ROB KLING, Professor of information and computer science, UC Irvine

Don’t get Rob Kling wrong. The UC Irvine professor of computer science loves his computer. But he also thinks society’s love affair with the “computer revolution” has masked a true understanding of the effects of computers, both negative and positive, on modern society. Kling co-edited a collection of essays on the controversial aspects of computers aptly entitled “Computerization and Controversy.” The book is being used as a textbook in about 40 colleges around the country. He spoke recently with Times staff writer Dean Takahashi.

Can you summarize what your book is about?

There is a lot of hype about computers. What people don’t hear and get access to are a lot of the debates. The pros and cons of various technologies, the debates about social arrangements that pertain to the tension on computer technology. The first thing this book does is make the debates more accessible to many more people, managers, technologists, and those interested in the subject.

The discussions about computing tend to be pro-computer and anti-computer, rather than on ways of organizing life and social practices around computers. It’s like talking more about the latest sports car model rather than how the automobile has affected society, such as creating a whole social support system of highways and suburbs.

What are some reasons that computers haven’t changed productivity as much as might be expected?

That’s one of the surprises. About half of capital expenditures today are for computer equipment. There is increasing evidence that those expenditures are not really producing increases in productivity. Sometimes people are not trained to use them right. Other times, for instance in writing, a word processor means that I can do 10 drafts of a book compared to only a few on a typewriter. There may be value in it, but I’m not producing more books per year.

When do computers stop being worth the additional effort? Value is not coming out in proportion to the cost going in. Economists haven’t answered this question very well. The net effect is so much of the focus of ideas today is on the equipment of technology and not the effect on work. As another example: I did a survey on a department of people that were on a computer network. None of the people knew they were on a network. They thought they were using stand-alone machines. That’s like not knowing whether you have a pickup truck or a sports car.

I’ve written six stories in the past two years that have used the phrase “computer revolution.” Can you talk about your perceptions on how stories about computers are handled in the popular press and why they are accepted without question?

Let’s begin with readers. In the United States, there is a long tradition of opinion and belief in social progress. You could argue that technological utopianism--the belief that computers make life better--is a kind of religion. It’s like romances that offer hope, but instead of a lover, it offers you a fantasy technology of your choice. I don’t understand exactly why, but it does soothe and offer a sense of hope.

Journalists are looking to write stories about something new and surprising. A variant of this might be stories about the Loch Ness Monster. If you wrote that it doesn’t exist, that might be authoritative. But it takes the fun out of speculating about what it looks like, how old it is, and where it came from.

In editing this book, do you see yourself as a traffic manager for the different views on the controversies, or do you believe that there is indeed an underside to technology?

In the book, I try to be a traffic manager. But I believe there is an underside to computer technology. It comes in a few different flavors. I think computers can be a hassle and a cause of stress. It’s common for organizations not to train people adequately to use them. And some uses of computers can have very harsh consequences for people. One example was Lotus Marketplace, which was a joint venture between Lotus (Development Corp. in Cambridge, Mass.) and Equifax (Inc. in Atlanta, Ga.) to sell names, addresses and records of buying habits of hundreds of millions of people. The idea was it would be attractive for people who want to sell certain kinds of products, such as baby products, to people who had a history of buying them. But it was very hard to take yourself out of the system if you wanted privacy. They caught a lot of flak and pulled it off the market a year ago.

What are some other aspects of the underside of technology?

One is monitoring of people in the workplace. Supervisors have some right to know what you are doing. But how intrusive can they become by virtue of this supervisory right?

Another kind of troublesome example is becoming dependent on a computer system to the point that it becomes the sole link for communication. For example, I could give my students assignments over an electronic bulletin board, and they could send me messages to fulfill certain assignments. It helped for the students who didn’t like to speak up in class. But that can become harsh if that becomes a substitute for social interaction, and I stopped holding class.

How much does this make you want to throw your computer out the window?

Much of the discussion is polarized between technological utopians and anti-utopians. I tend not to be sympathetic to either extreme.

What are your own predictions about the promise of information freeways and artificial intelligence or virtual reality? Will they meet their potential?

Artificial intelligence has been the subject of immense hype, so much that it’s doomed to fail. One of the common problems is that new technologies acquire names or connotations that are misleading. For instance, the information highway is a popular image, but if an information system tossed data around like cars on a freeway, it wouldn’t be very useful. You’d have to have something to sort out all that data for something that you really need to know. Would it do any good to put reference books on a database and then take away the library reference librarians?

On whether computers eliminate or create jobs. . .

“Telephone operators have certainly been hurt by computerization. But sometimes there are other jobs created. In periods of economic decline, it seems computers are used to eliminate jobs.”

On the understanding of how computers change society. . .

“I’d guess that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on computer systems. But only a few millions of dollars have been spent on systematic research about them.”

On using computers to monitor workers. . .

” Managers can use computers as a tool. In the hands of bad managers, computers can become a weapon.”

On making computers for people. . .

“That is something that I call social/technical design. If a system is designed badly, the computer doesn’t do much good.”