by Nancy Williams, Associate Professor

These aren't new questions, and Stephen Talbott adds his voice to the chorus of answers urging caution. His book explores not just the gifts but the dark side of the technology that put us on the Information Superhighway and concludes that, because we have allowed machines to shape our consciousness, we have also allowed them to limit our reach instead of expanding our horizons. Furthermore, he says, they'll continue to control our lives in subtly constricting ways unless we begin to pay attention to how and why we use them.

Talbott admits early on that his book is unbalanced, a reflection of his own life and relationship to machines. He's a computer "geek" with 14 years experience in the industry, having worked for the past several years as a senior editor for O'Reilly and Associates, the book's publisher. He recently relocated to rural New York -- a move made possible by the very technology he worries and writes about: the computers that allow him to practice his art and craft outside the "technology belt."

He is not blind to the irony here. An editor penciled a note in the margin of one draft: "How can you say this when it's your own life you're describing?" That's right, he says. Writing his book cost him damaged spinal nerves and general ill health from weeks of sitting and starting at a computer terminal. It hurt his family life and caused his existence to be dictated wholly by machines -- but that's what forced him to look technology in the eye and do something about his relationship to it.

What Talbott did to control his own dance with the demon is partly the subject of this book, a work he describes as more of a "symptom" of what's wrong with society than a cure for its ailments. That it doesn't propose a formula for fixing the problems is excusable because we'll never have all the answers to the questions: "...there never can be solutions in human affairs. There are only passages." (p. 24) Better to be awake and alert while navigating those passages than dozing along, thinking everything will be all right. Readers might accuse him of over- intellectualizing, he admits, or not answering his own questions, but his real purpose is a thoughtful examination of the ways we use machines.

The book works best when Talbott writes essays on topics such as whether disembodied cyber-communities are possible, whether we really want a global village, and the difference between access to information and the accumulation of wisdom. It is weakest when he waxes abstract, about whether reality has a future or humans can transcend computation. He wants to link talk about the practical impacts of our technologies with discussion of post-modern theories of meaning and linguistics, for which he relies heavily on the work of Owen Barfield, a philologist who studied the evolution of consciousness in the early 20th Century. Talbott applies Barfield's thought to the field of artificial intelligence. The main problem here is that the theoretical second half of the book is not solidly linked to the first half.

Hence the need for the book's final chapter, entitled "What this book was about." Although it flirts around the edges of abstraction, this is in many ways the most provocative chapter, bringing Jacques Ellul (The Technological Bluff, 1990) into the argument. Ellul says our inability to master technology has rendered us powerless against it; that technology has swallowed our culture because we've given up trying to understand it. Talbott recommends Ellul as medicine for anyone still "enchanted by the glossy allure" of modern technology, even though he finds him slightly more pessimistic than necessary.

For ethicists, the book's stength lies in the straightforward essays that make up the first two sections ("Man, Computers, and Community" and "Computers in Education"). These examine values such as community, stewardship of resources, human caring, freedom and the education of children, and whether computer technology can be cut to fit those values. A good example is the "Children and the Machine" chapter, in which Talbott examines the educational theories of Seymour Papert and finds them wanting. Papert is the creator of the Logo computer language used by young children to learn programming; his work says abstract reasoning is an obstacle to educational progress, that what we need is a return to more concrete ways of knowing. In light of these findings, Talbott is astonished that Papert's solution for defeating abstraction is to rely on computer technology, and he spends most of this lively essay making a case for why this is impossible.

The Future Does Not Compute is an ambitious book that wants editing. There are gems within these 502 pages, but readers will need patience to dig them out.

UP to the USU Department of Communication Home Page