More Machine Love

The tour proper of the steam plant was led by a man in a machinist's jumpsuit who knew the turbines minutely, who for about an hour did not stop giving us very specific information about parts and frequencies and other etcetera, and often stood very close and spoke like he was trying with some effort to meter out information at an intelligible rate and not in one explosive gust. (Even so, I didn't understand most of what he talked about, so I looked up the following description.)

Briefly, here is how a steam turbine works. A steam engine's function is based on a principle of thermodynamics that says that entropy (unusable energy--heat--that sometimes is described as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system) increases in any system producing work (in thermodynamics, work is a little more general than mechanical work--weight lifted to a height--and basically refers to energy that changes a system macroscopically). Since steam turbines rely on the irreversible process of cooling (heat moves only from hot to cold), some amount of energy will be irretrevably lost during the process of generating work. The idea is: steam inside the turbine is expanded in chambers, and nozzles direct this pressurized steam to rotor blades, which the steam turns. These blades spin an electric generator (the dynamo was the first electric generator), which operates on the principle that when electric conductors are perpendicular to a magnetic field, potential difference is created that can generate a current. From mechanical movement comes electricity, but never with ideal efficiency--there's always friction diverting some energy to useless heat. In an ideal world, theoretical machines turn energy into work with no losses, but as touching the nearest lightbulb will show you, this is not an ideal world.

Turbine rotor blade

The Georgetown turbines are capable of generating 3,000, 8,000 and 10,000 kw, respectively. For a comparison: Puget Sound Energy, which now supplies Seattle's power, is capable with all of its plants of generating a combined 1,800 megawatts, which is 1,800,000 kw. This is why the Georgetown Steam plant is very much a museum and not an operating plant. It is simply dwarfed by demand for electricity.

[Actually a watt is sort of complicated to define, and this complication gets at how abstract units of measurement actually are, the ones that reference the human body (the foot, the mile--which is from the Latin phrase for 1,000 steps, the inch--possibly originally the distance between the tip of the thumb and the first joint of the thumb, and the hand) being less so than the ones associated with really big or really small units, or with things that cannot be visualized laid end to end or stuffed in mouldy plastic containers at the back of the fridge. Which is perhaps yet another example of how an abstraction can become what's considered technical over time and through a routine course of associative training, which is what the above comparison between kilowatts and megawatts assumes. For me, it's only a comparison between numbers of zeros, which are themselves nifty abstractions.

For the definition, a watt is one joule of energy per second, a joule being the energy required to produce the power of one watt for one second, a definition which may not make the defined any more clear. Sorry.]

During the tour, it was difficult not to pay attention to this: what the machines do to someone intending to write about them is make superfluous the whole project of generating metaphors and trying by (often facile) literary tactics to make the machines mean anything beyond their utility. Sort of in the same way that trying to frame a stampeding elephant calls attention to the frame rather than the intended subject, making the device the subject--and the guy wielding the frame a damn fool. Which is to say, I felt silly, and this feeling is also part of the appeal, another aspect of machine love.

And I suppose this is where all kinds of obvious things can be said about why we tend to romanticize* what we know of through myths and abstractions and icons rather than through technical expertise. Not knowing anything about the turbines, I felt like a tourist in the steam plant: a little detached, consciously ignoring a sense of being where I didn't quite fit in.

What's preserved in the steam plant, in the weird silence surrounding big machines still capable of being very noisy, is the Myth of the American Inventor. This is unexpected, given the machines' obsolescence, and only reaffirms that the myth doesn't really have anything to do with the thing invented, but rather with the way the inventor has supposedly bypassed repetitive drudge work (the mechanical definition of work) to produce something seemingly from nothing. And then the inventor's name is put on the product and maybe the unit of measure the product requires we adjust to, and the process of invention is eclipsed by the Proper Noun.

Why the Myth of the American Inventor seems obsolete, too, like it definitely belongs in a museum, can perhaps be attributed to corporate R&D and marketing. Now the company puts its name on the product, and through marketing maintains focus on the product...but this is getting really tangential, except to say that there might be instances where overlooking the process of "inventing" a product is unethical, and this could lead into a discussion of bio-engineering and gene synthesizing that I'd be happy not to pursue right now. Suffice it to say that maybe the myth of the American inventor has survived as the myth of the American invented, where the process is often patented and sold to the public via euphemisms and abstractions. And from here the leap to talking about a much anticipated invention--the robot--is not that far.

There is the argument that our brains are chemically-controlled machines, that humans are big meaty chemical factories that house various mechanisms, including one called "soul" or "mind" or whatever. One aspect of this argument has cohered in the practice of prescribing and taking pills to alter the brain's inputs and thus its outputs. Another in the practice of designing machines that can reproduce thought (and whether it must be human thought in order for us to validate it as thought is also obviously debatable). A compelling argument can be made for defining love as a totally chemical phenomenon. Consider the effects of oxytocin, a hormone, on the brain: arousal (spontaneous erection in rats injected with the stuff), pair bonding, maternal behavoir, increased trust, fewer symptoms of stress.

Of course the gist of the opposing argument is that there is more to the human brain than the behaviour it causes; hence, we'll never really know how it works. Really, the arguments for and against brains as machines are complex, and they revolve around the equally complex arguments for and against the brain as mind/soul/third eye/etc. Either way, the debates themselves are fine evidence of just how complicated and self-conscious the brain certainly is, machine or not. And just this sort of self-consciousness is a crux of both sides.



We may resist seeing ourselves as machines, but we do readily anthropomorphize them. We enhance them with humanlike qualitative motivations and sensibilities, a practice that makes fairly routine advances in robot building (one I read about recently is a tacticle-sensing mechanism intended to allow surgeons doing minimally-invasive surgeries to "touch" tissue that might be abnormal to decide whether it is) seem familiar, even destined, and talk about robot ethics (like this article about human-robot interaction) seem warranted. We often don't want to see ourselves as machines, and yet we do, judging by the robots to which we pay the most attention. It's a case of real life catching up with a version of fictionalized--and idealized--life. (And aggrandizing the future is not unlike doing the same to the past.) Only in life, as in machines, idealizations turn out to be a lot less intricate (and certainly colder) than the real thing.


*Romanticize is the word to use here. What the group of philosophers, writers, painters, musicians, etc. cordoned into the category "Romantics" were (very generally) doing was sort of reacting in an unorganized way (from the p.o.v. of their present) to aspects of the Englightenment they found devoid of moral direction, a.k.a. nihilistic. While the scope of what they accomplished is broad and not necessarily subordinated to the thematic thrust of most histories, generally speaking they sought the individual, subjective experience and tried to get at the unification of phenomena through disciplines perhaps not as hell-bent on rigorous classification as the emergent sciences. In retrospect what this generated was, from one perspective, an almost exclusively aesthetic focus that survives in modernist lit. and art and that lots and lots of people see as a slipshod platform on which to build any sort of ideology/ethics, or as an escape altogether from dealing with trying to do this. Anyway. There's a bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that gets close to how I've come to understand the Romantic outlook: "Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency--or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself."