Thought Shrapnel

No technology is neutral, and vendors are only ever going to tout the positive qualities. Take this example: it’s a way to create a camera out of any window. Huge benefits, as the article says, but also some rather large (and dystopian) downsides.

Zeiss is bringing its remarkable Holocam technology to CES 2024, which can turn any glass screen into a camera. This means that everything from the window in your car to the screen on your laptop to the glass on your front door can now possess an invisible image sensor.

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The Holocam technology “uses holographic in-coupling, light guiding and de-coupling elements to redirect the incoming light of a transparent medium to a hidden image sensor.”

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Using an entire pane of glass as a camera lens also opens some fascinating optical possibilities. Some of Zeiss' bullet points include “large aperture invisible camera” and “individual adjustment of orientation and size of the field of views.” Which makes me wonder, what is the maximum aperture and focal range of a camera like this?

Of course, there’s a darker potential for such technology. Given the current fear around hidden cameras in Airbnbs, the idea of every single window (or even shower door) in a rental property being able to spy on you is a little disconcerting.

An insightful and nuanced post from Stephen Downes, who reflects on various experiences, from changing RSS reader through to the way he takes photographs. What he calls ‘AI drift’ is our tendency to replace manual processes with automated ones.

What I appreciate is that Downes doesn’t say this is A Bad Thing, but that we should notice and reflect on these things. For example, I’ve found it really useful to use AI with my MSc studies and to understand (and accelerate) some of the client work I’ve been involved with.

What's important is to notice what's happening. When I use AI to select the posts I read in my RSS reader, I'm finding more from the categories I've defined, but I'm missing the new stuff from categories that might not exist yet - the oft-referenced filter bubble. Also, I'm missing the ebb and flow of the undercurrent, of the comings and goings, of the stuff that seems off topic and doesn't matter - and yet, to someone who dwells in the debris like me, it does.

This is what I’m calling ‘AI drift’ in humans. It’s this phenomenon whereby you sort of ‘drift’ into new patterns and habits when you’re in an AI environment. It’s not the filter bubble; that’s just one part of it. It’s the influence it has over all our behaviour. One of those patterns, obviously, is that you start relying on the AI more do do things. But also, you stop doing some of the things you used to do - not because the AI is handling it for you, because as in this case it might not be helping at all, but because you just start doing other things.

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AI drift isn’t inherently good, and it isn’t inherently bad. It just is. It’s like that quote often attributed to McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Recognizing AI drift is simply recognizing how we’re changing as we use new tools. We then decide whether we like that change or not. In my own case, it comes with some mixed feelings. But that’s OK. I wouldn’t expect anything else.

Another fantastic article by Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic which draws on research about how your future is likely to be happier than your past. That’s because of various psychological effects that come into play as you age.

Good news! I’m particularly looking forward to my anxiety tamping down and not being as triggered by negative situations.

Let’s start with how you will feel when you are old. By this, I don’t mean whether your back will hurt more (it almost certainly will), but rather the balance between your positive and negative moods as you age. The answer is probably better than you feel now.

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A 2013 review of research reveals that older people develop at least three distinct emotional skills: They react less to negative situations, they are better at ignoring irrelevant negative stimuli than they were when younger, and they remember more positive than negative information. This is almost like a superpower many older people have, that they know negative emotions won’t last so they get a head start on feeling good by consciously disregarding bad feelings as they arise.

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If you follow the typical development, you can expect to be nicer and kinder, and less depressed and anxious, when you are old.

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The good news about aging is that if we simply leave things to the passage of time, life will probably get better for us. But we can do more than just wait around to get old. We can lean into the natural improvements and manage any trends we don’t like.

I always enjoy posts like this because I invariably learn something new. There’s some gems in here, some I hadn’t come across before, and some I had.

There are plenty of logical fallacies and cognitive biases amongst the ideas, which reminds me of this from Buster Benson. I’ve had a large poster of the linked image on the wall of my home office and it was always something people commented on.

Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman.

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Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.

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Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds.

Realistically, I’m never going to watch an hour-long YouTube video which is mainly a talking head. I mean, I’m into history, but I’m not that into it.

Thankfully, Open Culture has summarised some of the most important points. If you’re the kind of person who watches a lot of YouTube, then maybe you want to add this to your queue?

In the new video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Pre­mod­ernist pro­vides an hour’s worth of advice to the mod­ern prepar­ing to trav­el back in time to medieval Europe — begin­ning with the dec­la­ra­tion that “you will very like­ly get sick.”

The gastrointestinal distress posed by the “native biome” of medieval European food and drink is one thing; the threat of robbery or worse by its roving packs of outlaws is quite another. “Crime is rampant” where you’re going, so “carry a dagger” and “learn how to use it.” In societies of the Middle Ages, people could only protect themselves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each other. No one was an individual.” And so, as a traveler, you must — to put it in Dungeons-and-Dragons terms — belong to some legible class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present yourself as having come from a distant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guises that will suit your obvious foreignness: “you’re either a merchant or a pilgrim.”

Image: DALL-E 3

I’m reading Roots at the moment, the novel by Alex Haley about an African man captured and sold into slavery. I’m at the point of the story where his daughter’s ‘massa’ gets spooked about a slave uprising.

It’s difficult not to draw parallels when reading about an apparent trend towards billionaires building luxury ‘bunkers’ with supplies and blast-proof doors. They would do well to worry, given the amount of inequality in the world.

One prevalent speculation that has circulated suggests that these billionaires might possess knowledge beyond the scope of the average person. The idea is that their vast resources are being channeled into constructing secure retreats as a form of preparation for potential global upheavals or crises. This speculation plays into the notion that these elite individuals may be privy to information that the general public is not, prompting them to take unprecedented measures to safeguard their well-being. Moreover, some fear that the escalating global tensions and geopolitical uncertainties may be driving these billionaires to prepare for worst-case scenarios, including the prospect of war.

Image: DALL-E 3

Anything that Anil Dash writes is worth reading and this, his first article for Rolling Stone, is no different. I haven’t quoted it here, but I love the first paragraph. What goes around, comes around, eh?

[T]his new year offers many echoes of a moment we haven’t seen in a quarter-century. Some of the most dominant companies on the internet are at risk of losing their relevance, and the rest of us are rethinking our daily habits in ways that will shift the digital landscape as we know it. Though the specifics are hard to predict, we can look to historical precedents to understand the changes that are about to come, and even to predict how regular internet users — not just the world’s tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes.

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We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before. And while some of the drivers of this change have been hyped up, or even over-hyped, a few of the most important changes haven’t gotten any discussion at all.

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Consider the dramatic power shift happening right now in social media. Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it decays into X has hastened the explosive growth of a whole host of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibes of the noncommercial Mastodon communities (each one with its own set of Dungeons and Dragons rules to play by), the raucous hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most scandalous), and the at-least-it’s-not-LinkedIn noisiness of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, meaning Facebook, meaning Meta. There are lots more, of course, and probably another new one popping up tomorrow, but that’s what’s great about it. A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today.

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I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

Image: DALL-E 3

This is some incredible writing from psychotherapist Adam Phillips. It’s an edited extract from his forthcoming book On Giving Up and is based on the subtle difference between ‘giving up’ something and… just giving up.

It’s a really important read, at least for me, and particularly poignant at the start of the year. The fact that he talks about Montaigne (one of my favourite authors) and Marion Milner’s demarcation of different forms of attention makes this a highly recommended read. It’s long, but worth it.

I’ve almost picked at random a section to quote here because it’s all fantastic.

There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion – or reassures us – that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.

All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is about sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing – and, indeed, for the profits of the rich – we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices – or perhaps underlying it – there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called “a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life”.

The abiding disillusionment with politics and personal relationships, the demand for and the fear of free speech, the dread and the longing for consensus and the coerced consensus of the various fundamentalisms has created a cultural climate of intimidation and righteous indignation. It is as if our ambivalence about our aliveness – about the feeling alive that, however fleeting, sustains us – has become an unbearable tension and needs to be resolved. So even though we cannot, as yet, imagine or describe our lives without the idea of sacrifice, and its secret sharer, compromise, the whole notion of what we want and can get through sacrifice is less clear; both what we think we want and what we are as yet unaware of wanting. The formulating of personal and political ideals has become either too assured or too precarious. And the whole notion of sacrifice depends upon our knowing what we want.

Image: DALL-E 3

A belated Happy New Year, and what better way to start off 2024 than by this reminder that quite a lot of what’s holding us back in the world is political will and societal coordination.

I remember growing up with that same old adage of how you could be the next scientist to invent a cure for cancer, or a solution to climate change, or whatever. What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them. Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons. Most problems in the modern age aren’t complicated engineering problems, they’re the same problem: coordination failure.

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We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it. It’s likely that a similar form of immunotherapy will generalize to most forms of cancer. Unfortunately, the only approved gene therapy we have is for sickle-cell disease and costs $2 million per patient, so most people in America simply assume they will never be able to afford any of these treatments, even if they were dying of cancer, because insurance will never cover it. This is actually really bad, because if nobody can afford the treatment, then biotech companies won’t bother investing into it, because it’s not profitable! We have built a society that can’t properly incentivize CURING CANCER. This is despite the fact that socialized healthcare is a proven effective strategy (as long as the government doesn’t sabotage it). We could fix this, we just don’t.

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It’s January 1st of the new year, and with all these people wishing each other a “better year”, I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. Society getting worse is not something you are hallucinating. It cannot be fixed by you biking to work, or winning the lottery. We are running on the fumes of our wild technological progress of the past 100 years, and our inability to build social systems that can cooperate will destroy civilization as we know it, unless we do something about it.

Image: DALL-E 3