Cars but not for driving, and doorbells but not for ringing
From the newly-minted Ethical Futures Lab, this is Six Signals: a bi-weekly newsletter that finds and explores hints of our possible futures. Welcome to all our new subscribers!
In this edition, we’ve found a mix of the optimistic, the frightening, and the weirdly beautiful. Read on to discover the hottest new restaurant -slash- shared workspace in Japan, London’s latest food craze -slash- humanity-saving venture, and Florida’s expanding extra-legal panopticon -slash- delivery tracking system.
1: It’s a car, it’s a bed, it’s an…office?
Orix, a car-sharing service in Japan, recently noticed that significant numbers of people were renting cars but not driving them anywhere. Upon further investigation, they discovered that people were simply using the cars to have a private place to eat lunch, take a nap, use as a workspace, or temporarily store their bags. This behavior is on the rise, with an NTT Docomo survey last year showing that 1 in every 8 customers was renting a car for purposes other than transportation.
In the last issue, we discussed culinary arbitrage and how modern methods of value exchange could alter how we even think about what a “restaurant” is and how it works. Perhaps even sooner, we will likely see transformations in our understanding of what a “car” is. As we can see, there is already emergent behavior around using car-sharing vehicles for alternate purposes. As more autonomous vehicles take the road, the concept of “car” will start to extricate itself from the act of driving. In effect, vehicles will simply become other kinds of spaces, ones which happen to have mobility as a feature. But there will no longer be any reason for them to be used solely for the traditional purposes of transportation. We will likely see a host of creative possibilities for these “third places”, from roving retail to new forms of nomadic living.
Growing number of car-sharing users don’t rent cars for driving
Car-sharing service operator Orix Auto Corp. couldn’t figure out what certain customers were doing…
2: Smart Glass that’s actually smart
Building neural nets is expensive, computationally-speaking, but the models they produce can be very cheaply deployed. The best example of this is how the tiny processors in digital cameras can identify faces as you frame a picture: a learning model was trained on powerful servers parsing millions of examples, then reduced to simple instructions that the processor in the camera could easily execute.
This concept of reducibility seems to have reached a new extreme; the details of a neural net have been encoded into a piece of glass that can recognize numbers without any electricity. Weights of paths embedded in a neural network are expressed as grooves and imperfections in the glass, letting light from the source move toward spots that light up the right answer. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison built the glass by iterating thousands of times, making subtle adjustments in each version that focused light along the right paths.
While the practical implications are unclear at this time, we loved the flip-flop aspect of this experiment; the neural net is a digital expression of a physical brain, and this sheet of glass is the physical expression of that digital abstraction.
AI made from a sheet of glass can recognise numbers just by looking
A sheet of glass can distinguish between drawings of 0 to 9, because light waves reflected off the images are bent differently as they pass through the glass
3: Why ask why?
Jonathan Zittrain writes in The New Yorker about a loss of causal understanding brought on by increased reliance on artificial intelligence. Machine learning models arrive at answers by recognizing patterns in mountains of data, but they don’t understand why those answers are true — they can provide us with solutions, but no explanations. He explains this through an analogy to pharmaceuticals; many medical treatments have long been approved without an understanding of how their mechanisms work. Interactions between different treatments can’t be properly predicted without a causal understanding, so they’re instead discovered in the wild with real patients, often leading to injury and lawsuits. Take this model and apply it to all of the decisions to which we now apply AI, and we can see how we might end up with a much broader range of unpredictable and undesirable outcomes.
Better understanding of causality may be beyond the reach of current tech. If so, we may consider a rebranding of “machine learning” — the machines aren’t “learning” in a traditional sense — to a more accurate “automated pattern recognition.” On the other hand, we have based most of our understanding of the physical world on simple pattern recognition without fully understanding the underlying causes. Classical Physics leaves huge areas of causality unexplained, yet f=ma is still a reliable enough to power the world’s space programs. Finding the right times to ask “Why?” and when to simply accept the result and move on will be a continual struggle as more of our decisions are governed by AI.
The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking
Answers without theory, found and deployed in different areas, can complicate one another in unpredictable ways.
4: Maybe use the side door
You’ve likely already read about Amazon Ring’s Neighbors app, a 21st century neighborhood watch where videos of suspicious people or activities can be shared with your neighbors, and with law enforcement, at the tap of a screen. Critics worry that apps like Neighbors, Citizen, and even NextDoor are raising awareness of crime even as crime itself is on the decline, creating fear where it’s unwarranted.
Whether these devices are ultimately for good or ill, reporters at Motherboard have obtained a secret agreement between Amazon and the police department of Lakeland, Florida, outlining a program to “encourage adoption” of Ring devices in the jurisdiction. The department gets $10 for each new Neighbors user, to be used toward the acquisition of more Ring cameras. In addition, the police now have a portal showing the approximate locations of Ring cameras throughout the area, and can quickly and “informally” request video footage from owners without a warrant. This agreement is the only one that’s been uncovered, but evidence points to potentially thousands of police departments with similar Amazon partnerships in place.
The article goes on to describe law enforcement operations that have already benefited from increased Ring device penetration. One that stood out was a series of package theft stings in which decoy Amazon boxes are monitored, and people taking them from porches are captured on Ring cameras. It would be quite something if increased distrust of your neighbors, racial profiling, and distributed surveillance were all simply the side effects of Amazon trying to manage its delivery chain.
Amazon Requires Police to Shill Surveillance Cameras in Secret Agreement
The Lakeland, Florida police department is required to “encourage adoption” of Ring products as part of a secret agreement with the company.
5: It gives me virtual chills
You know that chill up your spine when you hear a beautiful piece of music? Or the way you might get goosebumps in response to fear or excitement? These physiological responses are known as “psychogenic shivering” (PS), and researchers are developing ways to artificially stimulate the shiver response:
“An ongoing collaboration…involves the creation of a wearable chill-actuator device designed to create artificial chills and shivers. Currently, the device form factor includes a custom circuit board, a vibrating motor disc, and a Peltier thermoelectric cooler housed in a body-fitted photopolymer resin case. This form factor allows for concurrent delivery of sudden cooling temperature and concentrated vibration on the upper back of participants, where organic PS typically begin, to initiate artificial shivers.”
Why, you ask? The idea is that this kind of mechanism could be used in VR and immersive media experiences to stimulate a deeper empathy response, especially in training scenarios where VR is being used to create compassion with a particular set of people or experiences. Other psychophysiological stimuli, like heart-rate biofeedback, has been shown to increase empathy in subjects, and one can imagine techniques like these being used in concert with virtual scenarios to effect new levels of immersion and depth.
Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback to Foster Empathic Abilities in Humans
In this short article, we present some of such devices with a particular emphasis on technology aiming to foster empathic abilities in humans.
6: Very green rooftops
Arborea, a British startup, has developed a new kind of solar panel that hopes to help with both climate change and food security. Instead of photovoltaic cells, the BioSolar panels cultivate microalgae, phytoplankton, and other plants, making them look like giant rectilinear leaves. Arborea “claims that BioSolar leaves grown on panels taking up the surface area of a single tree can clean the air at the same rate as 100 trees.” In addition, the plants grown on these panels are a nutritious and sustainable food supply. In the midst of so many tech advances that put profit above social good, it’s encouraging to see technology applied so optimistically to bettering our planet and the human condition.
'BioSolar Leaves' are better at cleaning the air than trees, say the technology’s developers
This nature-inspired invention uses microscopic plants to suck pollution from the air while producing organic biomass that can be harvested and used in food.
One misty thing
Atmospheric Memory — Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s recent installation in Manchester — included an array of “atmospheric machines” including this beautiful piece that takes words spoken into an intercom by participants and writes them in midair with cold-water vapor.
Cloud Display at Atmospheric Memory | Manchester International Festival
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
Powered by Revue