Dynamic Hypocrisy

I find myself spoiled by our era. Of course, not knowing what we don’t know—it seems we’re in an incredible time for…apathetic enthusiasm.

We grew up wishing for rocket jetpacks, and “only” got electric cars and GPS and Uber and smartphones and on-demand media and eradication of age-old diseases.

But I don’t want to harp on that. I want to think about the underlying current of this phenomenon. I find the fact that we even grew up thinking about jetpacks is what is amazing about our time era.

Related note, we’re going through a rash of superhero movies these days. Batman, Iron Man, Spiderman, and the like. Think about that. The masses, the majority of our human race for a $10 movie ticket can imagine worlds of spectacular circumstances. The notion of space flight, superpowers, healing, world wars with aliens or robots. We’re exposed to an infinity of different possibilities.

In other words, we are spoiled by the fact that our imaginations are larger than ever.

Just realize how many people lived their entire lives without ever even thinking about what existed across the ocean until Christopher Columbus. Or how many didn’t think about the other side of the moon until Neil Armstrong.

Heck, think of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They’re four figures riding on flying horses.

Horses.

The furthest imagination of that time era was to put wings on their most advanced technology: domesticated horses.  

And here we shrug at spaceships, open heart surgery, quantum computing. Real-time language processing by hunks of metal? “Oh well, Siri doesn’t always work that great. It mispronounces my friend’s name.” 

What a time to be alive.

After years of liberal arts training, the word “authenticity” triggers an “uuugggggghhhhhhh” within the pit of my stomach. Because talking about authenticity is a slog. It’s the trench warfare of debates. People quickly find themselves at different scopes of concerns, get on diverging tangents, quote the same evidence for both sides.

When does a music band sell out? Is it relative to their own ethos? It is relative to the goals of spreading a message? Is it relative to getting heard? Is it relative to them actually having experienced the contents of their songs? Is it relative to making sure that 14-year old in their bedroom keeps the poster taped to the wall? 

If you ask me, ultimately it comes down to uuugggggghhhhhhh…who cares? I’m gonna go get a donut.  

Each time we discover a new form of life, say a variation on a squirrel or a new bacterium, we reassess our taxonomy of life. We add a branch here, remove another, shift some things around. 

Every once-in-awhile we find something that stretches the framework of classification. Something that doesn’t quite fit here or there, and it’s sorta in two places at once. Like with convergent evolution where species evolve similar traits and have been genetically separate for generations. 

We find our models and structures a bit more inadequate. 

And yet we need them, we need simplifications because we have our own cognitive limitations. 

But what if we increased our cognitive limitations? If we could view a bit more of the tree of life at a bit more clarity? We can then increase the complexity of the model. 

And if we increase our boundaries a bit more? We can again increase the complexity yet again.

And again and again until the model that we can instantly process in our mind matches the complexity of the very network we’re observing. 

Every thought having the clarity of the entire universe at all moments.

Do humans have to make music for that music to be enjoyable?

For a party, say you wanted steady uptempo beats that’s sustained and consistent. Avoiding difficult topics while justifying certain behaviors conducive to a social gathering.

Now if you were given songs that fit that criteria, would you care that the song was created by Swedish pop producers, or Beyonce, or 16-year old Seattle kids with Casio’s? 

What if the app you’re using was actually generating the keyboard synths, drum beat, and vocals on-the-fly? The words were gathered from a cross-reference of the Oxford Dictionary and urbandictionary, and fitted to a traditional pop song structure with a crowd-sourced hook? 

What if it looked it looked at your Facebook event RSVPs, analyzed your party guests’ profiles, and made key references to common interests like basketball and Disney’s “Frozen”? 

What if it was checking your Nike Fuelband, and when it detected dilated pupils and elevated heart rate, it should reprise its own song into violin strings and made shout-outs to Cupid and falling in-love? 

What if it adjusted the backup vocals on the rear right speaker to whisper about being thirsty, and got Sam to punch bowl where you were standing?

What if it knew when to remix snippets of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” to get everyone but Sam to think about leaving for the night?

What if Sam’s Nike Fuelband confirmed the feelings, and took over as DJ for the night? 

What if version 4.2 of the app could also dim the lights?

The first emotion expressed by robots won’t be “I’m happy” or “I’m sad.” But instead will be borne out of a pragmatism of its owners. Factory managers and vacuum owners will need to know when their machines are breaking down. So they will build an alert system when a robotic part is worn down or broken.

“Sir, my gears are rusted, and I can’t move my arm anymore.”

The Age of Robotics won’t come with an enthusiastic bang, but a SMS text of a whimper.

In sixth grade, we learned about the Fertile Crescent and the start of agriculture. The thing that stuck with me was “specialization.” The production of farming, and settling down allowed for various members of a village to specialize into tasks. No longer was everyone a “hunter-gatherer.” Eventually, there were farmers, warriors, child rearers, cooks, tribe leaders, inventory trackers, explorers, traders…the modern conception of society. 

Fast-forward to today, I’m noticing an expansion on specialization in many directions, but the I’m thinking about today is a deepening of neuronal patterns. A bit more controversial because we, as a society, aren’t quite sure yet how to utilize these brain structures. So we label them as the autistic spectrum or ADHD. Hyper-specific patterns that don’t immediately conform to the general average of brains.

But we need these new brains. The average brain today won’t catch up to the deepness and the wideness that is the ocean of information and data we’ve created for ourselves. We need people that can single-mindedly dive deeper, and people who refuse to focus and look wider-and-wider. Because innovation never comes from looking at the same things in the same ways.

There’s a recent article on how Uber drivers get past the background checks. Which for a service that’s exploding across the country is worrisome, needless to say. But it reminded me about how hard it was before to become a taxi driver. London drivers have to memorize every road, NYC medallions to get a taxi car cost thousands.

The tech community sees those hurdles as frictions to innovation. Things to “disrupt” and ripe for new competitors in that “industry category.”

But it’ll take only one incident, one Uber driver gone bad, for the company to be forced to suddenly add their own checkpoints and security protocols. Essentially institute hurdles and friction back into their product. 

 You see this in Twitter and verified users. You see this in Facebook changing their entire PR and change announcements. You see this in Airbnb and increased insurance policies and stricter background checks. 

The benefit of a new competitor is indeed fresh eyes to reassess an industry. But the drawback to fresh eyes is often it hard to accurately identify which frictions are true hurdles, and which were instituted for the safety of its customers. 

The cost for the user, at its best, is inconvenience. However, at the other end of the spectrum, it’s becoming increasingly more dangerous as services like taxi services and space rental put people into vulnerable positions with strangers. “Fail fast and early” works best with software, not people.

There’s a juncture in (most) everyone’s life where they learn about burning bridges. The importance of not just wantoning destroying relationships (personal or professional.) And so most earn their “I’m a real adult” points as they think of others, and are careful not to burn down bridges.

But sometimes I find myself so proud that none of my bridges are on fire, that I forget that bridges decay; that they need maintenance. That sometimes even time will damage these bridges, and you have to go and actively repair them.

And that’s exhausting. We all intuitively know this. And we all on some level forgive this. 

You see it when someone goes “I’m going to start really focusing on who my real friends are.” Or when you think of someone, but forget about them the moment the doorbell rings or you realize you’re running late. 

I, personally, don’t even know quite what to do with this notion. What to do with bridge decay. Because it is tiring, it does take a lot of energy. And you know, it’s already 8:22am and I’m going to late for work…

We’re reaching an inflection point with technology. We are starting to see the benefits of more and more technology performing more functions within our daily lives. There’s a precision and repetition that technology is well suited for. Manufacturing cars, retrieving random inventory from a warehouse, coordinating mail into the right delivery truck.

Heck, they’re already better at driving cars than we are.

So the question that is being raised is: what things should we not replace with technology?

I think about high-frequency trading. The nano-second algorithms that trade stocks on the level of fractional pennies to generate millions of dollars. 

Conceptually that technology is “better” at finding deals on the market than humans. More quick, more reactive, more vision.

And yet at the same time, they suck at the stock market. They detect the change of the price better than any human, but they have no concept of what those price changes mean. 

They don’t know that cotton is cheaper today because Scottish shepherds had their sheep survive the winter. Or that oil is more expensive because of car bombings in the Middle East.

They don’t calculate the value that something brings to a human.

So that’s the tension. We, as humans, are already the bottleneck in the technological processes. Our fingers type slow. Light hitting our retinas to interpret word glyphs is slow. Everything we do compared to the cellphone in our pockets or laptops at work is slow.

And yet we are the reason anything is happening. A robot can make more cars per hour than any human, but if no human drives those cars then what’s the point? 

We are the bottleneck to progress, and yet we also the only reason “progress” has any meaning at all.

I’ve been thinking about commenting systems for awhile now. Not even about solutions, but to just recognize the shape of the issues. 

The primary issue to me seems to be that a human conversation with many actors is inherently multi-threaded. However with a set group, say at a dinner party most everyone quickly negotiates a rhythm and cadence that people settle into. It’s dynamic but people move together like waves. In an asynchronous situation like a party, actors come-and-go, but most wait to catch the wave before contributing or removing themselves.

There’s a social pressure to pre-assess and adjust.

The inherent format of most comment systems provide none of the social pressure. Or if it does (voting/banning/etc.) it doesn’t acknowledge the vectors of “the wave,” or the dynamism,  or really the “multi-threadedness” of the situation.

A party has the benefit of spatial spacing. Different conversations happen at different locations of the venue. They may all relate to a theme or a subject, but noise and relevance is grouped by proximity.

But within a comment system, often many comments are all in the “same space.” And worse presented linearly as-if they were “one” conversation.

There’s a lack of dimensionality in the visual presentation when the interaction is very multi-dimensional. Something that reality has solved for with physicality, non-verbal language to  socially pressure, and real-time assessment of when to contribute.

There’s a real lack of nuance within the technological implementation when the entire act is an exercise in nuance itself.