Box060: Muted Expectations

10.01.22

DS060: A petrol (or gas) station at night. Two cars are hung from a steel ibeam and rotate slowly around the middle of the forecourt, like a big car mobile.

I finally got around to setting up the subscription service to this blog. So if you’d rather get these posts by email you can sign up down there ↙. Unfortunately, the animations won’t embed but you’ll get a nice still image. If you’re one of the fifty-odd folks already subscribed then welcome! Last week was a bit of a test, please send me any feedback on the email version. You can click through to see the animation, or they’re all on Instagram.

DS060

This week I decided to play around with some methods for photorealism. To be clear, the cars are found models from CGTrader already textured but the rest of the scene is done by me. Cars are whole projects in themselves but useful assets and I’m not into them enough to start modelling them by hand. I used various photos from petrol station from the internet to do some project-from-view UV mapping of the pumps, bins etc. similar to this method. There’s a big cube volume in there for depth and mood and then straightforward lighting. Following last week, I’ve found that adding in noise post-render undoes some of the painterly-ness of the de-noisers. All in all actually quite straightforward this week.

Prognostications

I missed this piece way back in 2020 – the promissory year of the self-driving car – untangling the complexities and hype to explain why we still didn’t have self-driving cars (spolier: we still don’t.) It’s rare to get excited about the future now, I think, for most. There are glimpses of it around elections and announcements but it often disappoints. I can never tell if it’s me that’s changed or the world, but the hysteria around a new iPhone or service seems to have vanished a little from the world. The excited word-of-mouth chatter for a new app or gadget has been replaced by rabid zealotry met with bitter dismissal. I’m looking forward to the remastered release of Witcher 3, though.

Anyway, rather than do a year-in-review of 2021 (which sounds like a lot of work) I thought I’d trawl some things from some of the articles that proliferate around this time of year about predictions for the coming twelve months, adjust or add my thoughts.

Fusion and Quantum enter the rhetorical arena. Azeem Azhar highlights the dramatic increases in funding for both quantum computing and nuclear fusion that 20/21 have seen. He did a great podcast episodes about both these technologies here and here. These are both technologies that seem reasonably exciting in actual application. Based on the financing alone, these seem like reasonably sure predictions but I’d add that I would also expect them both to get sucked into the rhetoric-hype vortex of silicon valley as a result of the increased funding interest. The tragedy is going to be seeing them put to the service of social networks and/or so-called AI in the pursuit of power. We might expect to see ‘quantum’ in particular dropped more and more into advertising and pitches to boost hype while (like AI) the technology itself is still in a very formative state.
You built it and now they’ve come: Crypto-exclusionism. Quite possibly the emergence of a social division between crypto people and non-crypto people. My views on this are pretty-well known if you read this: It all seems to be a technology that, despite the feverish defences put up, is being adopted by those in the relentless pursuit of the accumulation of personal wealth. The grotesque and rapid accumulation of personal wealth is regrettably one of the greatest drivers of the adoption of new technology and so crypto is now probably here to stay. (About ten years ago I mined SolarCoin in our studio and that was my first and last dabble.)
A good test is to ask someone to explain crypto to you without mentioning money. I’m always up for hearing another argument or rationalisation but I have yet to hear it. Either way, similar to early social networks, as services become crypto-normalised, those who don’t engage may find certain services and products out of reach. Tech-exclusionism has impacted transportation already pretty severely in places where Uber et al have taken root and so the spread of crypto across digital transactions will probably exclude non-adopters; non-adopters of choice (like me) and those who are on the other side of the digital divide. Cryypto, like ‘digital’, ‘social’, ‘connected’ will just be in things without the need for its own prefix.
Crypto will probably continue to be incredibly divisive in a way that things like smart phones, self-driving cars and even so-called AI, aren’t. You see, even the most fervent luddite can see the potential application of so-called AI in faster and more accurate medical diagnosis or climate modelling even if we need to scrutinise and critique the methods and tools. But with crypto, the voices of people working on more than the money need to be amplified. Tangentially, an even darker prediction is that the inevitable crypto crash will lead in the deeper entrenchment of right wing extremism, particularly in the US.
No rise of the machines. The Wall Street Journal has put together its predictions for next year. Nothing particularly surprising: More gadgets and gizmos aimed at dealing with manufactured inconveniences than anything meaningful. However, there’s a peculiar leaning on robotics in the domestic sphere, both delivery bots and chore-bots. I really struggle with seeing the story of these machines; why would anyone want them? They can move things around, sure, but they require a bunch of extra work from users to look after, charge, store etc. The dream of robots in the home is almost 150 years old and I don’t think 2022 is the year we’ll see it manifest.
Curiously muted AI expectations. Unusually, this report from the AI world implies more humility and pragmatism in the gradual, incremental developments of the field. That doesn’t mean the hype will go away but perhaps part of the normalisation of AI is it’s sublimation into other processes and the background noise of general technological innovation rather than big blowout AI-specific announcements. As above with crypto, we’re less likely to see ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ highlighted as advertising gimmicks as they’ll just be expected to be part of things in the same way ‘digital’ and ‘connected’ are.
Planetary Design. Alice Rawsthorn put it beautifully here. I think it’s increasingly going to be accepted as a mainstream approach to design in practice to think on planetary and giga scales about design interventions in the environment as well as the role that design has in communicating and conceptualising large systemic change. There’s been a flurry of new degrees established in the UK to corner this demand and work I’ve done with clients over the last year has shown that non-designers are developing an understanding of the potential.
RIP Clubhouse. It’s never coming back.
Gamification of Fitness. It’s a little like smart fridges; there are gradual, incremental improvements but you really don’t need a gadget to know you ate too many doughnuts any more than you need a notification to know you’re out of milk. For some, maybe data does change behaviour (I know it works with my cycling) but in this prediction, health data is artificially loaded with financial value which reads a little bit like the Chinese social credit system but for corporations to profit off. The hope is that by being fitter, you become more ‘valuable’ in the most literal cosplay of Foucauldian biopolitics ever instantiated. It’s unclear why you would be more financially valuable by having a fitter or healthier dataset when everything from private health insurance to diet plans to medical research relies on you being unfit or at least paranoid about your fitness to profit.
Lifespan and reusability. This is a bit of a no-brainer. Partly due to ‘reading the room,’ partly because of actual legislation and partly because of the material issues in the next point, we may be seeing the end of the age of planned obsolescence. This has all sorts of implications for insurers and manufacturers but perhaps we’ll see them begin to tackle the enormous wastage of gadgetry. I would expect that this year or next we’d start to see lifespan and reusability as a marketing pitch on mainstream devices. Repair and reuse might also start to enter design curricula not as a novelty but as a fundamental.
It’s the coke, stupid. We had inklings of this with thing like the Evergiven crisis but 2022 could really be the year that the hidden material cost of tech starts to bite. The cost of silicon and chip manufacturing has been increasing through COVID but has also been affected by the environmental cost of turning Bauxite into Silicon crystals which requires huge amounts of coking coal, mostly supplied by China. But in other areas too are similar issues, a European requires about 15 tons of steel – also a coke-intensive process and other countries are catching up with this demand. There aren’t currently alternatives to the manufacturing processes of key materials like silicon and steel so the simple response is to stop using them. Canon has removed DRM chips from printer cartridges, ironically packaging chips with instructions on how to bypass the DRM.

I’m biased of course because my gut tells me that people are ready to turn away from technocentric solutionism and that there’s a popular and growing mistrust of Silicon Valley to deliver the utopias it’s promised as demonstrated through (for one example) the succession of issues that Facebook has faced but also the rising cost of living due to material and energy costs. Anyway, I won’t review these at the end of the year because they’ll be wrong.

Short Stuff

Bitcoin negated all energy savings made by electric vehicles in 2021. Hard to find a source. But there’s this from June 2021 that says the same thing with sources. (Edit, oh here’s the newer data. Via the excellent Web 3 Is Going Just Great)
Relatedly, Brussels Airlines running 3000 empty flights to keep slots. Here’s their statement on reducing their impact on the climate.
The future is not only useless, its expensive. Well-written description of the dispiriting vacuousness of crypto culture. It’s a bit snobby on culture – I firmly believe that people like what they like and that their right – but the general notion of financial exploitation is great.
Again relatedly, Brad Troemel’s NFT Report, online now for free is a really great analysis of the bubble.
This report on the state of Web 3 has been getting a lot of attention. The tldr is: Web 3 is just Web 2 dressed up in clothes with less privacy but people are making money off it so they don’t care.
This great syllabus from Afrotectopia.

That was by no means everything. I’m doing an interview in two weeks where I’ve been asked to assemble some ‘weak signals’ – are there any ‘weak’ signals anymore? Feels like everything is pretty loud. Anyway, you know what I’m going to say. – that I love you. It’s my affectation for these blogs but it’s always important to let you know, I think. Also, my time is a little bit freer at the moment so let me know if you’d like to catch up, in person (fully boosted up here) or via teleconferencing. Have a great week.

Box057: The rig to end all rigs

20.12.21

DS056: Inverse kinematics and cloth simulation all tied together. About three days’ work.

This week’s render was probably the toughest ever to produce. I built the set before knowing what was going in it and then decided to return to my attempt at making a fully rigged robot arm.

The model is actually a beefed-up version of a desktop arm with added hydraulics and cabling with my own materials added. The tricky bit was doing all the rigging. I decided to learn inverse kinematics after avoiding it my whole life. This means that the rig follows a leader, with all the rest of the armature automatically adjusting based on a series of weights and limits rather than forward kinematics where you animate from the base outwards. The difference is easily explained in how you pick things up; if you reach out your hand to pick up a cup, your arm automatically follows without you having to direct it. If we were a forward kinematic system you would first have to position your upper arm, then your lower arm, then your hand, then your fingers.

The rig use for the robot arm. Lot of work to have something that can follow my mouse around.

I even rigged the cables to work this way so that they move and flex realistically. It was definitely one of the most grinding renders I’ve done because it takes a lot more forward-thinking about workflow, if you set things up in the wrong order or if one piece is just slightly misaligned you can end up with a broken and glitchy system. Having spent two or three days carefully and intricately setting up an enormously complicated system I then decided to chuck in an element of danger by using cloth simulation to anchor a balloon to the claw. You can set different parts of a cloth mesh to behave differently so I kept the string floppy and the balloon pressured, inverted gravity and weakened it for the whole scene (which is a lot easier than telling something how to float) and then ran the simulation about three dozen times. My only advice here: ramp the simulation quality steps way up – sky’s the limit. I think the final version is something like 300 against the default of 5.

Fallacies

This week’s Exponential View focussed on quantum computing with an interview with a founder of one of the companies developing it. The science is fascinating and it’s something I know blissfully little about. What was interesting was the way the interviewee, Chad Rigetti, trod the line between the mundanity of technological innovation and the existential premise of computing at the quantum level. For example, when asked about application he talked about the quantum theory of gravity, something that we cannot really experiment with on Earth with our current computers. However, when pushed on the everyday application he defaulted to national security, intelligence and finance, citing Moore’s law and saying that ‘computing technology has always been a fundamental driver of economic development… an inevitable march of better computing power.’ I fully believe him when he says the science is what’s most interesting, it’s just predictably tragic that something as incredible a unifying theory of gravity isn’t going to drum up as much funding as crypto.

There are two fundamental interconnected fallacies in technological innovation. Both of which have been explored extensively by scholars of STS: First, that technological ‘evolution’ is inevitable – that the next thing will be better – and secondly that everything will be modellable or simulatable. The narrative of tech innovation is that through these duelling paradoxes, some supremacy over the ‘messiness’ of ‘nature’ (both human and non-human) can be achieved. But these are fallacies. Every new innovation is never quite good enough to model things with enough accuracy and so the next innovation is the promissory one with the current one being an exception for its failures: ‘…past failures are often isolated as special or peculiar cases with little technically or organizationally in common with the newly proposed promissory solution.’ (Borup et al.)

This is not to say that innovation is pointless, it’s more complex than that. Is there a way to present new technological innovation as neither inevitable nor final? Rather than an all-or-nothing approach something that is more about presenting technology in a constant state of imperfect flux? Open-source stuff has some of this. Blender’s development pipeline is fascinating because it’s totally open and done by volunteers. There’s some fanfare around releases but there’s never any promissory rhetorics of finality; it’s treated as incomplete (and all the more charming for it) and in constant development, which is a useful way to inspire the community to contribute. I’m sure there are loads of other examples.

Short Stuff

Venkatash Rao is literally giving away his OODA loop work for anyone to use. OODA loops were all the rage about five or six years ago but Rao has stuck with them and made something really rich. Also, I’m super in to giving stuff away and it’s great to see such an influential character leading there.
Meredith Whittaker’s Steep Cost of Capture – a pretty concise overview of the big-tech-so-called-AI research industry nexus.
Piece on Vox here talking about that idea of inevitability more and it’s ties to the American manifest destiny worldview.
Everyday Robots seems like a complex project – to build robots that can perform everyday chores. I’m always torn on these types of projects. On the one hand, it’s a super interesting and remarkably complicated set of technical goals to be able to teach robots to do things that we take for granted like folding sheets and wiping surfaces. On the other hand it feels like something we don’t really need robots for – we’re good at household chores already and the house was built around the able human body in most cases, so why adapt robots for it? They cite economic productivity as a rationale but again, there are better reasons for robots; see the ever-citable Paro.
An expolanet found where there should be none: 11 times the size of Jupiter found orbiting a binary star system 10 times larger and hotter than the Sun.
Brief into from IGN on speedrunning and tools. It’s a bit hyperbolic in places and skips over some of the interesting things in specific controversial runs. For more on the exact maths of that 1 in 7 trillion Minecraft speedrun check out this Standup Maths.

I’m migrating blogging to Monday because of my new training schedule. It’s best to get a solid block in Tuesday-Friday. Ok, love you, love you, love you. Have an amazing week.

Box056: Simulation is the answer

15.12.2115.12.21

DS057: Rendered from the view of a rom I spent quite some time in at the beginning of this week. The steam looks janky but that’s the problem with fluid sims and impatience. (I – for reasons that will be explained next week – did DS056 after DS057)

I was watching this Veritassum about snowflakes the other evening. The episode features ‘snowflake scientist’ Ken Libbrecht about his work and it is all really interesting. Of course, they get to the inevitable question: ‘Is it true that no two snowflakes are the same?’ At this point, Libbrecht laughs and points out that the question is somewhat ludicrous; no two anything are the same: No two trees, animals, rocks, grains of sand, salt crystals are the same so why would it be any different for snowflakes? I imagine the spirit of the thought that ‘no two snowflakes are the same’ is based on the seeming contradiction between their visual geometric-ness yet lack of any uniformity. Something in us imagines there must be some mass production at work for such forms but I find this reminder that everything is unique quite beautiful.

Simulate this

‘To make our future real, simulation is the answer.’ The lede is buried a few paragraphs down in this Nvidia blog on Earth-2. The audaciously named new hardware project Nvidia are building in their metaverse – ‘Omnivrese.’ Nvidia will invest more in faster computation to try and achieve this with the aim of modelling climate change, and in doing so, contribute significantly to climate change. Matt Webb pointed out another thing this week; a chip with 1.2 trillion transistors that can apparently simulate the things ‘faster than the laws of physics.’

As Matt points out, this is a rather spurious claim. We’ve been able to simulate things faster than physics like the movement of celestial bodies for ages, long before computers, but there may be an application at the atomic or micro scale. In fact the test run on it was fluid dynamics, which as anyone who’s ever got me on this in the pub will know, is almost impossible to do in real time partly because a) it’s really hard and b) mathematicians haven’t actually solved fluid dynamics.

Nonetheless, the provocatively named ‘Wafer Scale Engine’ manages to run water physics faster than real time – no small feat. There’s an interesting reverse hardware tendency here as well; the designers of the engine suggest that the prevailing logic of daisy-chaining a bunch of CPUs and GPUs together is not as effective as simply building bigger chips – a reversal of decades of miniaturisation.

This tracks with something that’s been floating around since I read that Hardware Lottery paper, the crux of which is; we only got this type of computation because these were the bits and bobs that were lying around in labs but they’re probably not the best bits for the job. See also the well documented subversion of the GPU for AI despite originally being designed to send pixels to a monitor in Image Objects and as Murray Shanahan describes in this week’s Exponential View: ‘[I]t’s a sort of hack. It’s repurposing of a technology that was meant for something completely different.’

All this tracks back to this metaverse thing as well – the big Internet rebrand. The socials are trying to construct captive economies but Nvidia are more interested in simulating the Earth, again; weird flex, but ok. An interesting thought experiment to do is to do a classic design school crit review on the metaverse ask what demand the metaverse is responding to? What audience or user need has been identified that the metaverse is a response to? What is the problem that it is trying to solve? I know this seems a fickle thing to ask of a lot of so-called innovations but it quickly becomes obvious that the problem is the hard ceiling on attention, time and property that the big socials have hit and the need to artificially raise that ceiling by crafting whole new economies. And the audience for these metaverses are really the companies themselves, not users. So the metaverse is basically a guarded open-pit mine built with coincidental, repurposed hardware that’s being used as the hastily assembled barricades. It will probably work too, simply because of all the things I go on about; the language of inevitability, the foreclosure of alternatives, the co-opting of everyday interaction inside these walled gardens.

Maybe it’s just the people I hang out with but a common complaint I have never heard is ‘I wish I just had more Facebook in my life and it could store all my stuff.’

Is there a possibility for us to construct our own metaverses? That might be nice, I suppose something like Minecraft or even the popularity of Animal Crossing hint at that – a world of your own you can build that you can bring people into that isn’t quite as hostile and extractive? (Ironic given the title of Minecraft). Even then, as J-Paul Neeley pointed out in a recent chat, it would still be built on the back of Amazon Web Services. This is perhaps (again, coming up in the same chat) a space to revisit the Dewey-an ‘public’ – start from scratch. Rather than a focus on platforms, what are the objects, issues and loci around which a public assembles and then what is the appropriate metaverse for that public that they can build? What tools might they use?

Is there something better than the. open pit mines of the socials, the deep sea mining of NFTs or the hubristic folly of whole-Earth simulation that you can do with fast computers?

Short Stuff

A marketing company has set up ‘Earth’s Black Box‘ – a plan for a megalith in Tennessee that will record 30-50 years worth of data documenting the demise of human civilisation. Sort of like a fancier decline.online with a physical presence. Some notes of skepticism: The website appears to show a stream of tweets with no indication as to methodology from the marketing company behind the project. It may be a somewhat speculative proposal to drum up activism on climate change, in which case fair enough really.
Spotify founder Daniel Ek has invested a bunch of money in a startup doing military AI. Another type of shareholder rebellion is the artists and users of the platform calling for a boycott.
Quantum spin magnets finally observed.
The forgotten advertising of climate change denialism. There’s a great graphic design project in there somewhere.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/long-blondes-band-landfill-indie-b1972792.html

You probably saw that I shared the news. I’m leaving London College of Communication after an amazing long journey to go to Arup Foresight as Design Futures Lead. I’ll be starting around the end of February but leaving LCC imminently to take some time off. I’m very sad to go, I love LCC and my friends and colleagues, but it was the right time and the right opportunity. My old job is up and advertised and if you want to ask any questions, get in touch.

Anyway, I also love you, but you know that. Speak later.