High fliers, deep fakes, and headless cats
A lot happened this week, not least because many futurists and gadgeteers were in Las Vegas at CES. In this issue we cover a wholesale change in how we organize our digital lives, new tech that can extend our working years whether we want to or not, and the myths we tell about tech we don’t understand.
1: Wanderers in a sea of content
Robinson Meyer wrote a beautiful reflection on the evolution of personal technology over the past decade. Specifically, he recounts the demise of iTunes and uses it as synecdoche for the dramatic shift in our approach to managing our personal data. We’ve moved from models where we were meant to carefully organize and edit our content to the model first proposed by Gmail — just keep everything and search for it when you need it. The explosion of cloud storage meant that space was essentially limitless, so why bother culling anything? This was meant to be freeing, but Meyer describes how our reality has fallen short of the aspirational ideal:
“This dream illuminated Inbox Zero and Kinfolk and minimalist writing apps. It didn’t work. What we got instead was Inbox Infinity and the algorithmic timeline. Each of us became a wanderer in a sea of content. Each of us adopted the tacit—but still shameful—assumption that we are just treading water, that the clock is always running, and that the work will never end.”
How the Death of iTunes Explains the 2010s
We started the 2010s obsessed with our electronic hygiene—and ended them a nation of digital hoarders. Eleven ideas about the decade that killed iTunes.
2: Drones from nowhere
Residents of western Nebraska and eastern Colorado have been reporting swarms of UAVs in their skies, sometimes in the dozens of devices, and no one yet knows who is flying them or why.
The FAA has recently enacted new regulations, including mandating the ability to remotely identify a device and its owner with a small transponder device, but this technology is not yet available and provides no clues here. The devices don’t seem to be doing anything much, unlike devices that have breached the restricted air space of the White House or dropped homemade explosive devices in Pennsylvania, but residents are concerned nonetheless. Authorities are quick to remind residents of the area not to attempt to shoot the devices down; to do so is a violation of FAA rules, and in most cases, the drones fly too high to be hit anyway.
For the moment the only risk is one of potential privacy breaches as the devices film the region over which they’re flying. Authorities are hoping to be able to follow the drones to their home locations one of these nights and see who retrieves them.
‘It’s Creepy’: Unexplained Drones Are Swarming by Night Over Colorado
Sheriffs in western Nebraska and eastern Colorado say they don’t know who’s flying the drones — or why. The F.A.A. is investigating.
3: People like you also ate...
In our last newsletter, we talked about 6 trends to look out for in 2020. We briefly mentioned ghost kitchens in the discussion of “algorithmic pop-up shops” and the future of physical spaces. To recap, ghost kitchens are food production spaces that make meals exclusively to serve delivery apps like Door Dash, Seamless, and Grub Hub. There’s no restaurant, you can’t pick up take out, there’s essentially no consumer-facing aspect beyond the apps they serve. As a result, the operations are much more cost-efficient, especially because one ghost kitchen can serve multiple businesses, enabling them to share overhead and the cost of resources.
In a recent New York Times article on ghost kitchens, there was an aside mentioning that Door Dash might be considering running its own ghost kitchens as a way to have control over the end-to-end process, from cooking to delivery. What if delivery apps are still in an early stage of evolution, like when Netflix was solely a delivery channel for content produced elsewhere? Eventually, Netflix realized that they could use all the consumer data they had about what people wanted to watch in order to create their own, highly targeted content. Similarly, Door Dash or Seamless could use their data on what people want to eat in order to spin up highly targeted ghost kitchens that integrate seamlessly (no pun intended) into their delivery processes.
Proponents of ghost kitchens see them as an inevitable market efficiency, but critics point out that there are unknown effects on everything from labor markets to real estate to the intangibles of customer experience. Which all loops back to our discussion of bundling and convenience maximalism from a few weeks ago.
Farm to Table? More Like Ghost Kitchen to Sofa
The new hunger games are here!
4: Facebook's deepfake policy
Facebook has not built a great track record of foreseeing issues and dealing with them promptly, particularly as relates to deceptive or manipulative media. This week Facebook issued a new policy, saying “deepfake” videos would be banned outright, as they do with nudity and graphic violence. On its face this is a good thing, in that deepfake videos have significant power to persuade people to believe what isn’t true.
That said, our discourse is already riddled with “cheapfake” videos or misleading editing. Previous examples included a video of Nancy Pelosi edited to make her sound inebriated or incapacitated. Just this week a video circulated of Vice President Joe Biden that, because of very careful editing, showed him seemingly expressing a white supremacist viewpoint. This video got significant news attention, and spread widely on social media, before it became clear that the video was misleading. Biden was even asked about the video in an Iowa campaign stop, causing further media attention to the lie.
While its great that Facebook has established a policy about deepfakes, it also highlights the fact that they don’t have any process for handling these more common forms of deceptive media, likely because they require more human effort and nuance to police. Until Facebook and other platforms have better ways to mark information as false and restrict its distribution, we will have to continue to rely on the press and public to debunk these cheapfakes. Between the lie and the truth, however, is a gap into which more and more people will fall, believing what appears to be true but isn’t.
Facebook’s Deepfake Ban Is a Solution to a Distant Problem
The platform has a plan to deal with tomorrow’s disinformation. But what about today’s?
5: Exoskeletons and the future of work
Exoskeletons are one of those innovations that still feel super futuristic, but have been slowly finding their way into the present over the past several years. We’ve seen them used successfully by people like soldiers, the paralyzed, and assembly line workers. At CES this week, Samsung even debuted a fitness exoskeleton for your workouts. But their application may be getting less specialized. In Japan, elderly workers are starting to use exoskeletons to extend their time in the workforce. Japan has started to experience a shortage of workers as its population rapidly ages — 28% of the country is over 65. Several companies have created exoskeletons, or “muscle suits”, that allow people to lift up to 55 pounds. They are being marketed to this older demographic with the explicit benefit of being able to delay retirement and stay functional longer in jobs that require physical labor.
The Elderly in Japan are Using Exoskeletons to Delay Retirement
Older folks in Japan are using exoskeletons to help them do their jobs as they are spending more of their lives in the workforce, as New Scientist reports.
6: The weird futures of CES
If you’ve never been to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, consider yourself lucky. Acres and acres of barely real (and often, not real at all) technology spread out over several convention centers can quickly dull even the sharpest technologist’s senses.
We much prefer reading the roundups of those intrepid writers who brave the show floor and tell the world about it. This summary from CNN is better than most, identifying trends (robot pets, personal mobility, and fake people, which we warned you about in our last issue) while maintaining healthy skepticism.
For a version that skips the optimism and doubles down on the snark, however, we’d definitely recommend this Twitter thread from Ed Zitron. For our part we can’t wait for the coming toothbrush speaker system revolution.
Best of CES 2020: These were the most talked-about products
Walking through CES can feel overwhelming. To your left is a headband that promises to read your brain waves. A few rows down is a toothbrush that will tell you if you’re brushing too hard.
One algorithmic mythology thing
This TikTok video is one of many where users try to reverse engineer the recommendation algorithm in order to understand how to better create and distribute videos on the platform. This is akin to another recent story about a Norwegian comedy producer who marketed his show explicitly to game Netflix’s algorithm. It’s fascinating to see how human behavior evolves in direct response to the algorithmic systems, but perhaps more fascinating is that much of this reverse engineering is just speculation. These myths are the stories we tell to explain an otherwise opaque digital ecosystem. As Dan Hon put it: “Imagine living in a world governed by algorithmic timelines and trying to figure out how they work from first principles, like trying to understand gravity.”
Interesting that I’ve seen several v popular videos with tiktok users trying to map out exactly how content is algorithmically promoted https://t.co/QBQD1IRXvX
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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