The Twilight of Car Culture?

Technologies are always about meaning, about how people define themselves.  For much of the twentieth century the automobile was the defining technology, economically, socially and culturally, of the United States.  Recently some commentators have suggested that the car's role in American society, particularly its cultural significance, has diminished.  Last week the Washington Post had an article on the waning of America's love affair with automobiles.  It particularly suggests that for millennials, with the rise of digital technology of all sorts, cars do not play the same role that they played for previous generations.  It notes that only 50% of millennials have a driver's license by the age of 18.  Cars used to be central characters in movies and TV shows--not so much any more.  Ford is starting a car sharing program, suggesting that it realizes that a car is not so important to people's identity.  The Washington Post article also implied that while the automobile used to be a symbol of freedom, it is not that any more.  Does the automobile mean the same thing to you as it did to your parents?  

Google Car Needs to Study Psychology

The New York Times recently had an article discussing the problems that the Google car was facing.  The problems highlighted were not purely technical ones, but what we might better call socio-technical problems.  Specifically, it is hard to design a car that can cope with the idiosyncrasies (and maybe idiocies) of human drivers.  The article recounts an incident when a Google car was not able to get through a 4-way stop sign because the human drivers kept nudging forward and the Google car was too polite.  In another case a Google car was spooked when an oncoming car approached a red light at a speed the Google car judged to be unsafe.  It took evasive action, but the driver of the oncoming car did stop for the light.  This article highlights the idea of socio-technological systems which we have discussed in class.  Maybe there will be some day when only automated cars are on the road, but until that day,  would-be makers of automated cars will have to program in human behavior.  

Tacit Knowledge and Methods Videos

In STS we talked about tacit knowledge and how information is much more effectively spread through communities of practice than through books.  The general consensus in class was that online learning could never replicate a classroom environment.  One might imagine that personal communication is even more important in state-of-the-art science and technology.   A fundamental tenet of science and engineering is reproducibility of others work.  But given the importance of tacit knowledge, this isn't easy.   The New Yorker recently reported on the Journal of Visualized Experiments,  where researchers post videos of their experiments so that others can see them and replicate them.  The article above gives examples of how the videos can make subtleties of experiments evident that would have been hidden otherwise.  These videos suggest how poorly traditional journal articles share subtle information.  Once upon a time, if one wanted to replicate the work of another scientist, the approach might have been to spent time in her or his lab, or perhaps recruit someone who had worked in that lab to come join you.  Will the widespread availability of information through these kinds of channels make personal communications less valuable?

Refugees and Smartphones

We usually think of refugees as some of the most wretched people, so desperate that they are willing to leave everything behind in the search for a new life.  A New York Times article says that they don't leave everything behind, though.  Many refugees find smartphones one of the few essential things that they take with them.  The Times details how refugees use smartphones to shares their routes with other refugees and access social media sites to connect with traffickers.  The Times quotes one refugee who sounds like a typical American, "I get stressed out when the battery even starts to get low.”  This article is a reminder of the extraordinary proliferation of smartphones.  Some people believe that smartphones are the most rapidly spreading technology in human history.  There are 2.6 billion smartphones in the world today.  Will this be a technology that empowers the poor of the world?  It is interesting to wonder whether so many people would be leaving their situations if they did not have information about other people's experience.  This widespread availability of information may be empowering some people, but it is putting stress on countries in new ways.  

Jimmy Carter as Engineer/President

The United States has had two engineers who were presidents--Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover.  Neither of these presidencies are generally considered "successful,"  whatever that means.  Jimmy Carter's announcement that he has cancer has brought him back into the public eye.  If you watch his public announcement of his diagnosis, you will see an amazing mastery of technical detail.  (He said he had a tumor of 2.5 cubic centimeters in his liver and the doctors removed 85% of it.  He later describes in great detail the medicine he is getting and what it does.)  When Carter was president, Saturday Night Live did a skit picking up on this tendency of his.  Stuart Eisenstat, one of Carter's aides has a piece in the New York Times arguing for all the positive achievements of Carter's presidency.  He writes: Trained as an engineer, he sought comprehensive solutions to fundamental challenges through a political system designed for incremental change; his significant successes never quite seemed to match the ambition of his proposals.  Politics is often called "the art of the possible,"  but Carter never trimmed his program to what was deemed politically possible.  One analysis of Carter's presidency says that his approach was to "to study a problem from every conceivable angle, arrive at the correct solution," and then tell the Democrats in Congress to pass it into law.  That did not work very well.  Are the skills of an engineer fundamentally at odds with the skills necessary to be a good politician?  

Technology and Labor Systems

One component of a technological system is the system of labor.  In History 341 and STS302H, we will talk about the system of labor that engineers worked under in the Apollo program.  Usually students say they would not like to work under such a system.  While we don't have the space race today, engineers and professionals at a number of companies work under very demanding and challenging conditions today.  Last week, the New York Times ran a lengthy article on the working conditions for professionals at Amazon, saying that Amazon was conducting an experiment in how far it could push workers.  Relying mainly on interviews with former workers, the article described a Darwinian, dystopian environment, where workers turned on one another, where working late into the evening and weekend was expected, and where people were regularly pushed to the brink of what they could handle.  (One worker said he saw nearly every one he worked with cry at their desk at one point or another.)  Jeff Bezos and other workers at Amazon have vigorously disputed this characterization, with one worker writing a lengthy refutation on LinkedIn.  (It is worth noting that Bezos sent a note to his employees encouraging them to read the New York Times article.)

Perhaps the New York Times overdramatized the Amazon workplace, relying too much on people who had left Amazon.  But it is indisputable the today's high-technology leaders push their workers close to the limits of human endurance.  A long term (5-year) employee of SpaceX, Elon Musk's private space venture, recently described the workplace there.  He said if you wanted to see your family or have hobbies, SpaceX was not the place for you.  Steve Jobs was similar.  A big difference between the working conditions in the Apollo program and those in today's high tech companies, is that then, the motivation was national pride.  Today the motivation is the huge financial rewards--most of which will go to Bezos or Musk.  There is also an intense global competition, the knowledge that there are a lot of other companies trying to do something similar.

When I worked for IBM in the 1980s, IBM was the unquestioned leader in computers and the work environment was much more relaxed.  If there was an emergency, you were expected to put in whatever hours that were necessary, but otherwise, the expectations were not too high.  The work hours were from 8:00 to 4:42pm, with 42 minutes for lunch.  (Although people often took longer lunch breaks.)  People generally did not take their work home with them after 4:42.  From what I know, that attitude is completely gone at IBM today.  

Technological Paradigms: Blackberry and Microsoft

In both my classes this fall we will be talking a lot about technological paradigms.  For better or for worse, in the last week we have two news stories that highlight technological paradigms.  Blackberry, which just a few years ago was the hottest technological gadget around, is in huge trouble and is trying to find someone to buy it.  At Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is retiring as the head of the company, after 13 years of unsuccessfully trying get Microsoft back into a competitive position against Google and Apple. 

Why does this happen?  Why do successful companies fail to meet new challenges?  Joe Nocera of the New York Times provides one explanation.  Creators of technologies sometimes want to stick with the technology that led to their initial success.  A little more subtle way to put it would be that companies sometimes see new technologies in light of their technology, and in that light it often looks bad.  The Blackberry was great for doing email, the Iphone wasn't.  But people saw that the Iphone could do so much more than email that they were willing to forgive its weaknesses there.

Microsoft has had a similar problem.  Now, it is hard to believe that in 1998, the US Department of Justice sued Microsoft claiming that it had too much power.  It is perhaps even harder to believe that in 1995, when Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Network, which was at the time its own version of the Internet, many people thought that Microsoft was going to destroy the Internet. 

Both the story of Microsoft and Blackberry are cautionary tales about how being successful in a certain technological paradigm, may make a business unable to compete in the next paradigm that comes along.  The power of technological paradigms to shape thinking and business strategies makes Apple's ability to develop new technologies that cannibalize its existing businesses all the more remarkable.