Talbott, Steve (Steve Talbott)

As information technology becomes ever more sophisticated reflections of our own intelligence, it seems fair to say that our thoughts and assumptions get built into them in increasingly powerful ways. Their whole purpose, after all, is to embody our own contrivings. If we would not want the contents of a book to act on us without our full awareness of the intent and import of the author's recorded thoughts, neither should we want the much more aggressive contents of a computer to act on us without full awareness of the intentions the programmer has invested in the device.

-- Steve Talbott

Self-forgetfulness is the reigning temptation of the technological era. This is why we so readily give our assent to the absurd proposition that a computer can add two plus two, despite the fact that it can do nothing of the sort - not if we have in mind anything remotely resembling what we do when we add numbers. In the computer's case, the mechanics of addition involve no motivation, no consciousness of the task, no mobilization of the will, no metabolic activity, no imagination. And its performance brings neither satisfaction of accomplishment nor the strengthening of practical skills and cognitive capacities.

-- Steve Talbott

...despite our recognition of the truth, we often find it nearly impossible to alter our course in any meaningful way. And so we move in lockstep with an ever more closely woven web of programmed logic. None of the machines guiding our activity may seem particularly malevolent, yet the meaning of our lives all the while becomes harder to lay hold of.

-- Steve Talbott

How hard it is to keep faith with ourselves is painfully evident in education, where everyone disclaims the fact-shoveling model of learning. And yet the unconscious metaphors by which we reveal our real real convictions about education revolve more and more around the idea of downloading information or transmitting it from one database to another. And the computer in the classroom makes this idea irresistibly concrete. Transfixed by the efficient data flows all around us, we easily lose sight of the fact that lack of information has not been the bottleneck in education for decades, or even centuries, if it ever was. Rather, the task for the teacher is to take the infinitesmall slice of available information available that can actually be used in the classroom and find some way to bring students into living connection with it.

-- Steve Talbott

I am not saying that the limitations of the computer, any more than the limitations of the telescope, are insuperable. We can and must learn to overcome them. But they are hardly the obvious instruments for countering the prevailing imbalance of society. And if it is true that the twenty-first century will be the age of unimaginably sophisticated and pervasive technologies, then counterbalance is what we will need the most.

-- Steve Talbott

We are right to think that technology has huge implications for education. But no more with the computer than with the television will the decisive problem be one of familiarization and adaptation.

-- Steve Talbott

Where are our priorities? Children are not at risk of missing out on the fact that we're becoming a wired society. We don't need help making sure that future generations embrace technology. Technophobia just doesn't happen to be the dominant trait of our society. What we need is balance and connection.

-- Steve Talbott

Lack of information has not been the bottleneck in education for decades, or even centuries. Rather, the task for the teacher is to take the infinitesimal slice of available information that can actually be used in the classroom and find some way to bring students into living connection with it.

-- Steve Talbott

The single thing children suffer from most in today's society is the lack of close relationship with caring adult mentors.

-- Steve Talbott

Given how many hours a day children pursue mediated experience through cinema screens, television screens, cell phone screens, and video game screens, it hardly makes sense to add a computer screen to the mix while saying reassuringly, "Let's make sure the children use it in a balanced way."

-- Steve Talbott

Computer labs have been displacing art, music, craft, and physical education classes. Does anyone pretend to have shown that the exchange is beneficial?

-- Steve Talbott

Money going toward computers could have been used for reducing class size.

-- Steve Talbott

The huge amounts of time teachers must spend learning to adapt their curriculum to the computer, and themselves to the latest software, could have been devoted to a livelier understanding of the subjects they teach.

-- Steve Talbott

Children, whose developing bodies need vigorous and varied physical activity, already spend too much sedentary time in cars, classrooms, and in front of televisions, contributing to an epidemic of obesity, among other things. Why are we now urging them to spend more time sitting in front of computers?

-- Steve Talbott

The claim that computers can stimulate kids, if true, hardly points to the decisive need for an overstimulated and hyperactive generation. Everything hinges on the kind of stimulation.

-- Steve Talbott

The quality of kids' play is correlated with their later cognitive, aesthetic, and social skills. There is, on the other hand, no demonstrated positive connection between these skills and early computer use - and there may be a pronounced negative connection.

-- Steve Talbott

How can we encourage the child's attentive love for the natural world? Studies have shown that naturalists, ecologists and environmental activists, together with teachers in these fields, have had, more than most people, childhood experiences in wild places with adult mentors.

-- Steve Talbott

If it's impossible to love mankind without loving the people around you, it's also impossible for computer-wielding children to love the Amazon rain forest, African wildlife, and the environment in general without learning to love the bits of nature immediately around them in yard, street and park.

-- Steve Talbott

Internet based multicultural programs in our schools are often more a celebration of electronic monoculture triumphant than of the invisible local cultures that technology is so efficiently marginalizing. Children in the United States end up communicating with their peers in wealthy families in technologically sophisticated, westernized schools with access to technology - not the children in poor villages without electric outlets.

-- Steve Talbott

For most people the computer, whether inside the classroom or outside, stands as an image of the human mind. But, for all its increasing presence in the lives of children, it presents an extremely one-sided, limiting, and distorted image of the mind.

-- Steve Talbott

Using the computer without understanding it encourages children to defer to it inappropriately, as when many say the computer never makes mistakes and is therefore more authoritative than their teacher.

-- Steve Talbott

Teaching the principles of computation, in any full sense, is best deferred until secondary school. These schools, however, are widely failing in their responsibility to teach students about digital technologies. They substitute computer use and online experience for a many-sided, socially and psychologically aware understanding of the technology.

-- Steve Talbott

Parents pushing for computer use in schools are often driven by fears for their child's employability and by an undue respect for the computer as a glamorous emblem of technical expertise.

-- Steve Talbott

Pressure to use computers in the classroom comes from the massively funded marketing arms of high-tech corporations, which are perfectly happy for the public educational system to condition the interests and buying habits of their future customers and oversee the vocational training of future employees.

-- Steve Talbott

Elementary schools should not be vocational training centers.

-- Steve Talbott

It is well-known that even the knowledge of graduates in computer science become largely obsolete within five years of graduation. What, then, is the sense in "training" fourth or fifth graders for their future work with computers?

-- Steve Talbott

The task of schools is to encourage the development of children who can decide what sorts of job are worth having in the coming century, not to train children to fit whatever jobs the system happens to be cranking out.

-- Steve Talbott

A great deal of computer-based learning turns out to be more about creating nifty computer effects than about learning the subject at hand.

-- Steve Talbott

The computer is often used as a gimmick to lend a touch of glamor or excitement to a subject. Why is this artificial glamorization more appealing than making the subject itself exciting - something good teachers have no difficulty doing?

-- Steve Talbott

As computer exposure among the young increases, the glamor factor is progressively losing its effectiveness. Therefore we see escalating competition among web sites much as we have seen in television and cinema. Indeed, turning children over to the computer for their education is much like turning them over to television. Babysitters have long appreciate the convenience of this.

-- Steve Talbott

More and more children's web sites have the same purpose as Saturday morning television: to keep children glued to the screen until they see the next commercial - a task on which vastly more psychological expertise is brought to bear than is ever available to schools pursuing the child's inner development.

-- Steve Talbott

Parents who are impressed that their tube-bound kids are so focused should ask themselves whether "focused" means "mesmerized" - and whether hyperactivity is the flip side of mesmerization.

-- Steve Talbott

The computer has been embraced as an all-purpose answer without the educational problems for which it is the needed answer ever having been articulated - and in willful ignorance of all the problems the computer itself introduces.

-- Steve Talbott

Why should we ever assume that exploring the world on hands and kees is less important to an eight-month-old than exploring the world on feet is to an eighteen-month-old? What possible grounds are there for trying to speed the transition from one stage to another? What essential experiences are we denying to the eight-month-old if we do speed things up?

-- Steve Talbott

The difference between the piano and the shoot-em-up video game is that, for the most part, the latter trains our reflexes to operate independently of our higher, more artistic sensibilities. The aim is merely to maximize a score or otherwise to win. Where the pianist is pursuing a sense of a coherent whole and is trying to produce an esthetically unified performance, the video game player is simply responding to one damned thing after another. Bodily grace and expressive content hardly figure into the picture as conscious goals - although I suspect there are few if any imaginable activities where the truly superb performer is not required to develop some aspects of grace.

-- Steve Talbott

Virtually all human growth comes through suffering. Almost everything worthwhile in the world is the fruit of suffering. I am the last person to say we should protect people from the grace of their own suffering. But if the sufferer was not allowed to discover what is every child's birthright - the truth, beauty and goodness that stand prior to and above all the suffering - and if he was not allowed to thrive within that bright kingdom, where will he find the courage to endure his suffering?

-- Steve Talbott

Why should I pay a school $160,000 for a vocational education when I can almost certainly find a business or agency or laboratory or nonprofit organization willing to hire me for nothing, assign me some useful chores, and give me an opportunity to start learning my desired vocation? Even if I had to pay something to the business at first, it would be well worth it. Long before I would have graduated from school, I'd be earning an income in my chosen field...

-- Steve Talbott

The most damning testimony against higher education today may be that students have not rebelled; they are evidently incapable of it. Two things prevent such rebellion. One is the inability of high school graduates to take their own education in hand. We do not teach them to become self-learners. I am constantly amazed at the number of adults that, if they are to learn anything new, they must "take a class".

-- Steve Talbott

Everyone disowns fact-shoveling education. And yet the computer and its databases, into which we pour information, have emerged utterly triumphant as the reigning metaphors for learning. The metaphors that powerfully grip us are more indicative of what's going on than our much too frequent protesting.

-- Steve Talbott

Imagine the potentials of our future if we cultivated an ever higher art of conversation with even a fraction of the energy and social investment we now commit to coaxing new programmed tricks from our computers! The fact that the latter is considered the "development of crucial economic resources" while the former isn't even on the agenda testifies to our relative assessment of humans and machines as the foundation for social evolution. The prevailing idea seems to be that we humans develop only by extending our technical skills: in other regards we are essentially "fixed quantities," destined to remain where we are even as our computers race on ahead of us.

-- Steve Talbott

The future hangs in the balance of our self-knowledge. When we lose much of ourselves to the subconscious, we become blind to our own motivations. We may also seek external powers to compensate for our loss of internal mastery. And, in fact, what we see in much of science and technology today is precisely a blind drive toward power. The idea of inevitability has widely substituted for the submerged sphere of consciousness where we might have felt called upon to exercise personal responsibility for our own actions.

-- Steve Talbott

Yes, every human creation is invested with intelligence in one form or another, and it would be pathological for us to ignore this fact in our reactions. But it us also pathological to fail to recognize the asymmetrical relation between artifact and artificer.

-- Steve Talbott

So... the fact that we meet human intentions in our machines is already reason enough for caution. Do we really want all those strivings and contrivings - all those thoughts and assumptions someone has cleverly etched into the hardware and software we are using - to remain invisible? When employing a search engine to sift through news items, should we be content to remain ignorant of the criteria, commercial or otherwise, determining the engine's presentation of hits? When recording a business' numbers on a spreadsheet, should we forget the meanings and values we had in mind when we started the business - meanings and values that the spreadsheet is designed, by virtue of its designer's preoccupation with manipulable data, to put out of sight? This is not to say we don't need the spreadsheet, but we also need to remain aware of the ways it can skew our way of thinking.

-- Steve Talbott

When we begin to believe that we've fingered the true locus of evil "over there" rather than "in here" - where the battle between "us" and "them" is equated with the battle between good and evil - the we have placed ourselves above all evil. This is to make gods of ourselves.

-- Steve Talbott

The whole idea of technology, really, is this externalization of part of ourselves - our muscular activity, our speech, our logical constructions. This is perfectly fine as long as we recognize these projections for what they are - mechanistic aspects of ourselves - and as long as we bear responsibility for them. This, however, is exactly what we are not doing when we are looking for good and evil outside ourselves.

-- Steve Talbott

The whole idea of a distance-collapsing technology is to enable us to get more quickly from point A to point B. But getting more quickly from A to B means having less time and opportunity for attending to any of the points between A and B. Moreover, as the influence of distance-collapsing technologies spreads, A and B themselves become intermediary points in an ever-expanding net of one-time destinations that are now mere way stations. If we're to cover those spaces efficiently, we have no more time for A and B than for any of the points between. And so we find ourselves in a world where we're all just passing through.

-- Steve Talbott

The simple and ironical fact is that you cannot get from pure numbers to anything that truly "counts". If you want human values, if you want qualitative distinctions, then your theoretical constructs must retain those values and distinctions every step of the way. The minute you allow them to collapse into number alone, you have no way to get back from there to the qualitative world. Not, at least, without being perfectly arbitrary, for numbers are inherently indifferent to their infinite range of possible application.

-- Steve Talbott

...It is fine to say that your profit from the sale of apples is $1000, and your profit from the sale of oranges is $1000. But if apples are not the same as oranges, neither are profits from apples the same as profits from oranges - or profits from cocaine the same as profits from penicillin. Yet everything in the distinction is lost as soon as you say, "Total profit = $2000" and proceed to crank that figure into still other calculations, heedless of concrete realities - the real world - from which the numbers arose.

-- Steve Talbott

As a medium cultivated for its efficiency, the Net lacks most of the qualities that give people a place to dwell. It does not embody the history and tradition, it does not possess the kind of stability and social structure, and it does not present the distinctive cultural and natural contexts within which people can adequately work out their profound destinies among one another.

-- Steve Talbott

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