SMART Letter #63
Amara's Law
November 26, 2001
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()
------------------------------------------------------------
SMART Letter #63 -- November 26, 2001
Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg
isen.com -- "one to watch"
isen@isen.com -- http://isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
------------------------------------------------------------
!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()!@#$%^&*()
CONTENTS
> Amara's Law
> Quote of Note
Paul Saffo on Short-Term Stupidities
> Smart Remarks from SMART People
James McKenna on Conservatism
Suchit Nanda's view from India
> Conferences on my Calendar (not)
> Copyright Notice, Administrivia
-------
Amara's Law -- by David S. Isenberg
Amara's Law says, roughly, "We tend to overestimate the
short-term impact of technological change and underestimate
its long-term impact." In the past, I attributed it to
Paul Saffo, not surprising because Paul Saffo works at
Institute for the Future, as did Roy Amara. People have
attributed sayings embodying similar thoughts to Robert
Heinlein or Arthur C Clarke or Winston Churchill or Mark
Twain. (Further, when Elvis sang, "I'm all shook up," he
was talking about here-and-now, with no regard for long-
term impacts.)
Whoever's Law seems true on its face. The first wave of
automobiles was wowie, neeto, peachykeen, impressive beyond
belief. The promise of swift, clean transportation that
didn't leave anything to step in when you crossed the
street heralded Utopia-around-the-corner.
> > > > > > > fast forward > > > > > > >
Today automobiles are ho-hum. They're too boring even to
be called 'technology'. But the world has re-shaped itself
to the automobile. Cars have permeated every facet of our
lives -- social lives, work lives, architecture, cities,
suburbs, the economy, the environment, and even foreign
policy. No matter how starry-eyed we were at first, we
underestimated the long-term impact of the automobile.
So let us assume that Amara's Law is maybe mostly true.
Why? What is the mechanism? What is the underlying
principle? How do we explain Amara's Law?
I got a clue from a recent edition of Phil Agre's Red Rock
Eater News, (Notes and Recommendations, October 7, 2001,
see http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/). I realized that
the passage below contained a pretty good guesstimate:
Phil Agre wrote:
"It strikes me that the conventions of news reporting
introduce a bias into our understanding of new
technologies and their place in society. And it's not
just news reporting: scholars who want to get tenure are
asked whether they have discovered something, and the
easiest way to discover something in the social world is
to declare that something is new: for example, that we
have entered an "information age", a concept that has
been renamed many times. (James Beniger's book, "The
Control Revolution", includes a huge table of these
names, and it's already fifteen years old. Nowadays the
table would probably extend to book length all by
itself.) If you can't declare a vast world-historical
discontinuity then you have to go to the trouble of
analyzing the same old world more deeply than others
have, and that's a lot of work."
Then, much further into the same Notes and Recommendations,
Phil Agre continued:
" . . . producers of any information product, are
competing with the past. Information products have the
distinctive property that you can use them without using
them up, and so much of the information that has ever
been stored in a permanent medium is still out there.
. . . To be heard, then, a musician must compete for
listeners' attention not only with other musicians who
are currently playing, but with the whole history of
recorded music. Novelists, scientists, and many others
are in the same position."
To this list, we might add predictors of the future.
In other words, we are told repeatedly, con brio, how
absolutely earth-shatteringly new the news, music, book,
scientific discovery, et cetera, is, as long as we get our
news from news people, our music from musicians or music
companies, our books from authors and publishing companies,
our science from scientists, our et cetera from
etceterologists -- et cetera, breathless et cetera.
Information from an-expert-in-that-field, or from somebody-
hired-to-write-about-it (even an unbiased newsperson) is
hyped. We need to get used to it.
[Corollary: It is nobody's job to think critically about
what the *actual* impact of any given information might
be, to tell us that things might not be so discontinuous
or so awesome as they're cracked up to be -- there is no
business model in doing that job. So how do we know
what is really important? How do we know what demands
our urgency?]
That's the "overestimate the short-term impact" half of
Amara's Law.
What about the other half -- the "underestimate the long-
term impact" part? Simple. Forgetting. New technologies
(or other changes) that didn't have a huge historical
impact are forgotten. There were hundreds of promising
technologies introduced in the past -- to great fanfare and
enthusiasm -- that never had an impact. I can't remember
any of them.
So it could well be that Amara's Law is composed half of
hype -- innocent (that is part of the structure of many
professional cultures) as well as deliberate, and half
forgetting. What's that they say about laws and sausages?
In summary: Amara's Law is boring and everywhere. But my
deconstruction of it (above) is the newest, greatest
intellectual breakthrough of the decade, if not the
century. It will change the world.
-------
Quote of Note: Paul Saffo
"The US has an unhappy history of short-term overreaction
to threats (just ask the Japanese-Americans interned in
WWII), BUT in the long-term, we have always renounced
those excesses and continued to nurture and extend our
freedoms. My forecast is that the worse the short-term
stupidities are this time, the more robust the positive
long-term reaction will be."
Paul Saffo, Institute for the Future, quoted in David
Farber's IP List, November 4, 2001.
[Paul, I want to react to your lack of over-hype, but like
you, I am a student of Amara's Law. It worries me that
ages of democracy are brief, and history's evidence favors
tyrants. So if I were one to pray, I would pray that you
would soon be proven right. And if I were one to act, I
would act vigorously to right the wrongs I'm seeing.
-- David I]
-------
Smart Remarks from SMART People
James McKenna [arcadia@one.net] writes:
"Your brother's letter [Letter from my Brother -- SMART
Letter #62] brings to mind a corollary of the law of
proximity he discusses: the law of emotional
investment. When I was young and didn't care about
much, I believed I cared passionately about ideals. Now
that I'm old(er), with a boy nearing draft age and
another only a little behind him, plus family and
friends all over the place, I find ideals to be
shockingly simpleminded. I used to think that people
got conservative as they got older; now it appears
conservatism results from having things one wants to
preserve.
"From my current emotional vantage, it seems perfectly
reasonable to put bullets in the heads of everyone who
might threaten my family and friends. Of course, it
would be irresponsible, at best, to let those feelings
guide my behavior. But it would be as irresponsible to
let an ideal [determine] my actions.
"What's left is that gray area of discernment: trying to
figure out what the hell to do and say that won't make
things worse. Your thoughtful SMART Letter is a great
aid in the process of sorting out where to stand. Mr.
Snow may object to your using the SMART Letter to talk
about current events, but, given events, it would be
more inappropriate to continue as if nothing were going
on."
---
Suchit Nanda [sn@suchit.net, http://suchit.net] writes:
"Your piece and the reply from your brother Daniel
[Letter from my Brother -- SMART Letter #62] highlight
divergent view points. It was with great pain and
anguish that we [in India] saw the live coverage of the
[September 11] dastardly acts of violence. Unfortunately
such terrorist-sponsored events are not alien to us [in
India] - although of different magnitude but in greater
numbers. The silent victims are many. And their voices
unheard. My cousins work in Manhattan & DC and by God's
grace are safe. However, the war cry and the show of
force by the USA is simply playing to a domestic
audience as brute force -- it is not going to achieve
the desired objective. It's funny how the local
sentiment here in India is, 'you still don't get it - do
you?'.
"It's no secret (but obviously being brushed under the
carpet) that the Taliban was promoted, funded, and
weaponized by the USA. The same forces have turned
against their mentors. Today, it is Pakistan that is the
front-line and therefore being pampered once again by
[U.S.] funds & (quite likely) weapons. [Pakistan] has
seen the largest number of people protesting the US
actions - more than even Palestine. It is Pakistan that
trained the Afghans and even post-11th-Sept had military
trainers inside of Afghanistan. Pakistan had training
camps and has been the best of buddies with the Taliban.
And was the most stringent supporter. Today, that is
rather uncomfortable to admit.
"Do you really think, that the acts of terror have
changed the loyalties [of Pakistan] overnight? Literally
hundreds of thousands of people have been fed & brought
up with the concept that Western ideas are anti-Islam.
Or is it the fear of [the U.S. President's challenge],
'You're either with us or against us' that has caused a
complete turn around? Has there really been a change of
heart so suddenly? Or is it "lets get our pound of
flesh or whatever we can from this".
"Today's newspaper cover page talks about how Indian
authorities gave concrete information to FBI on the link
between Pakistani ISI Director-General Lt-Gen Mahmud
Ahmad and WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta with a proof of
wire transfer of $100,000 including mobile phone calls.
This was the cause of the USA pressure on Pakistan to
dismiss/retire him. Why is India involved? Because its
the same person(s) who hijacked the Indian Airlines
Kathmandu-Delhi flight to Kandahar, Afghanistan last
December.
http://timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_ID=1454238160
"Want to read the diary of how westerners were
specifically targeted and kidnapped inside India by
[Pakistan's] ISI [secret police]?
http://www.indian-express.com/ie20011010/top1.html
"[It seems that] we have the good terrorism, the bad
terrorism and the I_don't_wanna_hear_or_know_terrorism.
"Today Pakistan-India is a flash point. What's worse is
that both always claimed and later proved in the open
that they have the nuclear capability. A conflict in
this region can have global consequences. In its 5,000+
years of history (http://www.itihaas.com/) India has
never attacked another nation. Period. Always
assimilated those who came and to avoid conflict even
given up its territory. Will this stand continue? Or
will we turn the land of Gandhi and Buddha, who are
epitomes of peace, into a country that reconciles to
Israeli-like response.
"Often I read www.dawn.com, which is the largest selling
English paper in Pakistan. I also read the journals that
cover the Middle East, and Far East. These give a very
different image and perspective. It's only when you have
read more than one side that you can make up your own
mind. The viewpoints out there are so divergent from
what is on CNN that you wonder if its the same event
being covered?!!
"Have you read the local papers or heard the radio
stations in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc.?
Wouldn't it be prudent to question why do so many people
in the world hate the USA? Not dislike - hate? One has
to reflect on this thought. I'm not at all suggesting
that they are right. Just that this is fact before us.
Too many Americans are clueless about the world outside
the US-borders. And that's a pity for a country that is
today undisputedly the world's leader in so many ways.
"Overall, I think there is great sympathy for the
victims. There is a concern for the future on what
further action & reactions will be there. At the same
time, the fact is that 'average Americans' simply don't
understand the global geo-political scenarios and have
very poor understanding of other cultures, heritage &
sensitivity. The US is perceived as a big bully. A lot
of effort will need to be done to change this
perception.
"The more we dissect the events and happenings the more
we learn that, above all, everything happens for a
purpose and for some good. Even if we can't see it yet."
-------
CONFERENCES ON MY CALENDAR
Conferences are listed when I am invited to speak or
otherwise participate. For the first time ever, there are
no public conferences on my calendar. Advt: I give a pretty
good talk, and most of it is even true! -- David I
-------
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Redistribution of this document, or any
part of it, is permitted for non-commercial purposes,
provided that the two lines below are reproduced with it:
Copyright 2001 by David S. Isenberg
isen@isen.com -- http://www.isen.com/ -- 1-888-isen-com
-------
[There are two ways to join the SMART List, which gets you
the SMART Letter by email, weeks before it goes up on the
isen.com web site. The PREFERRED METHOD is to click on
http://isen.com/SMARTreqScript.html and supply the info
as indicated. The alternative method is to send a brief,
PERSONAL statement to isen@isen.com (put "SMART" in the
Subject field) saying who you are, what you do, maybe who
you work for, maybe how you see your work connecting to
mine, and why you are interested in joining
the SMART List.]
[to quit the SMART List, send a brief "unsubscribe"
message to isen@isen.com]
[for past SMART Letters, see
http://www.isen.com/archives/index.html]
[Policy on reader contributions: Write to me. I won't quote
you without your explicitly stated permission. If you're
writing to me for inclusion in the SMART Letter, *please*
say so. I'll probably edit your writing for brevity and
clarity. If you ask for anonymity, you'll get it. ]
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*
David S. Isenberg isen@isen.com
isen.com, inc. 888-isen-com
http://isen.com/ 908-654-0772
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*
-- The brains behind the Stupid Network --
*--------------------isen.com----------------------*
Home