The Spy Under the Hood: Friend or Foe?

Most people have heard of the "black-box" data recorders that commercial airliners carry in case of a crash. Designed to survive high impact and long immersion under water, these bulletproof devices carry a record of vital statistics about the plane's speed, altitude, and control settings up to the point of impact, and have proved invaluable in countless crash investigations. What you may not have heard is that your own car very likely carries a small-scale version of the same technology. And if you ever have a wreck, the information in your car's black box might be used against you—or in your favor.

The technical name for the device is an Event Data Recorder. It typically preserves information on vehicle velocity, throttle settings, and even steering-wheel positions for the last five seconds or so before an impact. It is an outgrowth of the sensor systems originally developed to operate air bags. As more and more of the typical automobile's operation has become digitized and mediated by computers, engineers found that it would be little added trouble to store certain data in a non-volatile format (technically called an EEPROM) that can be read out even after a wreck, with the proper equipment. Already the systems have proved useful to both prosecutors and defendants in civil and criminal cases involving car wrecks.

In Austin, Texas, evidence from Daniel Talamante's GMC pickup was used against him to prove that he was going 85 mph before he slammed into another car, killing two children. He was convicted of murder. On the other hand, the system worked in favor of a woman in Connecticut who was facing conviction for negligent homicide resulting from a collision she had one winter day after crossing a main-road center line. The data recorder showed that her vehicle's speed was well below the posted limit and suggested that she drove onto a patch of ice that caused the accident. As a result, the charges were reduced.

What is your reaction to the idea that your car could essential turn government witness against you? From one point of view, the situation is not much different than a policeman using a radar detector to clock your speed. In both cases, law enforcement uses technology to monitor aspects of your driving. But if the data recorder's evidence is used against you, there is the added little sting that you paid for it yourself.

In my very limited research into this issue, it doesn't appear that evidence from the recorders is being abused or manipulated. Rather, as with most technical evidence, both defendants and plaintiffs use it, depending on which side the data favors. And in some cases, no doubt, the data is equivocal, consistent with a variety of interpretations.

The case of the automotive event data recorder is only one example of a trend that will likely grow in the future: the prospect that more and more aspects of our lives, from what websites we view, to where we go, to what we say, will get digitized and recorded somewhere. This trend will no doubt lead to great changes, just as the advent of mechanical sound and motion-picture recordings led to a revolution (or series of revolutions) in the entertainment industry, journalism, politics, and so on.

The extreme civil libertarians among us will object to any and every encroachment on what they see as the right to privacy, and such concerns should not be ignored. Some states such as California require that purchasers of new cars be notified that the black box is inside your new car. This has probably had little effect but to add another sheet to be signed to the growing pile of paper that has to change hands every time you buy a car, but at least it is an effort to let people know.

There is something to be said to the principled objection that a person should not be compelled to pay for a gizmo that can potentially record evidence that is not in their own interest. Some people even try to disable the device, but this is not a good idea, because its function is tied in with the airbag system. In damaging the data recorder, you might disable your airbags—or even set them off, which would be quite entertaining, to say the least. I'm in favor of people at least knowing that there is such a device in most new cars, but going beyond that to a right to disable them might be a little much. And who knows?—maybe some folks drive a little more carefully knowing that every turn of the wheel could be used against them in a court of law.

On the whole, this technology looks pretty benign. In the New Testament, we read that ". . . rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil." What's said about rulers can be applied to this kind of technology as well. If you're a good driver, or even the innocent victim of adverse circumstances, your black box's evidence can only help, it seems. And if you're a drunk driver or otherwise misbehaving, it can provide one more witness against you, which most people would agree is a good thing.

Sources: A column by Ben Wear in the Sept. 10, 2007 Austin American-Statesman discussed event data recorders. The story of the woman who hit the patch of ice appears at http://www.clickondetroit.com/automotive/3786478/detail.html. A good technical description of the kinds of data recorded, written by an employe of a company that makes software to download the data, is at http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/edr-site/uploads/Auto_Black_Box_Data_Recovery_Systems_by_TARO.pdf. And the New Testament quotation is from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans, chapter 13, verse 4.

Ray Guns Revisited

Back in February, I did a two-part series on non-lethal weapons. The first piece was about a system whose formal name is the Active Denial System. Despite the fact that the name sounds more like what politicians do when they get in trouble, the system in question is a rather elegant technical achievement. It consists of a microwave generator probably similar in principle to your microwave oven. Only instead of making waves that are about five inches long (the standard microwave-oven wavelength), these waves are only about a tenth of an inch long. If you're dealing with water-bearing substances such as potroasts or people, it turns out the depth of penetration of microwaves relates to the wavelength. So while you can cook a whole potroast that's several inches thick in your microwave, these shorter microwaves used by the Active Denial System only penetrate 1/64 of an inch into human skin. But if you pack about a kilowatt or more of short-wavelength power over an area of only a few square yards, the heat generated in that thin layer of skin with only a two-second exposure goes up to 130 degrees F. And that's uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that the Air Force scientists who developed the thing believe it will be a sure-fire (so to speak) way to disperse unruly crowds. Better than tear gas, because it leaves no residue or long-lasting health effects (they believe). And better than rubber bullets or any of the other accepted non-lethal technologies in present use.

Well, that's the idea, anyway. But as with so many technical solutions that appeal to technologists, the wider world raises objections that the scientists maybe didn't consider. According to a recent Associated Press report by Richard Lardner, the Active Denial System has run afoul of bureaucratic hesitation. After the first major conflict in Fallujah between insurgents and U. S. troops in 2003, the head of the Air Force Space Command, Gene McCall, sent an urgent email to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, saying that the Active Denial System could take care of just such problems. In 2006, Marine Corps Major General Robert Neller requested procurement of eight commercialized versions of the same system, called Silent Guardians. But Col. Kirk Hymes, chief of the Defense Department's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, says that one reason the system hasn't been adopted for field use is because of fears that it might be perceived as a form of torture, raising specters of Abu Ghraib. There are also outfits such as Human Rights Watch that don't want to see the system deployed. They complain that the testing and legal reviews on which the Pentagon bases its claims that the system is legal under international law and medically harmless, are classified and can't be independently verified.

When I first heard about this system, I was tickled technically. and less thrilled from an ethical point of view. I honestly don't know if it would be a good idea to use this thing in a real battle or not. Given (a big given, in the case of many readers) that we ought to be fighting in Iraq in the first place, my suspicion is that the thing would be helpful up to a point. The point would be when the target population figures out a way to defend themselves against the device. I won't give aid and comfort to the enemy by spilling beans right here, but it turns out that an item that would provide pretty certain defense against the system is available in any U. S. supermarket. (In Iraq, it might not be so easy to come by.) And there's the expense factor, which nobody in the know wants to discuss. If it was as inexpensive as a Humvee with chrome trim, you can bet they'd be bragging about it. As I mentioned in my February column, these things are probably not cheap at all—a lot more costly than a conventional weapon of comparable size. But every new piece of hardware is expensive until you start making lots of them and get economies of scale.

Independently of the questions about the weapon's safety, cost, and so on, what bothers me more than anything about this whole episode is the organizational schizophrenia it reveals. Here one part of the Defense Department has been spending $60 million over twelve years to develop a potentially promising new weapon, and wants to see it used. And some commanders are eager to try it. But some other part of the Pentagon successfully throws roadblocks up and says, "Well, not yet, not quite, we're not sure. . . ." Now even in well-run organizations you get different parts running off in different directions, and stopping a thing that's gone on too long is sometimes the right thing to do. But it does seem to me that if there were a more unified spirit—I don't know what other word to use—in the military establishment today, either the project would have been rejected at the outset, at a savings of millions of dollars, or else everybody would have been in favor of it from the start and it would be out there today zapping terrorists and doing whatever other damage it can do. There's an adage that says something like, "husbanded bullets are no bullets at all." Meaning, roughly, if you go into a battle worried more about how many bullets you have than about winning, you're likely both to run out of bullets, and lose. The abstract ethical question about the Active Denial System is one that we simply lack enough information to decide, at least in public. But what is very plain is that the internal squabbling that the system has created, is a sign of a deeper malaise within the military that can do no good at all.

Sources: My previous blog on this subject appeared on Feb. 6, 2007. The AP story on the Active Denial System by Richard Lardner ran in the Austin American-Statesman for Sept. 2, 2007.

Hackers and Slackers: Hotz's iPhone Hack

Thanks to George Hotz, 17, of Hackensack, New Jersey, we all know how to hack into an Apple iPhone to make it work with at least one cellphone carrier besides AT&T. Of course, not everybody has the combination of manual dexterity, software skills, and access to knowledgeable friends that Hotz brought to bear on the problem. As soon as George got one of the newly released phones in June, he set to work with some fellow online hackers to crack the iPhone's secrets. A week or so ago, he succeeded, and newswires everywhere carried reports about his feat and interviews with him. Despite comments from some of his "slacker" friends that he wasted his summer, I emphatically disagree.

I must confess a fond feeling of spiritual fellowship with Hotz. When I was his age, I spent my summers on similar techie quests that mystified most of my friends and relatives, although none of my exploits gained the publicity Hotz's did. He is no stranger to techno-fame, having competed successfully in Intel's Science Talent Search several times. All the same, we know that Apple and AT&T are probably not thrilled to hear that at least a few people can use their equipment in a manner contrary to their intentions. Is what Hotz did ethical? For that matter, what are the ethics of hacking in general?

From all reports, Hotz is clearly not trying to profit from his endeavors, at least not directly. He saw the hack simply as a technical challenge to overcome, a test of his own hacker skills, and after hundreds of hours of work, he and his online buddies succeeded. The fact that using the iPhone with a network other than AT&T goes against the spirit if not the letter of the law (at least as interpreted by AT&T and Apple) is peripheral to the main issue, which was whether Hotz could make the thing work the way he wanted it to, not the way its makers intended.

Hacking can be viewed as a game. The hacker pits his (or occasionally her) brainpower against whoever or whatever made the objective to be hacked—an iPhone, a Defense Department database, or a bank's credit card system. The rules are of two kinds: technical and moral. The technical rules are determined by the existing structure of the objective, which includes software, hardware, and physical and mathematical laws. The moral rules have to be internalized—there are no moral signposts out there that have to be obeyed in the sense that the law of gravity has to be obeyed. Hotz has expressed no interest in running a business hacking iPhones, but now that his hack is on the web, somebody else may do just that. And at least indirectly, Hotz would bear that responsibility.

Believe it or not, this matter relates to a distinction made by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre between what he calls internal goods and external goods. In essence, MacIntyre asks the question, "Given a practice which requires attention, the development of skill, and devotion over a period of time, what are the goods that we seek in return?" That is, if one wants to be a doctor, or an engineer, or a priest, one has to devote years of life to learning how to do these things well. If human beings seek the good, what are the goods that we seek in learning how to do such practices?

MacIntyre classifies such goods into two categories. Goods internal to a practice are examples of excellence judged according to the rules of the practice itself. A good internal to the practice of surgery is a new and more effective way of doing a gall-bladder operation, for example. People who are really "into" a skill such as surgery, music, or even iPhone hacking get a thrill from doing the practice well and thus creating goods internal to the practice. On the other hand, goods external to the practice are things like money, adulation, promotions, and the other incentives that organizations use to get professionals to do their practice for them. Clearly, there are many ways to get goods external to a practice, but to achieve goods internal to a practice, you have to do the practice itself well.

All right. It looks to me like Hotz's main motivation was a good internal to the practice of hacking. Hacking the world's most famous cellphone was a truly elegant hack, and Hotz did it. The fact that he's not skipping college to go make lots of money hacking cellphones shows that he is not unduly attracted by goods external to the practice of hacking, as some may be.

MacIntyre develops these concepts of goods and practices in the context of his ethics of virtue, which he bases on Aristotle's ideas. Since nobody can put things quite like MacIntyre, I'm going to quote his definition of virtue in its entirety, from his book After Virtue: "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods." To do his hack, Hotz had to be persistent, patient, attentive to detail, communicative with his hacker friends, ingenious, and self-educated, largely (there are no official hacker schools, to my knowledge). All these are virtues, in MacIntyre's terms, which helped Hotz do his hack. Were he to be tempted by external goods—the money, the fame of being blatted over MSNBC, etc.—he might turn his skills to nefarious purposes. It's interesting that Hotz wants to major in neuroscience—"hacking the brain!" as he puts it in one report. And if he achieves his dream, even partly, of "hacking the brain," there is no need to expand here on what dangers and promises that goal holds.

What Hotz does next depends on not only his technical skills, but the kind of person he is and the kind of circumstances he finds in college and beyond. You may recall that as a teenager, Bill Gates engaged in a similar kind of hacking with a "blue box" that allowed him to make free long-distance phone calls, provoking the ire of what was then the monolithic Bell System. Smart, effective people generally have something of the rebel in them, and suppressing such tendencies too much would lose us some good talent. But judgment comes with age and experience, and let's just hope that in the future, Hotz and his friends use their abilities for internal goods—and the good in general.

Sources: An MSNBC story about Hotz's achievement is found at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20424880/. The Austin American-Statesman carried a reprint of a story about him from by Martha McKay of The Record on Aug. 27, 2007. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (2nd edition 1984) is published by University of Notre Dame Press.

Skype's Wipe-Out

Just because a surfer wipes out every now and then, you don't jump to the inevitable conclusion that he's a bad surfer. And if a relatively new technology suffers a massive failure that puts it out of action for a few days, that isn't necessarily a reason to give up on it, condemn it, or conclude that it will never work. All the same, the recent collapse of the peer-to-peer function of what one source calls the world's most popular Internet telephone service has some lessons about reliability, the Internet, and using things for what they were designed for in the first place.

First of all, what is Internet phone service? The form provided by Skype works like this. With some inexpensive hardware such as a headphone and microphone, you can log on to Skype and call any of the millions of its other subscribers without incurring a per-use or per-minute fee. My understanding is there is a flat monthly fee, but that's it. Your phone call is routed directly over the Internet, completely independently of landline telephone wires or cellphone networks. So as long as the party you wish to call is on Skype too, you can say good-bye to concerns about talking too long on long distance calls, using up your cellphone minutes, and all those other worries.

Well, the other day (Thursday, August 16, to be exact), all Skype users woke up to a rude surprise—Skype was down worldwide. Despite initial concerns that it might have been a malware attack, the latest news is that a software glitch caused it. From the description posted on Skype's official website by staffer Villu Arak, Skype inadvertently caused the problem itself. Apparently, they sent out a routine software update to every user's computer. This update told the computers to restart. Well, all those computers restarting all over the world woke up and started trying to log on to Skype again. This massive pile of logon requests should have been handled by Skype's system, but due to a software defect, it wasn't. The end result was that the whole thing came unraveled and took a couple of days to put back together.

I don't know whether anyone uses Skype as their main form of telecommunications. Probably there are a few people in special situations in remote areas, but only a few. If there were, they were high and dry without a phone for the time that Skype was down. Probably most users take advantage of it as one of several communications options, an inexpensive alternative, possibly within a company where a central authority can enforce the use of Skype rather than conventional telecomm systems that cost more. But the convenience and low cost come at a price.

Technologies are not just hardware, or hardware and software, but a combination of that physical stuff and ideas, aspirations, and habits in the minds of billions of users. As new technologies come into being, to be successful they have to fit into the existing complex of human activity and the material environment, while changing both. In the process, existing technologies are often adapted for uses that their original designers never thought of.

Internet phone service is a case in point. If you were going to set up a worldwide computer network from scratch and design it mainly to provide telephone service, it would look like nothing that exists today except in a few laboratories. Why is that?

The closest thing to it is what is operated by the old-line telephone companies—the Bell System babies, or teenagers, or however you want to describe them. Their fiber-optic based networks are full of compromises because they've had to keep handling their huge amounts of traffic ever since the dawn of the telephone age. This requirement to use existing hardware rather than throwing everything away, starting from scratch, and going broke in the process has left them with a material burden that is matched by the regulatory burden which prevents them from doing a lot of things that they'd like to do. Because of the burdens of history, neither their physical environment nor their legal environment is what they'd like if they were starting over from the beginning.

The Internet was built basically from scratch over the last two or three decades, so in principle it comes closer to the ideal. But it wasn't designed for rapid, reliable, two-way audio signal transmission. You can force internet protocols to deliver up something that resembles an old-fashioned analog phone conversation, but it's difficult, it wastes bandwidth, and you're basically making the system to do something it wasn't designed initially to do. Fortunately, with enough bandwidth a lot of hard things become easy, which is why Skype can be as successful as it generally is. Still, Skype has the huge problem that not everybody in the world is on it. On the other hand, everybody with a telephone of some kind can in principle dial anyone else with a phone, and that fact makes the conventional international telecomm system that much more valuable. Every person added to that system makes it incrementally more valuable to everyone else already on the system. This is why communications networks tend to be dominated by a few large players, or only one.

And then there's the reliability problem. Since the public telecomm systems have gone heavily software-intensive, they have had their share of software glitches. But decades of conservative engineering practice have taught them to be hyper-cautious about changing anything. I once spoke with a woman who was a software engineer with one of the major "baby Bells" in an office near Chicago. She said that in order to make a small change in one line of code in the master operating software for their network, she had to put in about six months of work testing, checking, getting authorizations, and so on, before she could make the change. Only large, established organizations have the resources to take such pains, but it pays off in reliability.

Maybe Skype will learn from this experience, and spend a little more time testing new software. As it happened, the problem they had was more of an inconvenience than a disaster, except maybe to their bottom line. But as we rely more on Internet-based communications systems for things like medical records and emergency communications, reliability will move up the list of desirable features closer to the top. Let's just hope that the Internet can stand the strain.

Sources: The San Jose Mercury-News carried an article by Sarah Jane Tribble on Skype's outage at http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_6656717. Mr. Arak's comments can be found on the Skype website under the title "What happened on August 16" at heartbeat.skype.com.

Emergency Communications: FCC To the Rescue

So much of engineering ethics deals with bad news that I'm glad to report some potentially good news for a change. At the end of last month, the U. S. Federal Communications Commission did something that may vastly improve the way first responders across the nation can communicate in large-scale emergencies. But to appreciate this good news, you need to hear some old bad news about the sorry state of emergency communications today.

During the World Trade Center attack on Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of firefighters died, and later studies showed that a contributing factor was the gridlock in radio communications that happened that day. Policemen, firemen, ambulance drivers, and other emergency organizations need fast, reliable communications to save lives of both disaster victims and their own. But in the World Trade Center collapse and during Hurricane Katrina, people died needlessly because emergency radio communications systems broke down.

First responders have used two-way radios in this country since at least the 1930s, but unfortunately, the basic design plan of the technology has improved only marginally since then. Radios are smaller, lighter, and more durable, and computer technology has made some improvements, but many if not most emergency radio systems operated by city, state, and federal jurisdictions are basically analog point-to-point links. If phone companies had stayed with this model, we would still have about ten mobile telephones per metropolitan area instead of the millions of cell phones we have today.

Why haven't emergency communications systems gotten on the cellphone bandwagon? The reasons are complex, but here are two. First, most first responders are local: town fire departments, regional sheriff's offices, etc. Cellphone-like wireless networks require vast investments in infrastructure (towers, switches, computers, etc.) and are inherently large-scale operations, covering vast geographic areas. Second, the regulatory environment reflected traditional technology—the Federal Communications Commission (our traffic cops of the airwaves) up to now has not updated the frequency spectrum allocations to allow broadband wireless technology in this sector, even if there was anyone around who wanted to do it. As a result, we have a system that works okay most of the time, but tends to collapse in a crisis such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina–just when you need it the most.

Well, I am happy to report that at least the FCC is getting its act together in this area. On July 31, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps issued a statement accompanying some rule changes that promise to improve the situation in emergency communications in a big way.

You may be old enough to remember TVs with tuner dials, like cheap radios have even today. One dial covered the VHF channels 2 to 13, and the other dial was labeled UHF and went from 14 to 83. Well, now that digital TV is coming along like a freight train, the new smaller frequency allocations it requires have freed up what amount to UHF channels 52 to 69, some 108 MHz of spectrum space. The FCC is going to auction this valuable natural resource off in various ways, but it has reserved a chunk of it for (drum roll, please) a national interoperable public-safety system.

Now what does that mean? If all goes according to plan (and the plan, which involves both public and private funding, is by no means certain to work), we will go from creaky old analog radio systems that basically don't let firemen from Town A talk to policemen in Town B right next to them, to a broadband wireless cellphone-like system that will let anybody talk with anybody else they need to, and will have enough reserve capacity to handle the largest emergencies likely to happen. In his prepared statement, Commissioner Copps regretted that his fondest dream of a fully federal-funded system wasn't going to happen, but apparently he has high hopes that a commercial outfit will step up to the plate and bid for the spectrum that can be used to achieve these ambitious goals.

I have not studied the details of the FCC plan, but I do know the present hodge-podge of emergency communications systems has big problems. I congratulate the FCC on at least trying to do something about it, and hope that Commissioner Copps' dream becomes reality. So if you have any old analog TVs that you're going to have to scrap come February of 2009 (when analog TV is scheduled to fade into the sunset), comfort yourself with the thought that at least some of the spectrum thus freed is going to be used for a good cause. In my experience, those high-band UHF channels never came in very well anyway.

Sources: Commissioner Copps' July 31, 2007 statement can be obtained from the FCC website (http://www.fcc.gov). For more about the problems with present emergency communications systems, see my article "We've Got to Talk: Emergency Communications and Engineering Ethics," scheduled for publication in the Fall 2007 issue of IEEE Technology & Society Magazine.

Fixing What's Broke—or About To Be

At this writing, four people are known dead and eight missing in the collapse of the eight-lane freeway bridge that carried I-35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. A little after 6 PM last Wednesday, the bridge simply fell down in stages, as caught on a security camera video. We won't know for sure why it fell until months later, after engineers have studied the wreckage and pieced together the sequence of events that led to the disaster. Initial speculation has centered on corrosion and fatigue cracking, together with possible overloading in the bridge's weakened condition by construction equipment assembled at one end. Whatever the cause, it seems to be accidental rather than intentional. But that doesn't bring back the dozen or so people who died, the dozens more injured, and the millions inconvenienced by the sudden disappearance of an essential piece of Minneapolis's transportation system.

Most discussions of engineering ethics center on decisions that an individual engineer makes—whether to sign off on a doubtful drawing, whom to consider when designing a new product, those sorts of things. But if we think about right and wrong and technology in connection with great projects and large institutions, you get into the realm of what someone has called "macro" engineering ethics, as opposed to the "micro" ethics of individual decisions. Governments and institutions, and whole populations, can do the right thing or the wrong thing as well as individuals. The case of the Minneapolis bridge is a sign that a long-deferred problem of macro-engineering ethics is coming home to roost.

This problem has the dull-sounding name of "deferred maintenance on infrastructure." Infrastructure means the whole network of generally public services that make a city pleasant and livable, or by their absence, almost intolerable. Infrastructure helps makes New York City a fun place to visit, even without a car. Lack of basic infrastructure, such as electric and water utilities and trash pickup, is one thing that makes life in Baghdad so miserable these days. In the United States, local, state, and federal governments have historically taken the responsibility for most of our infrastructure, dating back at least to the early twentieth century. Where private companies were involved, as in telecommunications and electric utilities, they were regulated to such an extent that they could almost be regarded as branches of government. In such an environment, technology did not advance perhaps as rapidly as it could have. But reliability and safety were paramount, and by and large these goals were achieved in an exemplary way. For the three or four decades after World War II, America's infrastructure was the envy of the world. And it was built and maintained largely either by governments or under government supervision. That is not a political statement. It is a statement of fact.

Came the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan in the U. S. and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain urged a more privatized libertarian vision for the future. I heartily endorse some aspects of this movement toward classical liberalism, which is now known as conservatism. And in many respects, this political movement was needed to correct for some socialistic excesses. But since then, privatization and a libertarian, individualistic philosophy have been taken by some to an extreme that is both unrealistic and harmful in the context of our present situation. Let me explain.

The May 7, 2007 issue of Business Week magazine carried a long article called "Roads to Riches," describing how the new private capital market in formerly public works is growing by leaps and bounds. All over the country, private investor groups are snatching up toll roads, bridges, water utilities, and other large chunks of infrastructure from cities and states that are strapped for cash. In many cases, they are strapped for cash because the voters will not put up with higher taxes. When they do get money in these deals, governments tend to spend it on things that the voters see and like, such as poverty programs, education, and so on. My paycheck for teaching comes from Texas state taxes, and so I would not be expected to criticize this way of spending overmuch. But to sell infrastructure to the highest bidder and spend the proceeds on other things is to ignore statistics such as one we have heard over and over again since last Wednesday's bridge collapse: the American Society of Civil Engineers says that over a fourth of the nation's bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

Infrastructure is a long-term thing. Unlike budgets, fads, and politicians, bridges and roads and power lines are meant to stay around for ten, twenty, or forty years. But not forever. Just like any other engineered product, these things have an estimated life span that assumes they will be properly maintained during that time and will be replaced before they wear out. Either somebody (public or private) pays for fixing and maintaining them and eventually replacing them, and you have decent infrastructure during that time; or else you spend the money somewhere else and the infrastructure begins to come apart, as the Minneapolis bridge did spectacularly last week. There is no third alternative.

I hope some good will come of this tragedy in the form of a renewed intelligent and productive discussion about how we should pay for keeping up our infrastructure in this country. Free-market zealots who believe in privatizing everything should visit Lagos, Nigeria, which in some ways is a libertarian's paradise. If you want electricity, you buy your own generator and run it yourself. If you want water, you build your own rainwater collection system or you buy water on the free market from a water wagon. If you want to know if the water's clean, you test it yourself. As a result, Lagos is polluted by the exhaust and noise of thousands of generators and awash with the stench of untreated sewage.

Of course, putting government in control of everything doesn't solve all the problems either—the old Soviet Union and its satellites such as East Germany and Cuba showed that. What is needed is a sense of community, a sense that if I pay reasonable taxes, even if they are higher than last year, they will be spent on all that dull stuff such as bridge repair that I can't do myself, but which I want to benefit from. That sort of thing was traditionally seen as the proper province of government. Maybe private companies would do as well or better, but I have my doubts. Private or public, we need teams of people of good will who have the public's good at heart—not next quarter's stock market figures, not some ideological principle that sounds good on paper, but simple good will. And maybe that's what we're missing the most.

Sources: The American Society of Civil Engineers maintains a national "report card" on state-by-state infrastructure problems, which can be viewed at http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/index.cfm.

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/.