Sermon

The origins of the Borg are mysterious to the Federation. Their ships resemble huge cubes appearing first in a galaxy which is the home planet of Guinnan, a character played by Whoopi Goldberg in the television series Star Trek: Next Generation. The Borg were interested in assimilating people into their cubic colony. And assimilation, to the Borg, meant becoming part machine. They appear quite ugly to the human eye, partly because they have had one eye replaced by a camera lens, a bionic arm installed and lots of tubes looping out and in of their bodies: half robot, half human. They walk with a mechanical gait, lacking any grace. And as part of the assimilation process, they lose their identity, becoming like a worker bee in a colony whose only purpose is to serve the hive. The individual Borg's minds are fused together to create a super adaptable Borgian intelligence driven to learn, replicate, expand, and assimilate.

Sounds sort of frightening, doesn't it, being assimilated by machines, but one could make the argument that this process is now quite far advanced. Have we become slaves to the machines which were supposed to liberate us and make our lives better? My favorite example of technological slavery is the beeper. No matter where one is, no matter what the situation, one's beeper can go off and interrupt whatever one is doing. Then beeper slave must then rush around and find a telephone. With these mobile cellular phones, the quiet uninterrupted commute to one's job, allowing some time of reflective preparation for the day or review of the events of the day on the way home, is gone. One's job begins as one turns the key in the ignition and starts lining up the contacts and business of the day by phone.

Driving the changes in our world, of course, is technology. These changes are happening at an unnatural pace. Up until this time, the evolution of a new species might take a number of generations before it took hold in a population. In human evolution, the taming of fire, the learning to create stone arrowheads, the smelting of iron and bronze, the planting of crops, were technological evolutions that took hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet look at the speed of evolution of the automobile, the airplane, the missile and space travel, and the most dramatic of all, the computer. We have gone from zero to hundreds of millions of automobiles in less than one hundred years. How many biological species have been this successful? Fire ants or killer bees look tame by comparison. Just think how many billions of computer chips have been produced by now. I have a computer on my wrist, PC here, two at home, one in my car engine, one in my microwave, one in my television, VCR, telephone and on and on and on.

Some view this conquest of our species by machines with alarm. One way to look at the counter-culture movement in the sixties was as a rejection of technology and a return to simpler times. The neo-conservative religious fundamentalists of today (except Newt) are forever looking backward to a better time in the past, perhaps in the iconic small town. Rarely do we think of the village postmaster with a computer on his desk, but try to find one here in Port Charlotte without one. Mail delivery today is extremely high tech as I found out at the post office, as the clerk explained the advanced technology used today to deliver mail.

With each change in technology, things get faster. Originally, if one wanted to send a letter, it had to be carried by fleet-footed courier from one place to another. With the increase in correspondence came the idea of sharing the delivery process by setting up a postal office. Although the method of exchanging letters didn't change much for many years, the advances in moving mail by carriage, train, truck and plane, and advances in sorting machines allowed delivery to speed up from weeks to days. Most of us have seen the advances of overnight delivery which seemed so amazing just a few years ago. But overnight still isn't fast enough for many people, so they use their facsimile (FAX) machine to send a picture of their document over the telephone lines to another FAX machine. With each advance in technology, the speed of exchange has quickened the pace of life.

The positive side of this acceleration by all these technological devices is making people more productive and able to accomplish more in a shorter period of time. My use of and skill with computers has allowed this congregation to avoid the need for a half-time secretary to take care of my correspondence, generate the order of service each week and typing my sermons for me. Without a computer, I wouldn't have enough time to do all the other things I am able to do here in the congregation. The one thing I get behind on is organizing and filing the blizzard of paper that passes through my hands, but I do not have this problem on my computer where the hundreds of files I maintain are always filed in the right spot.

Being able to do more faster is to increase one's power. Technology gives the possessor the potential to manipulate and control. This is why the business community and the military have been so enamored of technology. Increasing one's power in the business community means getting the edge on one's competitors. Technical innovation in warfare means one side can see better with radar and cameras on satellites, hear better with listening devices in the oceans to track submarines, and attack better, reaching targets undetected quicker, with stealth air power. And no greater weapon has been devised than the masterpiece of technology, the nuclear bomb. Even musicians and visual artists have been attracted by the medium the computer provides for creativity.

So technology is becoming more and more tightly woven into our lives, and not just in the external world. Several here have a pacemaker which regulates their heartbeat. It is becoming routine to have one's cataracts repaired in such a way that one's vision is better than before the surgery. Debilitating joint pain can be ended with a hip or knee replacement. I have a friend who is diabetic, who has a machine implanted in his body which regulates his dosage of insulin and another machine which measures his blood sugar. Researchers are talking about a new device to implant in the ear to allow the deaf to hear. The Borgs cannot be far away, can they?

Technology is also changing how we think. Social theorists are just beginning to grapple with the effects of the mass electronic media on our mental processes. Rhoda Bernstein and I went up to Jacksonville together last week to a conference with Rabbi Edwin Friedman who is an expert in studying the behavior of human systems. He presented to us some ideas about the effect of the media on our thinking that I'd like to share with you. He drew a picture with the individual family units in the center, the institutions of society, the work place, the government, the schools, the churches, etc. in the next circle out, and in the outer circle he drew the media. As the stresses and strains of families become visible to the media, they are amplified and shown to all the other families, which increases the anxiety of the other families. This increased anxiety becomes more visible in the interaction within families, but also in interaction of individuals with the social institutions on the next layer out. The media picks this up and reflects it back in again to our households on the television screen, increasing the anxiety of those who were not involved in the stresses. The institutions, feeling they have to do something to fix this amplified anxiety, further amplify it by taking their own actions which further stir up anxiety. And the media is there to see the stress, fear, concern, so they can amplify it and send it back into the community, creating even more anxiety and stress. This environment of fear is perfect for cybernetic or machine intelligence to operate. The cybernetic intelligence thrives on manipulation, ordering and control because that is what it does best. Technology is most often used toward this end. Yes, the Borgs are coming; the Borgs are coming!

The climate of anxiety and fear as a result of over-stimulation by the mass media is an example of one of the greatest dangers of technology, the law of unintended consequences. When Henry Ford began mass-producing automobiles, I'm sure he had no idea that the air quality of an entire city could be threatened. It could have been predicted, but I'm sure in his wildest dreams he didn't see how successful his work would be. Automation of repetitive jobs makes a lot of sense. I remember reading studies produced in the sixties about how mind- numbing and dehumanizing factory work was. Better a machine should be designed and operated by the worker. But the net effect has been to replace workers with machines, especially workers who have minimal skills, often not enough to program or repair the machine. One of my favorite unintended consequences is the evolution of computer viruses. This was the last thing early operating system designers worried about. They wanted everything to be open and friendly. But out of the deviousness of the human mind, out of the question, "what if?", came the concept of the self-replicating software which would have a life of its own. There is something demonic but also divine in the evolution of the computer virus.

When I'm talking about technology, I'm on my home turf. I have been part of it as a computer engineer. When I discovered computers in my college years, I fell in love with them. I dreamed of being able to play what we now know as Nintendo. I remember being thrilled with Pong, the first arcade video Ping- Pong game. Now we are talking about virtual reality, a simulated reality using a helmet with a video screen which senses the movement of the head and a glove which senses the movement of the hand to create an imaginary world. The Borgs taking over our brains.

Let me assure you that we are a great distance from the evolution of machine intelligence that will rival our own in breadth, but it has already far exceeded us in many, many computational ways. I was attracted to study machine or artificial intelligence, but hesitated because the speed of technological change has far outstripped the evolution of our human social and relational skills. They are evolving today as I saw in Dr. Friedman's lectures, but much more slowly. And the dissemination and acceptance of new social engineering ideas are even slower. If our skills in democracy, interpersonal communication and understanding do not keep up with our development of the power to manipulate and control, the machine mind will win out. Control will win over freedom.

One of the reasons I'm in ministry and not in technology is because the world needs to accelerate the evolution of our social skills to keep up. Technology shows no indication that it will slow down. Just in the course of my professional work in the computer industry since the late seventies, we have seen the evolution of neural networks, a silicon replication of our brain cell. Some researchers are investigating biologically-based rather than silicon-based computers. Some researchers are looking at using individual molecules as a storage unit for computer data. The speed of innovation continues to race ahead while nations and individuals continue the same patterns of conflict unchanged for thousands of years.

While the picture looks dark for freedom, I still have hope. The machines have not yet evolved their own intelligence with which to control us, although this is just a matter of time. Fortunately technological power is not concentrated, but distributed throughout society.

As you may be aware, I am co-chair of the UUA committee on Technology and Communications. We are assisting the UUA in setting up a rest stop on the information superhighway with a kiosk of U.U. information. The highway, also known as internet, is a fascinating network of hundreds of millions of computer users around the globe that share the same methods to exchange information. It is fast becoming the global brain of our collective societies. There is no central control of the internet by design, since it was created to survive a nuclear attack.

The current design of the internet allows unrestricted communication of any person to any other person. One has an unparalleled opportunity to participate in wide-ranging communication on thousands of topics, to find others around the world with whom to share ideas. It is our hope that the efforts by our committee will help strengthen Unitarian Universalism by connecting U.U.'s electronically with each other. It is my intuition that networking U.U.'s together will advance and better disseminate our thinking to the world. Of course, at the same time, I am leery of unintended consequences. The work in which we participate has the potential to dramatically alter the way the UUA headquarters does business, the way the UUA Board of Trustees conducts business, the District services that are made available. And we have concern that the electronic exchange of information will not diminish person-to-person contact - rather extend it. I will be greatly distressed if our efforts to incorporate technology function to dehumanize our religious institution and the quality of congregational life. I have faith that technology, properly managed, can be used toward the good.

Still, my greatest hope for resisting the hegemony of the machines arises from this law of unintended consequences in the evolution of computer viruses. No one was prepared for them because no one expected such deviant disorderly behavior by those infamous hackers. I know the mind-state of the hacker well, as I'd have been one if I were clever enough. The mind that confronts limits and says, "what if I do this?" will save us from the manipulation and control of the machines. I imagine it as the same divine spark of innovation which has driven primordial clay to crawl up out of the ocean, then later revisit the seashore and throw a vase on the potter's wheel.

In the end there is no end. No amount of power, manipulation and control can resist the urge of creation. The chaotic will to be shall triumph over the desire to order. The machines will try to bring us under their control but our creativity shall prevent them from turning us into Borgs.

Closing Words

We have much to fear from technology, to be sure, but there is hope as well that we shall not be completely dominated by our creations. The machine can serve us if we understand its appropriate place in our lives. We need strong legislation to protect our rights and humanity from mechanical intrusion. But most of all we need to realize that technology is a tool and not an end in and of itself. May our intentions be progress for the people, not against them.

Go in peace,
Make peace,
Be at peace.