Philosophical commentary on technology black‑boxing and systemic opacity

completely understand. The French philosopher Bruno Latour, the father of “Actor Network Theory” has called this process “Black Boxing”. The better your phone works, the less you notice it. The more precisely some machine feeds you your news, the less you wonder what might I be missing? “Scientific and technical work,” he says, “is made invisible by its own success.”166 The operating system and network protocols of your tablet device are opaque to you now in a way they never would have been two decades ago (when even the casual user computer had to type to a C: prompt or wildly rage at a crashed “Blue Screen of Death” from time to time). But, in fact, the system is incalculably more complex. “Each of the parts inside a black box,” Latour remind us, “is a black box full of parts.” And it is in the winding and linking of all these pieces that action in a connected world is made possible. “It is by mistake or unfairness that our headlines read ‘Man Flies’”, Latour says. “B-52s do not fly,” he writes. “The US Air Force flies.” Every plane that ever makes it into the air does so because of the clicking coordination of thousands of linked, black boxed systems. Your stock portfolio or your computer or your bio-sensored heart is not a lone object; it’s a feature of a connected landscape. We're surrounded now, connected to, essential black boxes we’ve no way of understanding and whose development and operation we've left to the New Caste. Look around you, how many screens do you see? Each is a billboard: New Caste at Work. It’s not only the hardware in our lives that | mean, but the bits of knitted programming that decide how we search, when we communicate, and if we can exchange information or money. The virtual and the real are in constant contact and it’s the New Caste that does the stapling. In fact, one of the magic tricks of power in the connected age is an ability to flop easily back and forth between network and reality. It suggests other dangers too. As legendary machine systems designer Leslie Lamport warns: Computer scientists collectively suffer from the confusion of language with reality.‘°7Anyone who’s ever written a computer program knows this sense: You write some code. You compile and run the program to see what happens. You go back and work on the code some more to refine what you’ve done. You run it again. You touch the virtual; the real reacts. This seems in a way like the most trivial thing, the writing of a computer program or an AI bot or a trading order, but in fact 166 The French philosopher: Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Geneaology” in Common Knowledge, Fall 1994 Vol 3 No 2. p. 23 167 It suggests other dangers: Leslie Lamport, “Computer Science and State Machines”, Contribution to a Festschrift honoring Willem-Paul de Roever on his retirement” (Redmond: Microsoft Research, 2008). In its entirety it runs: “Computer scientists collectively suffer from what I call the Whorfian syndrome—the confusion of language with reality. Since these devices are described in different languages, they must all be different. In fact, they are all naturally described as state machines.” The Whorfian problem is a linguistics observation about the way in which our thinking is limited by whatever language we have to describe what we see or contemplate. 116 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018348