Future Imperfect #23: What does it mean to be human?
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been looking at the psychological and societal impact of perfect data collection, the rising popularity of dry farming in California, how digital devices hurt our ability to think abstractly, and the myriad ways autonomous vehicles will change our daily commute.
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What does it mean to be human?
As our brains are more and more supplemented by our devices (and the cloud services supporting them), are we as a species becoming less fallible? This isn’t necessarily a good thing—for instance, here is an article in defense of forgiveness and forgetfulness (and getting lost once in a while).
Writers have warned us about this world, from Dickens in Hard Times to the bleak authoritarian surveillance regime of George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In Hard Times, facts are everything and the world of technology is now creating that world. It is a world where human frailty is being progressively lost — while we ourselves are unable to be get lost because of our satnavs, and unable to forget because of the mass of data stored on us by our friends in social media and the companies that harvest those memories. We are not only being stripped of our frailty; this new world of reason turns us into data and keeps tabs on us all of the time to ensure we behave in a way that does not cause concern.
It is a process in which we also lose one of the central themes of our existence. Being lost is an idea that has been a stock in trade of books and films since the beginning of the written word. Taken to its logical extreme, we will never ever be lost again, not even to death.
Of course, constant surveillance also comes into play—a practice evolving into something akin to Minority Report. Of course in such a world, we’d have to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect prediction system:
Now the police in the UK and the US are developing systems that will use criminal profiles to find people who are likely to become criminals.
“The problem is that if we do that then we don’t know for sure whether or not a person would actually have committed the crime because every prediction based on big data is probabilistic, it’s based on probabilities,” Mayer-Schoenberger continues.
“Even if there is a 90 per cent chance that I would commit a murder in the next 48 hours, in one out of ten cases I would be sent to prison even though I might not have committed that murder and that I would have put away the knife and walked away from the crime scene.
“There would be a terrible temptation to become involved in a system of predictive social control, a system of social control which slaughters human volition at the altar of collective fear.”
Save the water for Disneyland
Watering crops? That’s so last century. Dry farming may be the path forward for California’s drought-stricken farms.
There’s something different about Will Bucklin’s grape vines. At first it’s hard to notice, but a drive through northern California’s Sonoma Valley, past waves of green, manicured vineyards, makes it clear. The black ribbon of PVC irrigation pipe that typically threads the vines is curiously absent here — because Will doesn’t water his crops.
Bucklin’s Old Hill Ranch, purchased by his stepfather Otto Teller in 1980, claims to be the oldest-rooted vineyard in the area. Teller fell in love with the vineyard because it was one of the few that still “dry-farmed”. Dry farming is a method that bypasses artificial irrigation, relying instead on seasonal rainfall and working the soil in such a way that it holds on to water for the drier months.
Is it possible to grow healthy grapes without watering them? Actually, if conditions are right, he says, it’s possible to grow even better ones. Less water means smaller, more intensely flavoured grapes with a higher skin-to-fruit ratio. Other crops — tomatoes, potatoes, squash, corn, apples, even marijuana — can be dry-farmed too, with similarly intensified results.
Although the article itself admits that few dry farmers see this practice as a panacea for the drought, no one can deny that irrigation represents the single largest use of water in California (80 percent of human water use). Put a dent in that, and the state may find itself able to reduce its restrictions on recreational water use.
Put down the phone
According to a recent study at Dartmouth University, using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly.
Participants were asked to read a short story by author David Sedaris on either a physical printout (non-digital) or in a PDF on a PC laptop (digital), and were then asked to take a pop-quiz, paper-and-pencil comprehension test. For the abstract questions, on average, participants using the non-digital platform scored higher on inference questions with 66 percent correct, as compared to those using the digital platform, who had 48 percent correct. On the concrete questions, participants using the digital platform scored better with 73 percent correct, as compared to those using the non-digital platform, who had 58 percent correct.
“Compared to the widespread acceptance of digital devices, as evidenced by millions of apps, ubiquitous smartphones, and the distribution of iPads in schools, surprisingly few studies exist about how digital tools affect our understanding — our cognition. Knowing the affordances of digital technologies can help us design better software,” said Mary Flanagan. “Sometimes, it is beneficial to foster abstract thinking, and as we know more, we can design to overcome the tendencies — or deficits –inherent in digital devices,” added Flanagan.
This has major implications for how organizations choose to convey information. Now I’m not saying that all works of long-form journalism need to immediately be published in print-only—however, it does beg the question whether long-form on mobile is effective at communicating the underlying themes of the work (and not just whether people are spending time with it or not).
Reimagining the commute
Fully autonomous vehicles mean more than a chance to kick back in the front seat. They’re not just going to radically change not just our media habits in cars (so long radio), they’re going to drastically change our approach to travel and city design:
You will be able to request a self-driving car with a tap on your phone and it will arrive in a few minutes. You don’t have to clean, maintain or repair your car anymore, these services will take care of all the boring tasks. Cities will be the big winners of the car revolution. With electric vehicles, air and noise pollution will disappear. We won’t have to park the cars all day long, so we get a lot of place back. Imagine if we could plant a tree in every parking place in the city.
And what will we do while the car takes us to our destination? You can watch the new episode of your favourite TV show, visit sights with the built-in guide or just darken the windows and enjoy the relax mode. Texting is not a problem anymore of course. Good news for workaholics too: you will have more time to check your emails or prepare those presentations.
I talked about this way back when, but for all the new subscribers, check out this article from Dezeen. The auto, airline, and hospitality industries all are on the brink of significant shifts:
Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand.
Business travelers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route instead of checking into city-centre hotels, he said.
“In the future you will not need a business hotel or a domestic flight,” Schuwirth told Dezeen. “We can disrupt the entire business of domestic flights.”
He added: “I think that vision is probably 20 years from now.”
Completing the narrative
Have you ever heard about Mother Horse Eyes? This mysterious writer has been piecing together a bizarre sci-fi vignette on Reddit—vaguely reminiscent of some of the narrative from SCP Foundation. If you want to follow along with the folks documenting this ongoing story, subscribe to /r/9M9H9E9.
But in the meantime, here’s a narrative this author recently published in Terraform. Here, we explore the “flesh interface.”
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of sending a dead body through the portal. It’s such a simple idea, and yet, at the time, it made no more sense than buckling a dead body into a space capsule and sending it up into space. We wanted to find out what was on the “other side” of the portal, beyond the event horizon. We had been studying the so-called flesh interfaces for years, and of all the mysteries that surrounded them, the portal phenomenon — the apparent teleportation of objects which occurred within the fleshly tunnel — was the greatest mystery of all. So sending a dead body made little sense.
Remember, this is what we knew at the time:
- If an inanimate object went into the portal, it returned a short time (< 3 seconds) later at a random location within the interior zone. Cameras and sensors picked up nothing of interest.
- If an animal went into the portal, it sometimes returned, either alive or dead. Most returned altered.
- If an adult human went into the portal, the person was likely to return, but would either be dead or too altered to describe the “other side.” Those who returned alive died shortly after.
- If a child went into the portal, the child was likely to return alive, but was invariably altered. However, the altering was relatively mild, and some even remained cognizant. Unfortunately information gleaned from them was cryptic and seemed to generate more questions than answers. They all died shortly after.
Sending children through the portal was distasteful to us for obvious reasons, and we were searching for an alternative. One day, during an experiment, somebody was about to send a group of genetically altered mice through when they noticed that one of the mice was dead. Perhaps out of curiosity, they sent it with the others anyways. All the mice came back alive.
GIF of the Week: “This is no tree” — Han Solo
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