Category Archives: Internet

Jeremy Bailenson on Virtual Reality

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The book is called Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality is, How it Works, and What it Can Do. It was a useful corrective to a lot of my naive impressions of the technology.

A few excerpts:

By January 2015, our lab’s state-of-the-art HMC, the one that cost more than some luxury cars, had been replaced by developer models of consumer HMDs like the Oculus Rift and the Vive.

HMD = head mounted display

if someone sees his avatar get lightly poked with a stick, and also physically feels his chest getting poked synchronously, the avatar is treated as the self. People “transfer’ their consciousness into it, according to dozens of studies.

People in taller avatars negotiate more aggressively, people in attractive avatars speak more socially, and people in older avatars care more about the distant future.

Virtual reality is going to become a must-have technology when you can simply talk and interact with other people in a virtual space in a way that feels utterly, unspectacularly normal.

But we are not close to that point.

One reason we might prefer avatars to video for communication is latency. . .videoconferencing at its essence is designed to send everything the camera sees over the network, regardless of how important the feature is concerning communication.

The neat thing about VR is that you don’t need to send all those pixels over the network over and over again. . .

Tracking the actions of two speakers, transmitting them online, and applying them to the respective avatars all occur seamlessly, and all the participants feel as if they are in the same virtual room

I have little doubt that virtual reality will be an excellent tool for spreading propaganda.

VR is about exploration, and storytellling is about control.

People who make movies are used to having control of where the user is focused. Good VR gives the user the freedom to focus anywhere. Contrast Hollywood movies with video games.

The educational field trip is the elusive unicorn.

Again, the conflict between exploration and control emerges.

by analyzing the body language of teachers and learners while a class was being taught, we could accurately predict the test scores of the students later on.

Very interesting result to think about.

To the extent that it is the teacher’s nonverbal communication that matters, and to the extent that students respond individually to nonverbal communication, students might learn better from avatars:

Virtual reality makes it possible for one teacher to give one-on-one instruction to many students at the same time. . .from a nonverbal standpoint

John Perry Barlow has died

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Here is a brief obituary. Among other things, in 1994 he wrote The Economy of Ideas, an essay admired by, among others, Hal Varian. It begins,

I refer to the problem of digitized property. The enigma is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

I boiled this down to: information wants to be free, but people need to get paid.

Blockchain and property rights

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Phil Gramm and Hernando de Soto write,

Fortunately there is a new technology that could make a global property-rights registration system feasible. Patrick Byrne, an e-commerce pioneer and the CEO of Overstock.com, has committed a professional staff and significant resources to modernizing the collection and maintenance of property-rights records on a global scale. Blockchain is an especially promising technology because of its record-keeping capacity, its ability to provide access to millions of users, and the fact that it can be constantly updated as property ownership changes hands.

I am not persuaded. Information technology can be used to track property rights, but that is not the problem in underdeveloped countries. The problem is to establish property rights in the first place. You can use data to identify a parcel of land. But data alone does not tell you who owns it. Ownership is a social construct.

Consumers’ Surplus and well-being

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Another paper from the AEA session on measuring well-being. The abstract of the paper by Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni says,

In principle, changes in consumer surplus (compensating expenditure) provide a superior measure of changes in consumer well-being than GDP and metrics derived from it, like productivity, especially for digital goods. In practice, consumer surplus has been difficult to measure. We demonstrate the potential of massively scalable online Single Binary Discrete Choice experiments for addressing this issue. These experiments provide a measure of consumers’ willingness to accept compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate the changes in consumer surplus from these goods. Drawing on several hundred thousand online experiments, our results indicate that digital goods have created substantial gains in well-being which are largely missed by conventional measure of GDP and productivity, and suggest that our approach can be scaled up to a broader set of goods and services. Two limitations of our methods are that they are much less precise than changes in GDP and they suffer from hypothetical bias. We show how much of an improvement in precision can be achieved with larger sample sizes and demographic controls and we document the direction and magnitude of hypothetical bias by conducting incentive compatible experiments with a smaller group of subjects. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to existing national income and product accounts.

Resistance Watch

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Charlie Stross writes,

However, Facebook is trying to get eyeballs on ads, as is Twitter, as is Google. To do this, they fine-tune the content they show you to make it more attractive to your eyes—and by ‘attractive’ I do not mean pleasant. We humans have an evolved automatic reflex to pay attention to threats and horrors as well as pleasurable stimuli: consider the way highway traffic always slows to a crawl as it is funnelled past an accident site. The algorithms that determine what to show us when we look at Facebook or Twitter take this bias into account. You might react more strongly to a public hanging in Iran than to a couple kissing: the algorithm knows, and will show you whatever makes you pay attention.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Trigger warning: lots of smug rhetoric presuming that the left is correct on climate change, net neutrality, financial regulation, etc.

Looking ahead, Stross writes,

Your phone will be aware of precisely what you like to look at on its screen. With addiction-seeking deep learning and neural-network generated images, it is in principle possible to feed you an endlessly escallating [sic] payload of arousal-maximizing inputs. It might be Facebook or Twitter messages optimized to produce outrage, or it could be porn generated by AI to appeal to kinks you aren’t even consciously aware of. But either way, the app now owns your central nervous system—and you will be monetized.

One key point on which I agree with Stross is that I am surprised and disappointed that of all of the possible ways to pay for content on the Internet, the advertising model dominates. I understand why micropayments did not take off–Clay Shirky diagnosed the “mental transactions costs” involved. But if the subscription model (what I called “clubs” in my essays from twenty years ago) were dominant, then the interests of consumers and content providers would be better aligned. With the advertising model, the relationship is necessarily adversarial. The content provider needs to grab and hold your attention, whether that works to your benefit or not. Bad consequences follow.

Resistance Watch

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Two from Monday’s WSJ.

1. David Benoit in a front-page story on Apple writes,

A leading activist investor and a pension fund are saying the smartphone maker needs to respond to what some see as a growing public-health crisis of youth phone addiction.

2. Regular columnist Chris Mims writes,

In the face of pressure brought by a growing roster of Facebook investors and former executives, many of whom have publicly stated that Facebook is both psychologically addictive and harmful to democracy, the Facebook founder and chief executive has pledged to “fix” Facebook by doing several things, including “making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.”

For a while, the term “gamify” was big in educational technology. The thinking was (and perhaps still is) that if you turn learning into a game, you can improve educational outcomes.

With social media, we have gamified social interaction. When people share, they look for rewards in the form of positive responses.

I am not a fan of this gamification, in either setting.

2018 as a year of resistance

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Tyler Cowen predicts some themes for 2018.

Many of the biggest events of 2018 will be bound together by a common theme, namely the collision of the virtual internet with the real “flesh and blood” world. This integration is likely to steer our daily lives, our economy, and maybe even politics to an unprecedented degree.

My prediction is that a main theme of 2018 will be resistance. Not the Trump resistance, but resistance against technology that is increasingly perceived as adversarial.

Yesterday, I was woken from a sound sleep by a spam phone call on my cell phone. I would like to see the full weight of the law brought on phone spammers, including the death penalty. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.

More realistically, I would propose that Congress pass a law saying that if the providers of land lines and cell phone service cannot reduce spam phone calls by 90 percent by the end of 2018, then the FCC should levy fines against them in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This stuff has got to stop.

I think that there is a large latent movement for resisting Facebook, Twitter, and addiction to smartphone apps of various kinds. Commenter Handle pointed recently to Paul Graham’s essay.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

That was written in 2010. I think the world has already gotten more addictive than it did in the previous 40 years. Maybe there will be a market solution. Maybe just a widespread consumer rebellion. But the issue is bound to get more and more attention.

As you know, I am bullish on self-driving cars. But look at the pushback I get from people who regard self-driving cars viscerally as a defeat for individual liberty and autonomy. The pushback suggests resistance.

Scott Galloway has become a YouTube star by sounding the alarm about the power of The Four, meaning Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. The popularity of his analysis is another indicator of the sentiment of resistance.

Remember Kevin Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants. He takes the view that the force of technological evolution operates independently of our control. That would suggest that resistance is futile. But I still expect it to be a main theme for the new year.

Social validation media

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Orge Castellano writes,

The only purpose of these apps — thriving in the attention economy market — is to trigger our brains into the instant gratification lifestyle, ultimately exploiting our mind’s weaknesses.

Whether in the form of a like (Facebook), a binary like/dislike format (YouTube), or a heart-shaped system (Instagram, and later Twitter) Silicon Valley has conceived a multitude of forms of innovative ways to gamify our nonstop need for social validation.

…Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations. Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook are built under the ¨variable rewards¨ scheme. According to Tristan Harris former Google design ethicist, the tech industry coerces our innate biases for: “Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-Seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable)”.

I see this as the outcome of a fierce competitive process. When I was growing up, there were the three TV networks, and no remote control. All they needed in order to keep your attention was provide something moderately entertaining. Today, there is competition among web sites, smartphone apps, streaming video, cable TV, and more. It is natural that the evolutionary process has made winners of the media sources that do the best job of hacking your brain.

We have to think of our electronic devices as adversaries to some degree. We need habits and tools that allow us to focus on meaningful, long-term goals in spite of what these adversaries are trying to do to us.

Should algorithms receive patents?

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David Edwards wrote,

the distinction between discovery and invention should be eliminated. This would allow the patent incentive to motivate exploration for previously unknown useful forms of bacteria, plants, animals, materials, molecules, atoms, particles, etc. Previously unknown mathematical formulas and laws of nature should also be patentable. Since patents only give control over the commercial applications of his discovery or invention to the patentee, granting patents on mathematical formulas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena would have no negative side effects on pure science. The economic stimulation of pure science that would be provided by such patents is particularly important today as the traditional economic support of pure science, namely university faculty positions and government grants, are in decline. For the society as a whole, the positive economic effects of such extended intellectual property rights would be quite substantial.

He sent me the article because I wrote about the importance of the intangible economy. However, just because algorithms and other ideas are important does not mean that we should wish to run them through the patent system.

My intuition is that intellectual property should be protected only when the marginal cost to create it is high relative to the ability to profit from it. I think those cases are rare with respect to algorithms. So I am afraid that I disagree with the paper.