Monday, December 17, 2007

Save the Plankton

A Monologue With Bill Gates

By John Taylor; 2007 Dec 17, 6 Masa'il, 164 BE

I have been an avid fan of Make Magazine's prolific blog ever since that publication first came out a couple of years ago. This hacker's how-to fills a hidden need in my soul at this point in my life. What happened when Make came out was that I had gone full circle, from a total non-practical person who would laugh in contempt at homeowners as I walked by and saw them wasting time repairing and cutting their lawns, to an enthusiastic new homeowner, putterer and tinkerer in the years after we bought this semi-detached house in Dunnville in 1997, and finally I reverted back to the non-handyman I am today.

What happened was that I just ran out of projects that could be done with my spare budget, limited time and unreliable energy supply. One year I made a batch of wooden boxes and gave them to everybody as Christmas gifts. But then the unfinished projects piled on top of one another and my tools were covered in junk and left in disappointing desuetude. Worst of all, as I investigated deeper into how homes could and should be built, I became utterly discouraged with what can and should be done. We should build them right in the first place, not waste our precious time and money trying to upgrade. So, gradually, I went back to my old cerebral ways. For years I collected every project plan and idea I came across for home projects, but now I gave up. Seeing a plan or idea just made me tired and full of regrets.

Then Make Magazine's blog came out. Now I gloried almost every day in the astonishing cleverness of inventors and hackers (their definition of "hacker" is someone who changes a product from its intended purpose to some other purpose). Better still, most projects were so far off the wall that I did not get that exhausting feeling that, "Maybe I should do that too?" I never bought the magazine though and in fact have never even seen it in hard copy, either in magazine stands or at the library.

This fall, though, they came out with a book, so finally I shelled out hard cash and purchased, "Make: Technology on your Time; The Best of 75 Projects from Make Magazine." The first article I read in the book is called "Propeller Chip; Basic Stamp's Chip Gracey puts a new spin on microcontrollers," by Dale Dougherty. It features this Gracey fellow who takes on a task that only multi-billion dollar corporations dare come to grips with, making a microchip from scratch. Really. He buys surplus equipment on eBay and adapts it for his own clean room. More amazing still, like the founder of Microsoft, this fellow is a college dropout. Gracey is working right now on adapting his microcontroller to be used as a dedicated speech processor. The project seems very promising, though I am hardly one to be a judge. To listen to the editors of Make, a new age is dawning where electronics that used to be understood and constructed by a tiny elite will be made, not just hacked, by your average handy-fellow in a garage. In any case, one thing Gracey said struck me as reflective of something Abdu'l-Baha said. It was this:

"Ultimately, everything has to be physical so we can perceive it with our senses. The hardware is like the body and the software is like the spirit. The whole point of the Propeller chip is to make an able body for the kind of spirits you want to create." (Editors of Make, Make: Technology on your Time; The Best of 75 Projects from Make Magazine, O'Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 2007, p. 88)

This is the miracle of technical advance in our lifetime. What glory it is to live in this day! Whereas before the industrial revolution had made machines that reflect our bodies, now with computers and microchips we have machines that are mirrors to both mind and spirit. Unfortunately, though, as the Master pointed out in the Minneapolis talk that we examined a few weeks ago here, we have yet to get out of the rut of concentrating technical, physical improvements and moving over to making progress in morality or religious faith.

With all that in mind, I want to comment on an article that Bill Gates wrote for the BBC a couple of days ago. He starts off saying:

"One of the most important changes of the last 30 years is that digital technology has transformed almost everyone into an information worker." (Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7142073.stm>)

Not to niggle, but we have always been information workers. We have these oversized heads because about a 100,000 years ago some upright monkey-like creatures figured out how to work together and use their brains in groups. The difference, as Gracey points out, is that now our tools are reflecting the supreme adaptability of the spirit as well as the physical attributes of the world around us. That is why the computer revolution is so far reaching. Gates continues:

Gates: "A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity. This isn't true at all. In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively. That's true for everyone from the retail store worker who uses a handheld scanner to track inventory to the chief executive who uses business intelligence software to analyse critical market trends."

There is truth in this, but not enough. Yes, it is a pervasive movement and software is made by groups. But we have not used computers to change our consultative methodology for anything other than technical questions. We must use them for moral, political and religious questions as well. Rarely are computers used to visualize data together or to solve new, unexpected problems in groups, problems like environmental degradation, decline of the oceans, and on and on. We use them in an isolated, discrete way to improve on old solutions while we ignore "new" problems like morality and cooperation completely. That is why the computer revolution is only speeding up the handcart to global warming hell that our present economy has become. We have no brakes. We use computers to accelerate, not slow down or turn around.

Gates: "So if you look at how progress is made and where competitive advantage is created, there's no doubt that the ability to use software tools effectively is critical to succeeding in today's global knowledge economy."

With all due respect Mr. Gates (and because of your charity work, there are no moguls in the world that I respect more than you), the very existence of competition is a sign that the crowd values a particular answer. Crowds imitate, and imitation is the reverse of originality. And unfortunately the answer the crowd values is not always worth all that attention. Why is there not massive competition, for example, to save the plankton? Forget saving the whales, the oxygen we breathe comes from plankton and the ocean in which they live is, as reported lately by oceanographers, in steep, precipitous decline. Yet people are still competing for what they competed thirty years ago. Forget competition, we need cooperation, and fast.

Gates: "A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career. Beyond that, however, I don't think you can overemphasise the importance of having a good background in maths and science. If you look at the most interesting things that have emerged in the last decade - whether it is cool things like portable music devices and video games or more practical things like smart phones and medical technology - they all come from the realm of science and engineering."

Yes, but do you not find that worrisome? Maybe our best talent should be channeled into other areas, perhaps ones involving moral and spiritual progress, for instance? We give our children about twelve years of math and science training before they graduate high school, but how much do they know about world religions? About ethics and peace studies? Not much; it cannot matter much because we do not bother to teach them about it. We want them to end war, but we teach them nothing about war or peace. And then adults like you go around handing out advice that kids need even more training in science and engineering because these areas have been so spectacularly successful. Is that not a circular argument?

Put a microphone in front of the average person's face and you will get at least some accurate scientific information out of them. They may not be able to name all the planets, but they will be familiar with the Copernican idea that the sun is the center of the solar system. But how about morality? Consider these questions: that `Abdu'l-Baha suggested for the man-in-the-street interviewer in September of 1912,

"If you should ask a thousand persons, `What are the proofs of the reality of Divinity?' perhaps not one would be able to answer. If you should ask further, `What proofs have you regarding the essence of God?' `How do you explain inspiration and revelation?' `What are the evidences of conscious intelligence beyond the material universe?' `Can you suggest a plan and method for the betterment of human moralities? (sic)' `Can you clearly define and differentiate the world of nature and the world of Divinity?' -- you would receive very little real knowledge and enlightenment upon these questions." (Promulgation, 325-329)

Man, I read this and imagined being asked any one of these queries by a street interviewer and I realized with a thud in my heart that even though I have been writing and thinking about just these questions all my life, the only thing you would be likely to get out me would be silence, and maybe some fillers, like, "Um. Ah. You know, I do not know, you know?" What I would like to do is write an entire series of essays, one on each of these questions. That way, even though I would still embarrass myself in front of a camera if I ever were asked the questions, at least I would be able to point to the URL of my blog where on one day I tried my level best to do the question justice. I guess I should not feel so bad, after all, like most people I have thirteen years of formal schooling in science and math, but at most one in religion.

Bill Gates continues under the heading, "Lifelong learning is vital,"

"Communication skills and the ability to work well with different types of people are very important too. A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code. This isn't true at all. Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs."

Right on. The Baha'i principle is: "Work and service are worship." What we often do not realize is that the more we reflect and worship the more effective our service in life will be. Belief in God is the Lex Parsimoniae, or law of succinctness. When we take our anxieties and insecurities to the Source, we find ourselves afterwards fully content with His Will, and more likely to pay attention to the needs and requirements that our calling is meant to answer.

Gates: "I also place a high value on having a passion for ongoing learning. When I was pretty young, I picked up the habit of reading lots of books. It's great to read widely about a broad range of subjects. Of course today, it's far easier to go online and find information about any topic that interests you. Having that kind of curiosity about the world helps anyone succeed, no matter what kind of work they decide to pursue."

That is the first Baha'i principle, search for truth, right there. I have been inspired by how Mr. Gates wooed his wife, by devoting an entire weekend to a subject like microbiology and studying and discussing it together. Pure ecstasy! I remember at 17 years old as a new Baha'i my first Baha'i teacher at summer school showed us how to schedule our reading so that by absorbing only a page or more every morning and evening you can go through all the main Baha'i texts and scriptures in two or three years. This had a great effect on the course of my life. Now I try to bring my broad, not to say promiscuous, reading into this Badi' blog.

Yet every time I talk to a Baha'i librarian or bookseller I hear the same story: we believers buy and read few books, and of those book we do get very few are the core texts, the Writings of the Bab, Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha. Which brings me to my next project cooking away in my blogger's kitchen: a YouTube introduction to Baha'i books, one at a time, starting with the Hidden Words. It will include leftovers thrown in from my abortive essay series, "A book lover's introduction to the Baha'i Faith." Keep an eye out for it.

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