We believe ourselves to be living in a democracy because from time to time we get to vote on candidates for public office. Yet our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological inventions that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect the ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves. Unlike human beings accused of crimes, all technologies should be assumed guilty of dangerous effects until proven innocent. No new technology should ever be introduced, until its ultimate effects are known and explained to the population. This is necessary because once it has been introduced, getting rid of any technology is practically impossible—so much of life gets reorganized around it and so much power and vested interest attaches to its continuance. Of course, this vision is itself practically impossible. Many technologies are too technically complex for the average person, like myself, not technically trained, to understand them. Also, in many instances it is impossible to identify all effects of a technology in advance of its introduction, especially those which do not lend themselves to scientific proofs and evidences. However, where does this leave us? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Since it is impossible fully to grasp or explain many technologies, do we then go ahead with them? Do we trust our industrial leaders? Do we merely let them shoot craps with our existence? And if we do foresee undesirable effects from a technology, what means exist for then getting rid of that technology? Are there are? And what does all of this mean to the ultimate control of our lives? There is the possibility of an alternative way of thinking about a problem. If we believe in democratic processes, then we must also believe in resisting whatever subverts democracy. In the case of technology, we might wish to seek a line beyond which democratic control is not possible and then say that any technology which goes beyond this line is taboo. Although it might be difficult to define this line precisely, it might not be so difficult to know when some technologies are clearly over it. Any technology which by its nature encourages autocracy would surely be over such a line. Any technology that benefits only a small number of people to the physical, emotional, political, and psychological detriment of large numbers of other people would also certainly be over that line. In fact, one could make the argument that any technology whose operations and results are too complex for the majority of people to understand would also be beyond this line of democratic control. Can we really say any longer that a reason to go ahead with a technology is that it is too complex for people to grasp, or too clumsy or difficult to dismantle? Either we believe in democratic control or we do not. If we do, then anything which is beyond such control is certainly anathema to democracy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

At the moment our only choices are personal ones Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say “no” to television. We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong. However, while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before. Like Huxley’s “savage,” or like today’s young people who drop out to rural farms, we find ourselves even further removed from participation in the central processes that direct our society, our culture, our politics, and our economic organization. We are struggling in a classic double blind. Because eliminating television seems impossible, and personal withdrawal is in some ways not enough, at least at a systematic level, most of us naturally attempt to reform matters. In the case of television we have worked to improve and democratize its output. However, a central argument of these reports has been that television, for the most part, cannot possibly yield to reform. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself to the same extent that violence is inherent in guns. No new age of well-meaning television executives can change what the medium does to people who watch it. Its effects on body and mind are inseparable from the viewing experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

As for the political effects, if we switched from the commercial control of television to, say, governmental control, as in Sweden or Argentina or Russian, this would not change the essential political relationships: the unification of experience, the one speaking to the many, the inevitable training in autocracy that these conditions engender. Similarly, no  change is programming format from the present violent, antisocial tendencies to the more “prosocial” visions of education and psychologists will mean much compared with the training in passivity, the destruction of creativity, the dulling of communicative abilities that any extended exposure to television inevitably produces. This even assuming that the programming could be substantially changed which, as we have seen, is highly doubtful. No influx of talented directors or writers can offset the technical limits of the medium itself. No matter who is in control, the medium remains confined to its cold, narrow culverts of hyperactive information. Nothing and no one can change this, nor can anyone change how television’s technical limits confine awareness. As the person who gazed at streams becomes streamlike, so as we watch television we inexorably evolve into creatures whose bodies and minds become television-like. True, if we banned all advertising, that would allay many negative effects of the medium and diminish the power of the huge corporations that are re-creating life in their image. True, if we banned all broadcast television, leaving only cable system, that would reduce the effect of the centralization of control. More kinds of people might have access to the medium, but they would still have to submit to the dictates of the technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

As they used the machine, they would find their material and their own consciousness changing to suit the technological form. The people who use television become more like each other, the Indian who learns television is an Indian no longer. If we reduced the number of broadcast hours per day, or the number of days per week that television is permitted to broadcast, as many countries have, that would surely be an improvement. If we eliminated all crimes shows and other sensational entertainment, it would reveal what an inherently boring medium this is, producing awareness of artificial fixation despite boredom. If we banned all nature shows or news broadcasts from television, due to the unavoidable and very dangerous distortions and aberrations which are inherent in televising these subjects, then this would leave other, better-qualified media to report them to us. The result would be an increased awareness of far more complex, complete and subtle information. If we outlawed networks, there would be a new emphasis on local events, bringing us nearer to issues upon which we might have some direct personal effect. All of these changes in television would be to the good, in my opinion, and worthy of support, but do you believe that they would be any easier to achieve than the outright elimination of the whole technology? I do not think so. Considering how difficult it has been merely to reduce the volume of the kind of advertising that is directed at our children, and considering the overwhelming power of the interests who control communications in this country, we might just as well put our efforts toward trying for the whole in one. It will take no greater amount of organization and it does not suffer the inhibitions of ambiguity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Imagining a World free of television, I can envision only beneficial effects. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer see fuzzy and reduced versions of drama or forests will be more than offset by the actual experience of life and environment directly lived, and the resurgence of the human feeling tht will accompany this. What is lost by the unavailability of escape from what may be the painful conditions of many people’s lives, might be more than offset by the concrete realization that life had been made painful, more to some than to others, and the desire to do something about this, to attack whatever forces have conspired to make this so. The average child has watched more than 200,000 commercials by the time he or she graduates from high school. Advertisers spend over a half-billion dollars each year to tell children to buy expensive toys and unhealthy food. Each year the average viewer sees 18,000 commercials. In a typical American household, a television set is on for seven hours and two minutes a day. By the time a young person finishes high school, he or she will have spent more time watching television than sitting in a classroom. 99.5 percent of American homes have a television set. More than 250,000 Americans write to Doctor’s on TV asking for medical advice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

An American will have spent nine years of his or her life in front of a television by the age of sixty-five. A Detroit paper offered $500 to 120 families to turn off their sets for a month. Ninety-three of the families turned the offer down. Children show classic withdrawal symptoms normally associated with drugs when their families agree to kick the TV habit. By the age of fourteen, a devoted viewer will have witnessed 11,000 television murders. There is an average of eighteen violent acts per hour on children’s weekend programs, and pre-school children show “unwarranted aggressive behavior” after heavy television viewing. When asked to choose between their fathers and their television sets, more than half the young people in a survey chose television. Once rid of television, our information field would instantly widen to include aspects of life which have been discarded and forgotten. Human beings would residcover facets of experience that we have permitted to lie dormant. The nature of political process would surely change, making possible not only more subtle perspectives, but also the possibility of content over style. Political and economic power, now more concentrated than ever before in American history, would surely shift somewhat in the direction of more decentralized, noncapitalistic, community-based structures. Learning would doubtless reemerge to substitute for brainwashing. Individual knowledge and the collective knowledge of communities of friends and peers would again flower as monolithic, institutional, surrogate knowledge declined. Overall, changes are excellent that human beings, once outside the cloud of television images, would be happier than they have been of late, once again living in a reality which is less artificial, less imposed, and more responsive to personal action. How to achieve the elimination of television? I certainly cannot answer that question. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

It is obvious, however, that the first step is for all of us to purge from our minds the idea that just because television exists, we cannot get rid of it. The biggest conspiracy of all, which few even dare to acknowledge, is that we are victims of our birth. Thanks to the often accidental result of a cojoining of simpletons we are yanked unasked into this noxious land of pretense. We are doomed to fit into someone else’s plan until we become cunning enough to find a way out. By the time we figure out where we stand, it is too late to leave, and even suicide has become a felony. The second biggest conspiracy comes into play soon after birth—the weaning and shaping of new lives into the Consumerist Reality, which is what the behavioral science of marketing children’s cereals is all about. Leaving the supermarket without a box of Breakfast With Barbie is not a crime. However, if you do not purchase at least a couple of the latest holographic polychromatic “free prizes inside” Nintendo Cereal Systems, your kids will make you think it is a crime. It is not just the mood-elevating refined sugared product they are selling. (You could make a god case for food manufacturer’s collusion with the AMA, ADA, and FDA, supplying a ready quantity of sugar-addicted children with juvenile diabetes and dental carries.) With children’s breakfast cereal, the product is only nominally different from brand to brand, and then primarily in its food coloring. No, the food product is only a Trojan horse into the hearts and minds of the little Billys and Debbies. Food manufacturers are training children to gorge themselves on style, on popular culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

The corporate mascots and icons of the past can no longer serve contemporary corporate lebensraum. Children are to have a tv show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, and a toy doll to accompany their eating experience. Kids are to have breakfast with the same “friend” who appears on the back of their tee-shirts and as toys in their sandbox and as characters on endlessly re-run television shows. This “friendship” is purposefully imaginary rather than tactile. The images are seductive, but are not tangible, creating angst in the young children, who gorge themselves with Super Mario Brothers cereal in order to fill the absence inside of them. Advertising works on two premises: 1. Convincing us to buy what we already have. Advertising spreads its economic hegemony through the tried and true religious principles of fear and guilt. Advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges its victims to believe that satisfaction can only be obtained through the symbolic magic or grace of its commodity. Foodstuffs that are advertised are usually processed—meaning more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. Children’s cereals rate in all four of these iniquities. Cereal boxes are designed to hold young ones in thrall as they progress through the normal transitory stages of orality and anality. The symbol of consumption—the open mouth—is found on nearly every box. More subliminally, symbols of the act of excretion are found on such products as Cookie Crisps, Corn Pops, and the aptly named Cocoa Pebbles. Cookie Crisp gives us a lipsmacking bandit with a tongue sticking out of a stretching mouth. Cocoa Pebbles is even less subtle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Barney and Fred are placed opposite sides of a large bowl containing the chocolate cocoa pebbles. The first perversion comes with the concept of Barney and Fred engaging in a menage-a-trois in oral consumption of Pebbles (the name of Fred’s daughter). The clincher is in the giant cereal blow before them with a hole bored out in the center with the aid of Barney’s “drill.” From that spincterish hole, large brown blobs are expelled. The cover of Corn Pops, formerly Sugar Pops, also boasts the prevalent hole with flying feces, with the O in Pops jettisoning large yellow brown blobs to all corners of the box. The predominate color of Cookie Crisp and Cocoas Pebbles is brown, while Corn Pops accompanies its brown with urine-yellow stains. Breakfast with Barbie appeals to the precocious libido of pre-teen girls and boys. The pink motif of the box is targeted for girls and, perhaps, gender neutral boys rebelling from their puddy dog tail stereotype. However, the image of a scantily-clad Barbie showing lots of plastic flesh or a Jeff Stryker 12-inch actions figure might be just the perfect breakfast companion for some boys. No longer does Barbie have superiority over the short He-men or tiny Gi-Joe action figures. However, the result of this may confuse a young boy’s gender role. This may be welcomed by food manufactures, for market surveys have found homosexual men to be more avid shoppers than their heterosexual counterparts. For the girls the pink design of Breakfast with Barbie cereal box suggests nothing more than pre-pubescent female private parts. To this end, an optical illusion that appears on the Breakfast with Barbie box panders to the primal fears of a young girl’s maturation and self-development. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

 In between Barbie’s legs an undefinable form emerges very pink and very erect. What is it? Further investigation reveals the form as Barbie’s pink sunglasses, which she rests upon her knee. Exclusivity which has played such a big part in status advertising for the last 70 years, has only just recently been applied to the children’s marketplace. Forested Flakes, Cheerios, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all offers a “limited edition” box with a hologram on the front. This may be the most dangerous form of advertising of all, since it foments such anti-social and competitive values as wealth and status. The collision of children’s games with consumerist doctrine carries the developing mind further afield from the childhood dreamstate, so necessary to the formation of a whole and healthy personality. Paramount in the invasion of economic hegemony into childhood imagination is the cynical revamping of fairy tales in the use of the “Magical Agent” to convince children of the merits of sugar cereals. Lucky Charms’ friendly Irish midget is a pied piper who keeps children in line with the promise of sweet confections, controverting parental dicta not to accept any candy from strangers. Ghostbusters and its spinoffs make good use of the unspoken secrets and mysteries that comprise the religious experience of childhood through its ridicule of adult oppressors. The prize inside Ghostbusters glows in the dark, glows secretly to children beyond the consciousness of adulthood. Corn Pops offers a prize “Ghost Detector” inside its box. The “Ghost Detector” is a psychic Geiger counter, a thin piece of heat-sensitive glow-in-the-dark plastic which curls up in one’s hand indicating the presence of a “ghost.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Batman cereal (the bat itself has long been associated with darker practitioners of the occult) offers a glow-in-the-dark “bat disc flyer” in exchange for a coupon. The hologram, itself a form of Techno-magic, is an offer available from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal in the form of a Holographic tee-shirt from another dimension. And Nintendo Cereal System offers the child an opportunity to buy the secret “power” either on cassette or in a magazine. Presumably, this empowers the child to go beyond the limits of parental authority. PMRC would do well to look at these marketing ploys as the earliest link in the breakdown of the family unit. The masters of commerce have let children of America know that they are what they eat. A kid can be Batman or Barbie or Mario or even the voracious Pac-Man. Can Satan Crispies be far off? (We have heard of a plan afoot by one of the three big cereal manufacturers to begin test marketing Jesus Flakes in several predominantly Catholic South America countries and Mexico.) When it comes to the conquest of fortune, the strategy adopted for the assault on the old regime had two parts—one belonging to natural science and the other to political science. First, Descartes proposed that the humble doctor, one of Socrates’ ordinary examples of a reasonable artisan, lacking in the political or religious splendor that brings men to the center of the human stage, could, if science were to increase his power to heal a thousandfold, promise enough—if not eternity, at least an ever-increasing longevity—to gain men’s attachment and disenchant the priest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Then, Hobbes proposed that if another humble type, the policeman, who protects men against those who administer violent death, could be made effective in a new way, he could ward off the real dangers for men who had been made to look those dangers in the face and thereby away from fear of invisible powers and their ministers. Doctor and policemen, enhanced by the application of science to their endeavors, were to be the foundations of a wholly new political undertaking. If the pursuit of health and safety were to absorb men and they were led to recognize the connection between their preservation and science, the harmony between theory and practice would be established. The actual rulers, after a couple of centuries of astute propaganda directing popular passions against throne and altar, would in the long run be constrained by their subjects and would have to enact the scientists’ project. The scientists would, to use Harvey Mansfield’s formula, be the hidden rulers. The ends pursued by politicians and the means they use would be determined by philosophers. Scientists would be free and get support, and scientific progress would be identical to political progress so conceived. The scientists in this system belong to a World order of scientists, for national loyalties and customers are irrelevant to them as scientists. They are cosmopolitan. Gradually the political orders would have to be transformed, so that no particularity remains in the way of reason’s operations or produces conflict between the scientist’s loyalty to country and his loyalty to truth. There is only one science. It is the same everywhere and produces the same results everywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Similarly, there can, in principle, be only one legitimate political order, founded by, on, and for science. There may well remain individual nations with old but decaying traditions stemming from special experiences in the past, and attachment to them may tug at the scientists’ cosmopolitanism. However, the nations must all gradually become similar. They must respect the rights of man. It is part of Manifest Destination, Globalization, and Americanizing. This doctrine of rights is the clear and certain rational teaching about justice that was intended to take the place of the ancient teachings, which were “like castles built on sand.” In fact, rights are nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which it emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and fear of divine punishment. These passions are what science can serve. If these passions, given by nature are what men have permission—a “right”—to seek satisfaction for, the partnership of science and society is formed. Civil society then sets as its sole goal that satisfaction—life, liberty and the pursuit of property—and men consent to obey the civil authority because it reflects their wants. Government becomes more solid and surer, now based on passions rather than virtues, rights rather than duties. These life-preserving passions act as the premises of moral and political reasoning, the form of which is as follows: “If I desire to preserve myself then I must seek peace, then…etcetera.” On the basis of such evident and deeply felt premises, men’s allegiance to government can be a matter of reason rather than passionate faith. Such imperatives are the very opposite extreme from those enunciated in the Ten Commandments, which provide no reasons for obeying their injunctions and do not affirm fundamental passions but inhibit them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Men now owe their clarity about their ends to reasoners. They obey on rational grounds the law that protects them. And they respect, and demand that the government respect, the scientists who most of all can, by the higher use of reason, understand and tame hostile nature, including human nature. Government becomes the intermediary between the scientists and the people. Part of human nature is autonomy and the freedom to travel, and Americans love their private vehicles that run of fossil fuels. However, oil-company executives are currently talking about the “last days of the Age of Oil.” Dr. Robert E. Armstrong, author of the NDU paper, takes this idea one step further, suggesting that we are moving toward a “biobased” economy in which “genes will replace petroleum” as a key source not only of many types of raw material and products but of energy. American farmers at the start of this century were gaining 280 million tons of waste leaves, stalks and other plant parts a year. Some of that biomass is already converted into chemicals, electricity, lubricants, plastics, adhesives and above all fuel. This, however, is only the beginning. Armstrong foresees the countryside dotted with small “biorefineries” that would turn biomass into foods, feeds, fibers, bioplastics and other goods. He cites a 1999 National Research Council report estimating that a domestic bio-based economy in the United States of America could ultimately fulfill “90 percent of the U.S. organic chemical consumption and 50 percent of our liquid fuel needs.” Nor is this just an American matter. In such an economy, Armstrong continues, “the basic raw material will be genes, and these, unlike oil, are found all over the World.” He thus forecasts a huge geopolitical shift of power from desert-bare oil countries toward tropical regions richly endowed with biodiversity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

“In a biobased World,” he writes, “our relations with Ecuador (to use a representative country…) will be more important than those with Saudi Arabia.” The reason: Ecuador has far greater biodiversity—hence gene diversity—of potential value to the World. And if that is true for Ecuador, what might it mean for Brazil? Or central Africa? At the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, Tim Smit directs what Fast Company calls “the World’s largest greenhouse.” “We are on the verge of a revolution that is greater than any in the 20^th century,” according to Smit. “There are now composite materials that you can make from plants that are stronger than steel and Kevlar. The implications are phenomenal. Every country in the World could have access to advanced materials created from their own plants.” Moreover, he continues, “biorefineries will have to be built close to the source of their raw materials. A regionalized agriculture will likely develop, with certain areas growing specific crops to supply regional biorefineries…The significance is the likely creation of nonfarming jobs in rural areas.” Armstrong concludes, “a biobased economy ultimately could help stem the flow of urbanization.” Are the Japanese bearing their share of the burden in nanotechnology research? For a variety of reasons, Japan’s contribution to nanotechnology research promises to be excellent. While the United States of America has generally pursued research in this area with little sense of long-term direction, it appears that Japan has begun to take a more focused approach. Researchers there already have clear ideas about molecular machines—about what might work and what probably will not. Japanese researchers are accustomed to a higher level of interdisciplinary contact and engineering emphasis than are Americans. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

In the United States of America, we prize “basic science,” often calling it “pure science,” as if to imply that practical applications are a form of impurity. In Japan instead of emphasizes “basic technology.” Nanotechnology is a basic technology, and the Japanese recognize it as such. Recent changes at the Tokyo Institute of Technology—Japan’s equivalent of MIT—reflect their views of promising directions for future research. For many decades, Tokyo Tech has had two major divisions: a Faculty of Science and a Faculty of Engineering. To these is now being added a Faculty of Bioscience and Biotechnology, to consist of four departments: a Department of Biomolecular Engineering, and what is termed a “Department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A university has a department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A. university has a department explicitly devoted to molecular engineering? Japan has both the departments at Tokyo Tech and Kyoto University’s recently established Department of Molecular Engineering. Japan’s Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) has broad-based interdisciplinary strength. Hiroyuki Sasabe, notes that the institute has expertise in organic synthesis, protein engineering, and STM technology. Sasabe says that his laboratory may need a molecular manipulator of the sort to accomplish its goals in molecular engineering. Research consortia in Japan are also moving toward nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology Organization (ERATO) sponsors many three-to-five-year projects in parallel, each with a specific goal. Consider the work in progress: Yoshida Nanomechanism Project, Hotani Molecular Dynamic Assembly Project, Kunitake Molecular Architecture Project, Nagayama Protein Array Project, Aono Atomcraft Project. These focuses on different aspects of gaining control over matter at the atomic level. The Nagayama Protein Array Project aims to use proteins as engineering materials to move toward making new molecular devices. The Aono Atomcraft does not involve nuclear power—as its translation might imply—but is instead an interdisciplinary effort to use an STM to arrange matter on the atomic scale. At some point, work on nanotechnology must move beyond spinoffs from other fields and undertake the design and construction of molecular machinery. This shift from opportunistic science to organized engineering requires a change in attitude. In this, Japan leads the United States of America, but America is gaining significant ground. Certainly, after the invention of the digital computer, it was abundantly clear that the computer was capable of performing functions that could in some sense be called “intelligent.” In 1936, the great English mathematician Alan Turing showed that it was possible to build a machine that would, for many practical purposes, behave like a problem-solving human being. Turing claimed that he would call a machine “intelligent” if, through typed messages, it could exchange thoughts with a human being—that is, hold up its end of a conversation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

In the early days of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called Eliza, which showed how easy it was to meet Turing’s test for intelligence. When asked a question with a proper noun in it, Eliza’s program could respond with “Why are you interested in,” followed by the proper noun and a question mark. That is, it could invert statements and seek more information about one of the nouns in the statement. Thus, Eliza acted much like a Rogerian psychologist, or at least a friendly and inexpensive therapist. Some people who used Eliza refused to believe that they were conversing with a mere machine. Having, in effect, created a Turning machine, Weizenbaum eventually pulled the program off the computer network and was stimulated to write Computer Power and Human Reason, in which, among other things, he raised questions about the research programs of those working in artificial intelligence; the assumption that whatever a computer can do, it should do; and the effects of computer technology on the way people construe the World—that is, the ideology of the computer, to which I now turn. From the sixteenth century until recently we were “Gutenberg’s Men.” The computer is the dominant metaphor of our age; it defines our age by suggesting a new relationship to information, to work, to power, and to nature itself. That relationship can best be described by saying that the computer redefines humans as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The computer subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “think” better than we can. Indeed, the thinking power of silicon “brains” will be so formidable that if we are lucky, they will keep us as their best friend. Even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs. The thermostats has three beliefs—it is too hot in here, it is too cold in here, and it is just right in here. This statement redefines the word “belief.” The remark rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that “belief” means only what someone or something does. The remark also implies that simulating an idea is synonymous with duplicating the idea. And, most important, the remark rejects the idea that mind is a biological phenomenon. In other word, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad. From the proposition that humans are in some respects like machines, we move to the proposition that humans are little else but machines and, finally, that human beings are machines. We have also suggested to the propostion that machines are human beings. If follows that machines can be made that duplicate human intelligence, and thus research in the field known as artificial intelligence was inevitable. What is most significant about this line of thinking is the dangerous reductionism it represents. Human intelligence is not transferrable at this time. The plain fact is that humans have a unique, biologically rooted, intangible mental life which in some limited respects can be simulated by a machine but can not at this time be duplicated. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Machines cannot feel and, just as important, cannot understand. Eliza can ask, “Why are you worried about your mother?,” which might be exactly the question a therapist would ask. However, the machine does not know what the question means or even that the questions. (Of course, there may be some therapists who do not know what the question means either, who ask it routinely, ritualistically, inattentively. In that case we may say that are acting like a machine.) It is meaning, not utterance, that makes mind unique. I use “meaning” here to refer to something more than the result of putting together symbols the denotations of which are commonly shared by at least two people. As I understand it, meaning also includes those things we call feelings, experiences, and sensations that do not have to be, and sometimes cannot be, put into symbols. They “mean” nonetheless. Without concrete symbols, a computer is merely a pile of junk. Although the quest for a machine that duplicates mind has ancient roots, and although digital logic circuitry has given that quest a scientific structure, artificial intelligence does not and cannot lead to a meaning-making, understanding, and feeling creature, which is what a human being is. All of this may seem obvious enough, but the metaphor of the machine as human (or the human as machine) is sufficiently powerful to have made serious inroads in everyday language. People now commonly speak of “programming” or “deprogramming” themselves. They speak of their brains as a piece of “hard wiring,” capable of “retrieving data,” and it has become common to think about thinking as a mere matter of processing and decoding. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Standards have long been set by industries or government to assure the safety or quality of products and, more recently, to safeguard the environment. However, they are also designed by protectionists governments to keep competitive foreign products out or to advance an industrial policy. West Germany, for instance, conveniently enough for local industry, effectively barred foreign beer on grounds that it was “impure.” And what good is beer without sausage? So Italian canned luncheon meats were also excluded, as were many other imported foods that happened to contain an additive widely used to improve the consistency of the jelly in canned ham and beef. It took a minuet of negotiations and ultimately the threat of legal action by the European Community to make the Germans back down. By now it should come as no surprise that GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has devised yet another standard—this one intended to reduce the use of standards for unfair trade purposes. However, even beyond their competitive purpose and their use as weapons in today’s blistering trade wars, there is another, deeper reason why la guerre de norms is heating up. A provocative article by the French writer Philippe Messine has suggested that fights over standards must multiply, because in advanced economies the ratio of systemic products to stand-alone products rises, putting standards “at the center of great industrial battles.” This important insight is underlined by the fact that computer-based manufacture leads to a tremendous increase in the variety of products, which means that systems must link more products into wholes or gestalts, and that, in turn, explains why demands for standards must skyrocket. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

It also helps us understand Messine’s remark that the new systemic products increasingly include “an important non-material component, gray matter.” For the manufacture of many goods in small runs aimed at segments or niches of the market increases the amount of information needed to coordinate the economy, making the entire cycle of production and distribution more knowledge-dependent. Then, too, as science and technology advance, technical standards themselves reflect our deeper knowledge. The tests and technologies employed to measure standards become more precise; tolerances, narrower. More information and even-deeper knowledge are embedded in the standards. Finally, as competitive innovations drive more new products into the marketplace, filling (and simultaneously creating) new consumer needs, the push for the definition of standards itself propels research forward. Thus, on every front—scientific, political, economic, and technological—the battle over standards can be expected to intensify as the new system for wealth creation replaced the fast-fading somestack World of the past. Victors in the widening wars over standards will wield immense, high-quality power in the fast-arriving World of tomorrow. Many people believe that the “Big Brother” syndrome—lies, disinformation, and deceptions which are setting the stage for a mass yoking to the false Messiah. There are plans to initiate a new colored currency which is being developed as the pretext of stopping organized crime. This U.S. government plot to destroy the “underground economy” will involve registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Sure, the lemons make the spacious kitchen island at #PlumasRanch Riverside Residence 2 LOOK pretty, but they’re also really useful around the house…

🍋 Toss used lemon rinds in your garbage disposal to freshen
🍋 Remove kitchen odors from your hands by rubbing with cut lemon
🍋 Add some to your water to increase refreshment!

Our home at Homesite 70 is move-in ready! We’re so excited to see who comes to make this gorgeous house a home. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-70/