My latest essay is on the decline of the Internet.
In 1993, I did not picture people having their online experience being “fed” to them by large corporations using mysterious algorithms. Instead, I envisioned individuals in control, creating and exploring on their own.
My theories of its decline include a snobbish view that the masses made it worse. Feel free to give me pushback after you read the whole thing.
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By January 2015, our lab’s state-of-the-art HMC, the one that cost more than some luxury cars, had been replaced by developer models of consumer HMDs like the Oculus Rift and the Vive.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
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.
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.
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.
Any network of self-driving cars would, by definition, necessitate total and unceasing tracking of their occupants. . . The car, far from serving as a liberator, would become a telescreen on wheels — an FBI-approved bug, to be slipped beneath the chassis in plain sight of the surveilled.