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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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Erasing the Trace: The Right to be Forgiven

Published May 16, 2014 by cgerrish

The European Union says you have the right to be forgotten. The technologists say that by asking to be forgotten you bring more attention on yourself. They call this the Streisand effect. A movie star demanding privacy causes more attention by virtue of the demand. Alec Baldwin is a good example of this negative feedback loop. The more violently he fights for his privacy, the more interest the tabloid press has in the force involved in his effort. What could be better than a photograph of a celebrity trying to stop a paparazzi from taking his photograph?

Journalists, if that's still a thing that exists, believe they have the right to report on any digital trace of what could be perceived as bad behavior. They don't think you should have the right to decide what should be erased from your own record. This right could lead to criminals covering up a history of bad acts. It would also require journalists to leave their keyboards to do research.

Search engine companies and technologist believe that it's too expensive to filter out stuff you don't want as the top hit for your name. They believe the data is what the data is, and that you should just live with it. These are the same people that probably have been shaping and gaming their own search engine results pages for years. Too bad for you if you have something in your past that brands you forever. The new morality dictates that you ought to behave as though your worst moment will represent you to the world for the rest of your life. Google will tell anyone who asks about your most extreme behavior, and it'll be the first entry on the first page of their search engine results. What is it they say about “first impressions?”

But what about “evil” you say, isn't it mostly evil that asks to be forgotten? Isn't forgetting evil and its deeds an evil in and of itself? “Forgetting” allows evil to cloak itself and inflict itself on us in a neutral guise. No doubt this is why we use our Google Glass to check the backgrounds of all the passersby as we walk the streets of the city. The flaneur knows what you did last summer.

The machine would like you to know that it's nothing personal, just like when it reads your email. It's simply trying to make connections and offer the space for advertisers to offer coherent purchasing suggestions to you. When your name is entered into a search engine, it returns a slanderous screed by a troll assassinating your character. It's nothing personal, that's just the entry in the index that scored the highest based on an algorithm. The machine doesn't really understand the result in a human way, it's just the output of a process.

The thing about one piece data is that it's just like any other piece of data. No data needs to be forgotten or forgiven; it's just grist for the algorithm. The fact that humans make this or that of any particular piece of data is simply a factor that feeds into the algorithm's scoring process. The algorithm makes no moral judgements and no assessment of the truth value of its output.

Erasing a trace from a search engine's index would require from the machine a sense of morality and propriety. For all the talk about artificial intelligence, machines seem to be getting smart in a very limited way.

 

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Transparent: Believing is Seeing that Believing is Seeing

Published May 11, 2014 by cgerrish

“We've almost made ourselves transparent in reaction to the fact that we know we're being watched.”

Annie Clark, St. Vincent

You are what you eat. You are what you wear. You are the music you listen to, the audio and video you consume. You are the investments you make, the work you do, the space you live in. You are the furniture that decorates your living space, especially the knick knacks on your mantle. You are the photos you share, the snarky comments you make on social networks, the political commentators you choose to listen to. You are the software you chose, the operating system, the device, the cloud that holds your stuff. You are the car you drive, the public transportation you take, the footwear you select for any particular walk. You are the cocktails you order, the craft beer you quaff and the espresso you sip.

You are the bill that was left unpaid this month. You are the parking ticket for parking in a handicapped spot. You are the bad report from a dentist. You're the person who doesn't floss enough. You're the person who raised his voice in anger. You are the phone call you forgot to make. You are the person living beyond her means. You are the person working two jobs and collecting food stamps. You are the person whose marriage didn't work out. You're the person who's too tired to read and too tired to sleep. Staring at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to ring signaling the start of another day. You're the person obsessively checking email, even though there's only ever spam. You're the person who can't afford to eat lunch today. You are the person who forgot the difference between baking soda and baking powder.

You're the person whose essence is never completely captured by a sentence, or even a paragraph. You're the person who is represented by thousands of entries in hundreds of corporate and government databases. But the pieces never seem to add up to a solid picture. You're the person whose potential isn't represented by your test scores. You're the person who can't be summed up analyzing your web search history. You're the person whose taste can't be modeled with an algorithm.

You're the person who's become transparent. You're the person who is watched but unseen. You're the person who is present, but unrecorded. You're the person who leaves a trace that is never fully comprehended. You're the person with wholly unexpected depth. You're the person filled with unknown unknowns.

 

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Apps and Sturgeon’s Law

Published May 4, 2014 by cgerrish

jumbo-slot-machine

Despite the fact that the Network has a kind of permanent memory, it’s not very good at remembering certain things. Or maybe it’s just that we aren’t. We see what we want to see.

During the last internet bubble we learned about startups, venture capital and burn rate. There’s a small window for new technology companies to find an exit before they burn up. The more companies in a space, the more difficult the exit.

The last bubble was burst when a list of tech companies was published that compared their cash on hand to their burn rate. Suddenly it was simple to see how much time each company had to make a profit or an exit. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

The unlimited optimism of the time quickly turned into a climate of fear. Investors suddenly wanted to see revenues and profits. It changed everything. Should someone publish such a list today, it would have a similar effect. We’ve simply forgotten that start ups burn cash, and while many things are cheaper, the fuse has just been lengthened a bit.

Another thing we seem to forget is that free communications systems fill up with spam. It’s estimated that 70% of all email is robot-generated spam. Whenever a new social communications hub is created we think that this time it’ll be different. As a social networking system matures it attracts trolls and starts to fill with spam. It’s always worked that way.

If your company is marketing to a free (non-subscription) social network, it’s likely the audience is filled with robots and spam accounts. Free access to a social network lowers barriers to growth, but it also creates a fertile ground for gaming the system.

Recently I read that 80% of mobile apps are used only once. That seems like a high number until you remember Sturgeon’s Law. This law states that 90% of everything is crap. In light of that, 80% is actually an excellent number. The other thing this should tell you is that as the ecosystem of apps matures it will revert to the norm. That means the number of apps used only once is more likely to be headed toward 90% than 70%.

If an app store has 1 million apps, 900,000 of them are crap. That leaves 100,000 that might be useful. That’s actually a pretty big number. Some say that software is going to eat everything. It’s certainly going to try and eat everything. But despite the brilliance of the young engineers writing this ravenous software, 90% of what they produce is going to be crap. It’s easy to forget when everyone’s smiling, optimistic and sure that their new technology is going to fundamentally change the way we do this or that.

It might be more helpful to look at tech start ups as though they were a slot machine programmed to take your money 90% of the time. Some can afford to play games with those odds, most can’t.

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