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Category: design

Dr. Dre versus the Big Bad Algorithm

Published June 8, 2014 by cgerrish

We're seeing some new shapes among the feudal technology stacks. Apple has made a couple of moves that puts them on the human side of the ledger. Yahoo seems to be following in that direction. Google and Facebook remain fully automated, and they've placed their bet on male software engineers, big data and algorithms.

A few years ago, as the stacks were establishing their hold on networked computing, Nicholas Carr asked “Does IT Matter?” The question occupied the spot between home-grown corporate technical systems and the eventual outsourcing to professional cloud-based services. In most cases utility computing in central networked data centers turned out to be a better investment than a local IT team cobbling together a custom application. If the technology in question wasn't a company's core business, it didn't matter. Outsource everything possible to a vendor who counted that service as a core competency.

The networked computing platforms that have battled so fiercely to be among the few left standing have learned a bittersweet lesson. The platform is just a blank sheet of paper, a surface ready to be inscribed. Its worth is minimal, in fact, Apple has begun giving away its newest operating systems. There's no value in an individual installation of the platform, it's only the platform as a whole that has value.

When the technical press looked at Apple's acquisition of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre they didn't understand. The music service didn't have enough subscribers, the head phones weren't even among the best, nothing matched up with the dollar figures that were being thrown around. Non-engineers aren't acqui-hired, non-engineers are replaceable worker parts that merit commodity pricing. Sure these guys have “taste”, but that's not really worth anything. An algorithm can be built to easily reproduce something like their taste. In a reversal of Nicholas Carr's thought, the algorithmists asked “Do Human Factors Matter?”

Jimmy Iovine's response to the machine was that something was missing from the algorithmic output. Here's how Iovine put it:

“The sequencing of an album was very important. Music is made in bite-sized pieces, but you need an hour's worth of music for certain activities. The other guys have an algorithm. For some reason, these young people aren't understanding why they aren't getting the feel they're supposed to get. We said no, no, you're supposed to have the right sequence.”

What's the value of being able to create “that feel” across a networked computing platform? There doesn't seem to be an acknowledged economic value that can be applied to in creative people working at the platform level. The technologist and the financial analysts ask “where's the game-changing technology?” That's what Apple did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Where's the iWatch? Where's that next big thing? No one creates a game changing technology. Steve Jobs said it best and very simply many years ago.

“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.”

You choose the wave. You don't invent the wave. In this new era of feudal technology stacks, the technology should intrude less and less. The technology, if it's well designed, should start to recede into the background. If you're noticing it, generally that's because it's broken. Finding the feel, creating the feel of, and within, the platform, that's the thing a machine can't come up with on its own. Or at least that's what we're about to find out. Will creative people who can operate at the level of a large platform (Dre, Iovine, Ahrendts, Deneve) be more successful than an algorithm that crowd sources, sorts and filters?

 

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Driving the Map, Not the Territory

Published May 28, 2014 by cgerrish

It's classic slight of hand. What's breathtaking is that it caught the entire country in its misdirection. Google demos its driverless car, the tiny one with no steering wheel and no brakes. The media shows us the pictures and then asks Detroit why this car is coming from the Silicon Valley and not the car manufacturers. Clearly another sign that U.S. manufacturers are hopelessly behind the times.

A few weeks ago Alexis Madrigal wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Trick That Makes Google Self-Driving Cars Work.” In his piece, Alexis explains how the trick is done. Self-driving cars have very little to do with the machinery of the car itself. In case you hadn't noticed Google has an extremely robust mapping application. The self-driving car can only drive itself through a territory with a sufficiently fine-grained 3-D map. That's because the car isn't really driving on the streets, it's driving on the map. This is a story about virtual reality for cars. And it's not about who builds the cars, it's about who owns the virtual streets.

 

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The 6th Time is the Charm

Published May 18, 2014 by cgerrish

When we look at the ecological catastrophe, we fail to see that it's already begun. Simply asking the question, “Has the ecological catastrophe begun yet?” is a signal that we're well past the beginning. We're on the inside of something that becomes visible to us as it reveals it has always enfolded us.

In Elizabeth Kolbert's book, “The Sixth Extinction”, instead of the dire warnings and hysterical laments about the end of the world, we see a calm journey to the places around the earth where species are in the late stages of extinction. Kolbert bears witness as the scientists around her record the effects of the rapid change in habitat. The life forms in these landscapes have deep ties to the slow moving patterns of the earth. As climate change accelerates, these ties are cut and whole species are set adrift.

The prose style of Kolbert's book is a smile of recognition; like the smile of someone saying a final goodbye to a loved one. The smile of someone who has experience loss before. It seems the most straight forward way of acknowledging our co-existence with other beings is at the moment when they're about to disappear forever. Kolbert is a calm witness; she says goodbye to individual life forms and whole species on our behalf.

Humans fancy themselves as highly adaptable. We can look around the world and see the varied and extreme conditions where humans have made a life. We're so quick that we believe we're exceptions. Other species may have a deep tie to the slow moving patterns of the earth, but we can a adapt to any pattern. It's this adaptability that defines us a species. Throughout our history we've looked for the thing that separates us from the animals, that thing that makes us special creatures on this planet. For a time we were the rational animal, our ability to reason set us apart. Now it's our belief that no matter what happens to the biosphere, we can adapt. Even if 90% of all other life forms were to suffer extinction, we could still make a go of it. Our existence is independent of the state of the biosphere or planet

The anthropocene is the unconscious effect of the sum total of human action on the geology and climate of the planet. The biosphere, thus changed by us, now turns and taps us on the shoulder. What was a deep, subtle and almost invisible power moving slowly in the background has emerged in the foreground. Like an unconscious thought made conscious, we believe that we can tame global warming with the power of our reason in the clear light of day.

Like Victor Frankenstein, we sit alone in our lab, attempting to reanimate a species, repair a damaged habit, stitch together enough of a biosphere to support the life forms we deem important. It's perfectly reasonable.

 

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I Like to iWatch

Published May 1, 2014 by cgerrish

For some reason we're looking for a computerized wrist watch. I guess it's because everyone, at least before smart phones, used to buy a watch. The market for wrist watches appears to include just about everyone, but good quality watches are rarely replaced. It's becoming a niche market steeped in nostalgia.

A watch is for telling time. A computer isn't necessary for that function. No one needs an iWatch to tell time. The current networked wearables are small feature-reduced smart phones that can be strapped to the wrist. Not that phones are still telephones.

The etymology of the word “watch” isn't entirely clear, but it seems to have something to do with a schedule for keeping watch, for instance on the deck of ship. An iWatch would be a device for keeping an eye on the wearer. The schedule can be discarded because it's always on, although the batteries need to be recharged now and then. “Wearable” means attached via a strap or some other means–it's a device not meant for the hand or the pocket.

These new devices, if they actually appear, are personal data collection devices that will send information for analysis to a personal or feudal cloud. The devices themselves will have limited read-out capability. They are sensors. They're meant to suck in data, not to display it. And once it's “in,” there's little chance it will remain private.

 

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