High-Tech Time Trap : Nanosecond Computer Culture Poses New Questions About Life in Fast Lane
At some computer work stations, an automatic alarm clock within the system reminds users what time of day it is.
“It prevents burnouts,” said one federal government employee who works with the latest high-speed computations.
“The computer speeds up the thinking process and relieves the doldrums of an eight-hour day.”
For others, however, the computer has become a time trap, monitoring their progress and forcing them to produce information at a faster, more frantic pace.
Speed, speed, speed. It seems to be a byword of a high-tech industry hurling itself at a breakneck pace toward the future regardless of the consequences to society and basic human values.
The rippling-down effect of the nanosecond culture is contagious. A billboard ad near a San Francisco commuter route reads, “Who Has Time to Go Grocery Shopping?” and offers a service that will buy and deliver bags of food for busy people.
At Stanford University, philosophers have written computer programs to teach students logic at a pace far faster than classroom instruction. In Silicon Valley, Apple Computer’s Macintosh development team wears T-shirts reading, “Working 90 Hours a Week and Loving It.” Store clerks are becoming faceless drones as they rush customers through automated checkout counters.
Computers are always waiting for instructions, which they respond to in measures of a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Once programmed, the modern machine can carry out a set of orders with the illusion of intelligence, unreeling a sequence of events into the future without further human assistance.
Clocks, invented in the 14th Century, brought schedules into the world, allowing industrialization and commerce to mushroom by replacing the time sequence of natural biological and physical rhythms with hour-dominated working days. Computers have now taken time and crunched and organized it at a speed beyond the realm of anything humans can experience.
Or control?
The recent stock market crash, caused in part by investment computers pre-programmed to react to a formulaic set of events, has given a signal that faster is not always better.
“It’s a major warning to us,” said Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Foundation of Economic Trends and author of the controversial and insightful book, “Time Wars,” (Holt, $18.95). “Whole other sections of our national life are being increasingly run by computer programs with decisions made in nanoseconds.
“The stock market is a prime example of a computer takeover affecting the lives and fortunes of millions of people. It should make us realize we’re increasingly losing control of our destinies.”
Rifkin maintains that a major political battle is brewing over the conception and control of time, the outcome of which will determine the future of society in the next century. The stock market’s manipulation by machines, he said, is a tame scenario contrasted with the specter of a “Star Wars” weapons system in which computers will make the ultimate decision within nanoseconds on whether to launch a nuclear attack.
“Human beings still have the power to intervene,” Rifkin said. “In a programmed nanosecond culture, which is a simulated future, real human beings don’t engage. The computer carries on the activity, anticipating in advance how things will unfold. It’s bizarre.”
Stewart Brand, who lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, has brought his counterculture roots into high-tech society and believes that humans will be able to balance the excesses of a speed-oriented computer future. Creator of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” and “Whole Earth Software Catalog,” Brand has taken a dazzling look at developing technology in the recently published book, “The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.”
In “Media Lab,” Brand takes readers through labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where there are talking desks, lifelike holographic images suspended in air, interactive entertainment, telephones that can chat with your friends, and computers that “learn” the likes and dislikes of their user so that they can select such things as what television programs to watch.
Brand questions whether computers are speeding out of control, saying that which technologies become commonplace is largely a matter of individual choice.
“If there’s too much, too fast, too expensive, we check it out and back off,” Brand said in an interview. “Human nature is pretty much of a constant.”
The stock market computer manipulations, he said, were timely because they served to teach people what can happen if machines are given control to trigger a set of circumstances without human involvement.
“We’ve got to hope that various information disasters happen early and often so we can build caution into the systems,” said Brand. “When computers are dealing with computers in computer time, then things can get crazy.”
Industry surveys, Brand said, show the “information” section of the economy outgrowing everything else, even the service sector. Fabulous success stories abound as well as a trail of bitter failures.
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road,” said Brand, a statement challenged by Langdon Winner, who teaches courses on political theory and technological choice at the prestigious Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
‘Creating . . . Juggernaut?’
“We’ve heard threats like that before, and they don’t reflect a friendly attitude toward human beings,” said Winner, author of “The Whale and the Reactor.”
“The crucial questions have to do with what are we about? Are we creating a world sensitive to and prepared to act upon the very powerful and fascinating possibilities that new technology presents to provide for human needs or are we creating a . . . juggernaut with a life of its own?”
Winner said that technology should serve human ends and that society should never be allowed to get into a position where people are serving the technology.
“In looking at the possibilities of technology, we need to keep in mind the most basic things we know about how we live and what we want--a decent life, freedom, a just society--and there’s no guarantee that technology that simply advances to greater heights of efficiency and productivity will satisfy those simple human ends.
“We have to work to accomplish them every day. My standard line is, ‘Now, as always, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and that includes the making and management of new technology.”’
Losing Contact With Reality
Winner said that many people he’s known get so deeply involved in the fast-paced computer world that they lose contact with outside reality, a phenomenon that has resulted in antisocial behavior, early professional “burnouts,” stress-related diseases and broken marriages.
Among engineers designing and building computers, he said, “there’s a kind of person who’s ill at ease in the physical world and ill at ease in the physical presence of human beings.
“So, they design systems that exclude the physical presence of nature, human beings or material objects, which is a fulfillment of their desire to eliminate contact.
“There are certain kinds of people who feel more comfortable with a symbol on a computer screen than they do with a person or with nature.”
The end result, Winner said, are computer programs that simulate the ocean or birds or trees for schoolchildren, rather than letting them experience the real thing. Programs for schools are also being developed that virtually make the presence of a teacher unnecessary during the period it’s being used.
‘Split-Second Timing’
In Silicon Valley, Winner said, the work ethic is so strong and competition so keen that highly paid engineers and programmers have no time for leisure activity or have to schedule it on the run.
“Particularly in Silicon Valley, a lot of lives are scheduled in split-second timing and move at a frantic pace. People just aren’t much interested in anything but work.”
According to some studies, the entrepreneurs of the computer industry are likely to be divorced, to share a condo, to rarely see their children and to be unconcerned about rules, dress or peer group pressures. Loyal to no company, these high-tech, high-achievers confidently expect to start up their own firms and be millionaires by age 40.
Tom Forester, in his book, “High-Tech Society,” said the unique culture of Silicon Valley may or may not be a glimpse into the future, where the “inhuman pace” of many engineers and executives causes them to be washed up by age 35.
“Silicon Valley people work hard, perhaps too hard,” Forester said. “Engineers often put in 15-hour days, and seven-day weeks. The competition between firms is often so intense that survival may well depend on being first to market with a new product. Many are simply out to get rich quick. Only work matters--and nothing else.”
New Type of Relationship
Craig Brod, a Berkeley psychologist and expert in “technostress” symptoms, said a new type of husband-wife relationship is developing in high-tech society. What used to be termed “computer widows”--the divorced wives of harried computer experts--are now learning to adapt, Brod said.
“Wives, in particular, are learning to be partners with their husbands in a way similar to that of co-alcoholics,” Brod said. “They’re adapting, seeking their own separate lives, and forming a partnership model that is more cognitive than lustful or sexual.”
Brod said this kind of relationship is widespread in the computer industry and is becoming the accepted “normal” type of marriage that is also showing up more in society in general.
One woman, he said, told how her high-tech husband would get upset when she talked slowly because he could not stand waiting to “process the information.” When confronted in counseling, the husband replied, “Give me the exact information so I can process it and make a change.”
Schools with computers, Brod said, are failing to give attention to the psychological and social issues involved with processing information on machines. Brod said he has interviewed children who become stressed with reading a book because they view reading as a slow medium contrasted with a computer screen with images.
‘Away From Reading’
“So, what we’re doing by educating kids with computers, which isn’t to say we’re trying to be evil or nefarious, is to socialize them away from reading. The reflective consciousness that is required for reading does not happen on the computer.”
Working on computers, Brod said, creates a sort of “brain drain” that leaves children and adults exhausted. Some children, he said, cannot interact with the family at night after a long stint on computers. Mothers working in high-level computer activity, he added, cannot relate to their children at night because of mental fatigue.
“We know very little about mental labor, an area that should be thoroughly investigated,” said Brod. “The modern office often involves a quiet stillness where the main relationship is between the working and the machine.
“You have computer monitoring of activities and automated assembly line-type work. We’re using a 19th-Century industrial model for 21st-Century technology.”
Brod and Winner recommend more dialogue on the impact of computers on society and on interpersonal relationships with workplaces designed to retain human warmth and interactions between people given a high priority.
‘Global Institute’ Needed
“What we need is a ‘Global Institute for Technology’ where countries can get together to discuss the human aspects of the computer revolution,” Brod said. “It should be funded by governments and be ongoing, meeting every year, with the best minds in the field taking part. There’s an incredible number of questions that need urgent discussions.”
Coping with the new time culture and technology is another matter, one that Steve Randall deals with in his “Time Seminars” for individuals and corporations. At a recent three-week course given at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Randall had high-tech employees take a look at the history of linear time, followed by participation in a dozen physical and mental exercises that deal with time changes.
The exercises deal with procrastination and deadlines, concentration, anxiety and stress.
“We explore and discuss alternative views, the main one being timelessness,” Randall said. “Some of our most productive, creative peak experiences are timeless.”
In his workshops, Randall said, he tries to balance Eastern perspectives and philosophies with those of the West, the spiritual values with the more materialistic.
‘A Timeless Quality’
“People exhibit a lot of anxiety about not having enough time,” said Randall. “I try to provide an antidote by bringing more of a timeless quality into whatever it is that has to be performed.”
A survey he took at the beginning and end of one of his three-week courses, Randall said, showed that participants experienced a 28% decrease in their sense of time passing. There also was a 47% decrease in the number of people who agreed with the statement, “Time is a limited resource.”
“So,” Randall concluded, “the courses really do work. The way we experience time now, we’ve run amok. It’s a rhythm that perpetuates itself and is always speeding up, but we don’t have to be at the mercy of it.
“Life can become more satisfying and productive. We can learn to slow down or speed up so that we’re not at the mercy of the computer’s time frame.”
Rifkin said he wrote “Time Wars” to question the excesses of the new technologies before it is too late to change the course of future events.
He predicted a backlash to technology that will produce a “slow is human” movement starting on the West Coast and spreading. The issues of time, he said, will permeate the environmental movement, politics, medical practice, school systems and workplaces.
“The problem with the computer culture is that it’s way out of line with the pulse beat of the Earth,” said Rifkin. “We’re consuming far faster than we can replenish, pollution is getting worse and resources are diminishing. A major environmental issue will be to find a time orientation more compatible to nature.”
Plea for Discourse
One irony of today’s world, said Rifkin, is that, in a culture obsessed with labor-saving technology, people feel they have less time available than at any other time in history to relax, reflect and relate.
An intellectual discourse on time values, said Rifkin, should take place on all levels of society if humanity is to prevail over a brave new world dominated by machines that program and simulate an alien form of reality.
“We are indeed free to will two very different futures,” he said. “In the first we seek to control the forces of nature and the lives of each other. In the second we seek to integrate ourselves back into the temporal bonds of the larger communities of life that make up the biosphere of the planet.”
