This post inspired by a series of articles about bad behavior on Wall Street over the summer.

What makes “too big to fail” or “too big to jail” equal to “license to steal”?  (How) Can the Humanities help restore the social contract, or should we simply acknowledge that we have given up on civilization and get on with the alternatives?  See for example:

• dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/case-against-sac-leader-hinges-on-e-mail-habits/
• dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/witness-in-tourre-case-describes-difficulty-in-knowing-deals-friends-from-foes/
• www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but-to-banks-pure-gold.html
• dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/jpmorgan-in-talks-to-settle-energy-manipulation-case-for-500-million/
• www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/technology/judge-rules-against-apple-in-e-books-trial.html

Here is a somewhat more thoughtful take on the overall situation: theamericanscholar.org/too-big-to-fail-and-too-risky-to-exist/#.Ue_pK9KNrZc

And somewhat less so:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhe3RlzgTiQ

Or, if you have four hours to spare, the 2012 4-part FRONTLINE series, “Money, Power & Wall Street.”  www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-power-wall-street/

I have lots of beautiful philosophical and public policy ideas relating to fairness, sharing, community, environmental, collaboration and empowerment. I am interested in learning about technologies that can help embody these ideas in a tangible and accessible way. Example: there is a 12 foot high plaster relief model 3d map of the Adirondacks on the wall of the great room at the Kelly Adirondack Center, formerly the home of Paul Schaefer, environmental leader and local builder and Renaissance man (self-educated but with great credit to the inspiration of his father’s liberal arts degree.) That map was the collaborative effort of 50 volunteers working together for a decade and I imagine how much those volunteers must have learned about the big picture of the Adirondacks in the process of creating it.

They were documenting in tangible terms a collective treasure that belongs to all of us New Yorkers, deeded in perpetuity by our constitution but not fully appreciated until leaders like Paul Schaefer used creative powers to bring it to our attention in many media–his writings on an old manual typewriter, his black and white silent documentary film on an early movie camera he borrowed from Irving Langmuir, and his great room 3d map. Important environmental laws have since been signed in ceremonies in front of that 3d map. Could we get Schenectady youth similarly engaged in creating 3d maps of their local environmental treasures (e.g. Central Park, Vale Cemetery, or the Union College campus itself or the surrounding foothill vistas) by supporting them in creating esthetically beautiful and tangibly powerful expressions of the terrain of their community spaces?

I’m involved in a collaborative research project on documenting and analyzing medieval Sanskrit scientific texts, with connections to a number of related projects on similar historical texts in other traditions (Babylonian, Hellenistic, medieval Islamic, early modern Latin, etc.). Digital textbase structures and the best ways to define and organize technical/bibliographic/prosopographic information are a key focus of our work.

Wenhua Shi, Colgate University

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It’s an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. In this hour long MAKE session with demonstrations of a few prototypes and art projects, participants will build paper circuits and learn a beginner level of Arduino programming.

“I For One Welcome Our New Robot Overlords”

Doug Klein, Union College

Should you be allowed to use genetic testing and engineering to ensure that your baby is not pre-disposed to certain genetically-linked illnesses? How about choosing the gender of your baby?  Or eye color? Or height; strength; musical talent; intelligence?

What about machines?  How intelligent can we make them?  How intelligent should we make them?  Can we make them intelligent enough that they can go on and make themselves more intelligent – sometimes called “the singularity”?  Should we?

Science and engineering seems to know no bounds, and is rapidly developing the ability to do all this and more.  Since there were humans, Humanists have speculated about the consequences of human actions – think Prometheus, Adam and Eve, through Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Carl Kapek’s robot play, “R.U.R.”  In 2000, Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article for Wired, called “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”  In it he argues that technology will make humans obsolete.  The Joy article (ironically named) is worth a look. Here is a response to Joy by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.  You can decide which side has the stronger case.

All this points to the enduring question, “Do We Control Technology or Does Technology Control Us?”  Wouldn’t it be ironic if the defining feature of humans – the use of tools – proves to be our undoing.  Or, as Elizabeth Kolbert glumly concludes in her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

And so the question: What more can the Humanities contribute to tame this whirlwind?  (Whatever it is contributing now does not seem to be enough.)  Or is the role of the Humanities just to keep us distracted, content, and out of the way?

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I for one welcome our new robot overlords
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skfw282fJak
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKbFb6TPVEA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Robot_Overlords

THATCamp          Union College         September 26-27 2013

 Technology in control in the Movies

2001: A Space Odyssey: I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I cannot do that.

WALL-E – Directive A113

I Robot      Trailer       Introduction to VIKI     Destruction of VIKI

The Matrix      The pills            The ending

Iron Man     Trailer

Planet of the Apes     Ending

Technology not quite in control in the real world

• Smiling robots
• Robotic mule
• Insect Drones
• Drone On: the Future of UAV Over the US
• Autonomous Vehicles Progress Faster Than Regulations
• Watson wins at Jeopardy

Observers of the growth of technological control

E.F. Forrester, “The Machine Stops”

Karl Capek, R.U.R.

Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Future of Happiness,” in James Brockman, ed., The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, pp. 102-103.
In the past, we were like passengers on the slow coach of evolution. Now, evolution is more like a rocket hurtling through space, and we are no longer passengers, but its pilots.  What kind of human beings are we going to create?

Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, p. 12
[The technium is] a self-reinforcing system of creation. At some point in its evolution, our system of tools and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex interactions that it spawned a bit of independence.  It began to exercise some autonomy.

Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Spencer Wells, pp. 52-53
We now come to the crux of what this book is all about.  When our ancestors created agriculture around 10,000 years ago, they had no idea of what other changes they were setting in motion.  They were simply responding to an immediate need for more reliable sources of food during a time of climatic stress, obviously making decisions about the future based on the near term rather than how events might ultimately play out.  …  Instead of relying on nature’s plenty, they were creating it for themselves.  By doing so they divorced themselves – and us – from millions of years of evolutionary history, charting a new course into the future without a map to guide them through the pitfalls that would appear over the subsequent ten millennia.

David Christian: Big History: The History of our World in 18 Minutes
So, here we are, back at the convention center. We’ve been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it’s a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it’s not clear that we humans are in charge of it.

Ann Anderson, John Rieffel, Union College

Are you interested in knowing more about the basics of 3D Printing?  Perhaps you have wondered about the ways in which your teaching (or your research) might be augmented or changed by incorporating 3D Printing techniques?  If so, please join us for this interactive, hands-on boot camp led by Ann Anderson and John Rieffel (Union College).  One of our goals for the event is to reach across the disciplines in order to integrate 3D printing into the humanities and social sciences.  During this 90-minute event, we will provide a very brief introduction to 3D Printing, engage in a conversation together about the possible ways in which 3D Printing might help us to cross and/or bridge divisional or departmental divides in research and teaching, and actually print out during the event a 3D model, based on audience interests, questions, and ideas.

Alex Chaucer, Skidmore College

In this hour long MAKE session, participants will learn how digital mapping tools, such as ArcGIS Online and Google Earth, can be used for telling geographic stories and sharing online. Included in the session will be a hands on activity including mapping a spreadsheet of coordinates in ArcGIS Online, and georeferencing a historic map in Google Earth, creating a .kmz file, and creating a tour. Examples will be shown of other extensions of these tools in the digital humanities and other similar products. Session is geared toward the introductory user with no experience with mapping tools.

Prerequisite: Please come to the session with Google Earth installed on your computer and having created a free ArcGIS Online account with username and password.

Meg Worley, Colgate University

Makerspaces (aka hacklabs, hackerspaces, hacker dojos, etc.) are communal workshops where members share tools, ideas, and skills to build physical objects.  We will be focusing on makerspaces within the educational environment — how to start one at your institution (gathering support, planning space, considering technical requirements, lining up funding) and how to integrate it into both the curriculum and the life of the campus.  This will be half bootcamp and half brainstorming session, and it should be of equal appeal to those new to the idea and those who are already deeply involved in thriving makerspaces.

Palma Catravas, John Cox, Dianne McMullen, Union College

Come experience a real world example of how a collaboration between Music and Electrical Engineering provides an interdisciplinary experience for students.  Participate in singing and recording a well-known folk melody with Union’s Camerata Singers and a music history class in several locations on campus and then come back to listen and analyze those sound recordings with students taking a course in digital signal processing.  Participants will leave with an understanding of how these two disciplines can be integrated to provide students experiences from two very different perspectives.