Dr Yvonne Foerster’s lecture on Friday May 2nd titled “Designing Future Bodies” took an anthropological and phenomenological approach to the study of fashion with special consideration to technology. Dr. Foerster began with a discussion of the term “fashion” in France. She explained that prior to industrialization, garments were typically produced in the home. As the technologies associated with industrialization made cotton more affordable, clothing became easier and cheaper to produce and fashion designers began to sell patterns for garments that could be finished in the home. Then the designers and producers moved to the business model of department stores with bi annual or annual fashion lines (rather than the seasonal lines we see today).

Her talk then transitioned into a discussion of the relationship between fashion and art or what we might call “high fashion.” Dr Foerster showed a skirt by Hussein Chalayan a designer who created a coffee table skirt (http://museumarteutil.net/projects/coffee-table-skirt/.) This took the talk toward the idea of “wearables” and the Internet of Things (IOT.) She referenced medical technology such as shirts designed for infants that can detect the arrest of breathing and thus help to curb infant mortality.

I was able to ask a question which went something like, “There is all sorts of empirical research that suggests that smartphones are bad for our mental health. That they leach our attention and ability to focus even when not in use. Should we be more concerned about wearables, what is so different about the transition from iphone to iwatch or google glass?”

Dr Foerster’s response was that technology has already infiltrated and mediated the way in which we experience the world (showing her phenomenological dispositions). She didn’t quite take a stance one the matter as I was hoping she might, but did offer a cautionary response suggesting that because the tech is so new (only a few decades), we should be wary of the potential risks.

Northpointe’s algorithm takes real people, with complex identities and lives, and reduces them to abstract equations. The job of a judge is to listen to the evidence presented by the defence and the prosecution, consider the whole picture, and issue a decision based on the available facts and the the law. When something like a mandatory minimum is introduced into the legal system, it takes part of the process of thinking and adjudication away from the judicial process. It is certainly true that the biases and prejudices of our greater american public are already reflected in our judges. When Northpointe’s algorithm, however, is used in matters of jurisprudence to influence bond and sentencing two things are occurring. First, we are relying on computers and programs to do our thinking for us and pretending that a number can accurately represent the complexities of a human life. Second, we are obscuring the biased process which gives a false notion of objectivity.

I wonder how ethicists, sociologists, lawmakers, and community members were consulted to determine what questions should be asked and how they should be weighted? Even seemingly innocuous questions such as where someone lives are tied up in issues of racial and economic segregation in America.

The readings on the history of operating systems made me aware of how little I knew about some of the fundamental computing concepts behind the technology I use everyday. One of the concepts that I have been trying to understand is the distinction between computer languages, programs, and operating systems. From what I understood an OS is a package of software that mediates the users’ interaction between the hardware and other computer programs. The OS is itself written in a computer language although it operates on different levels of abstraction from languages like html.

The more technical background on the development of Unix was enlightening, but it also reminded of the distinction between knowledge of and knowledge that. I have exceptionally little knowledge of how a car works, I couldn’t explain to you the principles behind the combustion engine, but I do know that when I turn the key, the car starts. In other words I think the intricacies of the technological development of OS are interesting, but I’m more interested in learning how to “drive the car” so to speak.

To that end, I was interested in some of the theoretical discussions about labor, property, and capital. One of the greatest potentials of technology is to liberate people from manual labor and to improve standards of living. A Marxist reading might also pose ethical questions about the consequences of the technological revolution and the conditions it has produced. We might question the commodification of our private data and the sale of customer’s personal information to advertising companies on sites like Facebook and Google.

It seems as if there are, among the readings, three narrative threads that emerge in telling the story of the integrated circuit. The first is about innovation and the history of science the second economic and the third sociological. 

The invention of the integrated circuit is attributed to Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. In 1958, while working at Texas Instruments, Kilby created the first circuit whose resistors and capacitors were made from the same material and interconnected into a single semi-conductor. Two years later, in 1960, Robert Noyce improved on Kilby’s concept and created a circuit out of silicon. Noyce became the co-creator of Intel, and in the following decades the integrated circuit became instrumental in the proliferation of computers and computing technology. Kilby went on to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.

The second part of the story about the integrated circuit is the about economics. While scientific discovery and advancements in technology created a new field of computing technology, the proliferation of computers did not occur until much later in the 1980’s. This was largely a result of the creation of the personal computer. As the integrated circuits improved and became more efficient and cheaper to produce, the integrated circuits became central to the massive economic expansion of the tech boom.

The third component of the story which also allowed for the profit margins that made the economics possible was the sociological story about the laborers who produced the integrated circuits. Beginning in 1965 Fairchild opened a plant in Shiprock New Mexico on a Navajo reservation. The location was chosen because of government subsidies as well the lack of unions and jobs in the Navajo community. The workers were paid very little given the skilled and precise nature of the work and made possible the massive profit margins of companies