I haven’t had coffee since Saturday so everything just feels a bit dazed and uncertain.
Well no-one got back to me to say that this website looks broken so it is you, Natalie. I did have some time to sit down and do some actual reading this week. I’ve cracked the spine on the Indigenous epistemologies of AI work from Suzanna Kite et al, particularly the Making Kin With Machines piece. There’s not a lot more to say about it other than what’s on the tin really. It’s a rich reflection of non-singularitarian, non-western perspectives on the position of AI in the world, or worlds. There’s also a performance work by Kite; Everything I say Is True, Poetic Bibliography which is a beautiful interpretation of some of these ideas. I’m sorry there’s not more, still many tabs open, many things to do but at least the rhythm is returning.
Susan Cox-Smith shared this as the ‘most Dutch thing ever’ – an easily hacked vaccine passport system in Holland. It’s the story of a hack, some systemic incompetence and then people find their own workarounds by sharing QR codes to basically go out clubbing despite not having negative results. I’ve been struck recently when doing home testing by how much faith is put in the social contract in order for the whole thing to work. You have to self-report the result of the test which means there’s nothing to stop you lying if you were that kind of person or, as we now know, million of tests that presumably show negative that aren’t reported because the interface is clunky and relies on you hand-typing a tiny sixteen digit string of letters and numbers and people – quite reasonably – can’t be bothered even though that data is just as useful and important.
Lots of governmental rhetoric has leant on ideas like faith, trust, patience, responsibility and so on which actually makes total sense to me. I’ve had a number of conversations over the last two years of the form ‘I know we’re allowed to do it, but does that mean it’s the right thing to do?’ And it’s been pleasing to see a world where most folks are reckoning with the responsibility for others directly instead of just going by the letter of the law and smashing around into the crash barriers of legislation: Just because you can travel at 30 miles per hour down a residential street with people everywhere, doesn’t mean you should.
There are exceptions of course. For example, when ‘local exercise’ was permitted in January there was outrage as Boris was spotted cycling in Victoria Park – not deemed to be in the ‘local area.’ ‘What is a local area!?’ people demanded. ‘Demarcate for me in miles what my local area is!’ Incidentally, British Cycling’s guidance was simply that local area would be considered a comfortable area where you would normally cycle, so if that’s a circle around 80km from your door (as it is in my case) that’s ‘local.’ The point was not to exceed normal behaviour and put others at risk, not to do anything that would stretch the net.
Policy makers I think had assumed two things; one cynically and one somewhat faithfully. Firstly that you don’t want to write anything or say anything that you might later be called up on. Practically, the local area for me in central London is smaller than say for my parents in a town in the north of England. It’s further for them to go for anything and everything’s spaced further apart. Giving metrics here would just create further questions. So instead, you lean on part two; that after months of taking the gravity of the situation seriously, people generally have a dialled-in moral compass to what is reasonable social behaviour in the time of a pandemic and can make responsible decisions on that basis.
But to bring it round to Dutch night clubbers, maybe that will never happen. We’re so deprogrammed from thinking about ourselves as s community or network that we make of ourselves exceptions convinced of gambler’s fallacy: ‘It won’t happen to me, I’m different. Those rules are for other people, I have a special case.’ So an exciting future of digital services that lean as much on trust for faithful participation as gates, checks, balances and verification is basically implausible. I don’t know if that’s what they were attempting to try with self-reporting testing, but it’s basically what they proved.
Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.
Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time.
Recents
Two books coming out in the coming weeks bear my name, one I co-authored and the other I contributed a chapter to: Design and Digital Interfaces which I coauthored with John Fass, Ben Stopher and Eva Verhoeven is the first one. We wrote this back pre-pandemic so it’s going to be interesting to revisit it. It’s a sort of discursive guide aimed at designers working with digital media and platforms taking in the different dimension and properties of working digitally with some interesting examples throughout.
The second books, Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life is one I co-authored a chapter for with Kristina Andersen. I’m really excited by this one. Despite the gravity of the book’s title we wrote a tongue-in-cheeck chapter attempting to classify types of machines according to a taxonomy developed by Jorge Luis Borges. The result is a somewhat frivolous but serious critique of smart objects. Anyway, those are all going out there soon and will be out and about. I’ll try and remember to report more once I have some feedback.
Here’s a short talk on the Haunted Machines stuff and AI I did for ‘My Home is My Burg’ – it was super fun. I always like it when it’s really conversational and I still miss meeting new people so there’s an opportunity to do that.
Short Stuff
I’m still crunking through the many tabs of things. I don’t think crunking is a verb.
- Matt Webb pointed out the other day that it’s been six years since we all put pictures of puppy slugs in our slide decks and talked about how weird it was that Google was building a computer that could dream. Now it all seems rather prosaic. If I see one more painter making a ‘deep dream’ of Disney films to try and turn a buck on an NFT I’ll grumble very quietly to myself. Nonetheless, here’s the original article again.
- Google is using AI to design chips to run AI on. The person who posted it said something like ‘this is the most amazing advance ever, truly groundbreaking’ and I think that’s a bit much. It’s not people making computer in Minecraft. But you know, it’s interesting.
- The UK government have published a report on human augmentation for warfare. So there’s that now.
Ok, ok, ok, ok. I can feel the body coming to life actually. Let’s hope the spirit is as willing this week. I love you, I love you, I love you. Speak to you next week.