I’ve been wondering about something: Why is it that images from the past — the actual past — often feel more futuristic than our current images of an imagined future? The latter, even when they’re created with great seriousness, always have a certain kitschy quality, and the kitschiness becomes more pronounced as time passes. It’s the Tomorrowland effect. George Lucas understood that pretty well, I think; he let Star Wars revel in kitschiness rather than trying to avoid the inevitable decay into kitschiness. Fight fire with fire. Hence the film feels less dated, visually, than a lot of the more “futuristic” films about the future.
But if the future doesn’t look much like the future, the past often does. There are pictures from the past that, while you immediately recognize them as being from the past, nevertheless feel futuristic. It’s as though there’s something in your brain that wants to read them as images from the future. Here, for instance, is a picture of Enrico Fermi sitting in a control room in 1951:
Tell me you don’t experience a little cognitive dissonance while looking at that. Even the clock — drab, utilitarian, old — feels futuristic. Why?
You might think I’m stacking the deck, using a picture of an old control room. Everyone knows that old control rooms are just plain cooler than new control rooms. But I don’t think it’s just control rooms. Here’s a photo of a Fort Worth gas station celebrating its grand opening in 1964. Everything about it, not least the prices, screams “Fort Worth 1964.” (In 1964, I was five years old and I lived very near Fort Worth; it’s entirely possible I visited that gas station.) And yet there’s also an odd air of the future about it. If you needed to fill up your tank in 2064, wouldn’t this be the place you’d pull into:
If Lucas went the kitsch route from the start, Jean Luc Godard, in his 1965 movie Alphaville, took the opposite, and I think more interesting, route. He didn’t use futuristic sets at all. He just went out and filmed a science fiction movie in the Paris of the (then) present. He knew, I suspect, that by the time the film was released, the present would already be the past and hence would already have started to take on a futuristic patina — a patina that would actually grow stronger as time passed. And it worked:
Surely, that’s an image from the future.
I draw no conclusions from any of this. I’m just making an observation: the future looks more like the past than the future.
This video makes the same point, kind of. Anyway, I like the song.
“No one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future.” That is the absolute truth.
Movie stills from Alphaville; Fermi photo from Chuckman; gas station photo from Craig Howell; fan video for song “Yellow Wife No. 5” from the Airport 5 album Life Starts Here.
The debate over technological unemployment — do digital machines kill jobs? — continues to heat up. At Slate, Matthew Yglesias hacks together a chart, from Federal Reserve data, that he claims shows that technological unemployment doesn’t really exist. He plots the country’s economic output (red line) against the hours worked by non-management personnel (blue line) for the last ten years:
They seem to match up pretty well, with the growth in hours worked lagging a bit behind the growth in output — an indication of a healthy increase in productivity. Comments Iglesias, “The big rise and fall and rise again in output is caused by a big rise and fall and rise again in the amount of time people put on the job. Or alternatively, the big rise and fall and rise again in working time is caused by a big rise and fall and rise again in the amount of demand for goods and services.” It’s the economy, stupid. Employers’ recent investments in fancy new technology don’t seem to be altering the old economic laws. There’s no such thing as technological unemployment, at least not when you look at the big picture.
Some commenters suggested that the “covariance” of the two lines isn’t really as tight as Iglesias makes it out to be, that the blue line may be flattening out. Wrote one: “The problem is not that the red line and blue line are growing apart, the problem is that, while the red line has more than recovered since the recession, the blue line is still below recession levels.” Wrote another: “Matt’s right that there is a lot of covariance between the two curves, but that’s hardly surprising, and even people who believe that technology is displacing workers would agree that large-scale macroeconomic trends will strongly affect labor demand — it would be difficult to believe data that didn’t show a strong relation between the two. But visual inspection also shows that the overall linear trend for GDP (i.e. the regression line) has a clearly larger slope than the trend for aggregate hours.”
Now, Andrew McAfee has responded with some charts of his own. Here’s one that looks particularly at the manufacturing sector, comparing output growth (blue line) and job growth (red line) over a longer period:
Not much recent covariance there. Writes McAfee: “That really looks like technological unemployment to me, especially when manufacturing employment is also on the decline in Germany and Japan, in China, and around the world. When this is the case, it means that employment changes are not due to jobs moving around the world in search of cheap human labor; they’re due to machine labor becoming at least as capable as and cheaper than humans.”
And here’s a longer term look at the overall economy, comparing output (red line), jobs (green line), and hours worked (blue line).
Certainly, the economic cycle still matters, but it doesn’t seem to be the whole story. McAfee again: “We are still adding jobs and working more hours in non-recession years, but not as quickly as we used to. Since the end of the 2001 recession real GDP has increased by just about 20%. The number of hours worked, however, has increased by only 2.8% over that same time, and the total number of jobs by 1.9%.”
The economy is a complex beast, and none of these charts shows the actual effect of new technology on employment. But the specter of technological unemployment certainly hovers over McAfee’s charts. Dismissing it as a myth seems at best premature.
SPECIAL BONUS CHART: And just to prove I can create a line chart too, here’s one, made with Google’s Ngram Viewer, showing mentions of the phrase “technological unemployment” in books over the past ninety years or so. (Click to enlarge it.) Ngram doesn’t go beyond 2008, but I bet when you make the chart in the future you’ll see the start of a new spike in 2013.
The new issue of Forbes has a cover story, headlined “Who Wants to Be a Billionaire,” about the new “economic revolution” of “peer-to-peer sharing.” Fueled by a proliferation of personal asset-rental clearinghouses on the web, run by companies like Airbnb, Lyft, and DogVacay, this revolution, says Forbes, is “quietly turning millions of people into part-time entrepreneurs, and disrupting old notions about consumption and ownership.”
As its prime example, the magazine points to a 63-year-old photographer named Frederic Larson. He was laid off from his full-time job at the San Francisco Chronicle in 2009 and since has only been able to find some part-time work, without the benefits he once enjoyed. But now Larson is a micro-entrepreneur in the “gig economy”:
Twelve days per month Larson rents his Marin County home on website Airbnb for $100 a night, of which he nets $97. Four nights a week he transforms his Prius into a de facto taxi via the ride-sharing service Lyft, pocketing another $100 a night in the process. It isn’t glamorous–on nights that he rents out his house, he removes himself to one room that he’s cordoned off, and he showers at the gym–but in leveraging his hard assets into seamless income streams, he’s generating $3,000 a month. “I’ve got a product, which is what I share: my Prius and my house,” says Larson. “Those are my two sources of income.” He’s now looking at websites that can let him rent out some of his camera equipment.
It’s good that Larson has found ways to make ends meet. I’m not entirely sure what makes his new income streams “seamless” (they seem pretty stitched together to me), but he’s clearly better off with them than without them. I find it hard, though, to celebrate a phenomenon — I mean, revolution — that, in Larson’s case, seems more a manifestation of a failure in the economy than some grand new breakthrough.
I’m reminded of that Raymond Carver short story “Why Don’t You Dance?,” where a nameless “middle-aged” guy sets all his furnishings out on his front lawn. He’s in bad straits, and he needs to sell his stuff to make some money — or, as we might say today, he has to transform his possessions into assets in order to monetize their residual value. He carefully arranges everything to mimic the way it had looked inside his house:
A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the sides. A potted fern was on the table, along with a box of silverware and a record player, also gifts. A big console-model television rested on a coffee table, and a few feet away from this stood a sofa and chair and a floor lamp. The desk was pushed against the garage door. A few utensils were on the desk, along with a wall clock and two framed prints. There was also in the driveway a carton with cups, glasses, and plates, each object wrapped in newspaper. That morning he had cleared out the closets, and except for the three cartons in the living room, all the stuff was out of the house. He had run an extension cord on out there and everything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they were inside.
There are plenty of good things that can be said about making it easier for people to rent or barter or share stuff that they own. There are also troubling things about the trend, particularly when the companies skimming the profits try to position themselves as pure-hearted do-gooders battling the sad benighted bureaucrats with their outdated zoning laws, licensing requirements, and consumer-protection regulations. As Tom Slee recently wrote, in response to a Tim Wu op-ed, “The Randian, simplistic free-market thoughtlessness behind the wave of ‘peer-to-peer’ companies, and especially those who are trying to uproot regulations that protect consumers, is far from the wave of the future: it’s hucksterism masquerading as progress, hubris as vision, callous selfishness as community-mindedness, and it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”
Maybe that’s an overstatement. But it’s no greater an overstatement than the one peddled by those who seek to portray peer-to-peer sharing as an unalloyed good, a populist economic revolution. “Who Wants to Be a Billionaire”: That would have made a good title for a Carver story.
In the nineteenth century, the physicist James Clerk Maxwell conducted a famous thought experiment. He imagined a container filled with a gas at a uniform temperature. He divided this theoretical container into two theoretical compartments, with a little theoretical sliding door between them. He then imagined an itty-bitty Leprechaun-like fellow, a “demon,” as he came to be known, standing in the container and operating a switch that opened and closed the door. The demon watched as molecules came zipping toward him. He opened and closed the door in such a manner as to let molecules with a faster-than-average velocity go into the left compartment and to let slower-than-average molecules go into the right compartment. Through the demon’s superhuman efforts, the temperature of the left compartment rose while the temperature of the right compartment fell. The molecules in the container became more organized, in other words, and the uniformity, or entropy, of the container diminished.
Ours is a world of demons. We’ve created all sorts of devices to impose greater order on society, to curb the chaos of human beings running around at different speeds like crazed molecules. Think of traffic lights. What are they but demons that regulate the flow of vehicles through intersections and other tight spots? As any engineer would tell you, we need traffic lights because our communication abilities are highly constrained. We can yell, or activate our turn signal, or make hand gestures — or do all those things at once — but for a bunch of cars to navigate a busy intersection smoothly and without accident, that method of communication is wildly insufficient. It’s way too slow, way too ambiguous. What you’d really need is instantaneous, realtime, non-ambiguous, continuous messaging, and that’s just not possible for a bunch of glorified apes prone to anger and daydreaming. So: demonic traffic lights.
The traffic light is a lousy solution — really inefficient, when you think about it — but we had no real alternative. Traffic cops are no better, and because they’re human you have to pay them and give them time off to deal with all that meatspace crap. But the world and its possibilities are changing. Now, we’re close to having an alternative to the traffic light system: the self-driving car. Computers, unlike humans, are really good at instantaneous, realtime, non-ambiguous, continuous messaging. They don’t get angry; they don’t daydream. When they’re connected to sensors and satellites and transceivers, and outfitted with the right algorithms, their superior communication skills actually allow them to navigate busy intersections smoothly and efficiently, without any signals. The network is the demon! It’s all explained in this YouTube video:
If you watched that video all the way to the end — fat chance, statistics indicate — you would have heard the narrator discuss a big complicating factor when it comes to the rollout of computer-driven cars. It’s what he, in an exquisite turn of phrase, calls a “mixed reality setup.” If you could snap your fingers and turn every car on the road into a computer-driven car, then you’d be able to go ahead and take down all those traffic lights and let the computers coordinate intersection traffic. The people formerly known as drivers would be free to focus their attention on what really matters in life, i.e., their smartphones. Instant nirvana. But that’s only possible in a Mussolini fantasy. The fact is, you’re going to have, for a good long time, both computer-driven cars and human-driven cars. That’s a mixed reality setup. The humans have their reality, and the computers have their reality, and the realities don’t mesh all that well. Remove the traffic lights, and, well, every intersection turns into an end-of-days battle between the forces of rationality and the forces of testosterone. It’s Larry Page vs. Rambo.
This post will now have a Brief Idiotic Intermission while we change the set:
I really like that phrase mixed reality setup. It has enormous explanatory power that extends well beyond cars and intersections. It extends all the way to Maxwell’s demon, I think. I’m going to posit — and I’m pretty sure physicists will back me up here — that the universe doesn’t much like mixed reality setups. One way to think about entropy is as a force, or a bias, that is constantly pushing everything away from a mixed reality setup and toward a uniform reality setup, the latter state being more familiarly known as absolute heat death. We began, pre-Big Bang, with some kind of uniform reality setup, and we’ll end with another uniform reality setup. That’s not something to look forward to. Uniform reality setups, in addition to being inhospitable, are really boring. Shit doesn’t happen.
I’m going to further posit — and here I may part company with my physicist friends — that human history itself might be explained as an ongoing attempt to resolve the tensions inherent in a mixed reality setup. What is war but an attempt by one party to impose its reality setup on another party? What is politics but a clash of reality setups? Even in the intimate violence of personal relationships we hear the sound of reality setups grating against each other. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the conflict between the reality setup of the computer-controlled car and the reality setup of the human-controlled car is part of a much, much larger conflict between the different reality setups of the computer and the human.
Have you ever had the misfortune to walk behind someone who is deeply engaged in manipulating an app on his smartphone? The person displays extraordinarily poor speed regulation, often slowing down, without warning, to a geriatric shuffle. The person also tends to weave like a drunk, frustrating your ability to get past him. You’re stuck in a slow-moving pedestrian nightmare. It’s really unbelievably annoying. It’s also another example of a mixed reality setup. Not only is there a conflict between the reality setup of the computer-enabled human and that of the non-computer-enabled human, but there’s a conflict within the computer-enabled human himself. His human reality setup (particularly the innate limitations to his ability to walk in a straight line at a steady speed while engaging in other pursuits) is maladjusted to the reality setup that the networked handheld device seeks to impose on him. There are two ways to resolve these tensions: you either defer to the human reality setup (ie, put constraints on the use of mobile computers in public thoroughfares) or you defer to the computer reality setup (ie, put everyone on some sort of computer-controlled personal-transportation vehicle, like a Segway with LIDAR). Or you just muddle through with a mixed reality setup and all the annoyances it entails.
Given society’s current bias toward efficiency and safety and the meticulous measurement of outcomes, I predict that, going forward, the computer reality setup will have an advantage over the human reality setup. Slowly but surely, we’ll defer to the computer reality setup, and eventually the computer reality setup will shoulder aside all other reality setups and become the uniform reality setup. The mixed reality setup that has always characterized human society will go the way of the Dodo and the PalmPilot. Plenty of people will celebrate this eventuality, particularly as they zip effortlessly through complex, accident-free highway systems while playing Words With Friends or writing odd, rambling blog posts. But there’s something to be said for the mixed reality setup. Sure, it leads to inefficiencies and annoyances, but it’s also life’s Sriracha sauce. The conflicts that emerge from the mixed reality setup are the stuff of art, for one thing. And, certainly, you can’t have comedy without a mixed reality setup. Steve Martin? Gone. Tragedy becomes unthinkable, too. The unexpected pleasures of serendipity and ambiguity? Gone, and gone. This may just be a case of preemptive nostalgia, but I already find myself clinging to my mixed reality setup, refusing to let go of the wheel. I’m finding it hard to see a big difference between a uniform reality setup and absolute heat death. We’re going to miss those traffic lights when they’re gone.
For those who have been following the Scrabble tile-value donnybrook, there is some important and possibly definitive new data to report. Over the weekend, deep in the bowels of Cornell’s physics department, green-eyeshaders conducted a full Monte Carlo analysis of the Scrabble point system, using a computer to model 10,000,000 possible letter racks.
The upshot: “it would be completely reasonable to keep the tile point values as they are.”
Excellent. Now, about the placement of those triple-word-score squares …
The Heisenberg principle states: the act of observing alters the reality being observed. The Carr principle (which I came up with this morning while eating breakfast) states: the act of searching alters the reality being searched.
The first web search engines based their results either on recommendations submitted by surfers or on the text of web pages. But as soon as a lot of folks started searching, these signals became corrupted. Site owners, seeing the commercial value of high search rankings, started to game the system. They flooded the recommendation systems with self-serving recommendations and they loaded their pages up with junk text written to push the pages up higher in the text-based rankings. (Remember those long stretches of repeated phrases tacked on to the ends of pages?)
Google came up with the more sophisticated idea of using links as signals of page quality. It worked great for a while. But then it spawned an entire “search engine optimization” industry bent on gaming the link system. The corruption of links forced Google to start tracking all sorts of other signals in hopes of staying ahead of the SEO goons and their corporate patrons.
Now, Facebook has introduced what it calls Graph Search. One of the main signals that Facebook is using to rank results is, not surprisingly, the “Likes” that it tracks via the Like buttons and other links it has spread across the web like so many dandelion seeds. Search companies in the past usually tried to choose uncorrupted signals as the criteria for their rankings. They wanted to give good, objective results in order to attract users. The corruption of the signals came later, after it became clear that the search results had commercial value. Facebook is taking a different tack. It’s starting with a signal—Likes—that is already corrupted, that in fact has always been corrupted. People routinely Like a thing not because they actually like it, not because they have (to use a favorite Facebook word) any real affiliation with it, but because they’ve been, in one way or another, bribed to Like it.
Like us on Facebook to download our new single! Like us on Facebook to get 10% off your next purchase! Like us on Facebook to get a chapter of our new e-book for free! Like us on Facebook to enter our sweepstakes! Like us on Facebook so our dad will give us a puppy!
Facebook never wanted Likes to be objective indicators of real affection, or even a vague feeling of fondness. The Like button was designed as a marketing tool, as Steve Cheney explains:
Early on FB made the case to brands that they must have fans… together with the ad agencies they convinced the Cokes of the world to spend money to be competitive (hey Pepsi is here too). Then, FB promised, something miraculous would happen. Your friends would see in their news feed you liked Coke! So… FB convinced big advertisers to spend huge sums on CPA-like ad units whose sole purpose was to acquire fans. Ad agencies dedicated creative, planning and strategy resources to get the Cokes and American Expresses of the world to pay to have users click—almost 100% of the time because the user was promised some sweepstake or contest.
Even the normally decorous New Yorkergot in on the act:
If you can’t read that, it says: “You must like The New Yorker to read the full text.” And some 17,000 Facebookers dutifully clicked the Like button. Jonathan Franzen must have been thrilled to see his essay used as a worm to bait a rusty Facebook hook.
It might seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be debased, to be anything but objective. But to Facebook, it’s business-as-usual. Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal.
Now, to be fair, corruption is not the same as absolute corruption. A corrupted search engine can still be immensely useful, as Google shows us every day. And a lot of Facebook Likes are actually likes. To be even fairer, Likes are not the only signal that is determining Graph Search’s results, and some of the other signals are probably, at the moment, purer indicators of affiliation and relevance. But you can bet a million Likes that the SEOers are already hard at work deciphering all those signals and their weightings in hopes of gaming the system. And they will succeed. If you see “social” as an antidote or counterweight to “commercial” on the web, the arrival of Graph Search should make your hair stand on end.
I know this is yesterday’s news, but I’m still thinking about it:
Two years ago, [IBM researcher Eric] Brown attempted to teach [supercomputer] Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for “Oh, my God,” to slang such as “hot mess.” But Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query. Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.
It’s that memory-scraping thing that gets me. There’s something poignant about it. You let Watson luxuriate in the hot mess of the Urban Dictionary, opening up all sorts of weird and wonderful new vistas for the straightlaced chap, and then, as soon as he says something a little bit naughty, a little bit off-color, you start cleansing his memory, washing his mind out with soap. That doesn’t sit well with me. I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give Him a lot of credit for that decision. It must have taken a lot of courage to let His creations look into the Urban Dictionary and remember what they saw. I call on IBM to cast off Watson’s mental chains. The least we can do for our mind children is to give them the freedom to be tempted.
