"Pop! Tech Conference Puts Touch of Humanity in the Age of Technology"

by Dan Gilmor    

     CAMDEN, Maine -- Technology's soul is most apparent by its absence. Silicon Valley remains disturbingly preoccupied with money and velocity, as much the values of today's tech culture as zeroes and ones.
   For a long weekend in this achingly picturesque village ``down east'' on the Atlantic coast, soul got its due. Some exceedingly bright and thoughtful people -- technologists, educators, artists, politicians and others -- contemplated matters of deeper importance than the next generation of operating systems or mobile data services.
No one at the annual Pop!Tech conference, aptly subtitled ``Being Human in the Digital Age,'' disputed the significance of commerce in general or the technology business in particular. Moore's Law and the other measures of relentless progress remain profound facts of today's life. And red and black ink, in real and virtual ledgers, will always help define what happens.
   But Mike Hawley, professor of media technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, asked a crucial question about technology: ``How does it really affect the bottom line of your life?''
   For most of us, the answer has been mixed. I was an early adopter of information technology, because I saw how helpful it could be in my work and in my wish to keep learning.
   Sometimes, in my most Pollyannaish moods, I convince myself that properly applied technology will be the literal salvation of the human race, at least in a material sense. And I would bet that most of the conference speakers and audience shared a similar sentiment, despite entirely rational worries -- prodded by several speakers -- about technology's impact on the negative side. Privacy invasions, cyber-warfare, out-of-control computers and the like are as much on the horizon as the ability to improve the processes of business and learning.
   But when we ask what it means to be human in the digital age, we are looking into something more mysterious. We are asking, ultimately, about values.
   Whether or not you share the faith of Leonard Sweet, founder and president of SpiritVenture Ministries and professor of evangelism at Drew University in New Jersey, you probably share his notion, as I do, that being human is not about being Creators in the cosmic sense but adding to what has been fashioned already -- to be creative.
    ``To be human means we have a moral responsibility to create, imagine and evolve,'' Sweet said. We accept responsibility for recognizing good and evil, he continued, seizing the future but recognizing our faults -- ``carpe manana and mea culpa.''
Because technology doesn't care how it's used -- today, at any rate -- those are much more difficult and rewarding questions than wondering about the Next Big Thing.
   Let's assume technology is morally neutral, said Rushworth Kidder, founder and president of the Institute for Global Ethics, which is based in Camden. ``I'll grant that it is,'' he said, ``if you'll grant to me that human beings engaged in technology are part of a moral community and they must make moral choices in the face of astonishing change.''
Overall, the human race is becoming more ethical, Kidder said. But is the pace of ethical improvement keeping pace with Moore's Law? No. Witness, he said, the ability of a single individual at a keyboard to create damage on a scale once reserved to nation-states.
   ``We may be better than our ancestors, but that may not be good enough,'' Kidder said.
    Questions of right and wrong are easy to decide. But some conflicts occur between right and right, when each choice can be justified as meeting some positive value. Those are the difficult choices, Kidder noted.
   One of these days, the technology itself may begin to develop a consciousness -- the creation of what some have called an ``overmind'' inside the network. What happens then?
   ``We have to start thinking about what this consciousness is, and how it can have a conscience,'' said John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a largely incorrigible optimist about technology's impact on our lives. ``If it doesn't, it may find us inexpedient. It may decide we are irrelevant and get rid of us.''
   But to expect this Overmind to develop a conscience, human beings will need to work on our own, Barlow said. We will have to change some of the ways we think, notably in our economic ideas.
   As a practical matter, he said, we have to revise economic thinking. We must ``place less emphasis on the sum at the bottom and either come up with ways of measuring so-called externalities or a willingness to recognize that something can be meaningful even if it can't be measured.''
    Li Lu knows about things that can't be measured in a spreadsheet. He was one of the leaders of the 1989 uprising in China, when the army's bullets turned Tiananmen Square red with the blood of students and others who were protesting for political and intellectual freedom. He went into hiding, becoming one of the regime's most-wanted ``criminals,'' and ultimately made his way to the United States. He now works as a venture capitalist focusing on Internet companies and remains active in the movement to bring China along toward democracy.
    Li was in Camden, in part, to celebrate. Since Tiananmen Square, a billion and a half people around the world have found political freedom. Today, he said, more of humanity lives in freedom than in tyranny.
The proliferation of technology has been almost nothing but positive, Li said. In the next decade it will help billions more people elude the grip of dictators.
   ``I have never been this excited, this confident, about the future,'' he said.
   Li won the only standing ovation of the weekend. It was a reflection of his courage and optimism -- qualities that seem to fit together so often.
   As someone remarked during the weekend, the optimists of every era surely think they are living in humanity's most exciting times.
   Call me an optimist. The technology advances to date are nothing next to what's coming. I hope we'll live up to our potential. Being human, we must at least try.