Too Much Information?

Ten essential questions for digital Christians

Andrew Graystone

• Publisher: Canterbury Press Norwich
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786221599
• eBook ISBN: 9781786221612
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Almost without noticing it happen, we have found ourselves shopping, communicating, playing and even worshipping online. Andrew Graystone aims to help Christians who want to think through their own engagement in digital culture, addressing ten key questions on how digital technology is changing our lives today.

1

Are Machines Getting Smarter – Or Are Humans Getting More Stupid?

The magic touch

When I was 11 years old, I went to visit my father in the 26-storey modernist office block in Central London where he worked. The only thing I remember about the day is the lifts. I was allowed to summon the lift by touching a square button that instantly lit up to say the carriage was on the way. I’d been in lifts before of course; in the department stores my mum sometimes took me to to buy school clothes. In those lifts there was a round Bakelite button that stood out from the wall and moved under your finger with a satisfying clunk. This lift was different. The button wasn’t a button at all, but a square shape with round corners, etched on the lift wall. This square was touch sensitive. Nothing moved. It simply reacted to the heat of an enthralled 11-year-old finger. I think. The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark said: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Summoning a lift from 26 floors up using just the power of my finger felt like a kind of wizardry.

You may be reading these words on the inked pages of a book made out of a recycled dead tree. But you may equally well be reading the letters formed of the absences of light on a tablet computer, or even on a pocket-friendly smart phone with a touchscreen. If so, you may be curious as to how the screen takes instructions from your finger and turns them into actions. There are several possibilities, but the most common is that, beneath the transparent protective layer that cracks so easily, there is a thin film carrying a grid of hundreds of thousands of minute capacitors. When you touch the screen a tiny electrical charge is transferred to your finger. The voltage drops minutely in the part of the screen you are touching, as the current flows to earth through your body. That’s why you can’t operate a touchscreen with gloves on, but you can operate it with a raw sausage. Try it.

Your fingers are probably so big that they touch scores of capacitors at any one moment, but the particular combination of switches tells the device at which point on the grid the current has dropped. It sends an instruction through the device’s processor, and causes it to perform a particular function, say, open an application or phone a friend. Scientists developing the very earliest touchscreens in the 1970s held a series of meetings to agree a common ‘language’, so that tapping the screen, swiping it from side to side, ‘pinching’ or even stroking it with multiple fingers sends an instruction that the device can understand. Of course, to manage such detailed instructions from such a vast range of possible choices the processors have to be enormously powerful. The processing power in an average smart phone is greater than the processing power that was available to NASA in the 1960s to send human beings to the moon.

At one level this is fantastically clever. To have conceived of this possibility, and worked out how to engineer it at such a microscopic level of detail; to create a business model that allowed the devices to be made in huge quantities for an affordable price; to develop applications that have transformed the way we bank, shop, play games and communicate with people around the world – our generation has been blessed with a string of developers for whom the word genius hardly seems adequate. And (provided you can afford it) you can access all of this technology and control it with the touch of your forefinger.

Of course touch-screen technology is nowhere near its zenith yet. New techniques are developing all the time. In the next few years we’ll see screens you can fold up like a handkerchief and put in your pocket, screens used as architectural material in buildings, and screens that have a sensitivity to pressure, warmth and position as well as just the touch of your finger. Amazing.

Touch-screen technology is nowhere near its zenith yet.

And that finger … how exactly does that work?

Well, it has no muscles at all. That’s right - the ultra-fine motion control that your fingers are capable of is generated by muscles in your palm and forearm, not your finger itself. They are connected to tendons that provide an amazing degree of motion control. The skin on your fingertip has several layers and embedded in them are millions of receptors that respond to stimulation. Thermoreceptors enable your skin to sense heat; nociceptors allow you to feel pain; and four different types of mechanoreceptors respond to various pressure, vibrations and stretching of the skin. In fact there are more receptors in your fingertips than anywhere else in your body except your genitals. Compartmentalized pads of fat act as shock absorbers. They are packed with capillaries less than 10 micrometres in diameter making your fingers ultra-sensitive. Nerve cells communicate with each other by secreting molecules that transmit signals to your brain at a speed of about 170 miles per hour. Each finger relates to a distinct area of your brain where the signals are processed, evaluated and co-ordinated, so as well as being interchangeable for some tasks, they can work in concert (literally, if you are a musician). Further instructions may be transmitted from your brain through your nerves and back to your muscles at around 250 miles per hour resulting in movement or other responses. Professor Mark Rutland of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has discovered that a human finger can feel a bump corresponding to the size of a single molecule. That enables us to discriminate between surfaces that are flat and those that have ridges as small as 13 nanometres high. By comparison, if your finger was the size of the whole earth, it would be sensitive enough for you to feel the difference between houses and cars. It would, however, be a nightmare finding gloves to fit.

A finger is pretty amazing. It is the place where your mind meets the world. You can use it to touch, point or play the violin. It is a dual-purpose tool for exploring and also controlling your environment. It is so well adapted that nine times out of ten you can touch something and understand it, even when you can’t see it. You can even fix your hair with your eyes closed. Wearing gloves if necessary.

As I said, the finger is pretty amazing. And you are provided with not one, but ten of these devices, cunningly located in groups of five on each arm. Even more remarkably, two of your fingers have been adapted into thumbs. They are opposable, meaning that they are capable of meeting your other fingers tip to tip in a pincer movement. This incredibly useful feature is shared only with the higher apes. Sir Isaac Newton once said: ‘In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.’ And he had two of them. Your fingers are also mounted on a fully flexible wrist that gives them almost infinite mobility. The surface cells are ready for action six months before your birth and are renewed every month of your life.

Our brains have become adapted so that they notice tiny movements of another person’s fingers across a huge distance, as any orchestral conductor can tell you. Can you imagine what happens when the fingers of one person touch the fingers of another? I do hope so. Human to human touch is the most intense and powerful exchange of information yet discovered. Opposable thumbs mean that human beings can lock hands in a way that is unknown anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

Human to human touch is the most intense and powerful exchange of information yet discovered.

By comparison with your finger, the touchscreen on your phone is rather limited. It can only sense where your finger is – not how hard it is pressing, whether it is wet or dry, how warm it is, what it feels like, what shape it is … Its language is limited to taps and swipes. Put your finger to your lips and a tablet computer won’t realize that you want it to be quiet. Point at an object and a smart phone won’t turn to look. A computer essentially does what it’s told – what it has been programmed to do. A finger, on the other hand, can take initiative.

When a finger touches a screen – or for that matter a keyboard or any other form of controller – something remarkable and yet remarkably ordinary is happening. In a sense a computer is no more than a sophisticated man-made tool. It is an accessory to enhance human activity, just as a pair of spectacles or a hearing aid are enhancements. It is a logical extension of the development of the hammer (though you are not recommended to knock nails in with an iPhone). The genius, the wonder and the majesty are all on the side of the finger, not the computer.

As you use your phone or computer, you are aware that you are one of 15 billion people who have occupied the planet over millions of years. You may also be conscious that there are more than 4 billion other people who at this very moment are potentially connected to you through the Internet. Your computer, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware that there are any other computers apart from itself. It is innocent of its own existence. It is oblivious to the fact that by connecting to the Internet it effectively becomes just a tiny part of a vast computer that contains more gathered information than the world has previously known. It doesn’t even know you’re there. It is a machine. You are a person.

Your computer is blissfully unaware that there are any other computers.

Tools change us

You might think that means that all the action is one way that your finger is the do-er and shaper of events. But you’d only be partly right. When we use tools of any kind a hammer, an egg whisk or an iPhone – we are trying to shape the world around us in some way. We use a tool because it allows us to extend our own powers, to hit harder, whisk faster or call further than we could without it. But no technology is neutral. As we use tools to shape the world, they in turn shape us. And we in turn are forced to respond to the transformation by changing ourselves. Every piece of equipment we use or invent makes new things possible and old things impossible. It has its own impact on us; on the way we see ourselves and the ways we live together. Whether or not we choose to engage with it, technology changes us.

The invention of the hammer, for instance, made it possible to build bigger and better shelters to live in. It also made it possible to knock down your neighbour’s shelter if it was in your way. And in extremis, it made it possible to knock down your neighbour. The person with the biggest hammer quickly realized that he had more clout than the person with the biggest muscles. So it became important to make a bigger hammer and grow bigger muscles to wield it with – and thus began the arms race. The person who invented the hammer only intended to use it to build a better shelter, but its very existence changed his perception of himself and his neighbour. It wasn’t all good, and it wasn’t all bad. The hammer itself turned out to be pretty much a morally neutral object. But a new age of human civilization had dawned, based around the existence of the hammer. Call it Hammer Time.

As we use tools to shape the world, they in turn shape us.

The American cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan is credited with describing the transformational impact of every new technology on the nature of human relationships. When we use tools of any kind, he said, we are engaging in an imaginative process to shape the world around us. But technology is not neutral. As we use tools to shape the world, we are in turn forced to respond to the transformation by changing ourselves. The technology makes its own impact. We don’t have to be passive in this. We have choices to make. But if we don’t make the choices – if we allow technological advances to carve out their own path like a river running down a hillside, then we and future generations will have to live with the consequences of the choices we failed to make.

That’s why an Internet iconoclast like Jaron Lanier is so useful. He is a computer scientist of the first rank, who pioneered the notion of virtual reality (and invented the term). He has developed cutting-edge techniques for medical imaging using computers. But he questions the orthodoxy that computers are getting smarter and smarter. Is it possible, he asks, that the machines we are making appear to be more and more ‘intelligent’ because humans are choosing to act more and more stupid? Have computers got smarter, or have people started to act stupid? When I type a request into a search engine it gives the appearance of knowing exactly what I want. But maybe I’m just adapting my expectations, degrading myself to make the computer seem clever. Lanier challenges the sci-fi assumption that information sources will necessarily aggregate and speed up until eventually a computer will be cleverer than a human brain. There is nothing clever or independent or free at all about the information a computer generates. No computer can or ever will have an independent existence because it takes at least one human person embedded in the culture to create the information and another to decode it. Otherwise it is meaningless.

Future generations will have to live with the consequences of the choices we failed to make.

So we have much more agency than we think. There are significant choices that we can make, and must make, about what it means to live well in the digital environment.

Jaron Lanier is a brilliant technologist but he is not a technological utopian. From his elevated viewpoint at the top of the digital mountain he gives a stark warning about the ways that technology is acting on us. He observes that when we are presented with a new technology we tend to diminish ourselves to accommodate to it. If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And if all you have is a computer, however big, every problem looks like a computation. ‘Machines seem increasingly smart,’ says Lanier, ‘because humans are choosing to abase themselves in front of them.’ Does Siri, or Alexa, or that annoying voice-activated cinema ticket-booking service I phoned recently, really know the answers to the important questions I want answered? Or am I playing along … playing dumb to make the machine seem clever?

Like so many of the issues that humans are facing in the digital era, this is not new. In the eighteenth century, in the period we call the Industrial Revolution, engineers began to develop machines that would vastly increase the rate at which goods could be produced and transported. Manufacturing moved from the workshop to the factory. In 1853 Richard Garrett and Sons of Suffolk developed ‘The Long Shop’, the world’s first assembly line, where products (in their case steam boilers) moved through the factory on a railway line as various operations were carried out. The role of human beings was to operate the manufacturing equipment, and to do anything that a machine couldn’t do. The trouble with this system is that if you are not careful you start treating human beings as just part of a big machine – an expensive part at that, and one that needs paying, is prone to breaking down, and sometimes throws a sicky on a Monday morning. One of the core values that Christians need to hang onto is that human beings are not machines. ‘You are not a gadget,’ as Jaron Lanier memorably says. Christians believe that humans have a unique status in creation. God did not create machines; God created humans, who went on to make machines. There’s a big difference. God did not come to the earth as a machine; God came to the earth as a human being, with all the inconvenience and specificity that goes with that.

God did not come to the earth as a machine.

Digital culture has a strong tendency to underestimate the value and uniqueness of human beings; to treat them as just a rather inconvenient part of a much larger machine.

A great many discussions in this area focus on advances in digital technology – and of course they are dizzying. If you are anything like me, you are easily awed by clever technology. I’ve been to more than enough conferences where the speakers speculated on what technology will be available five, ten, fifty years from now. Sometimes they were proved right, and sometimes not. Often it felt as if the speakers were simply trying to bamboozle us or even frighten us with the imagined consequences. It is easy to be awed or frightened by technology. It used to be talking fridges and intelligent clothes. Now it is digital house elves and driverless cars and sex robots. In this book I’m only going to refer to technology that is already available. But in fact, it’s not what’s happening in technology that’s fundamentally important, but what’s happening in our culture.

Recently I went to the International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots (I went so that you didn’t have to). It was full of academics talking about synthesized skin, virtual orgasms and teledildonics. The things I took away from it were: i) we can’t agree on what we mean by a robot; ii) we don’t know what we mean by sex; iii) no sex robots currently exist; iv) it’s extremely unlikely that we will be able to create one; and v) if we did, we’re pretty sure not many people would want one. But what was really important was not all the fascinating technology that is being built or imagined, but why so many people should consider having sex with a robot at all. We need to ask how living in a digital culture is changing us as people.

The infrastructure of life is increasingly autonomous – many decisions are now made not by an individual person but by a system that was programmed by a group of people we will never meet. When you search online for a restaurant near you the recommendation isn’t made by a human, but by an algorithm – a little bit of computer program that has been designed like a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Are Machines Getting Smarter – Or Are Humans Getting More Stupid?
• 2 Where am I?
• 3 What is Happening to my World?
• 4 Who Owns my Information?
• 5 What’s the Difference Between a Person and a Machine?
• 6 Who is my Digital Neighbour?
• 7 Who am I these Days?
• 8 Who can I Believe?
• 9 Is it Time to CTRL+ALT+DELETE the Church?
• 10 Is my Body Due for an Upgrade?
• What Next?
• Glossary
• Copyright