Road maps for our current dystopia
We compile this newsletter by collecting interesting links we encounter throughout the last two weeks, then spend the better part of a Sunday reading them and deciding which to pick. This week, we read a LOT of really dark considerations of our current condition (thanks Tim Maughan, Michelle Goldberg and Kashmir Hill) but we couldn’t bear to make this issue “Six reasons to hide under your bed.” We included some of these ideas, but also covered battles with bots, Balenciaga bags, and Bluetooth-powered babble.
1: Under the hood of surveillance capitalism
If you read one piece this week, make it Shoshanna Duboff’s searing analysis of surveillance capitalism. This op-ed is based on her new book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, and it’s difficult to do this excerpt justice in a blurb. Duboff presents an overview of the world we currently live in, with a thorough understanding of the structures of profit, inequality, and power that underlie it. It reads as a manifesto of sorts, and a powerful indictment of what happens when a society with unprecedented technological capability uses it solely to sell people more stuff. We talk a lot in this newsletter about the need to make implicit choices explicit (design choices, default behaviors, technical architecture, etc.). Part of what needs to be made explicit is that these choices do not exist in isolation. They exist within systems of power that incentivize particular kinds of choices over others, and make some downright impossible. While we can make some change through individual choice, it’s only by collectively choosing to challenge the underlying structures that we will make the kind of systemic changes that are clearly needed
“Anything made by humans can be unmade by humans. Surveillance capitalism is young, barely 20 years in the making, but democracy is old, rooted in generations of hope and contest.”
You Are Now Remotely Controlled
Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.
2: Bots are the not-so-silent majority
We knew that bots were a big part of the political debate we see online, particularly on Twitter, but the data in this piece from Bruce Schneier in The Atlantic are staggering. Around 20% of tweets discussing the 2016 election were from bots, as were nearly a third of tweets about Brexit leading up to that vote in the UK. For now, at least, bots tend to post in patterns and using language that makes them easier to identify.
As with everything else, however, technology continues to improve and the bots (or rather, the people who build them) are getting smarter. Artificial personas aren’t just Twitter accounts with long series of digits in their screen names; bots are beginning to create web sites, post long pieces to blogs, establish “friend” networks, and tweet with a frequency and tone more similar to real people. This all leads to an increasing volume of artificial speech, crowding out information and persuasive conversation. As Schneier writes, “Our future will consist of boisterous political debate, mostly bots arguing with other bots. […] Democracy requires two things to function properly: information and agency. Artificial personas can starve people of both.”
The answer to a better, more human political discourse? More face-to-face debate. It’s remarkable to see a writer recommend (or in this case, lightly allude to) the abandonment of social media. It may not be so remarkable if trends continue.
The Future of Politics Is Bots Drowning Out Humans
They’re mouthpieces for foreign actors, domestic political groups, even the candidates themselves. And soon you won’t be able to tell they’re bots.
3: Shin bags and computational fashion
Robbie Barrat, an artist who works primarily with neural networks to generate his artwork, recently collaborate with Acne Studios for Paris Fashion Week. He trained his software on a corpus of thousands of previous Acne designs, and Acne’s creative director then used the software-generated looks to inspire the final clothing design. The results have the effect of incorporating the weird computational gaze into clothing — “several coats in the collection had a curved opening at the bottom front: a direct result of the algorithm being confused about borders in clothing.” A prior experiment that Barrat did on the Balenciaga collection generated a pair of pants with a bag protruding from the leg “because it misinterpreted people holding actual bags next to their legs and thought that the bags were connected to their shins.”
If you want to go deeper on this kind of work, check out Matthew Plummer-Fernandez’s recent essay in Art in America on bots vs. AI as artistic strategies, and whether prior artifacts are used in a regenerative or degenerative manner. Good stuff!
Acne Studios x Robbie Barrat — XR Goes Pop
Artificial Intelligence hits the runway at Paris Fashion Week 2020.
4: Searching for meaning and finding science
You might remember that one of our “Six Signals for 2020” was “Genetics is the new astrology.” While we stand by that, we’re also somewhat humbled to be reminded of how these superstitious beliefs led to major advances in modern science and our understanding of the world.
“A Scheme of Heaven”, a new book by data scientist Alexander Boxer, draws a parallel between astrology as practiced by Kepler and Galileo and modern predictive analytics. Both are examples of nascent sciences, ones that use observation and correlation to make sense of vast and as-yet-unknowable systems. It was the belief that the celestial bodies affected behavior on earth that led to scientific observation and study of the cosmos, which in turn led to a deeper understanding of planetary motion.
Predictive analytics seeks meaning and understanding in a similar way: data are gathered and patterns are sought that correlate to outcomes, and the correlation is expressed in terms of mathematics. Astrology also sought to map our understanding of our condition onto a scientific basis and express it with numbers, and along the way, made real discoveries. It’s an interesting thought experiment to consider what the “real” science that emerges from data science might be, as astronomy emerged from astrology.
How astrology paved the way for predictive analytics
Astrology has influenced science for millennia, argues a new book – and it endures in algorithmic data modelling.
5: Ideas that demand nothing less than devotion
Reading this review of “The Charisma Machine” gave us the rare experience of finally having a phrase for a concept that we’d been seeing, but didn’t have language for. Morgan Ames’s new book is a deep and academic study of the One Laptop Per Child program, born from the MIT Media Lab in the late 2000s. Ames uses the phrase “charismatic technology” to mean one that is important because of its possibilities — what it might do, not what it does — and inspires people to look past limitations or failures in service of this imagined future. The book makes a particular study of the marketing and evangelism behind the device, owing in large part to Nicholas Negroponte, an outspoken supporter of the project and of the Media Lab in general. It also points out how the device, for all its misguidedly altruistic aims, is also a “Trojan horse” of sorts for the type of ideals that buoyed the lab: techno-libertarianism, entrepreneurship, individualism, and a skepticism for institutions.
Now that we have this phrase it seems like examples of it are everywhere. In particular we saw it sitting behind this post on Scientific American on just how dangerous the radiation is on the surface of Mars. While we tend to hear utopian visions of colonies on Mars, from Elon Musk’s aspirations to an imagined Martian outpost built in China, the logistical concerns discussed have mostly been about the lack of breathable air. It turns out the lack of an atmosphere or planetary magnetic field means there’s nothing stopping cosmic radiation from smashing into the planet, or people’s brains or DNA. The possibility and promise of Mars are enough to capture the imagination, and as Ames points out about OLPC, to inspire deeds both heroic and deeply misinformed.
Selling a Charismatic Technology - Los Angeles Review of Books
Historian of technology Patrick McCray reviews Morgan Ames’s new book on the MIT Media Lab’s One Laptop per Child program.
6: How to get hired by a computer
As we’ve mentioned here before, AI software for HR screening is starting to be used more widely across the globe. In South Korea, we’re starting to see some of the first emergent, adversarial behavior arise in response to these new technologies. Training programs have cropped up that offer lessons in how to game video interviews that use facial recognition to analyze applicants’ character. For example, one piece of advice is to smile with your eyes rather than your mouth to get a positive character assessment from the software. As we learn to adapt our actions to how machines interpret them, how much will those changes feed back into human social behavior? Will human interaction start to look more like computational interaction? To what extent has this already been happening? From text-speak to the RFID badge hip bump to activate a door lock, we’ve already seen how we readily adapt to our tools and our culture evolves in response. It’s inevitable that we will keep co-evolving culture and technology in both symbiotic and adversarial ways.
'Smile with your eyes': How to beat South Korea's AI hiring bots and land a job
In cram school-obsessed South Korea, students fork out for classes in everything from K-pop auditions to real estate deals. Now, top Korean firms are rolling out artificial intelligence in hiring - and jobseekers want to learn how to beat the bots.
One ventriloquism thing
Because who doesn’t love emergent behavior? (Though we do have to wonder how often students are allowed to keep their AirPods in while in class.)
Kids are swapping AirPods in class then using text to speech to ‘talk’ without talking 🤩🤩🤩 https://t.co/moLxK1rzbv
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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