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Is this thing on…

Working within such a system each day we become less and less conscious, less in control, more passive in meeting our needs and fulfilling our desires. The system calculates, the system learns, and of course, the system benefits. As this piece in Wired reminds us, ‘The more we use the butler, the more power it will have.’ This includes the power to manipulate its putative master. In the case of our cafe, there were no discernible ulterior motives - they just wanted to keep the line moving. In the case of the big four tech companies, control is very much an issue. So we should always ask: Who or what is taking control of our desires? Who or what do we increasingly rely on for the handling and fulfillment of those desires, and what do we give them in return? Whose script are we living by?

crap futures

If Mattel has such a right or obligation, should recordings be prescreened before they are uploaded to servers for Mom and Dad to hear? In some cases, “That sounds like something you should talk to a grown-up about” may be appropriate, but what if the child already is talking to a grown-up – the one who will receive these recordings later in the week – and that grown up is the person harming the child? Eighty percent of child abuse is perpetrated by the child’s parent(s). If material is not prescreened for suggestion of abuse, we could be putting already vulnerable children in the way of further harm when their abusers learn they are “blabbing.” However, it is unclear whether and how quickly data of this magnitude even could be screened – one possibility might be to “flag” certain key words in conjunction with CPS. (An interesting but tangential issue is how a parent could use a recording that suggests abuse by another individual).

Hello Barbie: Considering Potential Unforeseen Problems with A.I. Dolls and What Children Tell Them | Bioethics.net

As it turns out I am not alone in my stage fright. Last June the marketing research firm Creative Strategies released a short report (though none of the raw data or a comprehensive methods section) that noted 98% of iPhone owners use Siri but only 3% ever talk to it in public. Most Siri usage seems to happen in the car which they surmise is related to hands-free laws, not “a free choice by consumers to embrace this technology.”

Why We are Uncomfortable Talking to Our Computers - Cyborgology

Constructive criticism poses alternative possibilities. It skews toward optimism, or at least toward an idea that future technological societies could be improved. Acknowledging the realities of society and culture, constructive criticism offers readers the tools and framings for thinking about their relationship to technology and their relationship to power. Beyond intellectual arguments, constructive criticism is embodied, practical, and accessible, and it offers frameworks for living with technology.

Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism - Sara Watson - Columbia Journalism Review

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, theater, and the arts have a valuable, well-established role, serving as a helpful bridge between artists and audiences. Criticism of technology, however, is not yet afforded the same glad welcome. Writers who venture beyond the most pedestrian, dreary conceptions of tools and uses to investigate ways in which technical forms are implicated in the basic patterns and problems of our culture are often greeted with the charge that they are merely ‘antitechnology’ or ‘blaming technology.’ All who have recently stepped forward as critics in this realm have been tarred with the same idiot brush, an expression of the desire to stop a much needed dialogue rather than enlarge it. If any readers want to see the the present work as ‘antitechnology,’ make the most of it. That is their topic, not mine.” —Langdon Winner

Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism - Columbia Journalism Review

The fact is that Quality Metrics do not actually measure what is good; they measure what people perceive to be good, at a particular moment. But then again, allowing audiences a say – along with the organisations themselves and their (ideally) wise and discerning peers – is, to many, not just common sense but also morally responsible. And peer review on its own has many problems – “logrolling and backscratching”, in Hewison’s words. As Bridget Rennie points out: “I don’t envy the arts council. Its stated aim is ‘great art for everyone’ – but the ‘everyone’ bit is much easier to assess than the ‘great’ part.”

Orwellian nightmare or fairer system for all? What Quality Metrics will mean for arts funding | Culture | The Guardian

The zeal for disruption grips nonprofit boardrooms as well as corporate ones. Some arts institutions have taken this to its logical conclusion. Anxious about their place in the world, museums that once relied on existing reserves of cultural capital have succumbed, proposing the new mythic entrepreneur as a response to the precarity of the institution. Suddenly, the entrepreneur seems to promise more than the artist.

Silicon Values - Magazine - Art in America

Researchers identified three distinct themes of letting go: 'Dynamic disposal', which involves cutting, tearing or throwing -- this is normally used to express anger; 'Open disposal', which can involve releasing an object and seeing them drift away, such as balloons or an object floating away in a stream -- which can convey sadness or regret; and 'Covert disposal', which involves the slow transformation of an object by dissolving in water or decomposing in earth, which can also express sadness. "The traditional function of digital storage containers has been preserving content," said Dr Sas. "For rituals of letting go we should look at new ways to release content. Containers could display digital possessions such as text or images or sounds one at a time before they appear to drift away, never to be found or seen again. "We could also explore ways to encourage destruction and transformation of digital possessions through shaking, breaking or throwing so that the fragmentation of the content can be seen but take longer to disappear than by pressing delete." Another idea put forward by the computer scientists is to deliberately design fragile storage devices made from self-dissolving or biodegradable electronics, rather than the robust storage units currently available. Natural materials, like stone, could be augmented as containers for symbolic digital possessions, enabling a person to dispose of the container and emotionally disinvest the remaining possessions.

Designing better ways to let go of digital memories than 'delete' -- ScienceDaily

algopop

Algo beauty contest Beauty.AI results in preference for white skin

An online beauty contest that simply required candidates to submit a portrait photo to be processed by machine-learning algorithms, resulted in a selection of 44 winners out of 600,000 entrants from all over the world, stirring controversy as only one has dark skin.

Beauty.AI researchers have responded by suggesting the bias is caused by a lack of minorities represented in the training data. “When you’re training an algorithm to recognize certain patterns … you might not have enough data, or the data might be biased.”… “and for some population groups the data sets are lacking an adequate number of samples to be able to train the deep neural networks.”

The problems of Beauty.AI could be argued to stem from the outset, as the promo video for the contest demonstrates, from the start there is a lack of criticality and an attempt to mathematically measure and quantify some very questionable ideals of beauty. The video narrates:

[the algorithms] will evaluate the main features including symmetry, skin color, wrinkles, and many other parameters affecting our perception of your beauty, and rank you within your age group, race and gender. Be the first human to win the beauty contest judged by robots.

iamdanw

The Climate of Opinion | booktwo.org:

The “pole of inaccessibility” is defined as a point on the Earth’s surface which is harder to reach by some metric; the Northen pole of inaccessibility, for example, is a point on the Arctic pack ice calculated to be furthest from any solid landmass. Wayfinding, by contrast, calculates a pole of possibility: the point in Europe currently reported to be expressing the best (or least worst) sentiments towards refugees and migrants.

Onto the floor of the National Museum is projected a compass rose, the arrow of which points, constantly, towards this pole.

If social media promise a kind of unilateral access to sociality, nervousness belies that promise. Social media propose an ideal of sociality as something to be achieved, an end goal that can be completed. Nervousness reminds us that the work of being social is never complete. But at the same time, that nervousness is also the means by which we actually begin to do the work of being together across and through these media. It marks the work of entanglement.

Nervous? We Should Be — Real Life

A great response to the ultimate anti-object, the Camden bench, by 2016 Goldsmiths design students. via drcab1e

The relevance of this view of technology here is that it helps to explain why, as Peter W. Singer described in his Wired for War, explosive ordinance detonation (EOD) teams in Iraq and Afghanistan do not relate to their remote-control bomb-disposal robots as tools, but as comrades. As Singer writes: "Unmanned systems are supposed to lower the risks for humans. But as soldiers bond with their machines, they begin to worry about them. Just as a human team would 'leave no man behind', for instance, the same sometimes goes for their robot buddies. When one robot was knocked out of action in Iraq, an EOD soldier ran fifty meters, all the while being shot at by an enemy machine gun, to 'rescue it'." EOD robots were designed to function, to use Ihde's terminology, through "embodiment relations," as robotic extensions of a soldier's arm, and through "hermeneutic relations," as robotic extensions of a soldier's interpretive abilities. What Singer details instead are stories of EOD teams giving nicknames, ranks, and even commendations to their robots.

Death by Robot: The Ethics of Turning Assistive Technologies into Assassins – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

(via Color film was built for white people. Here's what it did to dark skin. - YouTube)

(via The Babypod: Intravaginal Hardware for the Pregnant Body | Rhizome)

‘In fact, once I pushed it inside my vagina, I heard nothing at all. I could only see that my phone was playing music and that I had an electric cord dangling from my crotch. I played random bits of indie music and with no specific intention an album of Shaker spirituals. I called my older daughter over to choose a song, and she selected “It’s a Hard Knock Life,” from the soundtrack to Annie, and Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” The fetus occasionally squirmed during our playlist but not more than usual. It evidenced no preference for any specific song or style of music, and it failed to register the end of our set. (I tugged the cord; the speaker flopped out.)’

In either case Game of Drones raises some challenging questions about design fiction in research. What role, if any, should fictional papers play in HCI’s design discourse? Is it unethical to submit works of fiction to academic venues without clearly sign-posting their fictional nature? If design fictions, in the form of fictional papers, are intended to stimulate discussion, where and how can that discussion happen, and who should take part in it?

Pushing the limits of design fiction: the case for fictional research papers - Joseph Lindley & Paul Coulton

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