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.

As I’ve written several times before here on Thought Shrapnel, society seems to act as though the giant, monolithic, hugely profitable porn industry just doesn’t… exist? This despite the fact it tends to be a driver of technical innovation. I won’t get into details, but feel free to search for phrases such as ‘teledildonics’.

So this article from the new (and absolutely excellent) 404 Media on a venture capitalist firm’s overview of the emerging generative AI industry shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. As a society and as an industry, we don’t make progress on policy, ethics, and safety by pretending things aren’t happening.

As the father, seeing this kind of news is more than a little disturbing. And we don’t deal with all of it by burying our head in the sand, shaking our head, or crossing our fingers.

The Andreesen Horowitz (also called a16z) analysis is derived from crude but telling data—internet traffic. Using website traffic tracking company Similarweb, a16z ranks the top 50 generative AI websites on the internet by monthly visits, as of June 2023. This data provides an incomplete picture of what people are doing with AI because it’s not tracking use of popular AI apps like Replika (where people sext with virtual companions) or Telegram chatbots like Forever Companion, which allows users to talk to chatbots trained on the voices of influencers like Amouranth and Caryn Marjorie (who just want to talk about sex).

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What I can tell you without a doubt by looking at this list of the top 50 generative AI websites is that, as has always been the case online and with technology generally, porn is a major driving force in how people use generative AI in their day to day lives.

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Even if we put ethical questions aside, it is absurd that a tech industry kingmaker like a16z can look at this data, write a blog titled “How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?” and not come to the obvious conclusion that people are using it to jerk off. If you are actually interested in the generative AI boom and you are not identifying porn as core use for the technology, you are either not paying attention or intentionally pretending it’s not happening.

A remarkably sober look at the need for regulation, transparency around how models are trained, and costs in the world of AI. It makes a really good point about the UX required for machine learning to be useful at scale.

“I have learned from experience that leaving tools completely open-ended tends to confuse users more than assist,” says Kirk. “Think of it like a hall of doors that is infinite. Most humans would stand there perplexed with what to do. We have a lot of work to do to determine the optimal doors to present to users.” Mason has a similar observation, adding that “in the same way that ChatGPT was mainly a UX improvement over GPT-3, I think that we’re just at the beginning of inventing the UI metaphors we’ll need to effectively use AI models in products.”

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Augmenting work with AI could be worthwhile despite these problems. This was certainly true of the computing revolution: Many people need training to use Word and Excel, but few would propose typewriters or graph paper as a better alternative. Still, it’s clear that a future in which “we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones,” is more than six months away, as the Future of Life Institute’s letter frets. The AI revolution is unfolding right now—and will still be unfolding a decade from today.

The author of this post really needs to read Thomas Kuhn’s The Theory of Scientific Revolutions and some Marshall McLuhan (especially on tetrads).

What he’s describing here is to do with mindsets, the attempt we make to try and fit ‘the phenomena’ into our existing mental models. When that doesn’t work, there’s a crisis, and we have to come up with new paradigms.

But, more than that, to use McLuhan’s phrase, we “march backwards into the future” always looking to the past to make sense of the present — and future.

I have a theory that technological cycles are like the stages of Squid Game: Each one is almost entirely disconnected from the last, and you never know what the next game is going to be until you’re in the arena.

For example, some new technology, like the automobile, the internet, or mobile computing, gets introduced. We first try to fit it into the world as it currently exists: The car is a mechanical horse; the mobile internet is the desktop internet on a smaller screen. But we very quickly figure out that this new technology enables some completely new way of living. The geography of lives can be completely different; we can design an internet that is exclusively built for our phones. Before the technology arrived, we wanted improvements on what we had, like the proverbial faster horse. After, we invent things that were unimaginable before—how would you explain everything about TikTok to someone from the eighties? Each new breakthrough is a discontinuity, and teleports us to a new world—and, for companies, into a new competitive game—that would’ve been nearly impossible to anticipate from our current world.

Artificial intelligence, it seems, will be the next discontinuity. That means it won’t tack itself onto our lives as they are today, and tweak them around the edges; it will yank us towards something that is entirely different and unfamiliar.

AI will have the same effect on the data ecosystem. We’ll initially try to insert LLMs into the game we’re currently playing, by using them to help us write SQL, create documentation, find old dashboards, or summarize queries.

But these changes will be short-lived. Over time, we’ll find novel things to do with AI, just as we did with the cloud and cloud data warehouses. Our data models won’t be augmented by LLMs; they’ll be built for LLMs. We won’t glue natural language inputs on top of our existing interfaces; natural language will become the default way we interact with computers. If a bot can write data documentation on demand for us, what’s the point of writing it down at all? And we’re finally going to deliver on the promise of self-serve BI in ways that are profoundly different than what we’ve tried in the past.

I had a conversation with my neighbour this week about drones. They were pointing out how invasive they can be, while I was talking about the amazing photographs they can take.

Sure enough, later that day I come across this year’s Drone Photo Award and there’s some absolute stunners in there. The ones of nature are, of course, amazing, but for some reason this one of a Dutch suburb grabbed me as my favourite.

The annual Drone Photo Awards announced its 2022 winners earlier this month, releasing a remarkable collection of images that frame the world’s most alluring landscapes from a rarely-seen view. This year’s contest garnered submissions from 2,624 participants hailing from 116 countries, and the aerial photos capture a vast array of life on Earth, including a caravan of camel shadows crossing the Arabian Desert, a waterlily harvest in West Bengal, and the veiny trails of lava emerging from a fissure near Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano.

I like this idea from Cory Doctorow, but monopolies tend to like exploiting their monopoly position. Still, it might be a way for Amazon to get around being scrutinised closely by regulators?

But what if buying local was as easy as shopping as Amazon? What if you could buy local while shopping on Amazon?

I got this idea from Library Extension, a browser plugin that notices if you’re looking at a book on Amazon and checks to see whether it’s available for checkout at your local library.

If the book is available to borrow at your public library, the extension shoves down Amazon’s “Add to Cart” button and draws a box with buttons to reserve that title at any of the local libraries that have it on the shelf.

This is basically awesome. It acknowledges that Amazon’s catalog, search, recommendations and reviews are useful to readers —and lets readers commodify all that stuff, treat it as infrastructure for discovering books to check out of your local library.

This is possible because books have standard identifiers: the ubiquitous ISBN. It’s easy for a plugin to recognize an ISBN when it sees it, and it’s easy for that plugin to look up the ISBN in another database.

In theory there’s no reason this has to be limited to checking books out of your library. You could just as easily write an extension that replaces Amazon’s “Add to Cart” button with a “Buy this on Bookshop.org” button. That’s the cool thing about unique identifiers — they’re great for cross-referencing.

I found myself using the phrase “the night is darkest before dawn” today. This post from Anne-Marie Scott is certainly an example of that, and I too look forward to a world beyond “today’s dogpile of an internet”.

I remember a time when I got excited about generative and liberating uses of technology, enabling people to bring their whole selves to learning, being able to incorporate their world, their context, their knowledge, and in turn develop new connections, new communities, and new knowledge to further explore and build on these things. I think this is still possible, and I think work around open practices, open pedagogies, ethics of care, and decolonisation point the way towards how to do it in today’s dogpile of an internet.