Going Critical: Perspective and Proportion in the Epistemology of Rob Kling1 John Leslie King



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5.ACTIVE/REACTIVE

In slides prepared for his last talk (Kling, 2003), Rob reviewed themes from his career. Much of the talk focused on the current revival of robotics and AI, especially on its predominantly military orientation. It also included an elegant analysis of the restructuring of copyright law, arguing that it was driven by the needs of entertainment and sales rather than science and education. He continued to contest the claim that technology increasingly influences institutional and cultural contexts (i.e., transformation up the levels of analysis), arguing instead that “…technological determinism is a poor predictor, (and it is) institutional processes and local social process (that) influence outcomes.” Rob defined his perspective as “socio-technical, constructivist, institutional, and ecological.” He declared that “…institutional processes explain how social actors are channeled to perform legitimate actions and interactions within socially structured arrangements.”


Technology was barely a factor in his causal model. Moore’s law, he said, applied only to hardware, and he declared it “unfettered fantasy” to think it would bring improved software and systems. He did not consider the likelihood, explained above, that radically improved, low cost, widespread hardware might provide the scaffolding for generating new knowledge, increased experimentation and exercise of choice, and economies of scale that would accelerate the development of more congenial software and systems. Yet, this is what has happened: better tools and infrastructure have enabled many researchers and designers to disseminate results and products more quickly, creating new capabilities that have spawned huge markets.18
A balanced critical perspective would note limits to how effectively developers will achieve particular goals, but it would not discount the intensity with which dedicated people labor to improve search engines, exploit memory sticks, create software for blogging, or build open source software. It would not discount the possibility that the combined effects could be transformational. Like the case of the Chinese emperor, who for six weeks took little notice of his rice payment, these efforts had modest effects at first. Today, major industries including film cameras and photographic, analog audiotape and videotape, wireline telephony, recorded music, and traditional gaming have reached week seven: shutting down, transforming, or struggling to cope with displacement by new digital technologies.
Rob appreciated evidence that earlier technologies, such as the telephone, led to social consequences, but he resisted indications that digital technologies would do the same. In conversation, he linked such suggestions to AI hyperbole, not separating claims that computers can deliver immortality to people living today (Kurzweil, 2005) from observations that technologies were delivering unprecedented access to information to unprecedented numbers of people, or were on the verge of transforming entire industries. Again, the balance of critical perspective is difficult to attain and sustain. It is no surprise that Rob struggled with this challenge. Like Achilles, it sometimes seems to take forever to overtake the tortoise. Consider the following quote:
“A machine with vast logic power, capable of storing enormous quantities of information… A much greater growth rate than an exponential increase… The dam is bursting… Mankind today faces an information deluge of unimaginable complexity… We must protect computer users from the vast and overwhelming mass of data… the computer files of current IBM customer orders contain more than 100 billion bits of information.”
The author was James Martin, writing in 1973. Today, when a small laptop contains more than 100 billion bits, we consider 1973 to be part of the era of information scarcity. Rob saw Martin as an unreconstructed utopian,19 and in a sense that was fair. Today we hear much the same thing, albeit from more voices. Thirty years from now, today will probably seem to have been part of the era of information scarcity, and people will still be announcing that the dam is bursting.
What explains the mixed analytical record of this brilliant analyst, whose views were socio-technical, constructivist, institutional, and ecological? This is a difficult question to answer; it requires speculation about personal features of Rob’s worldview that, of course, are not readily accessible. Some of it was a failure to factor in the unparalleled nature of growth in this technology: Had Moore’s Law been repealed in 1975 or even 1985, Rob’s tendency to forecast unchanging weather might have remained tenable. The intensity with which his work was a central life interest suggests that Rob allowed his strong convictions and beliefs about power and technology to overshadow contrary evidence and open inquiry. Ironically, the answer may lie in the paradox between Rob’s love of technology and his deep commitment to social values. Rob may have over-compensated for his attraction to technology by being exceptionally doubtful of its potential for enabling social betterment. Knowing why the “seductive equation” was so seductive, he guarded against it with zeal. He set an extraordinarily high standard of proof for claims that technology had resulted in good outcomes, and even in the compelling cases he attached cautionary conditions.
Rob’s deep social convictions certainly played an important role in his work. His Jewish working-class post-WWII childhood made him mindful of the dark side of human nature. He knew the downsides of the capitalist system in the exploitation of the working class. He understood the intellectual appeal of Marxist worldviews, with their simple but powerful explanations of dialectical materialism, historical determinism and class politics. Rob was too strong an analyst to accept them uncritically; he was at heart an empiricist who required causal evidence of the sort Marxist interpretations seldom provide.
Rejecting simple, covering explanations for the complexities of socio-technical change, Rob embraced a broad, systematic view. He was adept at tracing the causal connections among complex relationships, but even the most capable minds succumb to the combinatorial complexity of sufficiently large and complex systems. With neither simple ideology or omniscient systematics to back him up, he asserted his critical perspective on computerization as a guardian over social values he cared about so deeply—compassion, fairness, equality, understanding. Rob was at heart an activist, but the inherent difficulty of mastering systems beyond the scope of one person forced a choice. He could take the route of dispassionate observer, thereby avoiding the slippery slope but abandoning his activism; or he could accept his critical view and become reactive. He chose the latter.

6.SALVATION THROUGH SENTIENCE

Some might view this discussion as a criticism of Rob’s work. If to acknowledge is to criticize, we stand guilty of the charge. We do not see this effort in those terms, however. We worked closely with Rob, and were deeply influenced by him in every respect. It seems appropriate to emphasize Rob’s humanity by observing that he was only human. His ambitions were exceptional: He tried to understand phenomena so complex that few around him even recognized the phenomena in the first place. He did this with dignity and grace, and if he was occasionally petulant or obtuse, he was certainly no different than most scholars. The truly extraordinary feature of Rob’s scholarship was the consistency of his purpose. Whether or not he believed it was possible to “think it through,” he acted as though he did. He refused to admit defeat, and in the absence of omniscience, he was willing to settle for sentience.


He left a legacy for his students, a community far larger than those who worked directly for him or with him. This legacy includes his writings, of course, but more importantly, it includes the attitude with which he pursued his work. He accepted the limits of the world as he struggled to understand it, and he refused to foreswear the central interest of his life. A thoroughly secular person, he accepted and respected what could not be explained. His inquiring nature survives him in those whose work he influenced, and through them he undoubtedly continues to ask questions now, even if he doesn’t have to.
In the golden book of the golden game,

The golden angel wrote my name.

When the deal goes down I’ll put on my crown,

Over in the old Golden Land.


7.REFERENCES

Brynjolfsson, E. Hitt, L. (2004). Intangible Assets and the Economic Impact of Computers,” in Dutton, W., Kahin, B., O'Callaghan, R., Wyckoff, A. (Eds.), Transforming Enterprise: The Economic and Social Implications of Information Technology, MIT Press, 27-48.


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Danziger, J.N., Dutton, W.H., Kling, R., and Kraemer, K.L. (1982). Computers and Politics: High Technology in American Local Governments. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Dedrick J., Gurbaxani V., Kraemer K. (2003) Information technology and economic performance: a critical review of the empirical evidence. ACM Computing Surveys 35(1): 1-28
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Dubin, Robert (1979) 'Central Life Interests: Self Integrity in a Complex World'

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Eriksen, T.H. (2001). Tyranny of the Moment. London: Pluto Press.
Feigenbaum, E. and Feldman, J. (Eds.). (1963). Computers and Thought. McGraw-Hill.
Feigenbaum, E. and McCorduck, P. (1983). The Fifth Generation: Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Challenge to the World. New York: Addison-Wesley Longman.
George, J., Iacono, S. and Kling, R. (1996). Learning about computing in context: Extensively computerized work groups as communities of practice. Accounting, Management and Information Technology, 5(3-4): 185-202.
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Greenbaum, J. (1979). In the Name of Efficiency. Temple University Press.
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Jorgensen, D.W., M.S. Ho, and K.J. Stiroh. (2002) Projecting productivity growth: lessons from the U.S. growth resurgence. Economic Review Q3: 1-13.
King, J.L. (2004). Rob Kling and the Irvine School. The Information Society, Vol. 20, No. 1.
King, J.L. (1983) Centralized versus decentralized computing: organizational considerations and management options. ACM Computing Surveys,15, 4, December, Pages: 319 - 349 
Kling, R. (1978) “Automated welfare client-tracking and service integration: the political economy of computing,” Communications of the ACM, 21, 6,484-493.
Kling, R. (1973). Fuzzy PLANNER: Reasoning with Inexact Concepts in a Procedural Problem-Solving Language. Journal of Cybernetics, 3, 4, 1-6.
Kling, R. (1973). Notes on the Social Impacts of AI. SIGART Newsletter, October, 42, 35-40.
Kling, R. (1996a). Synergies and competition between life in cyberspace and face-to-face communities. Social Science Computer Review. 14, 1, pp. 50-54.
Kling, R. (1996b). The seductive equation of technological progress with social progress. In Rob Kling (Ed.), Computerization and controversy: Value conflicts and social choices (2nd ed., pp. 22-25). San Diego: Academic Press.
Kling, R. (1973). Toward a Person-Centered Computing Technology. Proceedings of the1973 Fall Joint Computer Conference. Atlanta, GA, August.
Kling, R. (1999). Can the "Next Generation Internet" Effectively Support "Ordinary Citizens"? The Information Society, 15, 1.
Kling, R. (2003). Cultural Constructions of “Superintelligence” and Information Societies in Critical Perspective. Slides prepared for a talk given at Yale University, April 2.
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Kling, R., Crawford, H., Rosenbaum, H., Sawyer S. and Weisband, S. (2000). Learning from Organizational and Social Informatics: Information and Communication Technologies in Human Contexts. NSF workshop report. http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI/Arts/SI_report_Aug_14.doc
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1 In deference to our close associations with Rob Kling over the years, we refer to him simply as Rob throughout this paper. We do not extend this familiarity to others. Authorship order is proportional to years with Rob.

2 The opening and closing quotes are from the poem, “Job’s Tears,” by Scottish bard Robin Williamson, set to music by the Incredible String Band in 1968.

3 SIGART is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence. The AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference was the most important conference in the computing field at that time, run by an umbrella organization that included ACM and similar socieites.

4 Mary Shelley conceived her masterpiece Frankenstein in 1816 , providing one of the earliest explorations of moral hazard from the power of science, an iconic symbol that survives to this day. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, written in 1870, explored the moral dangers of technology embodied in war-making power. H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, written in 1895, foresaw a future in which not even advanced technology could prevent the demise of human life. E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, written in 1909, considered a future of humans dependent on a great provisioning machine that suddenly stops, with catastrophic consequences. Evgeny Zamyatin's We (1920), arguably the first dystopian novel, explored the power of technology for social control and influenced Orwell. Huxley’s Brave New World followed in 1932.

5 This account is based on personal communication between Rob and John King.

6 Feldman co-edited an early landmark AI book with Rob’s former Ph.D. adviser (Feigenbaum and Feldman, 1963).

7 We are aware of what Rob read because he told us about all books he read, and made us read them, too, if we hadn’t done so already.

8 This idea is particularly clear in Kling and Scacchi (1980, 1982).

9 For background on this project and Rob’s role in it, see King (2004).

10 Based on personal communication with John King.

11 Based on personal communication with John King, who saw some of these papers.

12 Rob once remarked to John King that his “personal computer” in 1968 was a 36-bit KA-10 processor with a maxed-out main memory of 256Kbytes. He often did his work in the middle of the night, and was the only user on the machine.

13 “Moore’s Law” stated that the number of transistors that could be put on an integrated circuit chip doubles every 18 months, and became a paraphrase for a range of technology advances that follow a nonlinear or exponential growth path (with exponent greater than one).

14 For a nice discussion of exponential growth, see Eriksen, 2001.

15 (http://www.glreach.com/globstats/)

16 Because of the hasty demise of AFIPS, at the time of writing, no one seems to know who owns the copyright to hundreds of seminal papers by Rob and others, which for this reason have not been reproduced and are unavailable outside of the few libraries that collected them.

17 The ad can be found on several web sites using search terms such as Apple Macintosh 1984 Super Bowl. Apple followed it with an infamous 1985 Super Bowl ad showing lemming-like office workers following one another off a cliff.

18 Thirty years ago Xerox PARC made an investment that gave it a computing infrastructure a decade ahead of virtually everyone else. Today, anyone can purchase an up-to-date moderately-priced system and get capability that rivals that of a typical researcher with a 3-year-old system.

19 From personal communication with John King.





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