July 12, 2022

s12e37: This was not the future we were promised^w sold

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Tuesday, July 12, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and it is not as hot as it was yesterday. So far.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

This was not the future we were promised^w sold

I saw this tweet from Lani:

reminder that we live in the future, the future is here, it’s just stupid. it’s just use an app to price people out of their rental homes instead of “there’s nice and free houses for everyone everywhere” @LaniDotTech

I liked this as a reminder that the algorithm only ever does what people want it to. You can qualify this (and you should) by saying that on top of doing what people want it to do, it may also have unintended side-effects. But we should assume that the algorithm or the system is working as intended.

And if algorithms – and at this point, we mean “algorithms run on computers, to many people, at massive scale” do what people want, then which people? Well, they’d reflect, in general, the people who have influence. That can be good: in your sphere of influence, on a single human scale, you get to use computers to do what you personally influence them to. But then you get up to society scales, or even bigger, and then those algorithms do exactly what the people who have the power to influence them want to do.

So as ever, it wasn’t about computing, it was about people and what people want and who gets to decide. I suppose if you wanted to turn this around, one of the models of “agile” or “user-centered design” was that in theory it would examine that influence and attempt to move that influence from wherever it was to… somewhere else. Of course influence is always, still and ultimately going to end up with those decision makers with whatever power. Stakeholders was an attempt to give end-users influence, or recognize influence from people who might not otherwise have any. Designing with, not for likewise, and then layer on top of that recent criticism and awareness that Design Thinking is simply a rebrand of white supremacy, or preserving existing power structures.

I suppose my point is that computers were never “just” going to make the future better for all of us, they were, as ever, a tool, they were never neutral as others keep beating the drum about. If we wanted a better future, we’d have to use those tools to deliberately bring one about. Hope isn’t a plan and all that. I quipped somewhere else that there’s an app for that was as much a threat, and sure: it depends on who’s saying it, which depends on who has the power and who has the influence.

Shorts

“Shit Footage”

So there was a whole fake cricket league in India called the Century Hitters T20¹, set up to make a small amount of money from bettors in Russia. The whole thing is amazingly “minimum viable scam”: two HD cameras (you know, more than one), speakers playing freely available crowd noises (but those speakers are playing the crowd noises live onsite, not inserted into the stream in post), the whole thing used existing distribution infrastructure (YouTube, Telegram) and super cheap workers. It was, in my mind, a bit of a Shit Footage², a mundane scam.

Caught my attention because: just look at this! How down and dirty! How small, but also how easy? And if I’m to follow the thread from the item up above, the tech being used by people, the influence of money, and I suppose you could always throw in that Gibson quote (now that we’re at it) of the street finding its own uses for things.

Engineering is

I saw a tweet from Andrew Kemendo about the wonderful outpouring of creativity from people suddenly having access to AI/companion creative expression, and Andrew’s exploration of the term “Prompt Engineer”.

This is really well put together and shows a a bit of how it’s made for these new jobs I call: “Prompt Engineers”. Though engineer seems too formal, it immediately conveys the point I’m making: “Prompt engineers use natural language prompts and LLMs to produce new content” @AndrewKemendo

Caught my attention because: I noticed a super strong emotional reaction to this, in that for some reason I feel the entire term is both wrong and yet also understandable. Why it’s wrong: because what does engineer even mean nowadays, which collides in the whole semantic vector space in my head of “what is software engineering” and the quality of said engineering, and maybe in many cases it’s not engineering any more. I could go on about Webster’s defines engineering as, where I rail about how understanding a space and (somewhat condescendingly, I suppose) twiddling variables (last time I tried this, it was lots of fine-tuning training data and fiddling with one temperature variable), and is that engineering? Why would you want to call this engineering? What does that say about the world we live in that a term or description like this is being pulled towards the engineering-space. Is it not that the term is still just “creative”, but knowing how to use a particular tool? It would be like saying “Adobe PhotoShop(R) Technician”, or “Image Manipulation Specialist”. And again, it collides in my head with the ads I keep seeing with copy like “Become An AI Pioneer in 12 Months” from a Respectable University and I’m like: in some ways yes, but also… maybe not?

I really am not dissing people who are engineering prompts and playing and researching and being methodical and coming up with interesting, feeling, evocative, emotional art and otherwise, that is all fantastic, I just feel sad and angry that engineering is what it’s been reduced to.

Even shorter

• Claire Hummel, an artist at Valve, made some fake games for Valve’s Steam Summer Sale. Caught my attention because: the work it takes to create something that is like something but then isn’t that something, and the deep knowledge of genre.
• There’s that Duke Nukem 3D level precipitated by the wonderful British political news disaster that was Matt Hancock cheating on his wife and video evidence and now it’s been updated to include Boris Johnson’s resignation. Caught my attention because: if I ever need to hit anyone over the head with videogames are culture now I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation. I mean, it’s basically what if private eye, but videogames in which case, duh, yes, for a while, and also: here’s that latest example.

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Okay, that’s it for today.

I’m away on vacation next week, which means for those of you reading you have some time to catch up on backlog, as opposed to get even more behind. As some of you have told me.

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan