Instead of being driven by 1 human cars will soon be driven by 300 corporations over the internet what could go wrong?

The driverless car. We’re gonna be at the driverless car faster than you imagine… So, what do you have in a driverless car? You have a black box that tells you where you are. You have a GPS system that has to connect to satellites. The car itself is checking in to its manufacturer to let it know it exists. The driver is probably going to have one or more social devices which are also going to be GPS enabled and connected to a wifi device or to a wireless network. You’re going to have your music being delived by iTunes or some form of digital audio broadcast. The car is going to be checking in two or three hundred different components from tire pressure to engine temperature to oil level and communicating all of this information back. I’ve listed three or four hundred different applications in a driverless car, none of which are owned by one person, and all of them are connected by different means. Satellite to GPS, wifi, broadband, who knows, maybe radio links when you’re in a city. All of this data and all of these applications are owned by hundreds of different players and they all have to come together to make the driverless car work.

– Excerpt / quote from the video ‘The People’s Cloud Episode 5: Convergence’.

The tattletale car

The following is an excerpt from Your Car Knows When You Gain Weight by Bill Hanvey, in the New York Times.

Cars produced today are essentially smartphones with wheels. For drivers, this has meant many new features: automatic braking, turn-by-turn directions… carmakers are getting much, much more: They’re constantly collecting data from our vehicles.

Today’s cars are equipped with… an always-on wireless transmitter that constantly sends vehicle performance and maintenance data to the manufacturer.

Cars not only know how much we weigh but also track how much weight we gain. They know how fast we drive, where we live, how many children we have — even financial information. Connect a phone to a car, and it knows who we call and who we text.

But who owns and, ultimately, controls that data?

Ancient mills at Shushtar, Iran

This incredible photo was taken in 2008 in Shushtar, Iran, by Flickr user youngrobv, and is licensed Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives. It shows an old water mill, part of a massive and ancient water flow management system in Iran known as the Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System.

It’s obvious things have been moved around since this mill was last used to grind wheat grain to make flour. There’s a millstone on the floor at the right. The propellor-like object that seems to be cemented into the wall (just right and up from the sacks of grain) looks to me like the remains of a horizontal water wheel, of the ‘Norse mill’ or ‘Greek mill’ type.

Shushtar Hydraulic System is a vast complex, and there would have been many mills like this, powered by the flow of water. Like Roman Barbegal, it would have been a site of large-scale, industrial flour production, although the Shushtar site had many other purposes as well.

The photo page on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/youngrobv/2667264767/in/photostream/

Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System at Wikipedia

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialization of India

… We had for example Sir Richard Otterwy suggesting, challenging the very idea that it could be argued that the economic situation of the colonies was actually worsened by British colonialism. Well I stand to offer you the Indian example, Sir Richard. India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23%. By the time the British left it was down to below 4%. Why? Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depradations in India. In fact, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was actually premised upon the de-industrialization of India. The hand loom weavers for example, famed across the world, whose products were exported round the world, Britain came right in, there were actually these weavers making fine muslin, light as woven air it was said, and Britain came right in, broke their thumbs, smashed their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their cloth and products, and started of course, taking the raw materials from India, and shipping back manufactured cloth, flooding the world’s markets with what became the products of the dark and satanic mills of Victorian England. That meant that the weavers in India became beggars, and India went from being a world-famous exporter of finished cloth, into an importer.

– Dr Shashi Tharoor, speaking at a debate at Oxford.

Bad science, bad philanthropy, bad international aid

In east and southern Africa, genetically modified, drought-tolerant seeds, or “new technology” are made available to small holder farmers at the same cost as conventional varieties via philanthropic support and international aid, but many people see programs like these as death traps. Activists and civil society organizations are resisting “climate smart” solutions introduced by Monsanto and the Gates Foundation.

For example, the African Center for Biodiversity in South Africa is engaged in a legal battle because, in their view, these newly-introduced varieties present risks for small farmers, citing the absence of peer reviewed scientific data and evidence supporting the claims of Monsanto and significant economic risks for smallholder farmers.

Yimer explains, “Experience across Africa has shown that once the subsidies and credit [to support the adoption of new varieties] dries up, farmers can’t purchase the more expensive seeds. This also creates dependency on inputs such as synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and in the meantime their own seed varieties are lost.”

That is why Yimer doesn’t see the fight for food sovereignty in Africa as necessarily subversive. “It’s not like we [food activists] are going against some giant conspiracy. It’s not about our ideology. We work so that each and every person is healthy, doing their jobs, living their daily lives to the fullest. Food production, food systems—that is personal.”

– From 5 Food Systems Lessons the U.S. Can Learn from Africa by Jennifer Lentfer.

On the three ages (of stone, bronze and iron) of the distant past, progress, technology, and cultural superiority

… in happier days … food was plentifully available without the drudgery of farming: it only required gathering and eating. This idealised picture still plays a part in our view of the past and of ‘simple societies’, be it the concept of the ‘noble savage’ or …

The opposite view of society is embodied in words such as ‘progress’ and ‘technological advance’, popularised in Christian Thomsen’s Three Age System. Who, Thomsen argued, would make axes of stone if they knew of bronze and iron? What started as a classification of objects in the National Museum in Copenhagen rapidly became the basis for the chronological division of European man’s prehistory. Thomsen’s idea, coupled later with the concepts of evolution and ‘survival of the fittest’, reflected, if not originated, the self-satisfaction of late nineteenth-century West European society – the belief that it was technologically superior and therefore superior in all other respects to ‘less advanced’ societies both past and present.

– Exerpted from chapter 1 of ‘The European Iron Age’ by John Collis, 1984.

Horse-drawn wagons 5000 years ago, beneath a huge dramatic sky

… it is now possible to solve the central puzzle surrounding (the language) Proto-Indo-European, namely, who spoke it, where it was spoken, and when…

I believe with many others that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas in what is today southern Ukraine and Russia… The steppes resembled the prairies of North America – a monotonous sea of grass framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends from eastern Europe (between Odessa and Bucharest) to the Great Wall of China, an arid corridor running seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent. This enormous grassland was an effective barrier to the transmission of ideas and technologies for thousands of years… Eventually people who rode horses and herded cattle and sheep acquired the wheel, and were then able to follow their herds almost anywhere, using heavy wagons to carry their tents and supplies… after the horse was domesticated and the covered wagon invented… life became predictable and productive for the people of the Eurasian steppes. The opening of the steppe – its transformation from a hostile ecological barrier to a corridor of transcontinental communication – forever changed the dynamics of Eurasian historical development…

– From ‘The Horse, The Wheel, and Language; how Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the modern world’ by David W. Anthony, p 5-6.

The Engine

This comic makes use of the artwork Blockmaker engine from Glitch, a former multiplayer online computer game that released all its artworks into the public domain.

On the success and intelligence of prehistoric humans

The following is an excerpt from the book ‘A people’s history of science: miners, midwives, and “low mechanicks”‘ by Clifford D. Conner, 2005. It’s been somewhat edited and paraphrased to make it simpler.

Nasty, brutish, and short

Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century, had a low opinion of the knowledge possessed by prehistoric humans. In his eyes, their condition was scarcely different from that of animals. His estimation was not based on evidence; it was simply commonsense conjecture. He imagined what life had been like in the distant past without such benefits of civilization as the rule of law and assumed that it must have been, in his oft-quoted phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short”.

Noble savages

In the following century, an opposite but no less abstract appreciation of human prehistory was advanced by another social theorist, Jean-Jaques Rousseau. According to Rousseau, prehistoric humans were noble savages. In that original primitive state, Rousseau maintained, people “were as free, healthy, good, and happy as their nature permitted them to be.” The rise of civilization, however, “brought the downfall of the human race” by creating property, inequality, slavery, and poverty. But noble though they may have been, early humans were still essentially savages who, to borrow the biblical metaphor, had not yet tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. They were no more knowledgable or intelligent than Hobbes’ nasty brutes.

On the success and intelligence of prehistoric humans

Precisely what prehistoric humans knew and did not know is not easily determined, but it is certain that Hobbes, Rousseau, and the Bible all seriously underestimated their intellectual capacity and accomplishments. Unlike other species, early humans did not simply survive in limited ecological niches to which they were able to adapt, but spread throughout the globe, shaping their surroundings wherever they went to meet their own needs. It is reasonable to assume that they could have done so only because of their uniquely human ability to gain and apply an immense body of knowledge of nature.

Close members of our own “human family” have inhabited the earth for many tens of thousands of years. Until the end of the last Ice Age, about 13,000 years ago, they all depended for their subsistence entirely on foraging, fishing, hunting, and gathering. Today this foraging lifestyle is carried out by only a tiny fraction of the world’s population. Nonetheless, it is a safe estimate that more than 99% of the people who have ever lived were foragers.

A 20th century view of the Neolithic revolution

During the 19th century and most of the 20th, the way our foraging forebears were perceived owed more to Hobbes than to Rousseau. Their lifestyle was almost universally assumed – by scholars and laypeople alike – to have been one of unrelieved poverty, endless labor, and abysmal ignorance. Small wonder, then, that the “Neolithic revolution” that initiated agriculture and the domestication of animals was thought of as liberating humans from the miserable existence of hunting and gathering. In accord with the heroic view of the history of science, that great act of liberation was assumed to be the innovation of a few superior humans whose intelligence allowed them to perceive the advantages of settling down to produce a regular food supply.

Another view of the Neolithic Revolution

In 1966 anthropologists R. B. Lee and I. DeVore made a startling proclamation: “To date,” they said, “the hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has ever achieved” and Marshall Sahlins contended that the hunters and gatherers typically needed only a few hours of work a day to satisfy their material needs, leaving them with plenty of leisure time and a relatively relaxed existence. Some critics charged that he overstated the case for a prehistoric paradise, but he succeeded in fundamentally altering the way anthropologists and archeologists interpret the cultures and artifacts they study.

It had traditionally been assumed that “primitive” people failed to advance technologically because their desperate struggle for survival left them no time for deep thoughts and innovative experimentation. However Sahlin’s claim that foragers did not lack free time has been amply confirmed by subsequent studies. If foragers “failed” to make “progress” it was not because they were too busy or too stupid, but because “progress” simply held little attraction for them.

Whereas scholars considered the transformation to agriculture a liberating event, the foragers themselves may well have perceived it as expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Instead of being able to pick up their means of sustenance in the course of a leisurely day, the obligations of agriculture would henceforth sentence them to hard labor from sunup to sundown. They would make that change only as a last resort, when, under the relentless pressure of population growth, they would be forced to wrest their means of survival from ever-diminishing areas of land. Furthermore, it does not stand to reason that the “pioneers” of the Neolithic revolution were necessarily the most intelligent of the foragers; they were simply those who were first confronted with the choice between producing food or going hungry.

The above is an excerpt from the book ‘A people’s history of science: miners, midwives, and “low mechanicks”‘ by Clifford D. Conner, 2005. It’s been somewhat edited and paraphrased to make it simpler.

Lifted out of poverty part 2

This follows on from Lifted out of poverty.

Lifted out of poverty

Finding one technological fix and scaling it up cover the entire planet: a surprisingly bad problem-solving strategy

Agronomy: əˈɡrɒnəmi/ noun. The science of soil management and crop production.

– Google

The withdrawal of the state as the primary funder of agricultural research; the opening of public debate around science and science policy; the rise of the environmental movement; and the revolutions in communications technology have all contributed to opening agronomy to public scrutiny and debate to a degree that would have been unimaginable only forty years ago.

These developments have created strong incentives for individuals and organisations establish and defend their special contributions. One time-honoured way to do this is to promote a particular technology.

It is when information provision spills over to single-minded promotion that the nature of debate and contestation changes. We can see the blinkered promotion and systematic “bigging-up” of individual agricultural technologies, and their real or imagined impacts, as a direct result of the uncritical acceptance of the language of “impact at scale”. The great irony is that at a time when agriculture is back on the policy agenda, this self-reinforcing dynamic masks the critical insight that successful and sustainable agriculture is, by its very nature, situated and specific. It may seem counter intuitive, but in agriculture, the only viable route to impact at scale is through the details, nuance and performance of situated farming practices and systems.

– Exerpted / simplified from Why it’s good to argue about agronomy by Jim Sumberg.

Deep wells: water as a non-renewable resource

By contrast, deep wells have several putative advantages over qanats. First, deep wells are not limited by slope or soil conditions and can be located at sites convenient to transportation networks, populations centers, and markets. Second, they draw water from deep in the aquifer where seasonal variations in flow do not occur.

But deep wells also have disadvantages. The construction, maintenance, and fuel costs (for motorized pumps) of deep wells are high. Moreover, deep wells cannot be built
using local materials and local labor. By far the major disadvantage (and advantage) of deep wells, however, involves their success in meeting the growing need for water in the Middle East. Deep wells can draw water from permanent aquifers on demand without regard to rates of recharge. The technology, therefore, enables people to exploit their water resources in an unsustainable fashion. The ability of deep wells, and motorized pumps, to withdraw water in excess of an aquifer’s recharge rate makes this modern technology very attractive in the short term. As a result, however, water is fast becoming a non-renewable resource in areas where deep wells are used.

– From ‘Qanats and Lifeworlds in Iranian Plateau Villages’ by Paul Ward English.

It’s not actually a choice

Surrounded by machines

It is an astonishing concept to the modern mind that medieval man was surrounded by machines. The fact is, machines were not something foreign or remote to the townsman or to the peasant in his fields. The most common was the mill, converting the power of water or wind into work; grinding grain, crushing olives, fulling cloth, tanning leather, making paper… In the towns and villages the citizen could stand on a bridge over a river or canal and observe the different kinds of water mill: mills built along the banks, others floating midstream or moored to the banks, and, if he cared to look under the bridge, he might find the same machines built between the arches. If he walked upstream he would find the river dammed to provide a sufficient fall of water to drive the mills’ machinery.

– Exerpted from ‘The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middles Ages’ by Jean Gimpel.

A medieval ship-mill. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moulins_sous_pont_Paris.jpg

Apparently flat and stateless

But before we can ask the Net Neutrality question for Africa, we need to take a step back and unpack the motivation behind Net Neutrality. Coined by Tim Wu, a Canadian academic living in the US, Net Neutrality reflects the idea that “Internet service providers (ISPs) and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.” The central motivation in Net Neutrality is that we are all created equal on the Internet and that it works the same for everyone.

For Africans the Internet will never really be neutral. Apparently flat and stateless, the Internet is concentrated in places like the US and Europe. African countries have to pay a lot of money just to get to the front door. Vast investment in undersea cables has been necessary to become part of the Internet. And while neutrality reigns in Internet peering and transit in places like London and Amsterdam, African ISPs have to pay a lot of money just to get to these peering points. Worse, in many sub-Saharan African countries where only one undersea cable lands, that cable is controlled by an incumbent telco who extracts maximum rent for access to that international pipe.

– From Net Neutrality in Africa by Steve Song.

Net neutrality might seem a little hypothetical

At its essence, the debate is about whether all TCP/IP traffic should be treated equally or whether Internet service providers should be allowed to prioritise traffic from specific content providers.

You also get the impression that it is assumed that a) everyone has access to the Internet; and, b) they can afford it. These might be reasonable broad generalisations for the US market and perhaps the industrialised world in general but it breaks down in a region like sub-Saharan Africa.

For millions of people, the Access layer of the Internet is simply absent. There is no infrastructure. Or, where there is infrastructure, access is comparatively expensive. If you are part of the roughly 50% of the world’s population that doesn’t have access to the Internet, then the debate about prioritisation of Internet traffic might appear a little hypothetical to you.

– From Globalising the Net Neutrality Debate by Steve Song.

Rapid technological change

The tech gadget reviewer’s lament

It’s a feeling of skepticism, of anxiety – of yes, boredom – because I know it’s probably not going to be easy to come up with a unique angle or explain in a review why this new phone stands out from the pack. Maybe the new phone has a weak camera or bad battery life. Perhaps its display is discolored or pixelated. Does it support memory cards or have a removable battery pack?

If there’s no noticeable flaw, it’s going to be difficult to differentiate. That’s the sad truth of today’s high-end smartphone market: Most top-of-the-line handhelds released today provide comparable overall experiences, at least from a hardware perspective.

Newer is not necessarily better.

The pace of innovation in the handset world has slowed to a point at which the focus on extraneous pixel counts for smartphone cameras, fingerprint scanners that may or may not actually be secure, cool-but-mostly-useless UI (user interface) gestures and absurdly gigantic displays are among the most notable selling points for new phones.

Displays that are made of “Gorilla Glass” (toughened glass) but are still strangely fragile or have very little protection on their edges – and are often more expensive to fix than new phones or unnecessarily difficult to repair. Software updates that make your device lag. Incompatibility with new gadgets.

Not only has hardware innovation slowed; your next phone might not last as long as your previous one.

I won’t say that planned obsolescence is a part of the major smartphone makers’ strategies or business plans. There’s certainly no way for me to prove or demonstrate it. Many intelligent people have argued that the concept in the tech world is a “myth” perpetuated by conspiracy theorists in tinfoil hats. But it seems like more than a coincidence that, as more carriers make it easier and more affordable to buy phones more frequently, the need to upgrade more often seems to increase accordingly.

– Exerpted and adapted from Evolution of the Smartphone Refresh Cycle, Planned Obsolescence and You by Al Sacco.

Technology systems musings

I like this article because is shows that technology always has a particular context. We take it for granted that a modern smartphone that connects to the Internet and displays images and video, is more useful than, say, a 10-year-old handset with a black-and-white text-only display. But that’s because we take our technological context for granted; we take it for granted that both electricity and bandwidth are readily available, and affordable. In a context where this isn’t true the 10-year-old phone is far more useful; in fact the more “advanced” phone could do more more harm than good.

With technology, it doesn’t really make sense to think of “low-tech” and “high-tech” (although advertisers encourage us to think this way as they try to persuade us to buy the latest, most “advanced” device every six months or so). It doesn’t even make sense to think of individual devices or individual technologies. It makes more sense to think of a system; a set of related technologies that depend on one-another, are adapted to local conditions, are constantly evolving, and can change dramatically as you travel from place to place.

An advisor to the Apps Against Ebola project just announced that Amazon is sending 1000 “Fire” phones (unsold inventory) to West Africa in response to the Ebola crisis. Another major actor in the Ebola response has plans to bring 8000 smartphones to the region. This is a lot of phones. It’s millions of dollars worth of phones. I’m sure this comes from only the best sentiment, and a true desire to help – but it is a very bad idea.

The mobile network operators’ data is not thick enough to absorb this volume of devices. They will drag networks down if they get switched on, on 3G, and start sucking bandwidth.

One solution for this has been a proposition to bring in VSATs and BGANs – these are terminals (like satellite dishes for TV) that can pull data from satellites. This is not a good idea – because these devices need to be maintained, they create a parallel network, and they don’t build on what is already in place. They also create an economy where, even if they’re free at first, the subscribers (national government, health system, etc.) will eventually be paying money out to external bandwidth providers.

There is also not a lot of electricity. Big devices need more juice. Bring in solar chargers! Except that adds another layer of complexity and dependency on an already thinly stretched distribution and logistics proposal. Or, bring more generators in. It is difficult to move generators into parts of a country where there is frequently (or consistently) no road access. It’s even harder to keep those generators there and running.

What happens when you drop a million dollars of fancy shiny kit on an already delicate economy? What happens when you say to everyone who sells phones in Liberia – to every reseller, every street merchant, every shop: “I don’t care about you, or about your business – I am destroying your revenue stream by providing exactly what you sell, but for free. And a million dollars of it. You’re certainly not making a lot of friends in the local handset-sales market.

– Exerpted and adapted from the article Dumping Smartphones on West Africa is a Bad Idea, published by UNICEF Stories.

A meditation on the nature of technological progress

There were, in effect, two stages in machine making, indeed two types of machine, which might be regarded as primary and secondary. The steam engine, as developed by Newcomen and later, Watt, was a primary machine designed to carry out a specific function – initially to pump water out of a mine.

Early steam engine making was the province of the millwright whose skills, developed over centuries in the building of windmills and watermills, were the most appropriate ones available. A Newcomen engine, built into a brick or masonry engine house, using a massive timber beam as the link between steam cylinder and pump rods, was generally speaking within the already-existing capacities of the millwright.

In 1774 when John Wilkinson, the celebrated ironmaster, patented his boring mill, initially used for guns but soon after for steam engine cylinders, he was making a major contribution to the efficiency of the steam engine… This boring mill was at least as important in the development of the steam engine as any of Watt’s specific and recognized improvements. Indeed the double-acting engine, depending as it did on a closed cylinder with a stuffing box around the piston rod, could not have been made without an accurately machined bore, and that could only be achieved on a boring mill.

– Neil Cossons, ‘The BP Book of Industrial Archeology’ 1987. p131

Go nuclear part 4: On the meaning of technology

Go nuclear part 3: Is it a deity?

A meditation on the nature of technological progress

Artisans living in these cities developed elegant objects out of bronze, gold and silver, terracotta, glazed ceramic and semiprecious stones. Many of the most exquisite objects are extremely small and were often made from raw materiels that were transformed through complex techniques of manufacture. Their craftsmanship demonstrates a total control of the medium and the ability to capture the essence of a symbol or figure with a few delicate strokes.

Even today, in the modern cities and villages of Pakistan and India, we see the legacy of the Indus cities reflected in traditional arts and crafts, as well as in the layouts of homes and settlements. Given the availability of similar natural resources and raw materials, modern potters and glazermakers use many of the same production processes and firing techniques. The goldsmiths and agate beadmakers who make ornaments for modern city dwellers still use many techniques that were first discovered by the ancient Indus jewellers. Bronzeworkers who make utensils and sculptures have preserved many ancient techniques. Bone carvers of today have replaced the ivory workers of the past, but they continue to produce similar ornaments, gaming pieces, and inlay. These remnants of the past do not represent a stagnation of culture but rather highlight the optimal choices made by the Indus people.

– Exerpted from the book ‘Ancient cities of the Indus Valley civilization’ by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Oxford University Press, 1998, p17-19

Ceremonia vessel; Southern Pakistan, Indus Valley Civilization, Harappan, circa 2600-2450 B.C. Photo released into the Public Domain by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art http://www.lacma.org

Lowtech

“Lowtech” means technology that is cheap or free.

A lot of people say that new media is revolutionary. They say the net is anarchic and subversive. But how subversive can you be in an exclusive club, with a $1000 entrance fee?

Lowtech counters exclusivity. Lowtech is street level technology.

Text is great for communicating. Write down what you want to say. Make it clear and simple and non-exclusive.

Email is still the “killer app”. Fast, low cost global communication for the ordinary citizen is genuinely something new.

– James Wallbank, Lowtech Manifesto, 1999.

Industrial civilisation

Establishing an authorised version of engineering progress

The text of this post is an exerpt from the book “Inventing the modern world, technology since 1750” by Robert Bud, Simon Niziol, Timothy Boon and Andrew Nahum, 2000.

The far-reaching nature of changes in technology became increasingly clear to many in the mid-19th century as new transport and communications networks extended across countries and continents. Such innovations were brought to popular attention through deliberate publicity campaigns, and the promotion of progress also became institutionalised through the holding of regular exhibitions, showcases for new products and inventions.

One outcome of the popularisation of the notion of progress was the increasing lionisation of the engineer, personified as the creative force responsible for the transformation of the landscape and the dramatic changes affecting so much of everyday life. Among the first to receive such treatment was James Watt, eulogised as the ‘modern Archimedes’ for single-handedly conceiving the steam engine, the mighty invention which formed the basis for Britain’s greatness.

The stereotype of the lone genius, usually from a humble background, struggling with adversity to become a benefactor of mankind, was parodied by Dickens in the 1850s in Bleak house and Little Dorrit. In the following decade, Samuel Smiles established a whole pantheon of heroes of the Industrial Revolution in his Lives of the Engineers and Industrial Biography. These depicted their subjects as paragons of self-help, combining mechanical genius with infinite patience and industriousness, and went a long way towards establishing an authorised version of engineering progress, leading to perceptions which have never quite been eradicted.

Inventors invariably borrowed freely from the work of predecessors, or colleagues. The extravagant praise heaped on Watt ignored the earlier Newcomen engine and the work of contemporaries such as Trevithick or Hornblower. James Nasmyth did not single-handedly introduce the steam-hammer. Alexander Graham Bell’s contribution to the telephone extended little beyond the first imperfect prototype. The persistent emphasis on a small number of well known inventions plays down the achievements of a legion of unjusty forgotten technicians responsible for the continuous stream of steady improvements which ensured that technology never remained static.

On hunger, science, and well-known things that aren’t true

The following is a rather simplified/edited exerpt from the article Science means having to say “I’m Sorry” by Dr. M. Jahi Chappell.

Rights have been the most important elements in recent (and less recent) history. In most cases food was indeed available. Hunger and starvation were caused, not by low agricultural productivity or by a lack of food, but by a lack of sociopolitical rights or entitlements to food.

Nowhere is this perhaps more visible than Smith and Haddad’s landmark study, “Explaining Child Malnutrition in Developing Countries: A cross-country analysis,” which found that over half—54 percent—of the decrease in infant malnutrition in developing countries between 1970 and 1995 was due to improvements in women’s status and women’s education.

In short: the most powerful remedies to malnutrition and hidden hunger are and have been food sovereignty, and political sovereignty and equality more broadly. They are essential to get and to protect the right to a fair share of the food available in any society.

People have fought hunger and repression. Science and technology have been tools used to support—and to block—this fight. Without social movements, they are not enough—not nearly.

It is widely “known” that the Green Revolution, particularly the hybrid crop varieties and packages of “improved” seeds and fertilizers saved millions of people from starving. The calculations for this are simple: productivity went up, number of hungry went down. A (increased productivity) must have caused B (decreased hunger), right?

Well, um…no. This is not how science works—while this is by no means a SILLY conclusion to make , it is also not a proven one. The narrative about how the Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug Fed the World is over-simplistic and under-scientific. The issues we’re dealing with in the food system are complex and challenging. We need to go beyond the simple idea that increased food production = hunger reduction. We need to go beyond just focusing on technology and science, to get a moral, ethical and social movement-based understanding of how equality and improvements actually come about.

Tricorder

A message about technology, from the future. The 1967 future.

The problem lies in our definition of technology

The text of this post is an excerpt from the book ‘Stolen continents: conquest and resistance in the Americas’ by Ronald Wright, p50-51.

Mathematicians invented the concept of zero and place-system numerals – discoveries that eluded Greece and Rome – and with these intellectual tools the Maya designed a calendar that could measure time precisely over millions, even billions of years. This enabled them to reckon the solar year more accurately than the Julian calendar that was used in Europe until 1582; they refined the length of an average lunar month to within twenty-four seconds of the figure determined by atomic clocks, and their extraordinary calculation for the synodical period of Venus was out by a mere fourteen seconds per year.

Maya numerals. Source: Wikimedia.

Maya glyphs in Stucco at Palenque, Mexico. Source: Wikipedia.

Such triumphs are all the more remarkable when one considers that the Classic Maya were technically in the Stone Age. They had little or no bronze, certainly no iron, and made no practical use of the wheel, though they knew its principle. [The Americas lacked beasts of burden such as oxen or horses that would have made wheeled carts worthwhile.] To Europeans, who think civilization and hard technology are much the same thing, this poses a paradox.

The problem lies in our definition of technology. If we think of it merely as gadgetry, the Maya were far behind. If we think of it as the totality of systems devised by a civilization – not only their tools but their social structure, their use of intellect, their familiarity with plants and animals, weather and the environment, their ability to pass down knowledge and put it to work – then we can see how they overcame a lack of hardware. Their astronomical discoveries, for example, were made without telescopes of any kind, but they had the mathematical theory, the record keeping, and the perseverance to refine naked-eye sightings in the crucible of time.

To support cities such as Tikal, the Maya developed a unique form of intensive agriculture in what are now forbidding swamps. A network of canals and raised fields (similar to the Aztec floating gardens) allowed large populations to thrive. The luxuriance of the rainforest became reflected in the leafy baroque of Maya sculpture, in the fantastic regalia of their kings – jade and jaguar skin and irridescent quetzal plumes – in the illuminations of their books, and the painted roof combs of their buildings.

We now know that Maya writing was a fully developed system combining phonetics and ideographs, as in Egyptian or Chinese. There was much the Maya might have taught us, but from the thousands of their ancient books that could have been read in the sixteenth century, only three survived the Spanish bonfires. One contains the astonishing astronomical data on Venus and other planets. Who can say what has been lost?

A Maya pyramid, part of the ruins of the ancient city of Chichen Itza. Source: Wikipedia.

A stucco portrait of King K’inich Janaab’ Pakal of Palenque. Source: Wikipedia.

An artist’s drawing of what a living Maya city might have looked like. Source: Peaksurfer.

How Samuel Morse invented the telegraph

Image from the US patent ‘Improvement in electro-magnetic telegraphs US RE118 E’ Jun 13, 1848, of S. F. B. Morse, available at http://www.google.com/patents/USRE118?dq=re118

On a ship voyage not long before, he had overheard one passenger discuss some of the ways electricity was being used for such long-distance contacts. It was pretty well known. Joseph Henry was teaching at the College of New Jersey (soon to be renamed Princeton University) by then, and some of his work had been publicized. There also had been similar trials in Europe…

After struggling to make a telegraph of his own work efficiently, Morse almost gave up in frustration. He was certain there had to be an easier way, so he decided to get help from someone who actually knew how these mysterious electrical substances operated and could explain it to him.

Which is how, probably on a spring day in 1838, Joseph Henry found a surprisingly impassioned ex-painter at the door of his Princeton office.

… Henry had often declared that patents were the sort of thing that had held Europe back. He happily explained to Morse how the system worked – the batteries and the electromagnet and the spools of wire. In America, a young and growing country, it was right and proper, Henry believed, for all good citizens to share what they learned.

It took Morse several years – and judicious financial involvement with key members of congress – before he secured enough government funds to actually build a large, working prototype of his telegraph device. In its first week of commercial operation in 1844, connecting Washington with Baltimore, it took in just thirteen and a half cents in paid traffic, but in the next year an expanded line was taking in over a hundred dollars each week, and within a decade Morse was one of the wealthier men in North America.

Did it matter that he had largely stolen the idea for his invention? Telegraphs were already operating in England and Germany, and in America other inventors were close behind them. Someone else would no doubt have helped jump-start the American system if Morse hadn’t done it.

Although divine justice didn’t keep Morse from earthly riches, it did strike in another way. Joseph Henry had a satisfying life, at ease with his students and respected by his peers. Morse, however, having engaged in so much subterfuge, spent much of the next three decades stuck in litigation trying to defend the patents he’d railroaded through in his name.

– From ‘Electric Universe: how electricity switched on the modern world’ by David Bodanis, p21-24

Traditional ecological knowledge

According to Martha Johnson of the Dene Cultural Institute in Canada, Traditional Ecological Knowledge can be defined as: “a body of knowledge built by a group of people through generations living in close contact with nature. It includes a system of classification, a set of empirical observations about the local environment, and a system of self-management that governs resource use.”

Following this definition, it would be incorrect to assume that the word ‘traditional’ necessarily implies ‘outdated’. Indeed, the term ‘traditional innovation’ should not be regarded as an oxymoron since, as noted by the Canadian indigenous peoples organisation, the Four Directions Council:

“what is ‘traditional’ about traditional knowledge is not its antiquity, but the way it is acquired and used. In other words, the social process of learning and sharing knowledge, which is unique to each indigenous culture, lies at the very heart of its ‘traditionality’. Much of this knowledge is actually quite new, but it has a social meaning, and legal character, entirely unlike the knowledge indigenous people acquire from settlers and industrialised societies.”

– From The Public and Private Domains: Intellectual Property Rights in Traditional Ecological Knowledge by Graham Dutfield, 1999.

How farmers’ plant breeding is appropriated

The production and use of landraces (indigenous varieties evolved through both natural and human selection) are essential to Third World farmers. These are termed ‘primitive’ cultivars, whereas those varieties created by modern plant breeders in international research centres or by transnational corporations are called ‘advanced’ or ‘elite’. Trevor Williams, the former Executive Secretary of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources, has argued that it is not the original material that produces cash returns, and at a 1983 forum on plant breeding, stated that raw germ plasm only becomes valuable after considerable investment of time and money. According to this calculation, peasants’ time is considered valueless and available for free. Once again, all prior processes of creation are being denied and devalued by defining them as nature. Thus, plant breeding by farmers is not breeding; real breeding is seen to begin when this ‘primitive germ plasm’ is mixed or crossed with inbred lines in international labs by international scientists.

But the landraces that farmers have developed are not genetically chaotic. Nor do they lack innovation. They consist of improved and selected material, embodying the experience, inventiveness and hard work of farmers past and present; the evolutionary material processes they have undergone serve ecological and social needs.

As Pat Mooney has argued, “The perception that intellectual property is only recognizable when produced in laboratories by men in lab coats is fundamentally a racist view of scientific development.”

The denial of prior rights and creativity is essential for owning life. A brief book prepared by the biotechnology industry states: “Patent laws would in effect have drawn an imaginary line around your processes and products. If anyone steps over that line to use, make or sell your inventions or even if someone steps over that line in using, making or selling his own products, you could sue for patent protection.”

Jack Doyle has appropriately remarked that patents are less concerned with innovation than with territory, and can act as instruments of territorial takeover by claiming exclusive access to creativity and innovation, thereby monopolizing rights to ownership. The farmers, who are the guardians of the germ plasm, have to be dispossessed to allow the new colonization to happen.

– Vandana Shiva, ‘Biopiracy’, p 55-57

Incandescent light bulbs

In the period 1840-1880, twenty-two different versions of the incandescent light bulb were invented. In the UK, Joseph Swan invented an incandescent light bulb and in 1880 set up a business installing lightbulbs in homes and landmarks in England. His house was the first to be lit by an electric light bulb. In the US, Thomas Edison set up his own business installing incandescent bulbs of his own invention.

Edison was sued by another US inventor, William Sawyer, who claimed that Edison’s patent for “a filament of carbon of high resistance” was based on the prior art contained in Sawyer’s own patents and was thus invalid. The lawsuit lasted for several years, and a judge eventually ruled that Edison’s patent was valid. To avoid a possible court battle with Joseph Swan, whose British patent had been awarded a year before Edison’s, he and Swan formed a joint company called Ediswan to manufacture and market the invention in Britain.

A scanned image of a page from Thomas Edison’s 1880 patent, with a diagram of an incandescent bulb. Image: Wikimedia, Public Domain.

As time passed, light bulb manufacturers continued to experiment and innovate new, longer-lasting light bulb designs.

High Yield Varieties

In the development of “High Yielding Varieties”, multiple uses of plant biomass have been sacrificed for a single use.

The term “High Yielding Varieties” is a misnomer. The distinguishing feature of these seeds is that they are highly responsive to certain key inputs such as fertilizers and irrigation. In the absence of additional inputs of fertilizers and irrigation, the new seeds perform worse than indigenous varieties.

The measurement of output is also biased by restricting it to the marketable parts of crops. However crops have traditionally been bred and cultivated to produce not just food for man but fodder for animals and organic fertilizer for soils.

– Adapted from “Monoculture of the Mind” by Vandana Shiva, p 42-45

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Image derived from “Seedling” by zizee, Public Domain.

The Industrial Revolution

Things the Chinese Song Dynasty civilization did, around the year 1100:

• Invent the compass, the seismograph, and the odometer.
• Invent the pound lock, which is still used today for moving boats through canals.
• Print the world’s first banknotes in government-run factories.
• Have trebuchets that launched exploding gunpowder cannonballs!
• Lead the world in ship-building.
• Invent the moveable type printing press, and use it to reproduce written works quickly and cheaply.
• Use windmills and water-wheels to provide mechanical power for a variety of purposes, from grain mills, from efficient rock-crushing machines, to smelting iron and steel, to an astrological clock.
• Build small factories with assembly lines, worked by skilled artisans, for assembling products made from many smaller parts.
• Have a thriving steel and iron industry, mass-producing items such as ploughs, hammers, needles, nails, and chains for suspension bridges.
• Probably produce more iron and coal in the 12th century than England did in the late 18th.

Things the Chinese Song Dynasty civilization of around the year 1100 did not do:

• Violently drive millions of peasants off their common lands, creating a starving underclass who could easily be persuaded to work in factories under terrible conditions for almost no pay, since they had no other way to survive.
• Invade and occupy much of North America, South America, India and Africa, killing and enslaving millions of people.
• Send an ever-increasing stream natural resources stolen from the colonised lands back home to the factories to be converted into mass-produced goods.
• Believe themselves to be a superior type of human, chosen by God to rule by divine right over everything and everyone in the world.

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References:

Video: “ZDF info: Ursprung der Technik: Mechanik des Fernen Ostens” (in German).

“The Song Dynasty in China” http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/song/index.html.

Wikipedia: “Science and technology of the Song Dynasty”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_of_the_Song_Dynasty.

Wikipedia: “Economy of the Song Dynasty”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Song_Dynasty.

Wikipedia: “Enclosure”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Science and technology

What is science? What is technology?

The conventional answer is simply that science is what scientists produce, and technology is what technologists produce. Scientists and technologists are defined as people who have been formally trained in Western universities and institutions, or in Third World institutions mimicking Western ideas and traditions.

This answer is not very useful, so let us look for another. Let us define science broadly as “ways of knowing” and technology as “ways of doing”. From this perspective all societies, in all their diversity, have had science and technology systems on which their distinct and diverse development has been based. Technologies and systems of technologies bridge the gap between nature’s resources and human needs. Systems of knowledge and culture provide the framework for the perception and utilization of nature’s resources.

– Adapted from “Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge” by Vandana Shiva, p134-135.