As AI Moves In, Let’s Not Forget Why We Like People

Maybe we like having a produce guy after all.

Given the news around AI’s impact on the tech industry, search, and jobs in general, I thought it made sense to re-up a piece I wrote back in 2018, triggered at the time by the launch of Amazon Go (which, not surprisingly, did not exactly go as Amazon might have wished). I re-read it recently and thought it held up pretty well (and I’ve been on the road for over a week, so fresh pieces will have to wait for a few more days!). 

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The Recount Turns Two 

Two years ago The Recount moved out of beta with our first daily product. A short summary of national news, The Daily Recount was designed to cut through the bullshit endemic to mainstream media. As we grew, The Recount cultivated an incisive voice that never wastes time, rejects tired tropes, and focuses on the core values of journalism: Identifying the truth, holding powerful interests to account, and reflecting the world as it is today, not the way it used to be. 

Twelve months later, that voice had found a huge audience on Twitter – which in 2020 was pretty much the white-hot center of the political narrative we were covering. In my post summarizing that first year, I laid out what we’d learned, and how the audience who had gathered around our work was responding. And I indulged in a bit of boasting: “Since launch one year ago,” I crowed, “our work has been viewed more than half a billion times.”

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Is Humanity Obsolete?

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Upon finishing Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus, I found an unwelcome kink in my otherwise comfortably adjusted frame of reference. It brought with it the slight nausea of a hangover, a lingering whiff of jet exhaust from a hard night, possibly involving rough psychedelics.

I’m usually content with my (admittedly incomplete) understanding of the role humanity plays in the universe, and in particular, with the role that technology plays as that narrative builds. And lately that technology story is getting pretty damn interesting — I’d argue that our society’s creation of and reaction to digital technologies is pretty much the most important narrative in the world at present.

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else 12.2: “Anchoring digital existence in the physical world”

This week we get creative with 3D self-portraits, drones deliver in 30 minutes or less, we play Moneyball with job performance, 23andMe’s FDA troubles point to emerging data literacy problems, and language artifacts emerge. Because internet.

As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS. And tweet us links!

Look at This Lady’s Amazing 3-D Printed Selfie – Wired
Artists take up 3D printing as the latest medium for self portraiture. The artist’s statement resonates with some of the themes we are exploring in the book: “I wanted to explore our transition between both the material and immaterial world and the traces we leave…With 3-D printers, we are no-longer limited by our screens, the digital world begins to merge and integrate itself into physical existence.”

Lorna Barnshaw’s 3D printed self-portrait
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else 9.16: Start Making Sense

This week, we’re excited about what the new M7 sensors mean for iPhone activity tracking, we’re thinking about how to rebuild trust in the internet and tech companies post-Snowden, and we’re listening to some music that plays with the boundaries between analog and digital. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis, the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed, either as an email newsletter or through RSS.

Apple’s M7 Motion Sensing Coprocessor Is The Wizard Behind The Curtain For The iPhone 5s – TechCrunch
One of the most interesting new features of the iPhone 5S is the M7 sensors that bring fitness tracking to the devices we already carry in our pockets, making it easier for us to all become quantified selves without having to remember to wear our Fitbits or Jawbones.

M7 motion coprocessor will make tracking walking, running, or even driving more efficient.

This bracelet could replace your passwords, your car keys, and even your fingerprints – The Verge
Using ECG as a unique biomarker, the Nymi might introduce new ways of using our physical attributes as digital identifiers.

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Is US Culture Veering Toward The Dark and Deadpan?

NSA_Logo_Prism_Floor_640_1_s640x427(image) According to Wikipedia, “deadpan” is a uniquely American neologism less than a century old. The term arose from the slang term “pan,” for face: “Keep a dead pan,” a gangster told an associate in 1934’s The Gay Bride. In other words, don’t show your cards.

“Deadpan humor,” of course, is playing a joke straight, pretending you’re unaware of the punchline. It’s often related to “dark” or “black” humor, which makes light of otherwise serious situations, often with a cynical or satirical tone.

Why am I on about this now? Because I think as a society we’re rapidly shifting into a dark, deadpan culture, driven almost entirely by revelations around the NSA’s PRISM and related programs. We know we can’t pretend we’re not being monitored – so we resort to deadpan humor to handle that new reality.

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The Power of Being There

It’s been building for weeks – Friday marks the first day of the fifth annual Outside Lands festival here in San Francisco. Despite the demands of work and family, I try to get to as many festivals as I can – so far, I’ve managed to see Bonnaroo a few times, Coachella once (I’ll be back!), Austin City Limits, and a few others. Outside Lands is local to San Francisco and therefore much easier to attend – this will be my third. Compared to your average festival goer (who tends to be single and about half my age) I’m a punter, but I’ll take it.

Why do I go? In two words, serendipity and joy. When you gather with tens of thousands of like minded, smiling people, unexpected connections are made, and bouts of pure happiness break out all over the place. Who wouldn’t want to soak in some of that?

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