Jurassic Automation
Screenwriters always seem to bulldoze through the most impactful parts of the books they turn into movies. I recently picked up Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park at the suggestion of a friend who remarked that bad IT support killed everyone. Would you believe that nearly everyone dies (sorry) and Lex isn’t a vegan brat? More importantly, the clever and licentious mathematician, Ian Malcom, is pretty much the whole story. Even the chapter headers are designed around mathematics and chaos theory (see below). The images grow increasingly complex each chapter and the titles are redundant like computer code. I discovered that the entire book is a critique of technology.
Malcom is a chaos theorist. He believes that infinitely small chances and changes make knowing the future impossible. Weather is the most obvious example of chaos theory: very minor fluctuations can take a small windstorm and turn it into a tornado. "The flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world." Chaos theory is at the center of Malcom’s criticism.
Throughout the book, Malcom makes not so subtle jabs at John Hammond and the creation of Jurassic Park. However, he is opaque in his reasoning. It is only after the fences are down and dozens of loose raptors have eaten everyone that he finally comes out with it: automation is complicated and stupid; humans are complex and genius — yet stupid in this story for trusting automation. You see, automation follows a list of actions. First this, second that, third this, and so on. Human beings, however, make nuanced ethical and practical considerations at a pace nonpareil with computers. We think, we collaborate, we reflect and consider. Computers simply stop “thinking” when they get to the end of their programmed list.
This extremely simple critique gets at the heart of what goes wrong in Jurassic Park: they have built a completely automated park, devoid of human beings, to manage the care of genetically produced animals. In Malcom’s view, the park could have held bears and lions and would have failed just the same. Its reliance on automation — on a list of rules — sealed its fate.
From the genetics team to the automatic feeders, to fences and animal trackers, everything in Jurassic Park is built by a single engineer and on a single set of assumptions. To make matters worse, the chief engineer, the chief technician and the principal, Hammond, all wildly disagree with each other on the park’s purpose and vision. Their personalities also conflict, making the assumptions of those automations even more preposterous. To cite one small example, the “tracking computer” was built to count and track every dinosaur born in Jurassic Park. When visitors find wild raptors roaming the forest, the ragtag group of paleontologists discover that the computer had not been programmed to count additional dinosaurs; only the ones that had been born in the lab. With slight reprogramming, the computer is horrified to learn that there are twice as many dinosaurs in the park. The team also discovers that their all-female dinosaurs are easily reproducing because the filler DNA they used is from a frog that changes gender when it needs to. Another flawed assumption.
Malcom’s goofiness acts as a foil throughout the book. On one hand, you have lots of very serious men with serious arguments rooted in fact. The geneticist knows for a fact that his dinosaurs cannot reproduce. Meanwhile, Malcom is a jester and provides no counter. He cries tears of laughter and simply remarks: your dinosaurs are breeding — “life finds a way.” There is no seriousness to Malcom. Yet in the end, he is right.
The hubris of Malcom’s core technological criticism fits his movie personality perfectly. Asked over and over by Hammond why the park will fail — he answers like a stoic: because it must. Malcom’s inability or outright refusal to explain his reasoning is the only thing more arrogant than Hammond’s brilliant scam of resurrecting people-eating frog dinosaurs. In the end, this arrogance will take both their lives.
The only reason I dwell on this point is because I relate deeply with the character of Ian Malcom. The way we abuse ourselves with technology in modern society is so self evident that I have stopped defending the point in polite company. I feel like Malcom. The joke is so bad and overplayed that I cannot even bring myself to treat arguments in defense of technology seriously anymore. The park’s demise is inevitable. There is no way these choices we are making are intelligent or sustainable. But when the fences go down, what else can we do but wait to be eaten?
Who’s Michael? Why am I reading this?
I’m Michael Marinaccio. I work in Washington, D.C. and I do technology things. I have been writing for nearly a decade on technology and somewhere along the line you signed up for my newsletter. If you enjoy it, share with a friend. If you hate it, just unsubscribe.
What’s the goal here?
I am committing myself to one (hopefully short) note concerning technology a month.