I don't doubt that we may be able to work around some, or even most, of the problems - engineers are pretty clever people. I am skeptical that in every case we will be able to find solutions that are economically viable on a large scale, or that avert disruptive or even disastrous potential conflicts (military or otherwise) over current supplies of key resources. Even if we find an alternate method of manufacturing every single device that requires neodymium magnets, for example, it is unlikely that all these alternate products will be as cheap as the ones we have now. This could create serious problems, both by widening inequality between haves and have-nots and by crimping worldwide economic growth by making current logistics and delivery systems which rely on technology and have helped fuel enormous economic growth over the past half-century scarcer and more expensive. If computer hard drives cost ten times what they do now to manufacture, for example, it would likely scale back the current capabilities of the internet, which I suspect could have a fairly deleterious effect on global trade in addition to curtailing the ability of bored college students to download porn and illegal music. Furthermore, we've got ample evidence that conflict over scarce resources is a major driver of warfare in today's world - look no further than the civil war in Iraq (fought as much over who gets ownership of the country's richest oilfields as over any cultural or religious questions), or the recent war in Sierra Leone (in which the country's diamond supplies both precipitated and bankrolled the conflict). I think there's good reason to worry that as a number of critical natural resources become scarcer, conflict over what remains of them becomes more likely, particularly that more people than ever before now live resource-intensive post-industrial lives.

Maybe it's the inherent bleakness of my worldview, but I feel that the problem of resource depletion merits at best cautious optimism, and more likely genuine concern. I'm not going to panic a la the back-to-nature movement, but nor am I going to put my faith wholeheartedly into the notion that the coming techno-utopia will solve all our problems. We may survive the great challenges of the next century, resource depletion among them, but it's likely to be as bloody, messy, and difficult a challenge as surviving the challenges of the last was.