This week we contend with an eternal struggle: who decides what gets made, and how we make it? Do we let systems emerge from the ground up, or do we appoint leaders to guide and control them? Do we allow for human subjectivity, or do we rely on the calculations of machines?
—Alexis & Matt
1: Human-scale digital spaces
We watched Citizen Jane the other night — a lovely documentary about Jane Jacobs, everyone’s favorite urbanist — and we got to talking about the parallels between the design of cities and the design of digital platforms. There are striking similarities between the debates about what the internet should be (and whom it should serve) and the debates between emergent vs. top-down urban planning personified by Jacobs and her antithesis, Robert Moses. Alexis wrote up some thoughts about how we might apply Jacobs’ thinking to the modern web, in order to make our digital spaces vibrant, accessible, and human scale, just as we want our physical spaces to be.
Bringing agency, humanism, and creativity to the internet.
2: AR copy and paste
Over the last few weeks we saw a lot of interesting breakthroughs in augmented reality, including a new light-field video capture process that can record fully-immersive 3D video and an iPhone app that will use your front-facing IR cameras to perform real-time motion capture. While these point to a more immersive future, the beta app “AR Copy Paste” from French developer Cyril Diagne is immediately useful. Use your iOS or Android phone to take pictures of objects — even pictures of pictures, as the demo below shows — and the app will extract the object from its background. From there, use your phone’s camera to place the object inside a document, matching the scale and placement you define with your camera. (Adobe suite products are supported for now, with more on the way.)
This breakthrough is interesting for lots of practical reasons, but for one big philosophical one: AR largely focuses on placing digital objects inside the physical world; this is one of the first examples we’ve seen of the reverse, taking physical objects and seamlessly placing them in the digital world.
AR copy and paste
3: Fiddling while the world burns
A great piece that critiques the increasing dissonance between Silicon Valley investments and the state of the world around it. From Elon Musk launching rockets in the midst of a pandemic, to Marc Andreesen giving lip service to VCs tackling global warming while investing millions in an audio chat app, it seems that the future envisioned by our technology leaders has less and less to do with the future that is barreling towards us at an alarming rate.
“Reading articles about a new app that makes the process of doing laundry more convenient, set against the backdrop of constant reports that elements of the natural world are heating, melting, or becoming extinct, can feel like watching two Earths operating in separate realities, moving away from each other on irreconcilable paths.”
Chatbots at the End of the World
If coronavirus is a dress rehearsal for the crises to come, Silicon Valley has proved itself worse than useless.
4: Machines as creative collaborators
This piece by Stephen Marche provides a detailed look at what it’s like to have machine intelligence as a creative collaborator. He trained a system on prior science fiction stories (similar to the work Robin Sloan did a few years back in Writing with the Machine) and then had it provide prompts and guidelines for a story he would write. His experience of this collaboration is that, “It was creativity as interpretation, or interpretation as creativity. I used the machine to get to thoughts I would otherwise not have had.“
We’re fascinated by this kind of collaborative process between humans and machines, as Alexis has written about in “The computational gaze” — the most compelling aspect of machine intelligence is not its ability to emulate humans, but its ability to lend us alien perspectives that we couldn’t otherwise access.
I used an algorithm to help me write a story. Here’s what I learned.
A few years ago I used an algorithm to help me write a science fiction story.
www.technologyreview.com • Share
5: Failing a test you never took
You don’t need us to tell you that students — particularly those on the threshold of graduation or exams — are one of the groups most disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Schools have been adopting all kinds of technology to try and cope, and often, have regretted making hasty decisions.
The International Baccalaureate program may soon join that list. While other high-stakes tests like AP exams moved online (with their own set of issues). IB decided to cancel their exam altogether and replace test scores with an algorithm that assigned students a score prediction, based on their previous grades and a history of scores from their school. (There may be more to it, but IB has not released any details about the math behind these predictions.) While IB claims this year’s scores were higher overall than last year and matched historical patterns of distribution, individual students are shocked at their low scores and are partnering with instructors to protest these outcomes. Students may appeal their scores for a fee, but many have already lost their places in next year’s college enrollments.
Meet the Secret Algorithm That's Keeping Students Out of College
The International Baccalaureate program canceled its high-stakes exam because of Covid-19. The formula it used to “predict” scores puzzles students and teachers.
6: Anonymous analytics
One of the goals of Ethical Futures Lab is to talk about design and tech ethics in tangible ways. We want to not only discuss philosophical ideals, but also dig into the brass tacks of how we actually work as designers and technologists to make better systems for people. We’re including Goat Counter in this issue because it’s a solid example of good tactics for ethically designing a piece of software.
Goat Counter is an open-source web analytics tool that puts privacy first. It doesn’t use cookies or unique identifiers to track website visitors, instead utilizing a non-identifiable hash to track unique visits. This means that you can use it without having to provide a GDPR consent notice on your site (you know, those popups about cookies that you always have to dismiss). It’s a simple approach that allows website owners to understand useful information about how people engage with their site, while still respecting their users’ data privacy.
Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data.
One (or maybe three?) things about horses' eyes
Speaking of the computational gaze, let’s see what an AI thinks about horse anatomy:
When an AI is trained on words, weird things can happen to the physical domain.
I asked the @OpenAI API about horses.
https://t.co/V6pkWxcMRC https://t.co/7errIsWq1g
Six Signals: Emerging futures, 6 links at a time.
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