2047: Artificial Infatuation (Part II)
In a future absent of the uncertainty that drives our present society, how do we know where our humanity ends and data begins?
Continued from Part 1: Artificial Infatuation
She was old enough, just barely, to remember a time when mobile and connected devices existed separate from and external to the body. When phones had to be charged, plugged into electrical wall sockets. The vision remained, steeped in her memory, now somewhere in the shallows. Traveling through airports as a toddler with her family was always slightly exhilarating. Would the phone run out of battery before they’d be able to board the plane with their mobile passes? Had her parents remembered to bring their portable chargers or would they have to hunt for a wall outlet at the airport? Did those even exist anymore? She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen one, a wall outlet, during her travels. Her grandmother would want to intersect with them via video-call, to see their faces before they departed, to wish them safe travels. Wires would intertwine, cables would bend. “The network connection is weak here, Ma. We’ll call you once we land.”
The graft had drastically diminished the need to be subjected to the trauma of slugging around with multiple devices and portable chargers and living with the constant fear of finding one’s self in an “area with bad reception,” or having one’s battery die en route. These days, as long as she maintained her Daily Activity Quota (DAQ), the cells remained charged. And if there were ever a day where her DAQ ran too low for comfort she could always access supplemental energy to carry her over; after all she lived along the Silicon Coast, her data was raw and unprocessed and in demand, and therefore could be sold at a premium.
This seldom happened however. Her work schedule with HERD afforded her the time and energy to devote a substantial part of her day to staying mentally stimulated and physically fit. Ample time for socializing and knowledge-sharing was built into her schedule to ensure that her satisfaction rating rarely dipped below a comfortable threshold. The Intelligence made sure of this. In this advanced age of networked technology, the vision of guiltless and limitless abundance has been achieved, it seems, she contemplated this, still in a slight trance, her fingers still tracing the silhouette of the graft mark on her wrist.
8:01 AM “Hello? Hellooo?” That piercing sunlight. Her fogginess lifted, and she suddenly became acutely aware of its immense heat. Her body, once again sinking into the wall of pillows behind her.
“Hello? Are you there?” Her mother’s voice suddenly came into her conscious frame.
“Ma? How come you’re calling at such a late hour? Isn’t it well past nine o’clock there?”
“You called me.”
“Oh…sorry.”
She skimmed across the streaming display in her line of sight, pulling up her mother’s Outline. That’s why. Their satisfaction score was creeping into the blues and greens, as opposed to the healthier warmer tones where they typically floated. Her most recent gnawing preoccupation had left her feeling blanketed in a mental smokiness. With such low visibility she kept overriding any intersection opportunities the graft initiated to contact her mother in an effort to remedy their rating.
Having sensed that she was awake this Saturday morning, the graft must have automated a call to her mother.
“Since I have you here now, how are you? I haven’t heard from you in weeks.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve been…busy.” Damn. She winced, “busy” was a dead give-away. She was never busy. She was only ever occupied enough. Enough to be healthy. Enough to be satisfied. Enough to be productive, and effective.
“You’ve not been busy. You’ve been ignoring us. Why? Do we need to come visit you? Are you eating enough? Sleeping enough?” These were irrelevant questions, of course. Stale remnants from an earlier time when Data didn’t make the world go round, when money or oil did. When people did the best they could, educatedly-guessing their way through life. Or worse, “going with their gut.”
“Ma, how did you know that Papa would be a compatible match? Your marriage wasn’t arranged, right?”
She could hear her mother’s sweet laugh. Even in her old age, it was syrupy smooth and soulful. They didn’t typically discuss things of this nature. It just wasn’t done. She was moving well beyond the bounds of their comfort zone, even beyond topics which cautiously crept along the periphery, like her (modest) consumption of alcoholic beverages.
“You can’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your Papa and I, we just crossed paths enough times. Our lives sometimes mirrored one another, at some points we diverged, and at times our paths intersected. It was this unintentionally choreographed cadence. And at some point, that cadence became frequent enough that we found ourselves walking in parallel. Connected. Alone, but also together.”
Her mother had a tendency to speak like this, in metaphor, or as if in song; her language had a repetitive rhythm. She got her love of storytelling from her mother, the ability to artfully articulate the efficiencies of the world. And typically she could decode her mother’s expression. But this morning…
“What do you mean, Ma?”
“Your generation seems to do just the opposite. Connected, and seemingly together, but truly alone. You leave each other these shreds of your selves, digital crumbs. How is that enough? You rely on the Intelligence, instead of your conscience.”
“But my life is good. I’m satisfied.”
“Satisfied, sure. But when was the last time you told me you were happy, rani?” Rani — a common term of endearment, literally meaning “queen.” Her mother deliberately used this word when she was saying something which she felt to be harsh but insightful, tough love. It made the delivery seem softer.
Her mother continued, “No one ever talks about happiness anymore. You hear “satisfaction,” but pure happiness, fulfillment…That feeling when you connect with another human being, and you see the lightness in them, and it makes you feel human. It reminds you that you exist, in this world, and that we are tactile beings. You kids have lost this sensitivity.”
She let out an exasperated sigh. Not because what her mother was saying wasn’t compelling, or insightful. It was.
Propped up in bed, her head leaning back, eyes closed, shoulders slumped as if resigning to the weight of a revelation. By now she was almost certain that their paths - his and hers - would never converge, or intersect, or mirror each other. They would never run in parallel. Their algorithms weren’t in sync. Orbiting around in the digital abyss, they would forever amble in an asymptotic state — almost but not quite.
“Did you hear what I said? Are you still there?”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Maybe, you should get out of bed. Go for a walk, outside. You’ll feel better.” Her mother could no doubt sense that her attention was elsewhere.
“Ok, ma. I’ll talk to you later. Sorry for being a bit distracted this morning.”
“Take care of yourself, rani.”
Her eyelids slowly lifted, welcoming in the daylight now.
Finally, she emerged from under the covers. She threw on a pair of old ripped jeans (her mother’s from her youth), the kind typically reserved for lounging about at home, but this morning it was the first thing she saw, so why not? She found a clean gray shirt, wrinkled, slightly misshapen, and grossly over-sized but it would do the trick. Plaiting her long black hair, she let its weight fall off on one shoulder. She slipped into a pair of white platformed flats and headed outside.
Walking forward, an unfamiliar resistance hit the pavement and melted away with every step against the weathered gray-blue mosaic that caught the sun, the shadows and everything else she left behind, the everyday din of a thousand hurried steps. Dissonance dissolved. This new frequency resonated so vibrantly. Wasn’t this the point of the graft in the first place? To have the freedom to look up, and to look out?
Step after step. She was now aware of her own unique cadence, her sense of scale in relation to the buildings that had been planted erect along her path, the feeling of gravity. The presence of her being. This resistance, it made her feel like she was breathing with braided veins. Step after conscious step.
She paused; catching her reflection in the cool gray surface now obstructing her path.
10:17AM She swiped her graft across the sensor in front of her, and then hesitantly stepped backwards…and waited. An odd sensation: waiting. She was feeling anxiously hopeful? Her sense of hope began to slowly disintegrate however, with each passing second, leaving behind only anxiety. Time spent waiting is time wasted. I should…And then, with a swift start that startled her, the cool gray surface in front of her began to disappear into the adjacent wall to reveal a male figure.
He stood there now, one foot behind the threshold, one foot in front of it, pointing towards her. Planted there in sheepish silence, was that bewilderment painted across his face or was it intrigue? He was just as she had recalled from their earlier intersections but there was something unfamiliar about him, about his physical being. She suppressed the immense urge to pull up his Outline, opting reluctantly to focus on his silhouette in front of her instead. Look up. Her lips began to break into an awkward (but warm) smile now.
Deep breath.
“Can we go for a walk?”
|END
Author’s Note:
When artificial intelligence no longer seems artificial, how do we know where our humanity ends and Data begins? At this inflection point, what does it look like at the human scale, to re-learn how to navigate the world through our innate human conscience; without completely rejecting the benefits of technological advancement? What elements of our interactions with our fellow human beings will we then choose to prioritize?
I often either write about what I know, or I write in pursuit of deeper understanding — to dig into unfamiliar territory. This piece was an exercise in both. It began in conversation with friends, steeped in fact and fiction-based narratives from articles and podcasts and films. Each account seemed polarizing. A cautionary tale of how technology will destroy human-kind as we know it, or a Jetsonian vision of a sleek and sexy and pleasant future. In the words of Brian Eno, at one end of the spectrum we seek to “mechanicalize something idiosyncratic” while the other asks that we “humanize something free of error.”
I am interested in the tension between these two states, the in-between. My hope for the future is that as we become more reliant on intelligent, connected, and autonomous systems, that we leave room for the spontaneity that makes us human. This piece was meant to take us just to the edge and then bring us back again.
Designer’s Note
It is always a challenge as a designer when looking into the future and interpolating trends — and the direction of social media and how we integrate with each other when our current era of technology is displaced is about the most nebulous task one can take on. My job as designer was to look at this technology and find a corresponding visual style that resonated with the Author’s intent and the emotional journey of her character.
In developing the look of the visuals for Artificial Infatuation the author specifically asked for something different. Something with a nod to the vintage look of the official government pamphlets of the 1950s — and I went down the rabbit hole of vintage graphic design, album art, and risographs. Finding in the overlapping and misaligned colors not only a strong visual for the “synching” problem our hero faces, but a fun way to incorporate the color theory associated with human emotions.
Spinning off of this research, we took a look at branding. My intention was to incorporate some advertisement or element into the visuals that included the mark associated with this pivotal technology. Exploration began with simple geometric patterns with circles as the base element that might situate nicely on the wrist and indicate a connection (like rotating pieces fitting together) and which implied a traditional graft or patch applied topically. I explored cellular patterns and implied nervous system integration and distilled that into a continuous line that implied the flow of a vein or nerve without being too literal and boring.
The graft implant was designed specifically to imply a strong biological connection with the user that was unique and benign. Any time you design an object that is subcutaneous you probably will not be able to avoid an initial balk- but in making sure the design was rounded and a little playful I hoped to make it as palatable as possible. Radha’s story called for a design that looked almost like a birthmark or tattoo which somewhat resembled a goat or animal, and I loved the idea that the scar was like a cloud in which any person might see a different object. I also wanted to explore the idea that the Graft is formed organically based on the user’s unique anatomy, and thus creates a unique pattern much like a finger print — no two Grafts would be the same.
The UX design for the Graft technology was a blast to explore. Integral to Radha’s story was this brand new way of interacting and viewing information about yourself and others — and we wanted to make sure that the Intelligence didn’t become a bothersome gimmick, but rather a realistic integration with future life. I explored a few ideas for a “Siri”-like representation of the Intelligence, with fragmented blocks, data dots, and continuous sine-waves overlapping. But the UX for the user’s own data was supreme.
I looked at EEG brainwave graphs and explored the use of dot patterns to indicate the user’s mood and emotional synchronization. I’ve had this image of a “mandala” in my head, where these concentric rings, almost like components in a lock, spin and fit together, and when they complete the tiers this indicates synchronization or complete compatibility. So this element, combined with a personal “timeline” for the satisfaction threshold seemed to be a logical base screen to display in the user’s Augmented Reality. In our story, these motifs come in based on our hero’s mood and needs.
But how does one interact with something that isn’t physical? Something that doesn’t even have a screen to touch? We looked at the Soli technology — and personally, I thought about the powered suits in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi works, which were operated with subtle gestures of the body. We focused on the hands — with “fidgeting” behaviors translated into manipulations of the interface. Scrolling through time to really see where last week you felt your worst, and what helped you stabilize your “satisfaction threshold” seemed like a realistic user interaction. I also liked the idea that we keep interactions near to the Graft implant itself — so we emphasize the technology and keep interaction in this very delicate and vulnerable spot, where Radha has purposefully focused — making the story seem all the more intimate.
