Slow glass

The day that Opera announced that it was changing its browser to use the WebKit rendering engine, I was contacted by .net magazine for my opinion on the move. My response was:

I have no opinion on this right now.

Frankly, I’m always quite amazed at how others can form opinions so quickly. Sometimes opinions are formed and set on technologies before they’re even out and about in the world: little printers, Apple watches, Google glasses…

The case against Google Glass seemed to be a done deal after Mark Hurst published The Google Glass feature no one is talking about:

The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them.

It’s a very persuasive piece of writing and it certainly gave me food for thought. Then Eric wrote Glasshouse:

Our youngest tends to wake up fairly early in the morning, at least as compared to his sisters, and since I need less sleep than Kat I’m usually the one who gets up with him. This morning, he put away a box he’d just emptied of toys and I told him, “Well done!” He turned to me, stuck his hand up in the air, and said with glee, “Hive!”

I gave him the requested high-five, of course, and then another for being proactive. It was the first time he’d ever asked for one. He could not have looked more pleased with himself.

And I suddenly realized that I wanted to be able to say to my glasses, “Okay, dump the last 30 seconds of livestream to permanent storage.”

Now I’ve got another interesting, persuasive perspective on the yet-to-be-released product.

Just as we can be very quick to label websites and social networks as dead (see Flickr), I worry if we’re often too quick to look for the worst aspects in any new technology.

Natalia has written a great piece called No, let’s not stop the cyborgs in reaction to the over-the-top Luddism of the Stop The Cyborgs movement:

Healthy criticism and skepticism towards technologies and their impact on society is necessary, but framing it in a way that discredits all people with body and sense enhancing technologies is othering.

Now we get in to the question of whether technology can be inherently “good” or “bad.” Kevin Kelly avoids such loaded terms, but he does ascribe some kind of biased trajectory to our tools in his book What Technology Wants.

Natalia writes:

It’s also important to remember that technologies themselves aren’t always ethically questionable. It’s what we do with them that can be positive or contribute to suffering and misery. Sometimes the same technology can be used to help people and to simultaneously ruin lives for profit.

A fair point, but one that is most commonly used by the pro-gun lobby—proponents of a technology that I personally find very hard to view as neutral.

But the point remains: we seem to have a natural impulse to immediately think of the worst that could happen with any new technology (though I’m just as impatient with techno-utopians as I am with techno-dystopians). I really enjoy watching Black Mirror but its central question grows wearisome after a while. That question is “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I am, once more, reminded of the danger of self-fulfilling prophesies when it comes to seeing the worst in technologies like Google Glass. As Matt Webb’s algorithm puts it:

It’s not the end of privacy because it’s all newly visible, it’s the end of privacy because it looks like it’s the end of privacy because it’s all newly visible.

I was chatting with fellow sci-fi fan Jon Tan about Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work I (shamefully) haven’t dived into yet. Jon told me that a good starting point would be the Three Californias trilogy. It consists of one utopia, one dystopia, and one apocalypse. I like the sound of that.

Those who take an anti-technology stance, or at least an overly-negative stance on technology, are often compared to the Amish. But as Stewart Brand is quick to point out, the Amish don’t reject technology—instead, they take their time in deciding whether a new technology will, on balance, be better or worse for their society in the long term:

The Amish seek to master technology rather than become its slave.

I think that techno-utopians and -dystopians alike can appreciate that.

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The Training Commission is a speculative fiction email newsletter about the compromises and consequences of using technology to reckon with collective trauma. Several years after a period of civil unrest and digital blackouts in the United States, a truth and reconciliation process has led to a major restructuring of the federal government, major tech companies, and the criminal justice system.

Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine

The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).

Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:

I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

Escape from Spiderhead | The New Yorker

Madeline sent me a link to this short story from 2010, saying:

It’s like if Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon wrote an episode of Black Mirror. I think you’ll like it!

Yes, and yes.

‘Black Mirror’ meets HGTV, and a new genre, home design horror, is born - Curbed

There was a time, circa 2009, when no home design story could do without a reference to Mad Men. There is a time, circa 2018, when no personal tech story should do without a Black Mirror reference.

Black Mirror Home. It’s all fun and games until the screaming starts.

When these products go haywire—as they inevitably do—the Black Mirror tweets won’t seem so funny, just as Mad Men curdled, eventually, from ha-ha how far we’ve come to, oh-no we haven’t come far enough.

Dude, you broke the future! - Charlie’s Diary

The transcript of a talk by Charles Stross on the perils of prediction and the lessons of the past. It echoes Ted Chiang’s observation that runaway AIs are already here, and they’re called corporations.

History gives us the perspective to see what went wrong in the past, and to look for patterns, and check whether those patterns apply to the present and near future. And looking in particular at the history of the past 200-400 years—the age of increasingly rapid change—one glaringly obvious deviation from the norm of the preceding three thousand centuries—is the development of Artificial Intelligence, which happened no earlier than 1553 and no later than 1844.

I’m talking about the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations, of course.