Cautions on Mobile Phone Effects

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My article on February 20th 2012 from an old Media & Tech blog

I just saw this on my Twitter Timeline.  The article Do Cell Phones Make Us Less Socially Minded? by Medical News Today reported on a scientific paper on The Effect of Mobile Phone Use on Prosocial Behavior.  This research is being conducted by two marketing professors and a graduate student at the University of Maryland. They caution that it’s a work in progress, and their paper isn’t ready for peer-reviewed publication, yet.

I don’t know if they themselves announced it, but apparently someone else did, purposefully or inadvertently, as the paper is now running the rounds online. A simple Google search shows several links referencing it, proof that it has indeed been published!

Much as I believe in the power of science to illuminate aspects of ourselves, our lives, and our world, I am also cautious in the face of its limitations. Moreover, I shudder at the thought of others misusing its findings or jumping to wrong, unintended conclusions. The creation of the atomic bomb, which drew on the Theory of Special Relativity and caused horrific catastrophe, haunted Albert Einstein for years.

At best, this paper should provoke our thinking, and encourage us to reflect on what we do and how we relate to each other, in this media and technology-dominated world of ours.

So does using the ubiquitous mobile phone in fact make us less inclined to think about others and do good for them?

At first blush, this paper says that, as the Diamondback Online reported. Participants were less likely to volunteer for community service, or engage in problem solving that could lead to a charitable donation. Rosellina Ferraro was one of the research professors, and hear her offer some cautious musing; a university student chimes in as well:

According to Ferraro, the results of the study could lend a bit more credence to the popular opinion that while technology is beneficial, it may have some downsides, too.

“At this point I’m a little hesitant to say what the big-picture implications are,” Ferraro said. “But it’s just something that I think it’s important to be aware of.”

Students were not too surprised with the results, either. Ali Pastor, a sophomore neurobiology major, bought her iPhone just a few months ago and now views it as both a blessing and a curse.

“I think it’s more of like how society’s become nowadays,” she said. “I think people are so hooked on technology that they forget there are problems in the world that need to be fixed.”

My own musings 

What if researchers, or more importantly charity organizations, were to reach out to us directly via the particular media and technology channels that we frequent? In this way, would mobile phone use increase, decrease, or have no significant effect on prosocial behavior?

We know, moreover, that what our friends like is more influential on our buying behavior than what traditional sales ads try to do. So what if it’s a friend encouraging us, on a mobile conversation, to join a Habitat-for-Humanity activity?

You see, we don’t have definitive or generalizable answers for these questions, yet. But the very fact that I, or anyone else for that matter, can ask these question reinforces the caution about arriving at simplistic, potentially wrong conclusions on the effects of mobile phone use!

Here’s another personal account Study: Cell phones make people selfish in The Mommy Files of the San Francisco Chronicle:

The other weekend my husband and I found ourselves in an unusual situation without the kids for a couple hours. We both needed to work but squeezed in a walk to spend some quality alone time together.

About five minutes into our stroll, his iPhone beeped. He pulled out his phone and responded to the text… and then he sent another text and another and another. Fifteen minutes later he was still fully absorbed in his phone - and acting as if I didn’t even exist.

I was annoyed and told him. He made me feel like a nag for complaining. The texts were related to work, he told me.

“Can’t you give me 30 minutes of your time on a Saturday afternoon?” I said.

And then his phone beeped again…

That’s when I should have asked, “Are you interested in volunteering at the kids’ school this weekend?”

The Maryland study indicates that he probably would have said no.

Different people are going to have all kinds of reactions to this little story. But I imagine that besides being connected on, and unwittingly absorbed with, his iPhone, he was helpful, maybe even charitably so, to whomever on his mobile. No question, however, he was flatly disconnected with, even dismissing of, his wife. So I imagine, too, that charitable was absolutely the last word she would have used to describe her husband on that fateful stroll.

Therein lies the rub. Does media and technology benefit us or hurt us? Does it connect us or disconnect us? Does it make us more likely or less likely to help others? Probably the answer is both!

For me, that’s the beauty and the complexity of media and technology.

Privacy Bill of Rights

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My article on March 3rd 2012 from an old Media & Tech blog

Even if you’re just minimally active online, privacy ought to be an issue for you. While the past decade heralded amazing platforms for media and technology, this decade is the coliseum where both David and Goliath companies battle fiercely for as many pieces of information about us as they can grab.

Social network users face mounting privacy concerns, so announces The Citizen in its article today. It references the Pew Research Center and its report Privacy management on social media sites.

First, I believe it’s our responsibility as users to know the privacy controls and policies of sites we frequent and to use these properly to serve our purpose. Second, more importantly, it’s our responsibility to exercise good judgment in the content that we upload and respond with. The same, too, for content about us from friends, connections, followers et al. In particular, I regularly monitor their tags, mentions, and posts, and I do not hesitate to delete, block or report, if something is inappropriate or unwanted.

The Citizen also mentions Obama Seeks Privacy Bill of Rights for Internet Users from Voice of America.  Hear Darren Hayes speak about this (below).   He is head of the Computer Information Systems Program at Pace University in New York.

I think that, you know, this legislation is just, it’s long overdue. I think that in its present form it looks very effective and I think that it is a step in the right direction and the average online user does need more transparency and more control over the use of their information.

I think in practical terms it’s going to make online companies more accountable for what they do. It also seeks to provide more transparency about how third parties are sharing their information and give the user, hopefully, the ability to opt out of having their information shared.

What’s also going to be important about this legislation are the penalties and fines that will ultimately be imposed for non-compliance.

So be informed, entertained, and engaged on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. But, for goodness sake, be smart, careful, and responsible as well.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (3)

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Let’s now reflect on what in particular I find so compelling about Transcendence.  It asks three existential questions, and offers stunning answers vis-a-vis the work of Michio Kaku.

What is the essence of who we are? 

Consciousness and intelligence, maybe soul and personality. Of course the whole of who we are makes us who we are. But when we talk about essence, we get positively elemental in our focus, attention and ideas. So while the body may be the most evidential aspect of who we are, by itself it simply doesn’t define who are. Clearly for Evelyn Caster, the essence of her dying beloved husband is his consciousness.

What if we were to displace that essence from one medium (body) to another medium (machine)?

Not just any machine, of course, but rather a quantum computer. Presumably this computer has enough intelligence and infrastructure to accommodate our essence. But the film suggests that it is Will Caster’s mind that makes that computer super-intelligent and super-capable. In other words, the machine in and of itself is merely a platform or a framework. Scientists and technologists have labored for decades to create artificial intelligence; Transcendence suggests that it is inevitably human intelligence that makes machines intelligent. 

Once displaced what is the nature of our new being? 

Kaku envisions us becoming virtually boundless. We can actually ride a beam of light, just as Einstein imagined in his thought experiments, because we aren’t constrained by the physical limits of our body. We can actually explore the ends of the universe, far far more capably and efficiently than any means at our disposal. In Transcendence, it is as if a hologram of the erstwhile scientist were uploaded onto that quantum computer. But it is a hologram with wide-ranging awareness, knowledge and abilities. 

Bree | The biggest threat humanity has ever faced is one of your own making, self-aware technology. Computers control our banks, our airports, our national security, our lives. Once they are able to think for themselves, they'll use this power to destroy us, unless we fight back. We can unplug from the network. We can stop the scientists who invent these machines. We can lead the revolution that will save our species. We are RIFT [Revolutionary Independence from Technology] This is just the beginning.

Reference: Transcendence Movie Quotes.

But as with many science fiction film, all of the above inviolably takes place in a human context. There will always be people, it seems, who fear technology advancement and who fashion resistance à la the revolutionaries in history. But if we were to take a film like Transcendence as a kind of self-contained debate, nay, fight, on such matters, then we give ourselves an opportunity to work through all sorts of dilemma that science fact Kaku (rf. Dreaming in Code: Michio Kaku's Future of the Mind) and the science fiction Casters (rf. 'Transcendence': Johnny Deep in a bold, beautiful flight of futuristic speculation) seem to dismiss.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (2)

Transcript | Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer and his favorite science fiction story talked about an era far in the future, when our bodies would be in pods and we would mentally control beings, beings of pure energy that would go flying around the universe. And, of course, it was science fiction but here's the idea: mind without body. Pure consciousness roaming across the universe faster than any rocket ship. It turns out that that's actually a physical possibility.  First of all the Obama administration and the European Union are pushing the Brain Project to delineate all the pathways of the human brain. This means that one day we might have a CD ROM called Brain 2.0. That is every single neuron encoded on a memory disc, your personality, your memories, who you are, the essence of your soul would be incorporated in this disc as pure information. Even if you die your consciousness, in some sense, may live on.

Now you as an organic being will have died. That means that your [body] will turn to dust. But the configuration of neurons that made your thinking process possible can be put on a disc in which case, in some sense you become immortal. Not only immortal but this could be the most efficient way to explore the galaxy just like Isaac Asimov predicted in his short story. Let's say I take not your genome but your connectome, put it on a laser beam - in fact in the book I actually calculate how big a laser beam will be required to put your consciousness as pure photons - shine it into the heavens. You're now shooting consciousness into outer space at the speed of light. Forget booster rockets. Forget asteroid collisions. Forget radiation dangers and weightlessness and lack of oxygen. Forget all that. You are riding on a laser beam at the speed of light and then at the end there's a relay station.

A relay station which takes the laser beam and then puts into a surrogate. That is all the neural networks encoded into laser beam can be manifested as a robot on the other side of the galaxy. So in other words, it's like staying at a hotel. If you're a businessman you go from hotel to hotel and relax. The same way you'd be on a laser beam going from relay station to relay station and when you go to the relay station you take the robot body of a super human. You become superman on the other end of the rainbow. So is this a physical possibility? Yes. When might we have it? Well let's be honest. It would take perhaps a hundred years or so before we have a complete understanding of the connectome that is all the neuropathways of the brain. Perhaps another century beyond that before we have relay stations on which we could then shoot our consciousness into outer space. Is it mathematically and physically possible and the answer is yes.

Physicist Michio Kaku offers very compelling context to the 2014 film Transcendence.  The tale that Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall tell, as scientists Will and Evelyn Caster, is truly an emerging science fact, though currently science fiction.  It is quite possible to upload our consciousness onto a supercomputer, and from there connect to the World Wide Web (aka the Internet).  In the far far future, that consciousness may be downloaded onto a flash drive (or memory stick), and shot into the heavens to co-mingle, I imagine, with the greater cosmos.  I'm sure writer Jack Paglen and director Wally Pfister very much drew on Kaku's work.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (1)

Will | For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and... hackers... in this auditorium pales in comparison to the most basic AI. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as "the Singularity." I call it "Transcendence." 

I find this 2014 film, starring Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall as the erstwhile scientist couple Will and Evelyn Caster, simply enthralling.  To be sure, there is quite a bit that's uncertain and frightening about what they do, but the notion of uploading our consciousness onto a super computer; shedding what a poet called a dying animal (Sailing to Byzantium, Poem by William Butler Yeats); and reconstituting our being in a vastly expansive universe is, quite frankly, stunning.  

Max | This thing [i.e. uploaded Will] is like any intelligence. It needs to grow, to advance. Right now it's settling somewhere it thinks it's safe from outside threats. Somewhere its massive appetite for power can be met. But it will want more than that. After a while survival won't be enough. It will expand, evolve, influence - perhaps the entire world.

That new being isn't just exponentially intelligent, but also godly capable.  Because the transcendent Will can manipulate nanoparticles, he can quickly heal wounded colleagues, even resurrect them from the dead, and endow them with superhuman strength.  Will can create material, build apparatus, and fabricate the high technology platform he needs to survive forever, all seemingly out of thin air.

Audience | So you want to create a god? Your own god?

Will | That's a very good question. Isn't that what man has always done?

Reference: Transcendence Quotes.

Right.