Are Robots Human? or, Are Humans Robots?

Leo is a creature with long fuzzy ears, brown eyes that blink sleepily, and two Mickey-Mouse-like hands. On a good day, Leo will listen to his trainer, a young woman who tells Leo to press a green button on the table. After blinking and swaying around a little groggily, Leo will do just that. With some prompting, Leo will even figure out what the trainer means by pressing "all" the buttons, even if the concept of "all" is a new one just recently learned.

For a dog, this would be pretty good. But Leo is not a living creature. Leo is a robot, albeit a very fancy one. New York Times reporter Robin Marantz Henig spent some time with the researchers at MIT's Personal Robotics Group and Media Lab to find out what the state of the robotics art is today. She went prepared to be amazed, but found that the videos posted online by the labs represent the best-case performances of robots that, like recalcitrant children, do the wrong thing or nothing at all at least as often as they do the right thing in response to instructions. But performance is constantly improving, and when the various human-like behaviors of following a person with its eyes, recognizing itself in a mirror, and responding to verbal and visual clues are finally integrated into one machine, we may have something that people will be tempted to respond to as we would respond to another human being. If this happens, would we be right in saying that such a robot is then human, or has consciousness, if it acts like it does and says it does? And if so, what are our obligations toward such entities: do they have rights? Should they be protected?

A friend of mine recently told me that a European group is considering how to put together what amounts to a robot bill of rights: rules for the ethical treatment of robots. He personally feels that this is going way too far in a field that is as yet largely experimental and research-oriented. There's nothing wrong with figuring out how to respond to ethical challenges before they spread to the consumer marketplace. But before we go that far with robot ethics, we should get some philosophical matters straight first.

Henig quotes robotics expert Rodney Brooks, who seems to believe that the difference between humans and machines like Leo is one of degree, not of kind: "It's all mechanistic. . . . Humans are made up of biomolecules that interact according to the laws of physics and chemistry. We like to think we're in control, but we're not." Henig herself, in a lapse of reportorial objectivity, follows this quote with her own statement that "We are all, human and humanoid alike, whether made of flesh or of metal, basically just sociable machines."
Now a machine is an assembly of parts that interact to perform a given function. Being subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, in principle the operation of a machine is completely predictable, at least in a probabilistic sense if any quantum-mechanical things are going on. If we are machines and not human minds operating with the aid of bodies, then as Brooks implies, our sense of being "in control," of having the freedom to choose this or that action, is an illusion. Notice that neither Brooks nor Henig argue for this position—they simply state it in the manner of one worldly-wise person reminding another of something that they both agree on, but tend to forget from time to time.

Neither do they follow through with the logical conclusions of their mechanistic view of human life. If our choices are illusory, really determined by our environment and genetics, then all moral principles are pointless. You can't blame people for beating their dog, or their computer, or their robot—it was bound to happen. Maybe this sounds silly, but if you really buy into mechanistic philosophy, it is totally destructive of morality, and indeed of any values at all.

Fortunately, most people are not that logically consistent. I suppose Ms. Henig, and Prof. Brooks for that matter, avoid parking in handicapped spaces, give some money to charity, and otherwise follow general moral codes for the most part. But whether you bring robots up to the level of human beings by attributing consciousness, life, and what would in former times have been called a soul to them, or whether you drag humanity down to the level of a robot by saying we are "just sociable machines," you have destroyed a distinction which must be maintained: the distinction between human beings and every other kind of being.

As robots get more realistic, it will be increasingly tempting to treat them as humans. In Japan, whose demographics have made the over-60 segment one of the fastest-growing population groups, researchers are trying to develop a robotic companion for the aged that will help them in daily tasks such as getting things from shelves and so on. As long as we recognize that machines are machines and people are people, there is no harm in such things, and potentially great good. But a dry-sounding thing like a philosophical category mistake—the confusion of humans and machines—can lead to all sorts of evil consequences. At the least, we should question the commonly-made assumption that there is no difference, and ask people who make that claim to back it up with reasoned argument, or to leave it alone.

Sources: The New York Times Magazine article "The Real Transformers" appears at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29robots-t.html. A fuller discussion of free will versus determinism can be found in Mortimer Adler's book Ten Philosophical Mistakes (Collier Books, 1985).

War, On the Other Hand

Just down the road from where I teach in San Marcos, Texas, the Arredondo family lives in a suburb of San Antonio. Every now and then Rose, age ten, will rush inside the house and tell her father Juan, "There's another snake in the back yard, Daddy!" Then she follows her father outside and watches as he calmly walks up to the snake and picks it up with his bare left hand. Even if it tries to bite him on the hand, Arredondo shows no concern. My source does not report what he does with the snake after that, but it is safe to say that this particular snake never disturbs the peace of the Arredondo back yard again.

What is remarkable about this little scene is that two years ago, Arrendondo was on patrol in Iraq when a bomb severed his left hand. He survived to join the ranks of hundreds of soldiers who have lost all or part of a limb in the Iraq war. But the Army paid $65,000 for a new prosthetic hand developed by Touch Bionics of Edinburgh, Scotland, and after some months of training, Arrendondo can use it nearly as well as his intact right hand. Unlike previous electromechanical hands, the i-Limb has five independent motors, one for each finger and the rotating thumb. Sophisticated software uses myoelectronic signals from the muscles in Arrendondo's forearm to control each finger independently. Although a lifelike skin-colored covering is available for those who wish to blend into the non-amputee world unobtrusively, Arredondo, like many of his fellow amputee veterans, chose a transparent silicone covering which shows off the camouflage green-and-brown paint job on his plastic fingers.

Anyone familiar with the history of technology knows that war is one of the most effective cultural spurs for engineering advancements. All the great engines of destruction, from the crossbow to the hydrogen bomb, were developed for reasons of war. But while the ill wind of war spreads death and tragedy wherever it goes, those in the healing professions, including biomedical engineering, can beat the sword of war into the plowshare of better medications, treatments, and prosthetics. (I am now caught up on my mixed-metaphor quotient for the month.)

Devices like the i-Limb don't get invented overnight. The ideas that gave birth to the commercial product originated in research begun about twenty years ago under the sponsorship of Scotland's National Health, the government agency responsible for most health care in that country. When the technology was far enough along to be commercialized, the private firm Touch Bionics took over and now sells the device throughout the world.

So often, engineering ethics discussions concentrate on things that go wrong: disasters, accidents, fraud, coverups, and so on. But there is a strand in the discipline that says we should highlight good examples of engineering well and ethically done: projects that go right, people who benefit their fields and humanity in general. If all we talk about is how to do something wrong, how will anyone learn how to do it right?

Touch Bionics, and the government researchers before them, look like good examples to me. While there are unethical things you can do in any profession or field, a person who chooses biomedical engineering with the goal of developing better artificial limbs chooses an engineering career that will benefit humanity almost without question.

The choice of a career has profound consequences both for the person who chooses it and for the society he or she lives in. Sometimes it is made with maturity and judgment, but other times a person decides what to do with their life with less thought than they'd give to picking out a movie or a restaurant. At the same time, there are no guarantees that everything you do will end up being used in a way you would choose.

Suppose an engineer who was dead-set against war consciously chose to go into biomedical engineering and took a job with Scotland's National Health to develop the artificial hand that turned into the i-Limb. It is the nature of the case that one of the biggest customer segments for such products are amputees who lose limbs in combat. Can you say that the availability of good prosthetics encourages or supports war? I don't think so. Yet without that market and generous Department of Defense funding to support it, companies such as i-Limb might have more trouble staying in business.

Young people starting a career in engineering seldom consider such complexities as these, and I think that overall it is probably a good thing. If you start to worry about every little bad thing that might possibly happen to you, you'll never get out of bed in the morning. But as bad as war is, I'm glad that engineers working for companies like Touch Bionics have the imagination and dedication to pursue a good idea like the i-Limb over the many years it takes to bring it into reality.

Sources: The USA Today article describing the i-Limb appeared in the July 23, 2007 online edition at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2007-07-19-bionic-hand-amputee_N.htm. Touch Bionics has a website that gives details about the i-Limb at http://www.touchbionics.com.

Creeping Disaster: The Big Dig Tunnel Tragedy One Year Later

Just over a year ago, a woman died in the collapse of a part of the ceiling over a Boston highway tunnel that forms part of the so-called Big Dig. Less than a week after the collapse, experts were talking about how the epoxy used to hold up the ceiling tiles could fail. In the year that has passed since then, the National Transportation Safety Board investigated the accident and released their report on July 11, the one-year anniversary of the collapse.

At the time, I remarked on the apparent similarities between the Boston tunnel collapse of 2006 and the Kansas City hotel walkway disaster of 1981, in which 114 people died. As it turns out, the comparison was apt. In Kansas City, a contractor made an apparently innocuous change in the way some threaded support rods were arranged. But the change greatly weakened the structure and contributed directly to the collapse. The NTSB report says that while epoxy can be used safely to hold bolts in place to support suspended ceilings in tunnels, the wrong kind of epoxy was used in the ceiling that failed.

Epoxy adhesives have been available in some form since the 1940s, but to recommend their use in critical structural elements such as multi-ton ceiling slabs, the manufacturer needs to understand short-term and long-term chemical and physical processes in the material. It turns out that in common with many other plastics, certain kinds of epoxy (including what the NTSB called "fast-set" adhesive) slowly stretches under stress. This behavior is called "creep," and my blog of July 19, 2006 noted that engineering experts were already speculating that creep might have been responsible for the collapse.

It was. The epoxy vendor Powers Fasteners also sold another kind of epoxy, "standard-set," to the Big Dig contractor, Modern Continental Construction Company, intending it to be used for the critical ceiling bolts. Unlike the fast-set type, the standard-set epoxy does not creep when installed properly. Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, the consulting firm overseeing specifications for the project, allowed Gannett Fleming Inc., the ceiling designer, to specify the adhesive by performance rather than a particular make from a particular company. Such a practice is in keeping with the competitive-bid process, but often makes it harder to tell what is really needed for a specific job.

Of all the entities involved—the designer, the contractor, the vendor, and the people on the ground who actually put the adhesive in the holes—the NTSB found that only the vendor, Powers Fasteners, understood the danger of creep and the need to use the non-creeping standard-set epoxy, not the creep-prone fast-set type. But somewhere along the line, possibly under deadline pressure, that vital bit of information got buried in fine print, someone substituted the fast-set epoxy, and the deadly chain of events was set in motion.

If the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the organization responsible for operating the tunnel, had carried out prompt and thorough inspections of the tunnel after it opened, they would almost certainly have discovered signs that the bolts were creeping out, and could have taken corrective action. But the NTSB found that before such regular inspections could take place, the MTA felt obliged to compile a database of tunnel components and apply to the Federal Highway Administration for approval of its inspection plan before putting it into action. This bureaucratic musical-chairs performance took three and a half years—longer than the ceiling took to creep out and collapse.

There are many ironies in this episode, but I will content myself with pointing out two.

First, right in the heart of what in my less charitable moments I refer to as the "know-it-all capital of the world," the land of Harvard, MIT, and one of the greatest concentrations of engineering experts in the world, a critical life-saving bit of knowledge—the information about creep—didn't get to the people who were in a position to do something about it. I teach at an institution that is to Harvard or MIT as a culvert under a farm road is to the Big Dig. But we have a large construction program here, where hundreds of students learn the basics of materials and other dry matters on their way to becoming foremen and supervisors of the same kinds of workers who put the wrong epoxy in the ceiling in Boston. I can only hope that if our students were in the same position, they would have known better. I dare say MIT, or even Massachusetts as a whole, does not pay much attention to students who want to be contractors when they graduate. But if humble construction education programs such as ours teach people in that line of work about the dangers of ignorance when it comes to novel materials, we will have justified our existence in that regard, anyway.

Second, the kind of bureaucrat who values procedure and compliance and following all the rules above simply doing the right thing, is not serving anyone well in the long run. If there had been just one low-level inspector or employee of the MTA who had said to himself, "The hell with waiting forever for FHA approval—I'm going out there and take a look," he might have found the problem early enough to forestall it. But he would have had to raise a big stink, probably go over the heads of his supervisors, perhaps even go to the media, and in all likelihood he would have lost his job. Such people are called whistleblowers, and they are the engineering world's equivalent of the Old Testament prophet—one who speaks the truth regardless of how unpopular it might be, or how dangerous it is to one's own well-being. Like the office of prophet, it is a lonely calling, one that should not be entered into lightly. But paying the price of unpopularity, or even sacrificing one's career, is small compared to the saving of lives.

Sources: Articles describing the NTSB report were carried by the Boston Globe on July 11, 2007 (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/07/11/wide_risk_wide_blame/) and the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/11/us/11bigdig.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).

A Mouse That's Roaring: Antigua's Internet Gambling Battle with the U. S.

Back in May of 1993, my wife and I took a week's vacation in Antigua, a small Caribbean island with a present-day population of some 70,000 people. I brought back from that trip memories of great seafood, welcoming people, and a fondness for steel drum music (in limited quantities). At the time, the main industry on Antigua was tourism, and so it remained until the Internet came along.

A few years after our visit, a young former stock trader named Jay Cohen moved there from the U. S. with some friends and discovered gambling was legal in Antigua. They set up World Sports Exchange Ltd., one of many online gambling sites that catered to one of the largest markets in the world: the United States. Cohen's operation grew to employ hundreds of people on Antigua and it became the second-largest industry on the island.

Then (as I have noted in previous columns), the U. S. government decided to intervene against online gambling in a big way. The Justice Department began to use existing laws against domestic gambling to arrest operators of offshore gambling operations. In 1998, on a visit to the U. S., Cohen was arrested, convicted, sentenced to 21 months in jail, and went to prison in Nevada, not far from the lights of Las Vegas.

But before he went to jail, someone informed him that Antigua might have a case against the U. S. that could be tried before the World Trade Organization, an international body that adjudicates trade disputes between countries. To make a long story short, Cohen convinced Antiguan authorities and gambling interests to file suit with the WTO, and so far the WTO has agreed with them.

The principle that the WTO used makes sense. Countries have a right, it says, to prohibit certain kinds of activities in order to uphold "public morals and public order," even if people or entities outside that country are involved. For example, Muslim countries can prohibit the importation of alcoholic beverages, since Islam forbids their consumption. However, this kind of prohibition can't be used simply as an end run around fair trade practices, says the WTO. If you allow your own people to make homebrew hooch, you can't justify banning booze imports with the public morals and order rationale.

And here is where the great inroads into domestic gambling laws that the U. S. gambling industry has made, have come home to roost, so to speak. If the government were as hard on all forms of domestic gambling—Indian tribes, horseraces, Las Vegas, you name it—as they're trying to be on offshore Internet gambling, then the WTO case wouldn't have a leg to stand on. But even in the latest federal laws that prohibit banks and other financial institutions from processing offshore gambling payments, legislators have inserted exceptions for things like domestic horserace betting, again at the behest of gambling interests. Therefore, says the WTO, you can't use your morals and order reasoning to prohibit offshore internet gambling, unless you also try to wipe out domestic gambling with the same vigor.

While I have not too high an opinion about international bodies that presume to tell sovereign nations how to behave, I cannot fault the WTO on this one. The WTO is a toothless tiger in the sense that it cannot enforce its rulings except by means of other rulings. What Antigua is asking it to do in this case is to allow the small country to flaunt U. S. copyright law, which might turn the island into a massive sweatshop churning out knockoffs of Nike shoes.

I'd hate to see relations sour between the U. S. and Antigua, and realistically, I don't think the Caribbean nation is going to do anything that would seriously threaten the tourist industry, which still employs more people there than any other. And while I wish we in the U. S. had never started down the road toward legalized gambling, I have to admit that the charge of hypocrisy is one that sticks in this case.

In 1959, Peter Sellers starred in "The Mouse That Roared," a film about the fictional Grand Duchy of Fenwick. Faced with a bad economy, incompetent leadership (Sellers played three roles, one of them female), and the Cold War, Fenwick decides to declare war on the U. S., promptly lose, and then profit from whatever Marshall-plan-like aid would be forthcoming thereafter. Needless to say, things go awry, and the resulting international chaos ends up with Fenwick on top and the U. S. begging for mercy. Somehow I doubt that a similar comic-opera outcome will result from Antigua's lawsuit with the U. S. Like mineral wealth, gambling profits can addict and corrupt a healthy body politic in the long run as well as individuals, and I hope Antigua weans itself from excessive dependence on them in the future. But in the meantime, if they do get some huge settlement from the WTO, I have to admit it couldn't happen to a better island.

Sources: The Washington Post carried an article on Jay Cohen and his connection with the WTO lawsuit on Aug. 4, 2006 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/03/AR2006080301390_2.html. More recent developments are described briefly by a piece in the online technology newsletter TJ Daily at http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32594/118/. My previous blogs on gambling were "Online Gambling in the U. S.: Don't Bet On It" (Aug. 1, 2006) and "Legislating Morality: The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act" (Oct. 3, 2006).

Lie Detecting with fMRI: Using Physics to Do Metaphysics

This month's Scientific American carries an article by Joe Z. Tsien about reading the brain's "neural code": the patterns of nerve activity that go on when we remember or think about something. Although most of Dr. Tsien's work has been with mice, he has been able to transform the seemingly random pattern of nerve firings into binary code that tells him what the mouse has been doing and where. Admittedly, the range of mouse activities—nesting, falling in a specially designed mouse elevator, and experiencing a miniature mouse earthquake—falls a little short of human experience. But hey, you have to start somewhere.

Or do you? Many have seen farther down this road a threat to the final bastion of independence: the freedom of thought. At the end of his article Dr. Tsien speculates that "in 5,000 years" we might be able to download our minds onto computers, with all the potential for control and exploitation that this entails. He is more conservative than the inventor Ray Kurzweil, who in his book The Singularity Is Near estimates that "the end of the 2030s is a conservative projection for successful [brain] uploading." Interesting that the same process—transferring a human brain's contents to a machine—Dr. Tsien calls downloading, and Kurzweil calls uploading. Perhaps unconsciously, this may express their respective attitudes to the order which is appropriate to the two objects. Which is higher, computers or brains?

Computers and brains are also involved in a recent New Yorker magazine article by Margaret Talbot. The hero (or villain, depending on your point of view) in her piece is Joel Huizenga, founder of a company called No Lie MRI. Really. Huizenga claims that an advanced brain-imaging technique called functional MRI (fMRI for short) is the key to figuring out whether a person is lying. The technique works by tracing the oxygen consumption of various locations in the brain. Since more active parts presumably take up more oxygen, this allows fMRI users to discern different locations of brain activity with a resolution of a few millimeters or less (as long as the patient doesn't turn his head or move his tongue too much during the scan). Huizenga has run some tests in which subjects were asked to lie sometimes and tell the truth other times, and claims his technology is much better than the old polygraph machines that rely on such mundane things as heart rate, breathing rate, and the sweatiness of one's palms. Talbot reports that "neuroethicists" are already up in arms about the threat posed to privacy and freedom by the potential misuse of such technology.

The amusing thing is that nowhere in these articles does anyone mention the fact that when someone brings the machinery of science and technology to bear on the human mind and the question of truth, it is like trying to use an X-ray machine on your checkbook to figure out your bank balance if you've done the math wrong. A bank balance is a non-material entity. Yes, it's recorded in various places—the bank's computer memory chips and discs, your checkbook if you've kept it right, and so on. But without people around to agree on what a bank balance is in the first place and what numbers represent yours in particular, those black marks on paper or magnetized regions on a hard drive somewhere are just random features of the material universe.

Despite materialistic arguments to the contrary, the human mind is a fundamentally different thing from the human brain. In most peoples' experience, the physical brain is needed for the mind to manifest itself in the material world. But there are respectable philosophical arguments (too lengthy to repeat here) that say the certain features of the mind—namely, the validity of reason—show that matter can't be all there is. Truth, if it exists at all (and there are some dangerous types out there who claim it doesn't), must exist in what philosophers call the metaphysical realm, beyond the physical one that is directly sensible.

This is why attempts to develop a technological test for truth, as one would test for diabetes or AIDS, are doomed to fall short of the 100% reliability criterion that would make them justifiable for widespread use. Even if there is a part of the brain that telling a lie activates in many people, there are so-called pathological liars to whom what we would call a lie appears to be the truth. A delusional person will maintain with the greatest calmness and peace of mind that he is a fried egg, no matter how often you show him his appearance in the mirror and how badly he must have been fried to look like that. And any lie-detector test that relied on subconscious unease or cognitive dissonance to detect lies would fail to register the lie when such a person says he's a fried egg. For all the machine could tell, he IS a fried egg.

Most courts have wisely refrained from admitting lie-detector tests as direct evidence of guilt, although they can be used in a secondary way to assist in exoneration on a voluntary basis. While brain research is fascinating and may lead to cures for neurological conditions like Alzheimer's disease, the science-fiction prospect of a kind of "omniscience machine" that you could point at any passerby to read his innermost thoughts or secrets is likely to remain science fiction for centuries, if not forever. For one thing, all such systems initially have to have the cooperation of the subject, especially when the issues being explored are unique to that subject. Both conventional lie detectors and No Lie MRI's system work only to the extent that a subject manifests typical physiological responses to lying. If the information being sought becomes more specific, such as "Where were you on the night of the 19th?", a particular brain's neuronal patterns form an uncrackable code-book-type code, as far as I can tell. And the only way to crack it would be to interview the subject beforehand on the matters at issue, with the subject's full cooperation, in order to establish what the code is. In the case of unwilling subjects, this cooperation is hardly likely to be forthcoming.

So although people interested in engineering ethics ought to keep a watchful eye on brain research, the antics of outfits such as No Lie MRI probably pose more danger to the pocketbooks of investors than to the freedom or privacy of the public at large. That is, unless we convince ourselves that they work even if they don't. And that is a metaphysical problem for another day.

Sources: The July 2007 issue of Scientific American carries Dr. Tsien's article on pp. 52-59. Margaret Talbot's article "Duped" begins on p. 52 of the July 2, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Ray Kurzweil's prediction of brain uploading by 2040 can be found on p. 200 of The Singularity Is Near (Viking, 2005). For arguments that the mind's reasoning ability points to something beyond materialism, see Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea (IVP, 2003).

Big Brother the Robot

For a time in the 1960s, George Orwell's novel 1984 was required reading in most U. S. high schools. The dystopia Orwell wrote back in 1949 described how a despotic police state could use a then-new technology called television to spy on its citizenry. Always alert to the ways that politicians tend to distort language, Orwell coined the phrase "Big Brother" to show how an intrusive and freedom-expunging government might try to put these activities in a good light. The leaders who proclaimed that "Big Brother is watching you" intended to sound reassuring, but the context of the novel makes it clear that being watched by Big Brother was the last thing most people wanted.

The fact is, we have gone a long way down the very road Orwell cautioned us about. To see what I mean, try counting the number of cameras you see in a typical day. If you go to an ATM, you can rest assured your portrait resides in some bank's data bank showing who got your cash. Any time you step into a convenience store, a grocery, hardware store, or these days any establishment bigger than a guy selling newspapers on the corner, your visage is snapped by security cameras. And if the guy selling newspapers has a cell phone, he can take your picture too.

In England, the constabulary has gone the rest of the way to 1984 by installing speakers next to cameras in public places. Right now they're being used to chastise litterbugs and other nuisance violators. Don't drop an empty fish-and-chips bag on the sidewalk in Middlesbrough—you're likely to hear a disembodied voice call out, "Will the gentleman in the blue button-down sweater and hushpuppies kindly pick up his refuse and deposit it in the nearest receptacle?" Evidently, the glares of other passersby are more effective than the presence of a bobby in making miscreants toe the line. Reaction has been varied, but since the English have already gotten used to one of the highest densities of closed-circuit TVs in the world, this next step seems likely to spread too.

It used to be argued that the Orwellian vision of spy cameras everywhere was silly, because to be effective you'd need a person watching every camera, and unless you had one half of the country spying on the other half, the system wouldn't work. That was before the age of digital video storage and analysis. Image processing technology is now so advanced that computers can be enlisted as robotic pre-screeners, serving up only the suspicious scenes to their human masters. So that argument is out the window these days. And spy robots are no longer tied to one place. At a meeting to demonstrate high-tech rescue robots at Texas A&M's Engineering Extension Service at College Station, Texas, last week, a German development called the AirRobot flew around taking pictures of imitation disaster sites and radioing them to operator Thomas Meyer. Think a toy radio-controlled helicopter, but equipped with four propellers, video, and infrared cameras. Before you rush out and buy one to fly over the nearest nude beach, be warned that Meyer does not sell to individuals—only to organizations that he considers qualified to use the technology responsibly.

And that is the question to consider: what is the responsible use of today's increasingly powerful visual spying technology? A fire chief who uses an AirRobot to find people trapped in an otherwise inaccessible location is certainly a responsible user. A bank that uses its ATM camera to catch the guy who stole your bank card—that's responsible too. So far, there haven't been many major scandals or Enron-type prosecutions based on someone misusing spy technology. The cases that have come up usually involve peeping toms who leave wireless video cameras in women's bathrooms and so on. This is bad behavior, but it isn't going to bring down the Republic.

The thing Orwell saw the Soviet Union doing, and the thing he wanted to warn the free world about, was the institutional and governmental misuse of spy hardware. In a well-functioning democracy, if the people get tired of governmental spying on them, they can do something about it, but only if they know about what's going on and if the government responds to their protests. But in dictatorships and regimes such as North Korea's, where privacy is highly restricted or simply ignored, technology is handing new weapons to those who are most happy to exploit it for their own nefarious ends.

I teach a class about electronic communications, and in the first session I define a communications system for the students. You have a true communications system only if there is a person at one end originating some information, and a person at the other end receiving it. Spy technology is a kind of communications system, although with an unaware or unwilling person on the sending end. I don't personally view the proliferation of security cameras in the U. S. as that much of a problem, mainly because the people watching them—most of them working for private firms, not the government—are generally trustworthy and have my own best interests in mind. But if we ever embark on a large-scale program that enables the government to spy on the public, I'll haul out my old paperback copy of 1984 and start comparing notes.

Sources: An article describing England's experiments with talking cameras was carried by the Canadian Broadcasting Company's website on April 4, 2007 at http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/04/04/talking-cameras.html. The Texas A&M security robot meeting was featured in a New York Times online article on June 25, 2007 at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/25/washington/25robots.html. A description of the AirRobot can be downloaded at www.securiton.eu/cms/upload/pdf/M3pdfs/englisch/WerbeflyerAirRobot_E.pdf.

Mr. Wizard and the Twenty-First Century

Don Herbert has died. But the spirit of Mr. Wizard lives on.

If you were a boy with a mechanical or scientific bent, the 1950s and early 1960s were a kind of golden age. Politicians who feared that the Soviet Union was producing more scientists and engineers than we were poured money into all kinds of educational programs designed to attract young men (sorry, women weren't considered) into technical fields. And one of the most popular TV children's programs in 1955 starred a nerdy-looking guy in a white shirt and tie who, in his clipped Minnesotan speech, led a child each Saturday morning through the wonders of science by letting them do fun stuff on camera.

I just managed to watch Mr. Wizard (that was the name of the program, actually, Watch Mr. Wizard) for its last couple of seasons, in 1964 and 1965. As vividly as some people remember near-death experiences, I can see in my mind's eye Mr. Wizard's guest of the hour (Jimmy or Timmy, names didn't matter) as he poured steamy-looking liquid nitrogen over a pan full of shiny liquid mercury, transforming it into a hard block with a crinkled surface like aluminum foil. I can remember the boy's expression of delight as he slid a light bulb along a model high-voltage transmission line that spanned the length of the studio, showing why high voltage is needed to send electricity long distances. I wanted with all my heart to be that boy, and in large measure, the rest of my professional life formed itself around that desire.

I suppose I might have become an engineer without Mr. Wizard's help, but his demonstrations of the cool things you could do with science and technology was probably the most powerful incentive I had at the critical age of ten or twelve. My family knew no scientists or engineers, I was years away from my first proper science class, and I had read all the books and encyclopedia articles about science that I could get my hands on. But reading about science is to doing it as reading about swimming is to swimming, or any other pleasureable physical activity you care to name. At least during the sacred half-hour that Don Herbert ruled the airwaves, I could do experiments vicariously, take mental notes of the apparatus he used, and plague my mother to take me to Radio Shack where I could spend my carefully hoarded allowance on things like voltmeters and potentiometers.

A little-known line in the Code of Ethics of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a 300,000-member professional organization, says that it is the duty of engineers "to improve the understanding of technology, its appropriate application, and potential consequences." Although he wasn't an engineer, Don Herbert, who died last week at the age of 89, improved the understanding of technology and science for millions of young people, not by writing a textbook, or by discovering anything new, but by using the power of the then-new medium of television to show fun, neat things to a child who was the same age as his target audience. Herbert, whose background included training in both education and theater, was forced by the personal, intimate nature of the medium to contrive a dramatic narrative that would believably hold the attention of a twelve-year-old boy for close to thirty minutes. This was no easy task, but over his years of practice he brought his peculiar style of theater to a consummate level that has never been surpassed. And as his Los Angeles Times obituary noted, countless engineers and scientists whose careers are now in full flower cite Mr. Wizard as an important influence.

Of course, he and his show were a creature of their time. To the best of my recollection, Watch Mr. Wizard used no music except for intro and closing themes; there were no costumes, rock bands, or other show-business paraphernalia. I imagine that if I watched a kinescope copy of an old show today, I would be disappointed by the crude production values compared to present-day television. But the same kind of kid-centered technology programming can be found these days, especially on public television, which hosts a reality show called Design Squad. Each week, two teams of high school students (generally about equal numbers of boys and girls, I'm happy to note) tackle a task that a professional engineer has come up with, and face a two-day deadline to complete it. In one episode, the job was to take some old tricycles and the motor from a hand drill and build the best drag racer you could in forty-eight hours. Unlike most reality shows, which specialize in showcasing the baser sides of human nature as the losers get dissed by everybody else, the tone of Design Squad is friendly and positive, at least judging by the reviews I have read. Losing teams even have the decency to congratulate the winners. Young people model their own behavior on the way they see people act on TV, and so it's good to know there is at least one show that portrays teenagers as responsible, ingenious, and polite to each other.

I don't know how Design Squad has fared in the ratings. My suspicion is it will continue as long as its producers can maintain their funding from a variety of sources interested in increasing the number of young people interested in science and engineering: corporations like Intel and institutions such as the National Science Foundation and the IEEE. But Don Herbert did it in a free-market way, convincing networks and sponsors that kids would want to watch his show. And they did. And on the whole, I think the world is a better place because of it.

Sources: The Los Angeles Times obituary of Don Herbert can be found at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-herbert13jun13,0,7656221.story. The IEEE Code of Ethics can be found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/whatis/code.html. The Design Squad website is at http://pbskids.org/designsquad/index.html. More information about Don Herbert and his career can be found at the website operated by Mr. Wizard Studios at http://www.mrwizardstudios.com/.

The Ethics of IEDs

In 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence joined a force of Arab irregulars (today we might well call them insurgents) in their struggle against the Turkish occupying force of what is now Saudi Arabia. The Arabs wanted to attack the Turkish-held city of Medina, but Lawrence persuaded them to leave Medina alone and focus their attention on the Hejaz railway that supplied the city. A memorable scene in the film Lawrence of Arabia shows Lawrence blowing up a supply train with dynamite. To heighten suspense, the movie portrayed Lawrence in a closeup, waiting with bated breath as he held onto a detonator box plunger until the right moment as the train rolled over the mine. Biographical accounts relate that the reality was less dramatic. Lawrence helped the Arabs make what he called "infernal machines" in the form of bombs hidden in the firewood fuel supply for the locomotives. When the unsuspecting fireman tossed a booby-trapped log into the firebox, it would explode, taking the engine out of service, and perhaps the engineer and fireman as well.

Ninety-one years later, insurgents in a Middle Eastern country are still attacking the transportation systems of occupying forces with terrorist bombs. Only now, we have Iraqis instead of Arabs, humvees instead of steam locomotives, and Americans instead of Turks. Is engineering done in the service of military operations ethical, and if so, where do you draw the line between things that are okay to do and things that no civilized engineer would stoop to?

Ethically speaking, this is well-trodden ground. On one extreme you will find pacifists, who believe all military activity is wrong in principle. On the opposite extreme, there are people like Osama bin Laden, who evidently believe killing civilians in a terrorist attack serves some higher good and therefore must be ethical. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, and that includes most engineers. This is another case in which answering specific ethical questions can't be done unless you first say what your worldview is, and what assumptions or postulates you accept. Whether or not we can agree that aggressive wars are right or wrong, I think most people—even pacifists—would agree that preventing harm in war is a good thing. And in the current Iraq conflict, the single most prominent way in which American troops are injured or killed is by "improvised explosive devices" or IEDs.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, IEDs account for more conflict-related fatalities of American troops in Iraq than any other cause. Although the U. S. military terms these devices "improvised," the makers have achieved a high degree of technical competence in the last few years. According to one 2005 report in Military Review by Montgomery McFate, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service operated a bomb-making organization that developed a variety of techniques for hiding explosives in purses, briefcases, belts, and other camouflaged locations. Typically, however, the IED used against mobile forces is buried in a roadway and connected either by wire or wireless link (such as a cell phone) to an insurgent who waits for a U. S. convoy to pass by, and detonates the mine when it will do the most harm. And many of them do.

There is not a lot technically that can be done to defend against these devices. While occasional news reports carry items about RF-based anti-IED technology or other ways to defuse the devices, either these systems have not performed in the field as their inventors hoped, or there are other problems (technical or logistical) involved. Speaking from my experience as an RF engineer, I can say that a powerful enough field to disable a wireless-based system would (a) probably set off the detonator anyway and (b) have a range of only ten or fifteen feet. The obvious disadvantages of operating such a device yourself make it a problem to deploy. More armor on vehicles is another option, but the IED makers have countered this move with shaped charges and other techniques to penetrate armor. And not everybody can drive around in a tank, anyway, even if tanks were shown to be proof against IEDs.

An alternative approach to dealing with the issue that so far hasn't been implemented that well is to go after the network of bomb makers and suppliers. This was the approach favored by McFate in her Military Review article. As the IEDs become more sophisticated, fewer insurgents with the skills necessary to make them will be available. These skilled workers become the Achilles' heel in the network. Taking them out would severely cripple the entire operation.

But that's where we get into other problems. Despite some efforts to learn about the society and culture of Iraq, the majority of U. S. troops in that country have been there for only a short time, have learned only what they need to know to survive, and look forward mightily to their return to the U. S. It's a marked contrast to the way T. E. Lawrence learned Arabic, dressed often as an Arab, and took the side of the Arabs in international negotiations even when the policies he promoted were not always in the best interests of his native country. But it would take someone like Lawrence, or perhaps many Lawrences, even to figure out the social networks that support the IED attacks, much less do anything about them. However, as McFate points out, a similar effort which used software to coordinate information about tribal relationships and connections helped in the capture of Saddam Hussein.

I am no military expert by any means, and as Will Rogers once said, "All I know I read in the newspapers." Anyone with any personal experience in Iraq probably knows a great deal more about the situation than I do, and I will defer to their judgment. All the same, it's depressing, to say the least, to read or hear about yet another IED attack that has killed more American troops. Whatever one's position is on the war in Iraq, or war in general, I think we can agree it would be a good thing to figure out how to prevent these attackers from killing more people, both Iraqis and Americans. But it looks like that won't happen until either the people making and using IEDs decide it's no longer a good idea, or else the people they want to attack aren't there anymore.

Sources: Montgomery McFate's article in the May/June 2005 issue of Military Review can be found at http://usacac.leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/. The Christian Science Monitor report on IED statistics is at http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0102/p01s03-usmi.html.

Defending the Indefensible: Amateurs Threaten the Porn Industry

Pity the poor professional pornographers. They have come a long way since the days when the only markets for what used to be called "stag films" were certain men's clubs in big cities and a few shady movie theaters. The advent of the home videotape player in the 1970s, and then the Internet in the 1990s, made it possible for people to view dirty movies in the privacy of their own homes. Now the production of pornography is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that sells millions of DVDs and even more images directly over the Internet. But as a recent New York Times article noted, sales of pornographic videos fell 30% from 2005 to 2006, down to a measly $3.62 billion. The reason? Competition from amateurs.

Back when it took a camera costing several thousand dollars, time on a video editing suite costing even more, and a modicum of professional skill to produce any movie, pornographic or otherwise, the entry barrier to making porn movies was pretty high, which limited the supply (not to mention social opprobrium and legal restrictions). But now that there are few social or legal barriers in this country to making and selling porn, the economic barrier is falling too, as high-quality digital video cameras and editing software have become cheap and simple enough for anybody with a few hundred bucks to buy and use. And pornography is the one kind of movie for which untrained actors, directors, and editors can draw as well as professionals.

It's funny to listen to how the pornographers think they're going to compete against two guys and a gal armed with a $300 camcorder and iMovie. David Joseph, president of an outfit called Red Light District, says, "We use good-quality lighting and very good sound. . . . We use different locations, rooms and couches." I'm sure that Mr. Joseph's customers are paying lots of attention to the production values, upholstery, and backgrounds. Surely those things will do the trick, so to speak.

Another pornographer complains that a lot of online porn outlets give away too much free material. Harvey Kaplan, a man who earns his bread by processing payments for pornographic websites, says that circulating free clips in hopes of attracting paying customers is a failed strategy. Many surfers just watch what they want for free and then take off for the next site without spending a dime. Brand loyalty is not a prominent factor in this business.

This problem should sound familiar to any woman who has listened to the line, "If you love me, you'll prove it to me by . . . ." How many times has that worked? And how many times has the woman watched the man walk away afterwards? A lot.

Pornography is bad. Everybody knows that—people who watch it after promising themselves for the thousandth time not to, people who make it and sell it, people who act in it. Everybody who deals with it does so, not because of a principled belief that pornography is a benefit to humanity, but for some other thing they perceive as good—a cheap (or free) thrill, easy money, a start in the movie business, or something else they see as good or valuable. In essence it's no different from drug dealing, in that anyone who makes money off it profits from the enslavement of others to a pernicious habit.

I confess to having mixed feelings about this news. On the one hand, I have no sympathy for people who exploit women and make a living off the moral weaknesses of millions. To their complaints that amateurs are ruining their business, I reply, "Tough bubkis." But on the other hand, I am not entranced by the prospect that the house down the street rented by four or five college students may become a secret pornographic movie studio.

Where you stand about pornography depends on your worldview, and I can think of two different worldviews that give diametrically opposite conclusions about it. If you subscribe to a secular liberatarian worldview, then pornography is one of those "victimless crimes." As long as the pornographers or those indulging in their wares don't bother anybody else, they should be permitted to go about their business. In that worldview, this judgment makes sense.

But if in your view, the world is fundamentally spiritual, occupied by eternal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies, and this world is a training ground for achieving perfection in the next by the grace of God, then virtue is an eternal value that counts more than money, reputation, health, or physical life itself. The Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once said that purity is the most mysterious of the virtues, and that is especially true for those outside the faith, who simply can't see what all the fuss is about. But purity is nonetheless real. In this view, to make, sell, or watch pornography is to fail in the virtue of purity, which makes it that much harder to become what God wants us to be. That is the real damage that pornography does—it damages souls. But if you don't believe in souls, you're not going to see the point of this argument either.

As long as there are people, there will be sexual misbehavior. (In the Christian worldview, that is a point of doctrine known as original sin.) But laws and customs and standards for interstate commerce and so on are teachers. Back when most of what shows up on pornographic websites was illegal even to send in the mail, your average guy growing up learned that such stuff was dangerous to your legal health and socially unacceptable in most circles. Guys growing up nowadays learn something entirely different, thanks to the ubiquity of Internet porn. And engineers bear some of this responsibility, whether they like it or not.

Sources: The New York Times article appeared online on June 2, 2007 at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/technology/02porn.html?hp. For an in-depth look at the intimate connection between the rise of home video and pornography, see the historical article by Jonathan Coopersmith, "Pornography, Video, and the Internet," in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 19, no. 1 (2000), pp. 27-34.

Engineering Altruism: Two Paths

One of the first things my father would often say to me at the end of the day was this: "And what did you do to make the world a better place today?" He'd ask it in a half-joking way, and I generally didn't have a good answer. But it was a good question nonetheless.

Suppose you're a young engineering student about to graduate. You're filled with idealism and a desire to make the world a better place through engineering. Unlike medicine, counseling, and the ministry, engineering is not generally thought of as a helping profession. But it can be, in at least two ways: one pretty obvious, and one not so obvious.

The obvious way is to devote yourself to doing engineering for the billions of people on this planet who lack what the rest of us consider basic necessities: enough food to eat, enough clean water, decent sanitary facilities and medical care, and a way to earn a living that keeps you from starving to death or having to beg. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City has mounted an exhibit on display through September 23 called "Design for the Other 90%" which focuses on low-cost engineered solutions to the problems that 90% of the world's population of 6.5 billion people face. Those of us in advanced industrialized countries live in protected bubbles compared to a person who has to spend hours every day lugging buckets of water from a dirty well a half mile away, gathering firewood to cook government-provided rice, and hoping that you won't come down with the latest plague that is making the rounds of your village. But far more people live like that than like most of those who are reading this blog. A New York Times article describing the exhibit carried a photo of one of the cleverest inventions: a water carrier shaped like a wide tire that even a child can tow with a rope, enabling him or her to carry five times the amount of water that a bucket would hold.

As a sometime inventor myself, I know that the world does not lack for ideas. The reason that more of those 90% don't benefit from many of these inventions is not that nobody has thought of them yet. The real problem is more in the realm of economics and politics. What investor with a few million dollars to spend is going to start a company to make products for people with almost no money? The exhibit's website carries a statement about half the world subsisting on less than two dollars a day. Speaking in terms of market segments, that is not the segment that most investors will think of first.

Hence, the altruism in today's title. If those who need these things are going to get them, many things have to change. Yes, the products that would help them in their existing ways of life need to be invented and reach the intended users. But the users have to change too: harmful and even self-destructive attitudes and habits are not unknown among the poor as well as the rich. The hardest task of all, much harder than simply designing a clever product that looks like it might help somebody poor, is understanding enough about the people and their culture to know what would enable them to benefit from the product, and working with them to make those changes. The old saw about "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime" embodies a profound truth: changing a person's physical circumstance without changing the person for the better can help only for a moment. But if this type of humanitarian engineering is done with full recognition of the cultural roadblocks that so often turn a technical success into a social failure, it can truly change the world.

There are several organizations that help engineers in these endeavors, notably an outfit called Engineers Without Borders. If you are either a student or professional engineer, you can locate a chapter near you and find out how to get involved.

That's one way to be an altruistic engineer. The other way is one I don't recommend unless you've already met the first pre-requisite, which is to get filthy rich in engineering or invention. Turns out that the Cooper-Hewitt exhibit is funded by the Lemelson Foundation, the brainchild (one of many) of the late Jerome Lemelson. Lemelson figured out a way to make tons of money while being an independent inventor. There are two schools of thought concerning the merits of his approach.

One school goes like this: Lemelson just happened to be an extremely clever guy whose patents for toys, industrial robots, and other useful devices brought him millions of dollars, whereupon he founded the Lemelson Foundation to promote the benefits of invention and ingenious design, and died in 1997, end of story. The other school, for which I have some limited evidence, is that at some point in his career Lemelson decided to specialize in what are known as "submarine patents." According to this version, Lemelson filed scads of patents in hot new fields on all kinds of ideas he had never tried in practice, but hoped would some day pan out and become commercialized. When a well-heeled company came out with a product that could be construed to infringe one of his broadly-written patents, he would show up on their doorstep, patent in hand, and threaten to sue. Fearful of extended litigation, many companies simply settled out of court, but even court battles can turn out in an independent inventor's favor.

Probably the truth about Lemelson lies somewhere in between. However he made his money, toward the end of his life he decided to use it to benefit humanity by encouraging invention and design. And to his credit, as far as I can tell the Lemelson Foundation has done exactly that, sponsoring annual invention competitions and exhibits about invention at the Smithsonian Institute and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and funding other worthwhile endeavors.

And this is the second way you as an engineer or inventor can be altruistic. If you go into an engineering-related business, you can make as much money as you can. And once you make your millions, you can devote them to a good cause. The danger in this path is that once you have all that money, it can be really hard to turn loose of it. Of the world's millionaires, only a few emulate the 19th-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who once stated publicly his intention to leave the world as poor as he came into it. And even he didn't quite succeed. In his effort to die poor, he built hundreds of libraries throughout the U. S., and if you happen to get to Manhattan to tour the 64-room mansion that houses the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, you can thank Mr. Carnegie for it, because it was once his house.

Sources: The New York Times article on the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. The exhibit website is at http://www.peoplesdesignaward.org/design_for_the_other_90/. The website for those in the U. S. interested in Engineers Without Borders is at http://www.ewb-usa.org/.

Designer Baby or Sensible Precaution?

My wife edits a section of a commercial website devoted to medical information about breast cancer. She is more than casually interested in the subject, since she just celebrated her five-year anniversary of being free from the disease after undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy in 2002. My mother died of the same malady in 1980, so it is safe to say I'm as familiar with it as anybody can be who hasn't had it personally.

Two families in Great Britain have also had more than their share of experiences with breast cancer, having lost ancestors to the disease over three generations. So they decided to do something about it. Both couples found a physician named Serhal who has developed a way to test a fertilized embryo at the eight-cell stage for a defective BRCA1 gene, which if present increases the risk of eventually developing breast cancer to about a fifty-fifty chance. If Dr. Serhal receives governmental approval for his plan, and it looks like he will, the couples want to proceed with in-vitro fertilization using only embryos which do not have the defective BRCA1 gene. The embryos with the defective genes will be disposed of. In this way, the couples can "annihilate the gene from the family tree," as Dr. Serhal puts it.

Where is engineering in this situation? Everywhere: in the instruments and equipment Dr. Serhal uses to do the tests, in the procedures for in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and, most importantly, in the selection of embryos. In applying the sciences of genetics and embryology to a commercial end (it is unlikely that Dr. Serhal is working for free), he is doing engineering, broadly defined. And the subject being engineered is a human being, or rather, several human beings, many of whom do not survive the process. Remember, harboring a defective BRCA1 gene does not guarantee you'll have breast cancer; it just increases the risk. Many people with that gene live long lives and die of something else altogether. So we can be pretty sure that some of the embryos that get thrown away would have developed if implanted into healthy human beings living normal lives, whatever that means these days.

Now I'm going to go off in a direction that you may not follow, but I have come to believe it is the most direct way to express what I see to be the basic problem here. A few hundred years ago, back before much was known about embryology, the development of a baby in the womb was mostly a matter of speculation. People talked metaphorically about clay gradually being molded, and for all they knew, there was some amorphous protoplasm to begin with which only gradually became the individual who made his or her first public appearance nine months after conception. But now, with everything we know about DNA, genetics, and the fabulously intricate machinery that comes together to produce a mathematically distinct individual after the process of conception is finished (which can take just a few minutes), the empirical scientific evidence supports the idea of humans as substantial beings more strongly than ever.

Substantial say what? "Substantial beings." I'm using the word "substance" in a technical philosophical sense that goes back ultimately to Aristotle. To explain it in detail would take far more room than I have, but briefly, a substantial being is one which has a wholeness or completeness or integrity. A substantial being is more than the sum of its parts. For example, you can look at a dog in a number of ways: an assembly of atoms, a combination of bones, muscles, internal organs, hair, teeth, etc., even a set of behaviors that can be predicted (more or less, depending on how well you trained your dog). But when you say, "Heel, Fido!" you don't mean, "Heel, you assembly of atoms that just happens to be moving in front of me on the sidewalk." You mean a single being—your dog—continuous in time and localized in space, a real entity that has life (another philosophical term) and will some day die.

This concept of people as substantial beings is not popular these days. Few of us think of ourselves as substantial beings in fact, never mind the terminology. We think of ourselves as just collections of needs, or inclinations, or desires, or bits of knowledge and skills. Nevertheless, substantial beings are what we are—we've just forgotten the name for it.

What has this got to do with the case of the selected defective-BRCA1-free embryos in Britain? An embryo is what the substantial being called human looks like when it's a few days old. You, I, every human on the planet was once an embryo. And one day mortality will catch up with us and we'll die of something. No exceptions so far. The couples who are trying to eliminate the defective gene from their family tree are probably motivated by some generous motives and some fears. The generous motive is to give birth to a baby that won't have an increased risk of dying of breast cancer. The fear is of seeing their child die of the same disease that killed so many other relatives. So they decided to "eliminate" the children who might die of it and bear only those who probably—but not certainly—won't.

There is an old and unpopular name for this sort of thing: eugenics. In the first half of the twentieth century, followers of Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin, both biologically and intellectually) promoted the idea that we should take steps to improve the human gene pool, both individually (by marrying into "good stock" for example) and collectively (by allowing governments to sterilize those "unfit" to bear children). There are boodles of problems with these ideas, but that did not stop them from spreading in both the U. S. and Europe, and in particular Nazi Germany, where Hitler took aggressive means to eliminate "undesirables" such as mental defectives, homosexuals, the Romani (gypsies), and most famously, the Jews.

Hitler, more than anyone else, gave eugenics a bad name, although it took until 1969 for the journal Eugenics Quarterly to rename itself Social Biology. But the desire is still there, and since 1950 the tremendous advances in genetics and molecular biology have put powerful technology at the disposal of those who would use it for the same kinds of purposes that the old eugenicists had.

The British couples are not doing anything like advocating the genocide of a race. But, enabled by Dr. Serhal, they are doing the same kind of thing as Hitler did, only on a much smaller scale. On a personal level, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with desiring to produce offspring who are healthy, happy, intelligent, and possessed of other good qualities. But the end does not always justify the means. Now that you're prepped on vocabulary, I can make my point: destruction of human substantial beings is a wrong means of achieving this goal.

Sources: The article describing Dr. Serhal and his plans originally ran in The Times of London, and can be found at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21624095-30417,00.html. Wikipedia's article on eugenics has an abundance of historical and current information in its fairly balanced treatment.

Pop-Up Porn: The Trial of Julie Amero

Three days from now, on May 18, former substitute teacher Julie Amero is scheduled to be sentenced in a Connecticut court for allowing seventh-graders to see pornographic websites. That is, unless the sentencing is delayed again, which has happened since her conviction in January. Delays in sentencing sometimes mean that the prosecution is no longer as sure of its case as it once was. There are good reasons that the prosecutors in the Amero case could be reconsidering, but first let's try to get some of the basic facts straight.

Everybody agrees that on October 19, 2004, Amero was substitute-teaching a seventh-grade class at Kelly Middle School in Norwich, Connecticut. Everybody also agrees that at some point, pornographic images began to appear on a computer screen that students were using. At the trial, police detective Mark Lounsbury testified that his software (aptly named ComputerCOP) determined that such sites were accessed during the time in question. After this was explained to the jury, they convicted Amero on four counts of injuring the morals of a child.

What the jury was not allowed to hear, but what computer expert W. H. Horner determined, was that these pornographic images came from "pop-ups." As anybody who has spent more than five minutes on the Internet can agree, pop-ups are annoying, pesky little things that usually don't pose a threat to one's job, however. But in this case, Amero realized they could, so everyone also agrees that she tried to keep students from viewing the images. (The disagreement is over how vigorously and effectively she tried.) But, according to Amero, she had been told not to turn off the computer because she had no password, and since the person who had turned it on for her in the morning wasn't present, she couldn't turn it on again if she shut it off.

Horner also found that the computer in question had outdated anti-virus protection software, no Internet filter, and no anti-spyware software. Since these kinds of protection seem to be the school district's responsibility, Horner's evidence in this regard shifts at least some of the blame off Amero's shoulders.

But how much really belongs there in the first place?

For twelve-year-olds, the Internet has been as much a fact of life as television was to those born in the U. S. after 1950, say. This was brought home to me recently not by the Amero case, but by reading Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, by Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Among the many fascinating findings Regnerus presents, he makes the point that debates about the content of traditional public-school sex education classes,". . . oral sex or anal sex or gay or lesbian sex are quickly becoming utterly irrelevant, since a few clicks on a mouse will bring any of us to a demonstration of exactly how each is performed and 'experienced.'" Internet porn is ubiquitous and easily accessible, despite all that parents and teachers can do, and chances are that most of the students in Amero's class had seen worse things elsewhere than they saw on that fateful October day.

There are two issues that must be distinguished in this case. One is the technically-informed question of whether the physical evidence supports the contention that Amero voluntarily visited the websites in question, heedless of the fact that students were also seeing them. My judgment on this is that if Horner's testimony is to be relied on, Amero was caught between the rock of letting popups proliferate like flies on a dead horse, or the hard place of turning off the computer and losing whatever utility it had (and nobody seems to talk about what the machine was being legitimately used for at the time, except to say that students were looking at a hairstyling website, which doesn't sound like academic activity). And maybe she didn't realize how serious the matter was, although she evidently made some attempt to deflect students' attention away from the machine. But now she's facing the possibility of a forty-year jail sentence.

Which brings us to the second issue: the hypocrisy factor. Now don't get me wrong: porn is bad. While it may be true that, as G. K. Chesterton allegedly said, the young man knocking on the door of a whorehouse is really looking for God, that doesn't mean it's a good thing to go there. We have made the choice as a culture both to receive the manifold good things that the Internet brings, and to allow at the same time the huge Internet porn industry to profit from the millions of small evils committed by everyone who looks at their wares. To single out one person in one particular circumstance and lock her away for most of her natural life because she did not stop a student from what he or she could do outside the classroom any day of the week strikes me as cowardly, hypocritical, and pretty dumb, too.

The trial of Julie Amero reminds me of another trial held a long time ago, by a similar bunch of concerned citizens who had posted spies, not in a school computer, but near a place where a woman met her adulterous lover. The spies caught the two in the very act. The woman's lover they allowed to go free; but they hauled the guilty woman before another person they hoped to get in trouble, a troublesome preacher who had been challenging the concerned citizens' unquestioned authority to say what was right and what was wrong.

The preacher's name was Jesus. The concerned citizens were the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem around 30 A. D., all ready to take the woman out and stone her to death, as their law required.

All Jesus did was to write in the dust of the street (the words were not preserved for us), and then say, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." And St. John records that one after another, beginning with the oldest, her persecutors quietly slipped away, until there was nobody left except the woman and Jesus. He told her to go and sin no more.

I think Julie Amero has learned her lesson about computers, about pornography, about students who see pornography, and a whole lot about the creaky, hypocritical system of law in Connecticut. Her lawyers (who do not work for free) have promised to appeal, but that will take time and money. If you think justice has not been served in the Amero case, you can inform yourself further and then contribute to her defense at the website listed below. And if you do think justice has been served in this matter in all respects, then I just hope you never get the chance to judge me!

Sources: For the time being, Wikipedia has an entry for Julie Amero at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Amero. It lists many news reports and other information, along with her personal website http://julieamer.blogspot.com/index.html, where contributions can be made. I thank Peter Ingerman for drawing my attention to this case, which is well summarized in a USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2007-02-22-julie-amaro_x.htm.
Forbidden Fruit has just been published by Oxford University Press.

Death in Space: NASA Ponders Eternal Questions

Sometimes the Freedom of Information Act helps you turn up stuff that you'd almost rather not know. Mike Schneider of the Associated Press recently wrote a story about a NASA memo he obtained that way. As one of the most open agencies of our government, NASA is presumably used to operating in a fishbowl, but I would imagine that even the most open-minded of NASA's bureaucrats cringed a little when this document was made public.

The subject was how to deal with certain undesirable eventualities that might take place on a long mission such as the three-year flight to Mars that NASA plans some day. In a crew of five to ten people, somebody's likely to become ill over a three-year period, maybe even fatally ill. And on an interplanetary flight (at least one not powered by Star Trek warp drives), you can't just turn around any old time and go back. The memo goes no farther than to say that NASA needs a policy about what to do if a crew member becomes so ill that death is likely or certain, and for that matter, what to do with the body.

Another ethical conundrum the memo raises is whether a sick astronaut whose need for medical care is endangering the lives of the other astronauts should be guaranteed all the help he or she needs, or whether early "termination of benefits," so to speak, would be in the best interests of the mission.

I will give NASA credit: the memo doesn't try to answer all these questions, it just brings them up. Schneider found that NASA is working on these questions with the help of outside bioethicists, but I'm not sure that's the right approach. Here's why.

NASA is the quintessential engineering bureaucracy. Engineers and the engineering attitude pervade the institution. Engineers are used to working with inanimate objects that obey physical laws without exception. When the objects do fail in the purpose for which they are designed, it is always in accordance with those same physical laws, which is why scientific and engineering knowledge is so sought after among engineers. If you can just know enough about the physics, chemistry, dynamics, and so on, you should in principle be able to predict every possible outcome, or else design a system so that only a certain number of outcomes are possible in the first place, and deal with them in turn. Once you find that answer, it will work every time the same conditions arise. You've solved the problem.

But engineering know-how can take you only so far. The issues that the Mars-mission document addresses are not technical ones. They plumb the depths of what it means to be human and why anyone would volunteer for a dangerous three-year hike in a cold merciless vacuum in the first place.

In my view, NASA may be spending too much time and money on outside experts and perhaps not paying enough attention to the astronauts themselves. Much has been made about "The Right Stuff" and what it took in the 1960s, and what it takes now, to be an astronaut. Most of the early U. S. astronauts were former military test pilots. That is no longer a necessary qualification, although it doesn't hurt. What it takes to be an astronaut now, it seems, is a Ph. D. in something technical, a sterling resumé, and the patience of Job to wade through an arduous application procedure, and to train endlessly while waiting in line for your turn in space, which you hope will come before you hit retirement age. Is this the type of person best suited for what many people regard as mankind's greatest remaining adventure? Maybe we should look a little farther than we've looked up to now, and in a different way.

To the kind of person I'm thinking of, the advice of some bioethicist with a Ph. D. would be superfluous. True courage always knows what to do, whether it is to take a calculated risk for a great cause (which every astronaut who gets aboard a Space Shuttle already does) or to sacrifice one's life for a mission, which might well come about during a trip to Mars. Back before exploration became the business of bureaucracies, people had to be this way in order to attract support. Take the example of Admiral Richard E. Byrd, whose pioneering explorations of the Antarctic by land and air in the 1920s and '30s were financed virtually entirely by private contributions. Byrd is largely forgotten now, and recent historical discoveries concerning his claims to have flown over the North Pole in 1926 have cast doubt on their validity. But the style of the man (admittedly, reinforced by autobiographical books he published to finance his projects) was that of the courageous, risk-taking adventurer who gave technical preparation its place, true, but who then simply accepted whatever remaining risks there were as part of the job. Byrd was the closest thing the 1930s had to an astronaut: a man who went where no one had gone before, taking with him other brave souls who were willing to take chances with him.

No, Byrd took no women along, at least during his early expeditions. And yes, he nearly died of carbon monoxide poisoning during one stay in the Antarctic and had to be rescued. But those kinds of risks didn't stop him from going through with several more expeditions, the last one only a couple of years before he died in 1957.

In past blogs, I have said some negative things about NASA and the Space Shuttle program, mainly that the antique shuttles ought to be retired rather than trying to squeeze a few more increasingly hazardous flights out of them. But this is not to say that we ought to simply give up on space exploration because it's dangerous. If anything, that is an excellent reason to keep trying. Only, we need to pay more attention to the character of those who we send into space, giving them much greater authority and responsibility than they currently hold in the bureaucratized system that is NASA. Columbus, Magellan, Byrd—they not only went on the voyages, they ran the whole show. Maybe the answer will come from the private sector once again, as entrepreneurs find safe and effective ways to make end runs around NASA's bureaucracy and do more with less. Of course, the government could always stop them. But the U. S. isn't the only country in the space game any more. I'd like the first man (or woman) on Mars to be a U. S. citizen, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can get there, but only if we try. And while machines can do wonderful things, running robot cars around Mars is no substitute for being there.

Sources: The article by Mike Schneider on NASA's plans for the Mars mission appeared in numerous venues, among them the Austin American-Statesman on May 6, 2007, at http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/nation/05/06/6deathinspace.html.

If I Could Redesign the Internet

If I could redesign the Internet, I'd fix it so I could find out who sent anything I receive: personal emails, spam, bomb threats, you name it.

If I could redesign the Internet, anybody who wanted to send thousands of emails at once, legally or otherwise, would have to pay up front first.

If I could redesign the Internet, my browser couldn't be taken over by some little ad for low-interest mortgages that suddenly balloons out and hides the thing I'm trying to read.

All right, so the last one is more along the lines of a pet peeve. But the first two are reasonable. If we could easily and reliably find out exactly who is sending spam and malware, it stands to reason that not nearly as many people would do so. And if bulk email had a cost structure similar to direct snail mail, spam wouldn't go away, but we'd get a lot less of it. So why don't we just fix these problems right away? The reason can be illustrated by a little story from my days as a radio engineer with a large mobile-radio firm, back in the 1970s.

At the time, I was on a team of fresh young engineers charged with designing a new mobile radio for police cars and fire trucks. One of the first things we did was to take a look at the connector between the radio and the antenna. The connector is like a bridge that carries the "traffic" of the radio waves. If the bridge is bumpy or full of holes, you're not going to get much traffic across the bridge. Similarly, if the connector is of poor quality, you're going to have problems sending the radio waves back and forth to the antenna. The connector on the old radio design we were replacing was called a "PL-259," a type that dated back all the way to World War II, and we decided we were going to replace it with a newer design that presented a smoother path to the waves. Then we had our first progress meeting.

At the meeting, an old-time manager listened patiently as we presented our ideas for the new design, including our plans for the new connector. "Are you finished?" he asked. When we said yes, he replied, "You kids obviously haven't heard about the First Commandment of mobile radio design."

No, we guessed we hadn't. What was it?

"Thou shalt only use a PL-259. Neither shalt thou even think of using any other connector." He pointed out that thousands of police cars and fire trucks all over the world had antennas that connected with a PL-259, and there was no way he was going to let us change it. It was what engineers call a "legacy problem": there's too much hardware (or software) out there that a change would obsolete. Thus perished the notion of updating the connector, at least for that new design. Eventually, long after I left the company, I learned that they did manage to replace the PL-259, but probably only after a long internal battle and a lot of hand-holding for customers who had to replace antennas or use adapters.

This minor episode illustrates the major problem with changing certain features of the Internet. Take the problem of anonymity. Way down at the level of the basic protocols or rules followed by all the machinery that runs the Internet, there is simply no way to ensure that you can figure out who sent what. The reason for this is partly historical. In the Internet's early days, it was a research toy shared by a few large, sophisticated, and trustworthy computing centers. For several years, it probably never entered the mind of anyone involved that one of the users would deliberately try to misuse the system to conceal their identity. By the time the Internet was large enough to attract such people, it was too late to start over with a new set of protocols that contained built-in security. There are also a lot of problems and delays caused by the fact that people using the Internet move around a lot now, with laptops, PDAs, Internet-capable cell phones, and whatnot. The system was originally designed to deal with fixed mainframe computers that were as likely to move around as the Washington Monument, and the patches and fixes that have been added to deal with mobile users are inefficient and complicated.

More patches and fixes aren't the answer. For these basic legacy problems to be solved, it looks like we will have to wait for a new Internet altogether. The National Science Foundation is paying for research into how we'd like such a new system to look with its Future Internet Network Design program (FIND). But estimates for how much it would cost to scrap the existing system and install a new one range into the many billions of dollars.

Who's going to pay for it? Well, one way or another we already support the present system, through bills to our Internet service providers, tax dollars, and other ways. It will be interesting to see how far we can stretch the old protocols, but some day they'll start looking the way that PL-259 connector looked to us young engineers. Right now it's not just a crusty old manager stopping us; it's the expense of changing over. But as the Internet becomes a vital part of life-critical services such as medical telecommunications, we may have to start something like a two-tier system, rather like the HOV lanes on freeways: an expensive but super-reliable and super-secure network, and then the regular old system for everybody else, with maybe nodes here and there connecting the two.

I'm no computer scientist, so I'll let the experts figure out how to make the transition. But spamless email and freedom from malware seem like pretty attractive goals, even if it does cost a bundle. And if somebody does eventually figure out a way around the new safeguards, we might have a few years to enjoy the Internet as it was intended to be.

Sources: A series of articles by Anick Jesdanun on redesigning the Internet was carried by the Associated Press and reprinted in several newspapers, and carried online in part by the Hartford Courant at http://www.courant.com/business/hc-rebuildinginternet.artapr15,0,5625095.story?coll=hc-headlines-business on Apr. 15, 2007, and also in the Austin American-Statesman print edition of Apr. 23, 2007, pp. D1 and D4.

Does Engineering Ethics Matter? Joe Carson Wonders. . . .

Last week, I said here that in light of a tragedy such as the shootings at Virginia Tech, engineering ethics paled into insignificance. The question for today is, why should engineering ethics deserve any attention at all, when there are so many more pressing matters demanding our attention?

There are those who take the view that codes of engineering ethics as they now exist are little more than window-dressing, apparently designed to create a good impression on the public, but not to do anything more substantial than that. One such is Joe Carson, an engineer whose experiences as an employee of the Department of Energy taught him that the engineering profession does not rush to defend every engineer who is fired or otherwised penalized for "whistle-blowing." According to Carson's website, many engineering-related disasters and hazards result from the engineering profession's reluctance to both take its codes of ethics seriously, and to defend its members from unjust retribution by employers who are made to look bad when engineers bring such problems to light. Carson has organized an Association of Christian Engineers whose purpose is to bring Christian-based ethical principles into engineering in a way that makes a real difference.

Carson makes some good points. As things now stand, nearly all engineering codes of ethics are not binding and have no force either of law or rule. In other words, the worst that can happen if an engineer, or an entire organization, violates ethical codes but otherwise stays within the limits of statutory laws, is a guilty conscience. And many of us are used to living with those.

One reason is that most engineers in the U. S. are not required to have a Professional Engineer license in order to work in industry. This is in marked contrast to the status quo in the legal and medical professions, and even such mundane enterprises as surveying and plumbing, where some form of state or federal licensure is needed in order to make money doing those jobs. People who violate legal or medical codes of ethics (which often have the force of law) can lose their privilege to practice by the action of a professional licensing board. This economic threat must have some effect, although cases of lawyers and doctors who lose their licensure through malpractice are not as common as you might think.

Another reason is the lack of solidarity among engineers as contrasted with, for example, trade unions. The grievance procedure is a time-honored feature of all unionized workplaces. Any employer who runs afoul of union-monitored workplace rules runs the risk of getting embroiled in a lengthy and costly battle with the union, which generally rushes to the aid of its allegedly wronged member. As in any conflict involving organizational power, abuse can take place on both sides, but at least there is a restraint in place to limit the power of the employer to act arbitrarily. Not so in the case of engineering societies, which for the most part strenuously avoid acting like unions. If Mr. Carson had been a member of a federally-recognized union instead of just belonging to the National Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Nuclear Society, the outcome of his conflicts with the Department of Energy might have been very different, at least for him personally, and perhaps for the people who are endangered by the hazards he has spoken about publicly.

So what should be done? Mr. Carson has several suggestions. One is to make licensure a requirement for employment in any engineering job, not just for those few engineers whose need to sign off on plans for public projects makes licensure a necessity for them. Standing in the way of this goal is the fact that all states have what is called an industrial exemption which waives the license requirement for jobs in the private sector, by and large. This is a matter for state legislatures, which are notoriously tied to local industry and will loosen those ties only if another powerful force will make itself felt. The engineering societies could move in this direction, but so far they have given little sign of any interest along these lines. Another suggestion, which requires no legislation, is for the professional engineering societies to take up arms in defense of members who unjustly lose their jobs or other privileges when they act in accordance with ethical principles. At various times in the past, organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have produced "friend-of-the-court" briefs in legal cases involving ethical engineers and unethical employers. But for the last decade or so, I have seen little evidence that IEEE is interested in such matters, although its Society for Social Implications of Technology (SSIT) does give out a Barus Award from time to time which honors notably courageous engineers who put their careers at risk to expose risky products or practices. (Full disclosure: I am currently treasurer of SSIT, which office is not as impressive as it may sound.)

Finally, Mr. Carson wishes that religious motivations for ethical behavior were not automatically ruled out of order in most modern technical societies. He writes that "engineering professional societies should acknowledge that faith-based motivations are valid . . . [and relate] to their efforts to uplift and defend the engineering profession, its code of ethics, and its service to society." As we have noted elsewhere (see the Jan. 2 blog herein "Science, Engineering, and Ethical Choice: Who's In Charge?"), without some larger encompassing narrative or worldview, all engineering activity becomes "sound and fury, signifying nothing." The significance of engineering must be placed in a larger context, or else the thing that should be only a means to human blessing becomes a monstrous and insatiable end in itself.

Dallas Willard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, says this about the dangers of technology unlimited by some kind of theological understanding: "Human beings have long aspired to control the ultimate foundations of ordinary reality. We have made a little progress, and there remains an unwavering sense that this is the direction of our destiny. That is the theological meaning of the scientific and technological enterprise. It has always presented itself as the instrument for solving human problems, though without its theological context it becomes idolatrous and goes mad."

Stern words. Does that mean I favor a religious belief test before any engineer can become licensed to practice in private or public enterprises? Absolutely not. But I do think we have gone so far in the other direction away from any acknowledgment of the role of supernatural belief (including but not limited to Christianity) in the engineering enterprise, that we should not be surprised when the rather feeble and often ineffective things we do regarding engineering ethics, often fail to improve the ethical behavior of people and organizations engaged in technology. I do not agree with everything Joe Carson says. But I do think he's on to something, and I hope that his efforts meet with greater success than they have so far.

Sources: Joe Carson is president of the Association of Christian Engineers, whose website is www.christianengineer.org. His account of his trials and tribulations with the Department of Energy can be found at www.carsonversusdoe.com. The quotation about engineering and faith-based motivations is from his article in the December 2005 issue of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's publication "Professional Ethics Report." Dallas Willard's words are from p. 336 of Willard's The Divine Conspiracy (Harper San Francisco, 1998). The list of engineers and others who have received the IEEE Society for Social Implications of Technology's Barus Award can be found at http://www.ieeessit.org/about.asp?Level2ItemID=5.