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Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:33 -0500 From: "Philip E. Mirowski" <pmirows at attglobal.net> Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science Philip Mirowski Cambridge University Press 0-521-77283-4 (hardcover) 0-521-77526-4 (paperback)
Table of Contents
1 Cyborg Agonistes 2 Some Cyborg Genealogies; or, How the Demon Got its Bots 3 John von Neumann and the Cyborg Incursion into Economics 4 The Military, the Scientists and the Revised Rules of the Game 5 Do Cyborgs Dream of Efficient Markets? 6 The Empire Strikes Back 7 Core Wars 8 Machines Who Think vs. Machines that Sell
Chapter 1: Cyborg Agonistes
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor
encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor
restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a
story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story
you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude
has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the
victim of a very old and terrible lie.
--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
The first thing you will notice is the light. The florescent banks in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room. There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and matte colors, dampening unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam the standard dayglo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites parked in stationary orbits. Not everyone is held in the thrall of the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at other electronic devices. Some sit stock still, mesmerized, engaging their screen with slight movements of wrist and hand. Others lean into their consoles, then away, as though their swaying might actually have some virtual influence upon the quantum electrodynamics coursing through their station and beyond, to other machines in other places in other similar rooms. No one is apparently making anything, but everyone seems nonetheless furiously occupied.
I. Rooms with a View
Where is this place? If it happened to be 1952, it would be Santa Monica, California, at a RAND study of the "man-machine interface" (Chapman et al, 1958). If it were 1957, then it could only be one place: the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System run by the US Air Force. By 1962, there were a few other such rooms, such as the SAGA room for war-gaming in the basement of the Pentagon (Allen, 1987). If it were 1967 instead, there were many more such rooms scattered across the globe, one of the largest being the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White (Edwards, 1996, pp.3, 106). By 1977 there are many more such rooms, no longer only staffed by the military, but also by thousands of employees of large firms throughout the world: the SABRE airline reservation system of American Airlines (patterned upon SAGE); bank check and credit card processing centers (patterned upon that innovated by Bank of America); nuclear power station control rooms; the inventory control operation of the American Hospital Supply Corporation (McKenney, 1995). In 1987, a room like this could be found in any suburban shopping mall, with teenagers proleptically feeding quarters into arcade computer games. It might also be located at the University of Arizona, where "experimental markets" are being conducted with undergraduates recruited with the help of money from the National Science Foundation. Alternatively, these closed rooms also could just as surely be found in the very pinnacles of high finance, in the tonier precincts of New York and London and Tokyo, with high-stakes traders of stocks, bonds and "derivatives" glued to their screens. In those rooms, "masters of the universe" in pinstripe shirts and power suspenders make "killings" in semi-conscious parody of their khaki-clad precursors. By 1997, with the melding of home entertainment centers with home offices and personal computers via the Internet (a lineal descendant of the Defense-funded ARPANET), any residential den or rec room could be refitted as a scaled-down simulacrum of any of the previous rooms. It might be the temporary premises of one of the burgeoning 'dot-com' startups which captured the imaginations of Generation X. It could even be promoted as the prototype classroom of the future. Increasingly, work in America at the turn of the millennium means serried ranks of Dilberts arrayed in cubicles staring at these screens. I should perhaps confess I am staring at the glow now myself. Depending upon how this text eventually gets disseminated, perhaps you also, dear reader, are doing likewise.
These rooms are the "closed worlds" of our brave new world (Edwards, 1996), the electronic surveillance and control centers which were the nexus of the spread of computer technologies and computer culture. They are closed in any number of senses. In the first instance, there is the obviously artificial light: chaotic 'white' sunlight is kept to a minimum to control the frequencies and the reactions of the observers. This is an ergonomically controlled environment, the result of some concerted engineering of the man-machine interface, in order to render the machines 'user-friendly' and their acolytes more predictable. The partitioning off of the noise of the outer world brings to mind another sort of closure, that of thermodynamic isolation, as when Maxwell's Demon closes the door on slower gas molecules in order to make heat flow from a cooler to a warmer room, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics. Then again, there is the type of closure that is more directly rooted in the algorithms that play across the screens, a closure that we shall encounter repeatedly in this book. The first commandment of the trillions of lines of code that appear on the screens is that they halt; algorithms are closed and bounded, and (almost never) spin on forever, out of control.
more at <http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2001/RRE.Machine.Dreams.html>
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