‘”Its destruction left a deep and lasting wound in the architectural consciousness of the city. A famous photograph of a smashed caryatid in the landfill of the New Jersey Meadowlands struck a guilty chord.” (Wikipedia)
Patty King wrote in a comment a couple of days ago: “I remember a time about 10 years ago when flying was fun and so easy. Will it ever be like that again?”

Once upon a time, inspiring the traveler was important. The reactions of people in Penn Station were worth the enormous amount of time and effort placed into the space. Cultural and artistic expression were clearly strong and valued.

First impressions matter. Train stations and Airports are places where we welcome people from other countries or cities.

Perhaps someday we’ll remember the art, ambiance and culture that these important spaces brought to us. Perhaps someday we’ll once again decide to make our airports and train stations welcoming instead of paranoid, inspiring instead of intimidating, proud instead of afraid. Then flying will be fun again.

“I don’t know,” she frowned. “The Internet’s down. I can’t access our product catalog.” (Gah!)

Weeks later, I walked into a U-Haul to rent a truck. The computers weren’t working properly, and the manager was having trouble completing my transaction. “What happens if the computers are down?” I asked. “Can you still rent me a truck?”

“Well, I can,” he said, “But that’s because I’ve been here for fifteen years and I remember how to use the forms. That kid over there–” he gestured toward the younger employee, “He doesn’t even know the paper forms exist.”

As communication technology advances, society has shifted from a thick client to a thin client model. Until recently, Radio Shack employees maintained product knowledge in their heads and on paper that they could physically access. U-Haul staff used paper and ink to rent out their trucks. Individual stores could operate independently of the central system, at least until supplies ran out. They each had to maintain up-to-date books and forms, and train employees.

More and more, information resides on remote systems, which distributed franchises and employees access in order to conduct transactions. On the one hand, this increases efficiency. Gone are the reams of preprinted contracts and forms to be manually filled out for each transaction. Employees have less to memorize, as information and procedures are built into software systems.

On the other hand, individual locations are increasingly vulnerable to network disruptions. Many businesses today rely upon the Internet in order access central databases and conduct normal transactions. Without connection, they’re just appendages cut off from the central body. Radio Shack may have FM transmitters, and U-Haul may have trucks, but without network access they have difficulty conducting business. Many businesses do not physically have the paper and supplies to support manual transactions, let alone the knowledge of manual procedures.

Do the benefits of the thin client model outweigh the costs? That depends on your perspective. From Radio Shack’s point of view, the vast savings from cutting employee training and paper supplies probably does outweigh occasional losses due to network outages. This is especially true if they create a more stable infrastructure than their competitors. Furthermore, in the thin client model, employees require less specialized knowledge, and are therefore more mobile (and expendible).

However, as a society our economic dependance on the Internet may be premature. The Internet was not designed for security, and as noisy worms have demonstrated, it can be brought to a standstill by small groups of people or even by accident. If a widespread network outage brought businesses to a halt, Radio Shack might not lose market share compared to other businesses, but society and the individuals within it would suffer.

The vulnerability of the thin client model was strikingly illustrated back in 2002, when Beth Israel Deaconess hospital “experienced one of the worst health-care IT disasters ever. Over four days, [the] network crashed repeatedly, forcing the hospital to revert to the paper patient-records system that it had abandoned years ago. Lab reports that doctors normally had in hand within 45 minutes took as long as five hours to process.” The emergency department was forced to close down and divert patients elsewhere.¹

The disaster also helped hospital staff understand the benefits of the thin client system. One physician commented, “When I do this on computer, it checks for allergy complications and makes sure I prescribe the correct dosage and refill period. It prints out educational materials for the patient. I remember being scared. Forcing myself to write slowly and legibly…Without that dashboard of information I’d get from the computer, I had to walk up to patients I had treated before and ask basic questions like, What allergies do you have? Even if I thought I remembered, I didn’t trust my memory.”²

Will individuals become “dumb terminals”? Or will we simply evolve different kinds of processing capabilities? During the past few decades in the computer market, we’ve oscillated from thin clients to thick clients and back again. In the early days of computing, people used dumb terminals to access a mainframe, which stored and processed the data. Later, personal computers emerged, and each individual machine ran specialized applications and hardware.³ Nowadays, with the emergence of web-based business applications such as Google Apps and other client-server business processing systems, data is increasingly stored and processed on central systems once again.

Business processes will always mirror the technologies upon which they depend. As computers and business become increasingly intertwined, the efficiencies and vulnerabilities of our economy reflect those of our information technology. Humans have limited information storage capabilities, and leveraging centralized data storage systems helps us function as a group more efficiently.

How can we leverage the efficiencies of the thin client model, while still maintaining a robust and reliable infrastructure?

 
Sherri Davidoff

At the same time, specific genetic modifications could be marketed to the “worker” humans. Perhaps there will be an “intelligence” trait (which actually modifies your child so that he or she focuses better– no need for Ritalin!) Humans might well develop into two (or likely more) different species, based on class.

Right now genetic experimentation on humans is commonly seen as distasteful to in our society — perhaps because of a widespread belief in the sacredness of every human life– but I don’t think this will stop us in the long run. The incentives are just too high. Also, if someone were to develop human genetic modifications in secret, over a long period of time, and then eventually release modified humans to the world, how would we treat these people? I believe the larger population would still consider them as having the same rights as a “normal” human, therefore assuring them of the right to live and reproduce. In a world of six billion people, it is hard for me to imagine that there isn’t ONE person currently being used for genetic experimentation right now.

We’re at a defining edge in human evolution. Barring major catastrophe, those who are financially well off in the next few centuries might live to see their genes evolve in one manner, while those who are not might see their genes evolve in a very different way.

To a limited extent, this isn’t much different than what has been happening all throughout evolution. Humans have been managing our own breeding for millennium through careful mating selection, which breeds specific traits. The difference is that now the pace will accelerate. You will not only be a product of your ancestor’s genes and their culture, but you will incorporate specific physical and intellectual traits that they consciously decided you should have. Advertising in the medical industry will take on whole new implications.

• Technology allows one person to wield the power of many.
• Technology allows many people to communicate very quickly and effectively.

In some ways, these are two opposing factors. If one person can wield the power of many, someday it may be possible for a very small group of people to directly control the daily lives of all of humanity. For example, my roommate is one of a handful of people building Big Dog, an autonomous robotic pack mule funded by DARPA. In its last trial run, Big Dog walked seven miles across uneven terrain all by itself. Robot patrol dogs, anyone?

On the flip side, large-scale collective communication vastly increases the knowledge, and therefore power, of the proletarians. Buy It Like You Mean It is a great example where sharing of knowledge between consumers increases control over big corporations.

However, the system upon which this communication relies is a physical system, and like any earthly resource, it can be controlled. Relatively few corporations own the communications backbones which make up the Internet – AT&T, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, etc.

An important future battleground is this: Will our global communications systems be controlled by a small group of people, or will humanity at large manage to maintain it as a democratically controlled system used for free exchange of ideas?

Given the natural cycles of change, I imagine that variations of these scenarios will play out, in different forms, many times throughout our collective evolution.

We will undoubtedly develop increasingly sophisticated technologies of communication, and increasingly sophisticated technologies of control. This will spur the arms race between our growing collective consciousness and small groups in power, which we already see in an early form today.

Examining our own bodies, we are made up of many different types of cells working in harmony to accomplish specialized tasks. Given our progress on genetic modification techniques, I think it is likely that we will develop a global human organism with many different collections of human-esque creatures. Some of these will be more self-aware than others; some will have control over specific aspects of the communications systems; some will have more ability to direct the large-scale activities of the organism; others will operate on a more local level.

Thinking about our potential evolution reminds me a lot of a game of Go. Lots of new territory is opening up right now. When I first started playing Go, I assumed that the player which first established an advantage would inevitably grow to subsume the entire board. However, that is not the case. Even when one player has gained a clear advantage, it is still possible for the other to create living niches.

To Mars, Together

A snippet:

Marwa, from the purple row, raises her hand.

Hamza agrees. “We would have to use wires on the masjid, and even then, our prayer rugs would float away.” Marwa, behind him, shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I don’t think that’s right. Because, you know, maybe Allah created new things, and he wants us to see them. Allah probably wants us to go to Mars, to see the ayat and pray.”

Today Blake sold his first 25 baby clownfish to Sea Creatures in Revere. I knew it was going to happen, but I was still sad to see them go. He packed them up in little plastic bags, placed them carefully in a 5-gallon bucket, and then before I was ready to say goodbye they were off.

It’s funny- I know that if we hadn’t stood there in the middle of the night rescuing them with plastic cups and carefully pouring them into the nursery tank, they never would have survived to begin with. That doesn’t change the fact that I want every one of them to end up in a good home with someone who will take care of them. I suppose it’s a little like sending kids off to college– you just have to raise them as best you can, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Every two weeks, like clockwork, the mating pair lays yet another nest of 200-400 eggs. Of that, perhaps 50-100 will survive. That’s still a lot of clown fish! It’s amazing to consider that all of these creatures are so deeply dependent on the attention span of a human for their survival. And yet they seem so relaxed.

Right now, Blake has nearly 400 baby clownfish in his room. At night they clump together in schooling balls of thirty or fifty. Sometimes even in the nursery, things go wrong and baby clownfish die– perhaps during metamorphasis, or right after they’re transferred into a bigger tank. Nature is far crueler than we are, though. They’re not designed to all survive. In the wild, only one out of 100,000 or so makes it to adulthood. The eggs and post-metamorphosed clownfish are immune to anenome stings, but the larvae aren’t, so after the babies are born the host anenome gets an immediate snack. A nutritious sacrifice to the host.

Now and then Blake goes down to Quantico for a Big Dog demonstration, and I get to be the illustrious clownfish babysitter. This is a pleasant opportunity to get familiar with his intricate setup. It’s pretty amazing. In his room four tanks hum, with rows of bubbling bottles and tubes next to them. It looks a lot like a mad scientist’s laboratory. As the babysitter, my job is to feed the zooplankton to the little babies, the phytoplankton to the zooplankton, and the microalgae to the phytoplankton. The medium babies get brine shrimp, which we hatch from eggs daily in bubbling bottles. The biggest babies have already been weaned onto flake food. I grind up the flake food with a mortar and pestle (like human babies, their food has to be mashed up). Last but not least, the babies all like to be read bedtime stories, usually involving robots and outer space.

It’s eye-opening to help replicate even just a few of the infinite biological processes that make up ocean life. It reminds me how complex the earth is, and how everything in nature has a place in the cycle. Birth and death are a lot like function returns, their by-products to be used by other functions in the larger program. A thousand clock cycles is nothing.

The babies, with their large, shiny eyes, think only of the moment. I suppose focusing on the present is an important survival mechanism. Memory is, after all, just another tool in our evolutionary arsenal. An unusually good memory is probably as much of a disadvantage as an unusually bad one. Given nature’s efficiency, I imagine each organism has evolved to store the data it needs to survive: no more and no less.