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A “Senseable” World
Apologies all, for the long hiatus. This has happened to me before — the demands of my business pull me away from my blogging. But the demands were especially heavy last year, and the time I spent on the business these last few months will have some lasting benefit. Hope I can blog more in 2010. But in the meantime, I can share with you on this first day of the year where I think things are going. Not just in my business, but in the corporate communications industry in general. Things are really beginning to get interesting.
“Gaydar” Experiment Raises Eyebrows
As the article concludes, there are a number of public policy issues worth pondering here — and ponder them we will. But there are other ways that a technology company using such data can misstep: issuing “false positives.” About a dozen years ago, at a time when I was employed as a theater producer in the San Francisco Bay Area, I became a big customer of dramatic literature on Amazon. Soon after my first order, I began getting recommendations for books on topics like, oh, gay life in San Francisco. I was not in the least offended, but I was surprised to see that the mighty and famous Amazon recommendation engine was actually quite crude (at least back then). When you automate things like gaydar — or any idea for identifying people based on their explicit or implicit behavior — you not only expose yourself to public policy concerns but also run the risk of looking like a stooge. My Amazon experience was the e-commerce equivalent of the Turing Test — the idea that artificial intelligence will reach a milestone when a machine can “pass” for a human being. The false positive in 1997 simply reminded me that Amazon customer service was driven by machines, not human beings. Not a good thing for your customers to feel when you are attempting to persuade them to stop buying from people. Of course, Amazon has spent the past ten years perfecting its engine. But not without great care and expense.
The Unbundling of “Augmented Reality” — Behold the Bionic Eye
Critics of these various unbundlings claim that consumers will never allow themselves to be encumbered by new tech appendanges. But that’s what makes the contact lens so intriguing. There are many of us who would never wear glasses (too dorky). And there are many of us who would never wear contacts (too fussy). And I’d bet that there are even more of us who would never walk down the street pointing phones at people, places, and things (way too dorky). But with the options for “better vision” ever increasing, AR is beginning to look like it’s really going to happen. We’ve been dealing with the issues of vanity, usaability and technology-prosthetics for many generations. And we have learned a great deal. I trust that AR technologists and designers will get things right.
UK Apologizes for Persecuting Gay Scientist
U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s formally apologized today for the country’s “appalling” treatment of WWII codebreaker and AI pioneer Alan Turning, who was prosecuted for gross indecency and sentenced to chemical castration in 1952. Two years later, Turing took his own life. Today’s announcement came following a petition that collected thousand of signatures from citizens calling for a posthumous apology.
Nokia’s Future Product “Mix”?
For the uninitiated, augmented reality is a set of technologies that enable businesses to overlay data on top of a consumer’s view (say, over a mobile phone). The technologies have been embraced by an army of marketers and developers, mostly outside of the U.S. But with recent news that some U.S. mobile phones can now run augmented-reality applications, U.S. consumers can expect to hear a lot more about the category over the next few months. And what is Nokia’s vision? It’s a world turned on by augmented reality that doesn’t necessarily depend on the phone. That’s a rather evolved view for a phone manufacturer. But perhaps Nokia’s world, too, has become augmented.
What Does it Mean to be “Real-Time”?
The Twitter “database of intentions” is too vast, too unwieldy, for human hands, and already a number of useful, practical tools have emerged for enabling human beings to navigate that database. The problem is that it’s too easy to rely on machines to do the work of humans. We can expect businesses to misstep here, and do the real-time marketing equivalent of sending form letters. We can expect others to use these tools in a more intelligent way, offloading work that’s better handled by machines, and freeing up people to do what they do best. For in the final analysis, what it takes to be real-time is both the philosophical and practical commitment to be real … and to do this in the face of one of the most exciting new opportunities in the history of business (it’s bigger than marketing). As always, the temptation to do things the easy way will be extreme. Resist the temptation.
How I Said No to Drugs, And Yes to Technology
Leaving the cozy comforts of the doctor’s office — with all its benign-yet-medieval contraptions — I realized that the prescription was an A through Z (or alpha through omega) of medical comforts. I wasn’t looking forward to it. For one thing, I wasn’t a drug person. Like many people of my generation, I had sampled recreational drugs — but less as a lifestyle choice, and more as a rite of passage to growing up. With the possible exception of alcohol, my body has never taken well to drugs. I suffered so much of my childhood with an unbelievably long hay-fever season — beginning early Spring, ending late Fall — because I hated the loopy feeling induced by antihistamines, and later, when the new class of hay-fever drugs came along, the jumpy mania of pseudoephedrine. The problem I had with drugs was as much physical as it was psychological. With drugs, I really didn’t feel like myself. Yes, it’s hard being me – there are easier jobs, I am sure — but I prefer it to the alternatives.
My Life as an Amphibian — Part II: The Colonel of Silicon Valley
The doctor I visited in the summer of 1999 — in a non-descript medical-professional strip mall in Belmont, California — was of the latter variety. He struggled through elementary school, middle school, high school, and medical school, never understanding why he had to work so much harder than everyone else around him. He didn’t work harder on the things that most people found difficult — he was great at math, sciences, and other things that require a facility for abstraction. It was the little things — or littler things — that made life so difficult for him. Like showing up to class on time. Like remembering people’s names. Like putting on his shoes — from the same pair — in the morning. He became a famous ADD doctor — highly recommended by someone close to me and my wife — and a legend in Silicon Valley, though few of his patients will reveal his name. Not because it would expose the patients as ADD people, but because revealing would be rude. The doctor was a gentleman, the furthest thing from rude. He spoke in a hard-to-exactly-place Southern accent, appeared to wear the same suit every time you visited, sported a well-groomed beard, clean, snow-white, cut with a flair. On the right day, he looked just like Colonel Sanders. I will respect the doctor’s anonymity — kinda — and call him the Colonel. I owe him that respect. I may have been his last patient.
Weekly Wrap: 8/3-7/2009: Matter Over Mind
I can’t help but feel like what I experienced this week — my second week writing this blog — might have been a microcosm of two larger-but-related trends: man reaching its limits, machines being deployed to do more. But a more likely explanation is that I have carefully chosen to focus on fresh information that conveniently fits my new focus of interest. But even if that were true, I believe that the mounting evidence that people are pushing themselves to their physical, intellectual and emotional limits (did I mention all the new drugs we are taking?) compels us to look closely at the narrowing interface between man and machine. That’s a big focus for this blog, and in my travels this week I realized just how important it has become. The machine is becoming more like man — everyone gets that. But the surprise for so many of us at the beginning of this century is how man is becoming more like machine. As I suggested in my Thursday rant about the pleasures of disconnecting, it’s important to distinguish between the two phenomena. For as long as we are more like man and less like machine, we will need to take better care of the body that houses us. And for now, that body does have limits.
Who Will Speak Up About “Distracted Driving?”
This is the post-2.0 era, where so many issues cannot or will not wait for a brand to the lead the conversation. But from my perspective — the perspective of a communications consultant who often advises companies on both their opportunities and duties in public affairs — it really doesn’t matter who speaks up first. We are all guilty parties to this affair. Who among us has never picked up a phone behind the wheel and dialed or texted or emailed or taken a photo, all the while knowing that it’s reckless — perhaps criminal — to do so when operating a one-plus ton piece of machinery on wheels? Like drunk driving, distracted driving may have to claim more lives before we all care enough to take serious action. Hope we will not have to wait long this time around. But device addiction, like many other post-2.0 consumer behavior, is rooted in a great need to stay connected, in a world that demands we stay connected. This is not going to be easy.
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