Читать книгу Is Technology Making Us Sick? - Matthew Taylor - Страница 11

AElectrosensitivity sufferers such as Jean-Jacque and Emilie sometimes resort to home-made shielding devices such as headscarves, sheets or, in this case, coats, lined with metal mesh or foil shields.

Around the world, up to 13% of the population experiences symptoms of electrosensitivity. The rate of this is highest in Taiwan, and lowest, just 1.5%, in Sweden. Sufferers report a range of problems from headaches and nausea to heart palpitations and depression. They attribute this to the presence of radiation from Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile phones, both masts and handsets.

In addition to these feelings of ill health, many people fear a link between mobile phones and cancer. Microwave radiation has been at the centre of cancer scares since the 1980s, when microwave ovens became more widespread in people’s homes. Regulations to make sure the ovens could not continue to emit radiation when the door was open exacerbated fears, despite reassurances that the rules were intended to prevent people burning themselves. Studies that have found no link between microwave use and cancer, such as the comprehensive survey undertaken by Peter Valberg for Cancer Causes and Control in 1997, have not been enough to dispel the myth. Wi-Fi and mobile phones both use microwave spectrum radio waves, so the association is easy to carry over.

Radio waves, light, Wi-Fi, mobile phone signals and kitchen microwaves are all the same kind of electromagnetic rays. They are different wavelengths and carry different amounts of energy however, meaning Wi-Fi and mobile phone signals cannot achieve the same warming effect as microwaves.

In Taiwan in 2013, a cohort study of 23 million people found no link between cancer and phones. In the same year, a Cancer Research UK-funded study of 791,710 women in Europe reached the same conclusion. Yet individuals continued to be electrosensitive. They genuinely felt ill unless wearing protective clothing, and they felt relief when they moved away from Wi-Fi and mobile phones.

A cohort study takes a group of people who share a characteristic – in this case heavy mobile phone use – and measures certain things about them over time. Unlike a controlled trial there is no control group without the characteristic tested for comparison. They are particularly useful for refuting a cause and effect relationship.

BMany who experience the syndrome have to leave cities and live isolated rural lives away from people using technology and mobile devices that emit radio waves, and protect themselves when they have to visit towns.

Scientists tested whether the symptoms continued when the mobiles and routers were actually emitting something, or just appeared to be. There was no difference. Cancer rates were monitored for spikes in heavy phone users and IT workers: no difference. Mobiles have been ubiquitous for two decades and although brain tumour diagnosis rates have risen, researchers agree that this is down to better detection and reporting rather than an increase in incidence. The radiation given off by Wi-Fi routers and mobile phone masts and handsets is too low powered to harm our DNA and does not cause cancer or other ill health effects.

Routers generate Wi-Fi signals and thus connect wireless devices to the Internet.

Tabloid headlines persist, however, and support groups continue their well-meaning but misguided work, despite the NHS in Britain, the NIH in the USA and cancer research charities publishing guidelines that give evidence-led information. The World Health Organization classification of Wi-Fi in 2011 as a ‘possible risk’ did not help reassure anyone, but it was not intended to mean that any risk was actually present, only that there was some effect shown in tests on animals. Human exposure would never reach the power levels used in those experiments.

AMobile phone masts have become a common feature of urban landscapes. The objections to them are sometimes aesthetic rather than health-based, leading to attempts to disguise them as local flora.

BApple Store sales assistants in Russia happily welcome the latest models of iPhone. Queues still appear at shops all over the world every year when new technology becomes available.

To dismiss electrosensitivity because it is psychological in origin is over-simplistic and more than a little heartless. These people are genuinely suffering. What is really going on here?

It is not the case that all of these people would be feeling ill anyway and are blaming the technology for existing symptoms. They start to feel ill when the technology is introduced and feel better when it is gone. The fact that there is no physical link between their symptoms and their phone, for example, is beside the point. It is not just worry; they are sick and technology caused their ill health, but not in the physically causal way that would make such sickness universal. Why does technology adversely affect some people when others keenly queue up to get their latest dose of progress, and feel nothing but joy when they get it?

ANo evidence on effects peculiar to the latest 5G mobile phone standard has yet been collected, but protesters already claim that new health problems are being felt.

Anxiety is the most common mental illness of all and can have a wide range of causes. Some are physical, some not. Researchers at Harvard in 2012 found that a third of the population will experience anxiety. Together with depression, dysregulated mood, aggression, fatigue and difficulty concentrating, there is a catalogue of mental well-being problems that are reported by sufferers as being in reaction to technology. What is it about the people who do not suffer from electrosensitivity that is inoculating them from it?

Anxiety, in a clinical sense, includes panic attacks, debilitating phobias and a sense of the overwhelming need to escape. The pulse rises, muscles tense and the anxious person becomes vigilant, as if in anticipation of danger.

Dysregulated mood refers to mood swings that the subject cannot control, including anger and outbursts of temper. When dysregulation persists for most of the day, every day, for at least 12 months it can be classified as a clinical disorder.

The electrosensitives, just like the civil servants who blamed the steel nibs for scrivener’s palsy, are displaying a human trait that, when applied in other directions, has been a driver of progress. They are observing an effect and looking around for a pattern to explain it.

BMarches such as this one in Germany in 2019 have coincided with cities such as Brussels, Belgium, and Geneva, Switzerland, delaying their rollouts of the antennas required for 5G reception.

Diverging with the scientific application of pattern spotting, though, they are finding something new and, if it fits with concepts they already hold, they believe that it is the cause of the effect. Controlled trials that use logic and evidence to establish possible cause, such as the landmark British government-funded study published in the Environmental Health Perspectives journal in 2007 that found no link between ill health and mobile phone masts, are dismissed if they conflict with intuition. Science stands out as one of the very few areas of life where this evidence-led approach is taken. In politics, the arts, most of the humanities and our personal lives, this reliance on intuition is absolutely the norm.

Intuition is the tendency to seek out information that accords with our existing beliefs. To disregard everything else is called confirmation bias.

Too often we forget that all technology, from the invention of fire onwards, was once new technology and that cutting-edge inventions have often provoked a fearful reaction. Poet John Keats (1795–1821) fretted that public money would be wasted on the ‘nothing of the day’ – the velocipede. ‘We shall soon be nothing but transparent heaps of jelly to each other,’ said the New York Times about the telephone in 1877.

AA diagram showing how memes spread on fringe websites such as 4chan, Reddit and Gab. Some are racist, such as Happy Merchant, some triumphalist, such as Dubs, and some mock emotions.

Sociologists of online behaviour have long since identified the brutalizing effects of assuming an anonymized persona on murky Internet forums full of trolls, such as 4chan and Reddit, and seen the dehumanization of people in opposing tribes there. For the average channer, normies are not a group of people with lives, families and feelings but transparent heaps of jelly, to be triggered and abused with glee and malice.

4chan is a message board website where anonymous users gather to discuss subjects including Japanese animation, video games, far right politics and anti-feminism. Freedom of speech absolutism is taken as a given and contributors compete to find new ways to offend normal society. Similar platforms include 8chan and Gab.

Reddit is a website for posting links, discussing them and voting for your favourites. As with 4chan, unfettered speech is valued highly and trolls are common, but there are spaces for more mainstream and less offensive topics.

Normies, also referred to as ‘normalfags’ in 4chan’s casually homophobic slang, are people who do not go to 4chan. Those who visit 4chan are known as ‘anons’, referring to the site’s completely anonymized nature.

Influencers on social media can also have a huge impact on the views of followers without their realizing it. In the Data & Society report ‘Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube’, published October 2018, researcher Rebecca Lewis highlighted how audience members could be ‘incrementally exposed to, and come to trust, ever more extremist political positions’. The data revealed the wide network of influencers collaborating with one another and acting as conduits to other influencers in the network.

In the 1990s, a group of people calling themselves the Neo-Luddites gathered around the writings of Chellis Glendinning (b. 1947), a psychotherapist specializing in recovery from trauma. She took the view that technology itself is not an evil, but that the current state of the technological landscape is harmful to many. She argued that all new technology should be critiqued and, if found wanting from the point of view of human well-being and ecological sustainability, abandoned and an alternative path found. All technology is political, she claimed, and creates social structures around itself that aid the preservation of the technology, rather than benefit the users.

Neo-Luddites were attempting to reclaim the word ‘luddite’ which had come to mean crassly technophobic. The original English Luddites (active from 1811 to 1816) were concerned not with new technology per se, but its use in putting skilled weavers out of work.

BThis grinning face is used online to assert that another user is trolling – posting purely in order to create conflict. The crossed out version symbolizes the phrase ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’, i.e. resisting rising to the trolls’ bait. However there is some doubt as to whether this tactic works, or whether online harassers will continue, or even escalate, their behaviour when they do not get the attention they seek.

AHillary Clinton is seen on multiple screens during her presidential candidate’s debate with Donald Trump in 2016. Her campaign worked hard to make sure she was seen as often as possible.

BLi Na was one of China’s top tennis players until her retirement in 2019. The game’s growth in China is largely due to her and her 23 million followers on Weibo, a website similar to Twitter. She is seen here on multiple screens in an airport, highlighting the prevalence of screens in everyday life.

Glendinning’s Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto (1990) conducts that critique and sets out a programme for the future without six particular types of technology – nuclear, chemical, genetic engineering, television, electromagnetic and computer – that are condemned as being negative, anti-people and likely to lead to the destruction of all life. Community-based renewable energy sources, organic technology inspired by nature, conflict resolution technology and decentralized social technologies are approved as being positive and life-enhancing.

For the Neo-Luddite, technological progress should continue, but only in the approved directions and the rest of it should be stopped.

The ideas are not entirely new, continuing a tradition dating from the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain (1880–1920), and including the ideas of E. F. Schumacher (1911–77), especially those espoused in Small Is Beautiful (1973). Glendinning provides a lucid path to a peaceful future with well-being as its primary focus. However, to one particular individual she appeared to be foretelling an impending disaster to be fought against at all costs.

Theodore Kaczynski (b. 1942) is better known as the Unabomber. He sent 16 bombs through the post in the USA between May 1978 and April 1995. Three of his targets were killed: Hugh Scrutton, a computer shop owner in Sacramento, in 1985; Thomas Mosser, an advertising executive in New Jersey, in 1994; and Gilbert Brent Murray, a lobbyist, also in Sacramento, in 1995. Most of his victims were scientists, technologists, airline staff or engineers. Kaczynski was trying to destabilize modern society to bring about a new set of technological norms in a twisted, murderous reflection of the Neo-Luddite project. He wrote a manifesto, ‘Industrial Society and its Future’, in which he set out his contention that technology has been disastrous for the human race, and that we are addicted to its comforts.

Unabomber derives from the acronym UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber), which was used by the FBI to refer to the lone wolf bombing case before they deduced Kaczynski’s identity.

‘Industrial Society and its Future’ was published in full in the New York Times and the Washington Post in 1995 after Kaczynski said he would desist from terrorism if they did so.

CTheodore Kazcynski being interviewed at the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Colorado, USA, in 1999. He is still imprisoned there, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

ARobert McNamara and Mark O’Brien were both iron lung users. McNamara for muscular distrophy, O’Brien for the after-effects of polio. The iron lung was an early example of total life support extended over a longer period.

Ray Kurzweil (b. 1948), a pioneering optimistic inventor, futurist and director of engineering at Google, quoted Kaczynski at length in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), in a passage subtitled ‘The new Luddite challenge’. Kurzweil relates Kaczynski’s prediction of a society in which artificial intelligence is increasingly used to make decisions for the welfare of individuals. The machines are controlled by a tiny elite and their decisions are accepted because they genuinely seem to offer a better outcome for living standards. Humanity drifts into a situation in which it finds it cannot turn off the machines, as doing so would be tantamount to suicide. In this society, physical needs are satisfied, children are raised in ‘psychologically hygienic’ conditions and everyone is kept busy, but they are reduced to the status of domestic pets for the machines.

Kurzweil is a transhumanist. He believes that technological progress will soon result in a techno-utopia in which we defeat our own mortality with the help of the learning machines we have invented.

Transhumanism is a term coined by Julian Huxley in a lecture in 1951, drawing on a paper by W. D. Lighthall from 1940. It refers to the desire to evolve away from the current human condition via the use of technology.

Once artificial intelligence equals or surpasses that of the human mind, it will be able to design new machine minds, ever more intelligent than itself, resulting in increasingly rapid evolution towards superintelligence. The application of this machine superintelligence to human problems will result in them being solved far more easily than before and a new, much better, society will be born.

Superintelligence will have been achieved when learning machines are more intelligent than people, a moment known among transhumanists as ‘the singularity’. The eagerness with which it is looked forward to was satirized by writers Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, who called it ‘the rapture of the nerds’ in their 2012 novel of the same name.

Kurzweil does not see Kaczynski’s fear of reduction to pet status as an unavoidable fate, but takes his ideas seriously enough to discuss them. The road we are on, says Kurzweil, far from leading to cosseted slavery, is a road paved with gold and we are already past the point at which we could turn off the machines. For Kaczynski, the machines keep us from being free. For Kurzweil, our free choice to make and live with the machines, like our choice to live in society, augments us and makes us, and our world, better.

BJames Nall, paralyzed and told he would never walk again after breaking his neck, took 819 steps using this robotic exoskeleton in 2013.

It is no wonder people feel anxious.

But the cause of the anxiety is unacknowledged by those who do not know how technology is progressing. Unless they understand what the machines are actually doing to them and their society, they can only blame partially grasped developments for their own feelings. That can never result in the kind of reasoned analysis that Glendinning believes is the way to build a healthier society. It can only lead to fear and uncertainty.

ARed dots clamour for the phone user’s attention, regardless of how urgent the message is.

BA graph showing the adoption of different technologies in American households since the beginning of the 20th century.

Almost all technological progress has happened in the last lifetime or two, especially since the invention of the computer, and the time between someone having an idea and that idea being disseminated around the world has shrunk so much that we have future shock. Alvin Toffler mapped out human history in terms of 800 lifetimes. Invention up until the last one or two spans of 80 years or so took place slowly over centuries. The developments of the wheel, fire, pottery, language, agriculture, the cart, even steam engines did not appear over a few years but took lifetimes to become widely adopted.

Things started to accelerate when the scientific method was developed by French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) in the 17th century. Building on the ideas of the 10th-century Iraqi-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician Ibn Al-Haytham (965–1040) and the 16th-century British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Descartes rejected the platonic model of conducting science through a priori reasoning and insisted on using ruthless observation and experiment to discover the practical, actionable truth about the universe.

ACommuters use smartphones in Seoul, South Korea. 68% of South Korean adults have a smartphone.

Then, in the 20th century, came mass production and the computer, with its amazing ability to analyse and communicate data. Millions of scientific papers were published, read and acted upon every year, and thousands of patents were granted. Major inventions arrived with unprecedented frequency and spread across the world at a previously unimaginable rate. Aeroplanes, space travel, computers, chemotherapy, robots, reliable contraception, nuclear power, antibiotics, recorded music, organ transplants and the Internet were all invented in the last two lifetimes, and are but a tiny fraction of the world-changing inventions of that period.

We are, undoubtedly, living in a time of change such as the world has never seen before. Our brains have evolved slowly over 2,000 years but we are having to negotiate a world that has changed inordinately over the last 200 years. Is it any surprise that we have new and confusing feelings about it all?

BA Walkera test flight crew try out new virtual reality camera-equipped drones, allowing them to see where they fly and integrate virtual elements, such as games, routes and targets.