The humanities are in retreat. For years science and technology have been running roughshod over the arts in the nation’s colleges and universities, a thrashing turning now into rout.

This is hardly news. For years a consistent string of news articles and commentaries have documented the humanities’ decline. An especially robust burst of coverage greeted the release last summer of “The Heart of the Matter,” an earnest series of recommendations and equally earnest short film produced under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Backed by a prestige-dripping commission of actors, journalists, musicians, directors, academics, jurists, executives and politicians, “The Heart of the Matter” sounded what the New York Times called a “rallying cry against the entrenched idea that the humanities and social sciences are luxuries that employment-minded students can ill afford.” In our race for results, the commission urged, the quest for meaning must never be abandoned.

Alas, the sad truth is that earnestness at this point doesn’t begin to cut it. Celebrity endorsements won’t reverse the trend, either. We may as well come clean and accept that the fact that the humanities have been losing this fight for centuries, and a reversal of their fortunes isn’t likely anytime soon.

The reason, I think, is fairly simple. Relative to the tangible solidities produced by science, technology, and capital, the gifts the humanities offer are ephemeral, and thus easily dismissed. “The basis of all authority,” said Alfred North Whitehead, “is the supremacy of fact over thought.”

This is not to say the humanities won’t retain a place at the table. They will, insofar as they can make themselves useful. But like Oliver Twist, the paucity of their portion will always leave them begging for more.  All the more reason, then, to celebrate those who have managed to land a blow or two against the empire.

One of the early aggressors against whom the seekers of Higher Truth had to defend themselves was Francis Bacon. His introduction of the scientific method was accompanied by an unending string of attacks on the philosophers of ancient Greece for their worthless navel-gazing. Like children, he said, “they are prone to talking, and incapable of generation, their wisdom being loquacious and unproductive of effects.” The “real and legitimate goal of the sciences,” Bacon added, “is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.”

Legions of scientific wannabes followed Bacon’s lead to become dedicated experimental tinkerers in whatever the Enlightenment’s version of garages might have been. Meanwhile Jonathan Swift stood to one side and argued, with droll, often scatological amusement, that the emperor had no clothes.

Those who read Gulliver’s Travels in the days before literature classes were eliminated may recall Gulliver’s visits to the Academies of Balnibarbi (parodies of Salomon’s House, the utopian research center envisioned in Bacon’s New Atlantis), where scientists labored to produce sunshine from cucumbers and to reverse the process of digestion by turning human excrement into food. Embraced in greeting by the filth-encrusted investigator conducting the latter experiment, Gulliver remarked parenthetically that this had been “a Compliment I could well have excused.”

A more recent battle in what might be called the Arena of Empiricism unfolded in 1959, when C.P. Snow presented his famous lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.”

The cultures to which the title referred were those of literary intellectuals on the one hand and of scientists on the other. While it’s true Snow criticized the scientists for knowing little more of literature than Dickens, by far the bulk of his disdain was reserved for the intellectuals. Sounding a lot like Bacon, Snow said the scientists had “the future in their bones,” while the ranks of literature were filled with “natural Luddites” who “wished the future did not exist.”

Again, a partisan of the humanities launched a spirited counterattack, this one fueled not by satire but by undiluted rage.

Manning the barricades was F. R. Leavis, a longtime professor of literature at Downing College, Cambridge. Leavis was well known in English intellectual circles as a staunch defender of the unsurpassed sublimity of the great authors, whom he saw as holding up an increasingly vital standard of excellence in the face of an onrushing tide of modern mediocrity. Snow’s lecture represented to Leavis the perfect embodiment of that mediocrity, and thus a clarion call to repel the barbarians at the gate.

From his opening paragraph Leavis’s attack was relentless. Snow’s lecture demonstrated “an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style,” its logic proceeding “with so extreme a naïveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it.”

Snow, Leavis said, made the classic mistake of those who saw salvation in industrial progress: he equated wealth with well being. The results of such a belief were on display for all to see in modern America: “the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life impoverishment—the human emptiness; emptiness and boredom craving alcohol—of one kind or another.”

The uncompromising spleen of Leavis’s tirade certainly outdid the conciliatory platitudes of the “The Heart of the Matter,” but to no greater effect. Neither fire and brimstone nor earnest entreaty will rescue the humanities from their fate. Meaning will remain the underdog in a world that increasingly demands the goods to which it has increasingly grown accustomed.

Defeatist? To the contrary, all the more reason to carry on the fight, boldly and without apology. I keep a quote from Jonathan Swift taped over my desk:

“When you think of the world give it one lash the more at my request. The chief end I propose in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.”

Doug Hill’s book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology, has just been published on Amazon Kindle and other outlets. He blogs at The Question Concerning Technology and can be followed on Twitter at @DougHill25.

The film Gravity is having an especially strong run at the box office, and it seems to be having an especially powerful impact on those who have seen it. It’s certainly a beautiful movie, visually, and an unusual one, as far as big-budget Hollywood attractions go. For anyone who thinks a lot about technology, as I do, the film has some interesting, though somewhat ambiguous, messages.

Be forewarned: What follows is all spoiler.

Technology gone wrong plays a central role in Gravity. The film also resonates with a theme that’s central to the technological project: the drive to open new frontiers. This is not to say that either of those subjects is the principal concern of Gravity’s director and co-writer, Alfonso Cuarón. His interests lie elsewhere, as I’ll explain. Still, when you make a saga about human beings in space, questions of technology and frontiers are hard to avoid.

The direction of Gravity’s plot makes it, in a basic sense, an anti-frontier movie. It’s all about the need of Sandra Bullock’s character, Dr. Ryan Stone, to return to Earth. She has to get home. There’s no mission to explore an unknown planet, destroy a threatening asteroid, or investigate mysterious transmissions from Jupiter. The plot hinges on what is, in essence, an industrial accident during a routine repair mission a few hundred miles above Earth.

What’s not routine is our reaction as viewers to that routineness. It’s clear from the reviews and social media comments on Gravity that people have been stunned and moved by the beauty of Earth as it’s depicted from the astronaut’s perspective. Also stunning is Cuarón’s depiction of the vastness of space. The genius of  the film—the reason people find it so effecting, I think—is the way Cuarón positions his human characters between those two poles. Seldom has the strangeness of our position in the cosmos been defined so starkly. Dr. Stone’s desperation to return to Earth is more than a fight for survival. It’s a flight from existential terror.

As I say, I don’t think Cuarón has any particular ax to grind for or against technology, but it’s hard not to notice in Gravity how alien the space environment is for the humans who are moving around in it. This is something that’s always mystified me about space enthusiasts. I understand being motivated by the adventure of exploring space, but the appeal of actually living there escapes me. You can’t breathe in space! Or walk! You have to put on an incredibly bulky suit every time you go out the door. It seems like it would get old pretty fast.

As many critics have pointed out, Dr. Stone’s psychological motivation is to come home not only from outer space, but also from her disconnection from life. Having lost a daughter in a freak accident, she loses herself in work, and in long drives to nowhere after work. This suggests that Cuarón might be commenting on the technological project, after all. Is he saying that space exploration is equivalent to an escapist drive into the night?

Probably not. In fact, Gravity’s concluding scene is open to a couple of interpretations.

On the one hand, when Stone pulls herself up on the shore, gasping for air and grasping terra firma, we see an affirmation of how good it is for her to be back where she belongs. She’s isn’t running away anymore. She’s alive, and grateful to be alive: she can embrace the pain that comes with the joy of existence. She’s home, and space travel seems behind her.

Or is it? Stone’s emergence from the water is an obvious allusion to humankind pulling itself out of the ocean and onto land to begin its evolutionary adventure as a terrestrial species. In case we miss the point, Cuarón shows us a frog swimming alongside Stone as she escapes the sinking space capsule and swims toward the surface. Once on dry land, Stone doesn’t just lie there. She pulls herself to her feet and stands, and the low angle from which Cuarón shoots her rise leaves no question that he wants us to consider her standing a courageous, heroic act of will.

All this seems to suggest not so much that Stone has learned to accept the limitations of life on Earth, but that she’s found a new determination to accept no limits. It’s a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit, to the implacable drive for progress that brought us out of the depths and took us to…well, outer space!

Cuarón has said in interviews that the inspiration for Gravity was the divorce he endured immediately before writing the script (with his son from a previous marriage). The ability to triumph over adversity, to survive and move forward, are themes that mean a lot to him. They’re also themes that mean a lot when contemplating what’s good and bad about the technological project.

Progress as an ideal has taken its hits in recent years, in part because it’s been inextricably linked with a refusal to accept limitations. Nonetheless, we can’t give up on it. We have to believe we can move toward something better, and it’s not unreasonable to think that technology, sensibly applied, can help us get there. The flip side, of course, is that technology has so often been used to take us in the opposite direction.

As Gravity’s credits roll, we leave the theater inspired by Dr. Stone’s resilience and her determination to carry forward the human adventure. What we tend to forget is the reason she ended up on standing heroically on that shoreline in the first place. She was sent spinning helplessly into space when a Russian missile exploded a dead satellite, starting a chain reaction that sent a shower of metal debris hurling into orbit. This is no made-up problem. So many pieces of space junk now surround Earth—the Air Force currently tracks 20,000 of them, some as large as a Greyhound bus—that low-Earth orbits will eventually have to be abandoned if some method of cleaning up the mess isn’t found.

There’s a pattern here. We’re very good at using our technologies to open new frontiers. We’re also very good at using our technologies to despoil those frontiers. Survival is one thing. What we do with survival is another.

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Doug Hill’s book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology, has just been published on Amazon Kindle and other outlets. He blogs at The Question Concerning Technology and can be followed on Twitter at @DougHill25.

I remember hearing somewhere that one of the most important things you can teach a child is to delay gratification.

Give a five-year-old a choice between a cookie on the table in front of him right now and two cookies 15 minutes from now, and chances are he’ll take the one cookie right now. Maturity is about learning to live within your means. You want something nice, you save up for it. You resist blowing your entire paycheck on bling so that when the first of the month comes you have enough money to cover the rent.

It’s obvious that the consumer economy wants us to ignore these basic principles. Commercials tell us we can have what we want right now! The financial meltdown was largely a product of the banks handing out mortgages to people for houses they couldn’t begin to afford.

More and more we’re learning that our National State of Technology is another manifestation of the same mentality. We built it, but we don’t want to pay what it costs to maintain it.

Case in point: the 2013 report card on the state of the nation’s infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Here are a few highlights:

· Roads get a grade of D. Federal, state, and local capital investments on roads and highways have increased to $91 billion annually. That amount is still insufficient, the ASCE says, to prevent continuing declines over the long term. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that capital investments of $170 billion annually would be needed to significantly improve road (and therefore traffic) conditions.

· Bridges get a grade of C+ One in nine of the nation’s bridges is rated “structurally deficient,” the ASCE says. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that we need to invest $20.5 billion annually on bridge repair and maintenance. We’re currently spending $12.8 billion annually.

· Dams get a grade of D. More than 4,000 dams in the United States are currently rated “deficient.” The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates we need to invest $21 billion to repair them.

· Levees get a grade of D-. The nation’s estimated 100,000 miles of levees, originally built to protect farmland, are increasingly protecting developed communities. The National Committee on Levee Safety estimates we need to spend roughly $100 billion to repair our levee systems.

· Wastewater systems get a grade of D. We need to spend an estimated $298 billion over the next 20 years to bring our waste and storm water systems up to snuff, the ASCE says.

The ASCE studiously avoids mention of climate change, so it’s hard to know if the figures it cites take into account the added stress of severe weather patterns associated with global warming. Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the current series of floods, droughts, tornadoes, and wildfires in the Midwest and West have given us previews of what’s in store. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a $20 billion plan (the total cost is expected to be much higher than that) to build an extensive network of flood walls, levees, and bulkheads to protect the city from rises in sea level and storm surges. “This is urgent work, and it must begin now,” Bloomberg said.

Similarly, the ASCE report gives roadways a higher grade this year than four years ago only because in the interim there have been “targeted efforts” to improve their condition, targeted efforts that are largely the result of huge federal expenditures in economic stimulus funds to bolster a tanking economy. At the same time mass transit continues to go begging. The ASCE notes that funding of mass transit improvements has declined even as demand for mass transit has increased. Forty five percent of American households lack any access to mass transit, the report says, and where there is access it’s often inadequate. Meanwhile many systems are reducing services and increasing fares.

In an era when politicians and voters are obsessed with cutting government spending, don’t expect to hear many mayors—or governors, senators, or representatives—calling for major infrastructure initiatives of the sort New York’s Bloomberg has proposed. (It’s been pointed out that Bloomberg won’t be in office when the bills to pay for his plans come due.) What we can expect is that rising interest rates will make infrastructure investments today significantly more costly than they have been. And don’t forget: whatever money goes to repairing infrastructure is money not spent on other public services, including, for example, schools, public parks, and aid to the poor.

In his seminal 1977 book Autonomous Technology, Langdon Winner talked about the “technological imperative,” referring to the vast web of supporting systems needed to sustain our technological commitments. As Winner put it, those commitments set in motion “a chain of reciprocal dependence” that requires “not only the means but also the entire set of means to the means.”

The automobile culture is the most obvious example. Our commitment to cars has obligated us to build and maintain massively complex fuel and repair systems to keep them running, massively complex traffic systems to keep them from running into each other, massively complex police and ambulance systems to take care of the mess they make when they do run into each other, etcetera, etcetera. All that in addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve already spent on roads, bridges, and tunnels, and the hundreds of billions of dollars more we’ll spend in perpetuity to keep those roads, bridges, and tunnels in working condition.

Under the best of conditions, all of these systems can be said to work marginally well. But as the ASCE report shows, the cracks in the seams are becoming increasingly evident, even as the costs of staving off progressive decline are becoming increasingly steep.

The bottom line: When times were good we constructed a culture based on some hugely profligate toys. While doing so we didn’t give a lot of thought to what it would take to keep the whole thing running in the long term. In other words, we grabbed the cookie that was on the table in front of us.

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Is modern culture being overwhelmed by an epidemic of childishness? José Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1930, thought so. Annals of Childish Behavior™ chronicles contemporary examples of that epidemic. The childish citizen, Ortega said, puts “no limit on caprice” and behaves as if “everything is permitted to him and that he has no obligations.”

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Doug Hill is a journalist and independent scholar who has recently completed a book on the history and philosophy of technology. This post also available on his blog The Question Concerning Technology.

I was thinking this morning about two subjects that don’t usually go together, skeuomorphs and morality.

A skeuomorph is a design element applied to a product that looks as if it’s functional but really isn’t. Its real purpose is to evoke a sense of familiarity and comfort. The literary critic N. Katherine Hayles cites as an example the dashboard of her Toyota Camry, which is made of synthetic plastic molded to look as if it’s stitched fabric.

Software designers use lots of skeuomorphs for their user interfaces; examples include the “pages” that seem to “turn” in e-readers and word processing programs. Hayles calls skeuomorphs “threshold devices.” They “stitch together past and future,” she says, “reassuring us that even as some things change, others persist.”

For a few months last year Apple Computer took a lot of flack from the design cognoscenti for its dedication to skeuomorphs; the linen texture that appears as background on the iPod and the wooden bookshelf used for the iBook display were frequently cited examples. The company’s skeuomorph aesthetic was said to be a legacy of Steve Jobs, who was convinced people needed recognizable touchstones to ease them through the uncharted expanses of cyberspace.

Enough! cried the cognoscenti. The time for such reassurance has long since ended! So it was that cheers greeted the firing in October of Apple’s software leader, Scott Forstall, carrier of the skeuomorphic torch, as well as the introduction of Microsoft’s sleek new Metro Design, which doesn’t pretend to be anything other than pixels on a screen.

Although I’m pretty sensitive to the look and feel of things, my thoughts about skeuomorphs this morning had nothing to do with user interfaces. Rather I was thinking that perhaps the idea of a skeuomorph might be applied outside the domain of design, specifically to the realm of ethics.

It seems likely that in an era of mass-market technology morality has become – not always, but often – a skeuomorph: a feature that’s retained for the sake of appearances rather than any practical function. Any function, that is, other than that of reassuring people that even as some things change, others persist.

These admittedly dark thoughts were prompted by reading the recent cover story in the New York Times magazine, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.” Reporter Michael Moss describes in brilliant detail the lengths to which America’s biggest food and beverage conglomerates have gone to design products we can’t get enough of, literally. Their profits and our waistlines get fatter. They prosper, we don’t.

Moss opens the piece by telling the story of an extraordinary summit meeting of food industry leaders, convened in Minneapolis in 1999 by a Pillsbury executive named James Behnke. Among those in attendance were the presidents or CEOs of Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, Mars, and Coca-Cola.

Behnke called the meeting to discuss the implications for their businesses of the nation’s skyrocketing rates of obesity. Health officials and physicians’ groups were sounding alarms: Obesity was a health-care catastrophe in the making, especially among children, and the products sold by the men at Behnke’s meeting were a major cause of the problem.

Behnke, a chemist with a doctorate in food science, believed it was time the industry addressed the obesity issue, not only because it was threatening to become a public relations liability, but also because the health officials and physician’s groups were right: the industry did bear some responsibility for undermining the health of its customers. His feelings were shared by a vice president from Nabisco named Michael Mudd, who presented to the assembled executives an obesity primer, describing with the help of some 114 slides the scale of the epidemic and the threat it posed to the packaged food industry.

Mudd then offered a series of recommendations. First, he said, the industry should acknowledge that its products were more fattening than they needed to be. Second, the industry should vow to do something about it. He suggested a three-step course of remedial action that began with a program of scientific research to determine what was causing people to eat more than was good for them. Once that was determined, the industry could reformulate its products to reduce their harmful ingredients and devise a nutritional code for its marketing and advertising campaigns.

It would be lovely to report that Mudd’s presentation was greeted with a standing ovation and an impassioned, consensual vow to go forth and reform America’s packaged foods marketplace for the sake of the people. That didn’t happen. According to Moss, the next person to speak was Stephen Sanger, who at the time was leading General Mills to record profits by selling just the sort of fat-, sugar-, and salt-filled products being blamed for the obesity explosion.

Sanger wanted no part of Mudd’s remedial program, or, for that matter, his guilt. General Mills had always acted perfectly responsibly, he said, not only toward its customers but also toward its shareholders. Consumers buy what they like, and they like products that taste good. General Mills was in the business of selling products that satisfy those tastes and had no intention of doing anything else. His competitors, Sanger suggested, should do the same. On that note, Moss reports, the summit meeting ended.

That these captains of industry would proceed, with endless creativity and ambition, to fill the shelves of American supermarkets with mountains of unhealthy, wasteful, dishonest products, knowing the pernicious effects those products would likely have on the well-being of millions of consumers, was the source of my dark thoughts this morning.

It’s hard not to conclude from examples such as these – and there are many others – that in the pursuit of corporate power moral restraint becomes – not always, but often – a skeuomorph, a decorative element that pretends, for reassurance’s sake, to be functional, but really isn’t. There’s nothing new about greed, of course. The difference is the scale of mendacity advanced technologies put at our disposal, and the ease with which checks on mendacity are discarded. The only justifications required: consumers will buy it and stockholders will profit.

The divorce of technology from morality is a theme that was sounded repeatedly by the philosopher who has most influenced my thinking on matters such as these, Jacques Ellul.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, Ellul pictured technology as a unified entity that relentlessly and aggressively expands its range of influence. Ellul used the term “technique” to underscore his conviction that technology must be seen as a way of thinking as well as an ensemble of machines and machine systems. Technique includes the methods and strategies that drive those systems, as well as the quantitative mentality that drives those methods and strategies. The invention, production, distribution, and marketing of addictive junk foods are all manifestations of technique.

The single overriding value of technique, Ellul repeatedly said, is efficiency. Worries about morality are obstacles in the attainment of efficiency, except where the brutality of efficiency’s pursuit causes concerns that might produce resistance, and interference. “It is a principle characteristic of technique that it refuses to tolerate moral judgments,” Ellul wrote in 1954. “It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain.”

Moral “flourishes” remain, he added, but only for the sake of appearances. In reality, “None of that has any more importance than the ruffled sunshade of McCormick’s first reaper. When these moral flourishes overly encumber technical progress, they are discarded – more or less speedily, with more or less ceremony, but with determination nonetheless. This is the state we are in today.”

At the time of the food summit in Minneapolis, it’s clear James Behnke hadn’t fully acclimated himself to those conditions. Stephen Sanger apparently had.

(For a related post, see Autonomy continued: Technology or Capitalism?)

Doug Hill is a journalist and independent scholar who has recently completed a book on the history and philosophy of technology. This post also available on his blog The Question Concerning Technology.

Given that we’re not in the habit of thinking too much where our technological passions might lead us, I’ve been heartened over the past year to see an unusual willingness to confront the potentially devastating impact of the robotics revolution on human employment.

It was a question that was hard to avoid, given the global recession and the widening gap between rich and poor. It’s obvious that rapid advances in automation are offering employers ever-increasing opportunities to drive up productivity and profits while keeping ever-fewer employees on the payroll. It’s obvious as well that those opportunities will continue to increase in the future.

Some credit for opening up the conversation on the implications of this progression goes to two professors at MIT, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. Their book Race Against the Machine, published late in 2011, had a man-bites-dog quality that attracted a lot of attention. We don’t necessarily expect experts from the temple of technology to question whether technology might be leading us in directions not entirely favorable to humankind.

“The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair,” said the New York Times, “whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.”

A series of similar assessments appeared at intervals through the year, among them an essay by Christopher Mims in MIT’s Technology Review in May (“Is Automation the Handmaiden of Inequality?“), an Atlantic.com commentary by Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University, in October (“The Consequences of Machine Intelligence“), and three New York Times pieces in December, two by Paul Krugman (“Rise of the Robots” and “Robots and Robber Barons“), and one by Brynjolfsson and McAfee (“Jobs, Productivity and the Great Decoupling“).

Also in December, the perennial technological enthusiast Kevin Kelly weighed in with his views on the automation revolution in a Wired cover story (“Better Than Human,” published online in December, in print in January). Although Kelly skipped over the short-term challenges that worry Brynjolfsson and McAfee, in the end his conclusion was the same as theirs: The future for workers depends not on competing with machines but on learning to leverage the advantages they offer to get ahead. As Kelly put it, “This is not a race against the machines,” he wrote. “If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines….Let the robots take the jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.”

Probably the oddest recent entry in this discussion, and the one that intrigued me most, came not from an economist or journalist, but from a press release issued by a company hoping to capitalize on the robot revolution. I’d like to dwell a bit on the details of that release here, seeing as how it had some outstanding man-bites-dog qualities of its own.

The release was issued in November by a San Francisco-based startup called Momentum Machines. It announced the arrival of a hamburger-making machine that will revolutionize fast food as we know it. (The robot pictured at the top of this piece is from a different company.)

The surprise isn’t that the release promises a product with revolutionary benefits. The surprise is that it acknowledges those benefits might be accompanied by some troubling side effects. In doing so the release embodies with unusual clarity the tension that exists between those two conflicting outcomes.

Momentum Machines claims its hamburger machine can churn out 360 fully prepared and packaged hamburgers an hour. Not just ordinary burgers, but gourmet burgers, expertly cooked and seasoned to order. The quality of the product, however, isn’t the principal value the release seeks to promote.

Its headline centers instead on the machine’s astonishing economic benefits. “The Restaurant Industry Is The Most Labor Intensive Industry In The Country,” it reads. “Our Technology Can Save The QSR [Quick Service Restaurant] Industry $9 Billion/Year In Wages.”

The release goes on to promise that Momentum Machine’s machine (they’ve yet to come up with a name for it) “replaces all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant. It does everything employees can do except better.”

The unexpected twist appears in a three-paragraph statement at the release’s end.

Apparently recognizing that its earlier promise to replace every line cook in the business carries some unpleasant implications, for line cooks if not their employers, the company expresses a desire to help retrain people displaced by its technology. To help smooth their “transition,” the company says it will offer opportunities for technical education at a discount. The suggestion is that fry cooks will be transformed into engineers, after which they will participate in further automating the fast food industry.

The release then ventures into territory seldom explored in the annals of public relations: economic theory.

“The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries,” it says, “and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment.”

This increase is the result, the release says, of three factors: New employees are hired to build the robots; the robots allow the company to expand its “frontiers of production,” which requires more employees; and automation produces savings that can be passed along to customers, thereby stimulating the economy.

“We take these issues very seriously,” the release says, “so please feel free to tell us how we can help with this transition.”

The release also encourages anyone with questions to get in touch, so I did. I asked for any references the company could provide to support its contention that economists “generally accept” that technologies increase employment, and also for more information on the retraining assistance the company planned to offer displaced employees.

To my surprise, a couple of weeks later I received a response from the Founder and President of Momentum Machines, Alexandros Vardakostas. His note was cordial, but not very enlightening. It provided no direct answers to my questions, only a link to a Wikipedia article on technological unemployment, aka “the Luddite Fallacy.”

“Hi Doug. Hope all is well you,” Vardakostas wrote. “Read this to learn more. Warm regards. Alex.”

True enough, Wikipedia’s article does describe the theories of a number of economists who agree that technological advance ultimately leads to an increase in employment. It can’t be considered an unqualified endorsement of that position, however, given that Wikipedia says its “factual accuracy” is disputed, and that it needs “additional citations for verification.” The article also pays little attention to whether today’s revolutionary advances in automation may be creating changes in the economics of labor that render previous theories, even if they were historically true, obsolete. That’s the question asked by most of the articles I’ve cited above.

As we rush toward a super-automated future, plenty of other questions remain unanswered. Brynjolfsson and McAfee, for example, propose innovation through entrepreneurship as a leading solution to employment stagnation, and toward that end recommend various deregulatory measures that will allow new businesses to flourish unencumbered.

I’m no economist, but it seems fair to ask whether measures of the sort they prescribe might simultaneously open the way for even greater exploitation or elimination of labor. Automation typically puts more power in the hands of management, after all, and there’s no guarantee that the vast majority of post-automation jobs will be any more satisfying, economically or spiritually, than the jobs they replace.

For example, Brynjolfsson and McAfee cite as models for the future the thousands of entrepreneurs now exploiting the new opportunities for employment offered by the likes of eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Apple’s App Store, and Android Marketplace. Even if we take for granted that such traditional benefits as health insurance, vacation pay, maternity leave, and pensions are off the table, one wonders how many of those entrepreneurs are making what used to be considered a middle-class income.

Not many, at least in the apps market, according to a recent article in the New York Times. The article makes it clear that winning big in that race with the machines is only slightly more likely than hitting it big in the lottery, and that the people who are really cashing in on the app market are the stockholders of Apple and Google. The headline tells the story: “As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living.”

That article demonstrates perfectly a phenomenon Brynjolfsson and McAfee do address: The emergence, due to the unprecedented economies of scale offered by various technologies, of a super-star marketplace, one in which a few people become fabulously wealthy while everyone else scrambles desperately to break into their golden circle. Kevin Kelly’s vision in this regard is positively Panglossian. Let the machines take over the jobs, he says, while we dream of new work that matters. Take it from one who knows: You don’t get paid for dreaming.

Perhaps the most pressing question is whether an economy shaped by super-automated techno-entrepreneurs will be sustainable. We have an abundance of evidence today that another historical truism of economic theory – that growth solves every problem – may also be obsolete. Certainly the environmental disasters we’ve created suggest that perhaps the time has come to consider a different option: restraint.

Momentum Machines, for example, believes that technologies like its hamburger machine will open new “frontiers of production.” Forgive me, but I’m not sure the frontiers of production opened by previous advances in fast food technology have proved entirely salubrious.

These are some of the reasons why I was hoping Momentum Machines might provide more detailed answers to my questions. I’ve sent Alex Vardakostas a second email, asking for elaboration and passing along links to the aforementioned articles. So far no response, which could mean he’s disinterested in further discussion, or simply that he’s too busy opening new frontiers of production to entertain quarrelsome emails from bloggers.

Doug Hill is a journalist and independent scholar who has recently completed a book on the history and philosophy of technology. This post also available on his blog The Question Concerning Technology.

Brad Pitt’s latest movie, which opens today, is being described as an attack on capitalism, at least as it’s currently practiced in America.

When “Killing Them Softly” premiered at Cannes last spring, an article in the Los Angeles Times called it a “post-Occupy” film and “what the documentary ‘Inside Job’ might look like if it was a fictional feature.”

“Inside Job,” you may recall, is director Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning examination of how Wall Street speculation and duplicity led to our current economic crisis. The action in “Killing Them Softly” takes place during the stock and housing market crashes that got the current crisis rolling; visible in the background are clips of presidential candidates Obama and McCain making promises (still unfulfilled) of economic reform. Director Andrew Dominik’s underlying theme, according to the Times, “is that U.S. capitalism is deeply flawed, and that government, whether Democrat or Republican, has let down its people.”

I mention this here because “Killing Them Softly” demonstrates a theme I’ve written about in this space: the symbiotic relationship between capitalism and technology. It also demonstrates the contradictions inherent in trying to use the tools of that symbiotic relationship to attack it.

“Killing Them Softly” was financed by Megan Ellison, the daughter of Larry Ellison, the co-founder and chief executive officer of the software company, Oracle. The third richest man in America, Ellison is reportedly worth more than $35 billion, a fortune produced by that magically powerful combination of – you guessed it – technology and capitalism. Brad Pitt, of course, is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, an icon whose stature is a product of that same magical combination (in addition to good looks and acting talent).

As I noted in my earlier commentary, you can argue that capitalism is the driving force behind technology or you can argue that technology is the driving force behind capitalism. That’s what I mean when I say the relationship between the two is symbiotic. Sometimes technology stimulates capitalism, other times capitalism stimulates technology. At their present state of development in advanced technological/capitalist societies, neither could exist without the other.

I’m an admirer of Brad Pitt, who, like George Clooney, has gone out of his way to use his Hollywood clout to make meaningful movies, both as works of cinematic art and as commentaries on important issues of the day. Not every film Pitt and Clooney make fits that category, but they’re obviously trying. The problem, as I’m sure they know, is that those films owe their existence to a system that’s responsible, in many ways, for the injustices they’re trying to address. If the films are successful they also feed that system.

There’s also a contradiction implicit in addressing real-life issues through a technological medium that sells dreams. “Killing Them Softly,” says the Times, “is a hit-man movie, albeit an arthouse one, and contains many of the schemes and stylized violence you might expect from a film with that label.” This is reminiscent of “The Godfather,” surely one of the most profitable anti-capitalist films in Hollywood history. I’m not saying that art can’t have an impact. I am saying that we don’t strike a meaningful blow against the empire by spending ten dollars or more to watch a make-believe assassin pretend to kill people.

My favorite example of this contradiction is the DreamWorks logo, a silhouette of a boy with a fishing pole, sitting, one imagines, by a peaceful lake on a summer’s afternoon, lost in a reverie. This, of course, is exactly the sort of old-fashioned pastime that DreamWorks, with all the technological and marketing power at its disposal, is doing its best to make obsolete. Boys won’t be spending their summer afternoons lolling peacefully by lakes if DreamWorks has anything to say about it. Rather, they’ll be sitting inside multiplexes in shopping malls, hypnotized by reveries conjured for them by the latest extravaganzas of computer animation.

This post also available on Doug Hill’s blog The Question Concerning Technology; It is an updated version of an essay he posted last May, when “Killing Me Softly” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

As many have noted, technology – specifically, email accounts – played a central role in the ongoing scandal involving the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. “Harassing” emails sent to socialite Jill Kelley led to the FBI’s discovery of emails that revealed Petraeus’ affair with Paula Broadwell; other emails led to the discovery of questionable exchanges between Kelly and another top-ranking official, General John R. Allen; subsequent searches found classified documents on the hard drives of individuals who weren’t authorized to have them.

With the indispensible assistance of the media, reverberations have been ricocheting furiously up and down the corridors of power and gossip from Washington and Langley to Florida, Afghanistan, and Libya since the scandal broke last Friday. It’s not the first time these elements have combined to produce a sensation, but it’s the messiest we’ve seen lately.

The Petraeus scandal demonstrates the dynamics of a phenomenon known in organization theory as the “tightly coupled system.” The concept was introduced by Charles Perrow in his 1999 book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. Computer programmers use the term to describe systems in which central processing units share some or all of the system’s memory and input/output resources.

The elements at play in the Petraeus scandal are more heavily weighted toward the human than the examples Perrow deals with in his book, which include nuclear and petrochemical plants, airplanes, mines, and weapons systems. Nonetheless, because his emphasis is so strongly systemic, and because the systems in question always rely on some combination of technology and human beings, his ideas can be fairly applied.

As the name implies, tight coupling describes a system in which an intimate connection exists, intentionally or not, between its component parts. This connection creates a potentially volatile interdependence as changes in one element of the system quickly reverberate throughout, setting off a chain reaction of associated effects. A simple example is a freeway at rush hour, when a stalled car in one lane causes a backup that stretches for miles.

The stalled car example demonstrates, as does the Petraeus scandal, that in tightly coupled systems small events can quickly mushroom into crises on a different order of magnitude. After-the-fact accident analyses, Perrow says, consistently reveal “the banality and triviality behind most catastrophes.”

Perrow writes somewhat ruefully that all too often it’s the human factor that introduces the fatal flaw into technological systems that are, because of their complexity, already primed for error. “Time and again warnings are ignored, unnecessary risks taken, sloppy work done, deception and downright lying practiced,” he says. “Routine sins” plus technology equal “very nonroutine” consequences.

Perrow also stresses that, as careful as we think we are, it’s impossible to anticipate every consequence of any action taken within a tightly coupled system – the potential reverberations are beyond our comprehension. What we see isn’t only unexpected, he adds, it’s often, at least for awhile, “incomprehensible.” This can be true either because we’re not aware of the consequences as they gather momentum, or because we’re aware of them but can’t bring ourselves to believe they’re really happening. One assumes the principles in the Petraeus scandal have experienced both conditions.

Note: An earlier essay by Doug Hill discussed the part that the dynamics of tightly coupled systems played in the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

“Everything is Connected” is a recurring feature named in honor of the late Barry Commoner’s four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Photo Credit: Washington Post/ISAF via Reuters; Image, physicsworld.com

This post also available on Doug Hill’s blog The Question Concerning Technology.

©Doug Hill, 2012