Dr. A. Prabaharan's

Technology like other inventions are doomed by anti modern folks. Now it is up to the people to use it for the right purpose.

Andrew Brown writes in The Hindu (2 July 2009),

Last year, Nick Carr wrote a forceful article for the Atlantic magazine, arguing that Google was making us stupid (http://bit.ly/google32). It’s not just Google, of course, but the whole chaotic wave of technology that seems to be sweeping us into the future, surrounded and sometimes battered by the flotsam and wreckage of old certainties. And that was before Twitter hit the big time.

This month’s issue of the magazine has a riposte by Jamais Cascio, who has spent a long time in the future, and who believes that technology has already made us enormously smarter (http://bit.ly/google33). This won’t happen, he says, because of the kind of dramatic stuff that crops up in conventional speculation, like digital brain implants. No, it is all around us already, in the web and all the things that it lets us do. The trouble is the things the web lets us do aren’t actually all that intelligent. Cascio gets round this by redefining intelligence as “fluid.”

Fluid intelligence, he says, is defined as: “The ability to find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge. Fluid intelligence doesn’t look much like the capacity to memorise and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower. [But] the information sea isn’t going to dry up, and relying on cognitive habits evolved and perfected in an era of limited information flow — and limited information access — is futile. Strengthening our fluid intelligence is the only viable approach to navigating the age of constant connectivity.” We’ve heard this before, and more pithily, when the borg queen said resistance was futile. But it doesn’t have to be boiled down. You can get a detailed version into something scarcely longer than a tweet: “Sure, we can’t read or write complicated sentences, and nobody can remember anything for longer than it takes to cut and paste but what does this matter when we have ‘fluid intelligence?’”

This kind of optimism depends on a number of assumptions and stereotypes. It depends on an absurd view of intelligence, as if there were nothing between automation and intuition. Of course there are circumstances in which following the old procedural rules no longer work. But they are the times when we need most to cultivate the habits of disciplined thought, to master the confusion. This kind of problem crops up constantly in armies, where disciplined and stereotyped behaviour is both essential and sometimes lethal. Armies value two qualities in their officers besides leadership: initiative, and the capacity to recognise the problems that need a new kind of solution — and distinguish them from those that don’t. Those are the skills that do the jobs that “fluid intelligence” is supposed to and neither skill depends on computer networks nor is much nourished by them.

The real problem with Cascio’s optimism is deeper and appears in his justified dismissal of most futuristic hype about brain implants and the like. Who would put the 2009 chip in their brain when in three years competitors would have upgraded to the 2012 version? This is a good question, but it should be carried further.

We don’t have to put chips in our brain to change the ways we think. All we need do is form new habits. Children brought up in front of the television have in effect rechipped their brains compared to those brought up only with books; and children brought up in front of computers are different again.

It follows that if we’ve been dumbed down by technology, we may be unable to recognise it. Students copying from Wikipedia think they are smarter than their parents, in the same way drunks think they are able to drive. But it’s important here to worry about the right things. It’s not the technology that damages our ability to think. It’s the habits of mind that technology promotes. The habits of disciplined, careful thought that linear reading promotes are more useful for understanding a changing world than the ability to pay superficial attention to five different streams of information. I don’t think computers make it more difficult. It has always been difficult. But if they allow us to pretend we don’t need it any more, then they are really helping us to become a lot more stupid, fluidly or not.

Open source sounds alturistic. If its promise is true the world will accept dumping the heavy profit making sources.

The Times of India interviews Jonathan Schwartz (22 June 2009)

The CPM has long supported the free software movement and launched a poll website based on such software. The BJP’s L K Advani recently threw his 
weight behind open source technologies. Jonathan Schwartz , CEO of Sun Microsystems, tells Sujit John that open source indeed is the future:

Is the rate of adoption of open source technologies growing?

It’s accelerating rapidly. And with economic pressures mounting, free enterprise software is looking more and more compelling. Open office, our free office productivity suite, is now downloaded 1,00,000 times a day. A year ago, it was half that. Downloads of Glassfish, our open source application server, has also doubled in the last one year, and that of MySQL, the open source database, has increased 30 per cent. This is partly because of our awareness campaigns, but more because of the IT budget cuts, which push you to look for the best free software available to run your business systems.

Where do you see the fastest adoptions?

The fastest adoptions are in places where there’s rapid economic expansion, good bandwidth and large student populations. We have seen some of the highest adoptions in India because of the first and third reasons. Universities are major seeding grounds for open source innovations. And when these students join the workforce or start their own companies, they disproportionately tend to select free software. We did a poll of 2,000 university students and found that less than 6 per cent knew Oracle database, but more than 90 per cent knew MySQL.

How are big companies and governments looking at it?

Hundred per cent of Fortune 500 companies are now using free software. Ten years ago that was barely 10 per cent. We see household names like Google, Yahoo, Sun being built entirely on free software. Governments have been amongst the most aggressive endorsers and users of open source software. Governments in developing countries especially have decided that they do not want to architect into their society a dependence on an American proprietary software company. For instance, governments are adopting open office as a means of escaping Microsoft Office. If every Indian citizen had to pay $500 for an Office suite, that’s good for Microsoft but not for India. We have seen this in India, Brazil, across Africa, the British government recently standardised on open source software.

How much is the overall cost advantage?

The initial cost of putting in free software, including service and support fees, will be just 15 to 20 per cent of proprietary software. A mid-size enterprise may run Oracle and pay $10 million a year for a database software. For an equivalent licence from Sun, they will pay $7,50,000 to $1 million. For application servers, we tend to be even less expensive. There’s a roughly 10:1 price advantage. And this year, we are at a point where we will achieve feature parity equivalent scale, quality and functionality with proprietary peers. Open source is generally more stable and better supported.

Modernization has brought a heavy pollution of Earth. There is no stopping of pollution. Different forms of pollutants have wreaked havoc. From air pollution to noise pollution to water pollution natural resources have been spoiled. In the post modern age there is a new and deadly form of pollution is silently shattering the nature. The intensity of electronic pollution is very strong. As more and more electronic gadgets are used, pollution coming from these equipments is destroying the human lives and atmosphere. Not only the current generation is suffering but also the generations to come will be made to pay heavily for the present mindless electronic pollution.

Above 200 million Internet searches everyday creates huge greenhouse gas emissions. The amount of electricity consumed and the less used electronic gadgets dumped are other pollution fuelling factors. A google search generates 7g of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to boiling a cup of coffee in a keetle. One wonders why alternative source of energy like solar are not used for computer usage and other popular electronic usages.

John Buckley of Carbonfrootprint.com of Great Britain estimates that a Google search yields 1g to 10g of CO2. Personal computer operation per hour generates 40g to 80g of CO2 per hour.

Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist in Harvard University is researching on the environmental impact of computing. He is concentrating on the amount of carbon di oxide and other polluting gas emissions from electronic gadgets. He says “Google operates huge centres around the world that consume a great deal of power”

Information technology and airline industries contribute 4% of the global CO2 emissions. When one types a word for search in google it goes to many computers which are competing against each other. Even it may reach servers across the world.

According to Wissner-Gross “Simple website viewing generates about 0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises about tenfold to about 0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

While these statistics sound horrific unconcerned usage of electronic gadgets are alarming eco warriors. The producers, consumers and advertisers of electronic goods should be reined in. They must be pressurized to introduce green technologies and minimize consumption of electronic gadgets. All these three players are equally responsible for the large-scale electronic pollution in the world.

Without an early action electronic pollution will pull the last pillar of the living earth. It seems that all are contributing for the harmful cause without any awareness. The inter-governmental panel on climate change, UN bodies, local governments, users are yet to embark on the electronic pollution control. Early it is done the better for the generations.