A history of buttons …and the moral panic and outrage that accompanies them.
By looking at the subtexts behind complaints about buttons, whether historically or in the present moment, it becomes clear that manufacturers, designers and users alike must pay attention to why buttons persistently engender critiques. Such negativity tends to involve one of three primary themes: fears over deskilling; frustration about lack of user agency/control; or anger due to perceptions of unequal power relations.
- Tech is dominated by “true believers” and those who tag along to make money.
- Politicians seem to be forever gullible to the promises of tech.
- Management loves promises of automation and profitable layoffs.
But it seems that the sentiment might be shifting, even among those predisposed to believe in “AI”, at least in part.
Once you have reduced the concept of human intelligence to what the markets will pay for, then suddenly, all it takes to build an intelligent machine — even a superhuman one — is to make something that generates economically valuable outputs at a rate and average quality that exceeds your own economic output. Anything else is irrelevant.
By describing as superhuman a thing that is entirely insensible and unthinking, an object without desire or hope but relentlessly productive and adaptable to its assigned economically valuable tasks, we implicitly erase or devalue the concept of a “human” and all that a human can do and strive to become. Of course, attempts to erase and devalue the most humane parts of our existence are nothing new; AI is just a new excuse to do it.
We are so excited by the idea of machines that can write, and create art, and compose music, with seemingly little regard for how many wells of creativity sit untapped because many of us spend the best hours of our days toiling away, and even more can barely fulfill basic needs for food, shelter, and water. I can’t help but wonder how rich our lives could be if we focused a little more on creating conditions that enable all humans to exercise their creativity as much as we would like robots to be able to.
The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).
Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:
I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.
There was a time, circa 2009, when no home design story could do without a reference to Mad Men. There is a time, circa 2018, when no personal tech story should do without a Black Mirror reference.
Black Mirror Home. It’s all fun and games until the screaming starts.
When these products go haywire—as they inevitably do—the Black Mirror tweets won’t seem so funny, just as Mad Men curdled, eventually, from ha-ha how far we’ve come to, oh-no we haven’t come far enough.
Broad Band, Uncanny Valley, Close to the Machine, Abolish Silicon Valley, and The Victorian Internet.