Future Imperfect #31: A massive web of entangled issues

Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been following a bunch of issues:

• Our social news gatekeeper (aka Facebook)
• The use of robots as a bomb (a first for domestic police)
• Our depleting supply of helium (more important than you think)
• A proposal to reinvent America’s high school experience
• Pokemon Go as the first mainstream augmented reality phenomenon
• The future of workplace wearables (perhaps a more useful Google Glass)

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A massive web of entangled issues

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last week, you’ve heard about Philando Castile and the Dallas sniper. What made these events remarkable, strictly from a media perspective, is that both were captured in real-time through livestreaming platforms—particularly Facebook Live.

In Castile’s case, the video taken by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, was taken down within an hour of it going viral (a glitch, according to Facebook). As Motherboard’s Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler note, this event has major implications for the wider distribution of information on the internet.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media, and two thirds of Facebook users say they use the site to get news. If Facebook is going to become the middleman that delivers the world’s most popular news events to the masses, technical glitches and erroneous content removals could be devastating to information dissemination efforts.

More importantly, Facebook has become the self-appointed gatekeeper for what is acceptable content to show the public, which is an incredibly important and powerful position to be in. By censoring anything, Facebook has created the expectation that there are rules for using its platform (most would agree that some rules are necessary). But because the public relies on the website so much, Facebook’s rules and judgments have an outsized impact on public debate.

Meanwhile, in the Dallas incident, not only did we see the impact of these livestreamed events in real-time, you may have heard of a first for domestic policing: The use of a robot to kill an armed assailant.

The use of bombs in policing volatile situations has a painful history in the U.S. Most infamously, in 1985, the Philadelphia Police Department detonated a powerful bomb after a lengthy standoff with black radical group MOVE. The mayor approved the bombing, and in the end 65 homes were destroyed and eleven people were killed, including five children. The incident was heavily scrutinized, but after multiple grand jury investigations no one in city government faced criminal charges.

While that the use of a “robot bomb” to kill suspects appears to be unprecedented in America’s domestic history, the tactic has frequently been used in overseas war zones. In the war in Iraq, a device called a MARCBOT (Multi-Function Agile Remote-Controlled Robot) has been deployed to effectively carry explosives to kill insurgents.

Why does this all matter? Getting police to stop killing in the line of duty and ensuring deadly weapons don’t end up in the hands of those willing to kill police and civilians are both issues of the utmost importance. But there’s a lot more to figure out here once you peel back the layers.

Should Facebook be authorized to censor on behalf of the authorities? What about other companies such as Apple which just filed a patent that could prevent your phone from taking pictures or video at “sensitive locations” (which, if in the hands of police to decide, could prevent bystander filming of police activity)?

Should police have the authority to employ robots to kill? Is it ethical, as in the case in Philadelphia with MOVE, to put civilians at risk as collateral damage instead of police officers?

I’m not qualified to answer these questions, but it’s well worth thinking about.

Put those balloons to better use

Have you ever thought about how important helium is to modern technology? An article from Mun-Keat Looi shows us how this element is responsible for a lot more than just filling balloons and airships.

Because it’s inert, it helps in storing highly reactive and combustible rocket fuel. Welders use it as a gas shield, to keep out oxygen or other vapors that can damage the quality of the weld. It’s great for detecting leaks — in aerosols, air conditioners, fire extinguishers, nuclear reactors, you name it — because its small atoms can flow through the tiniest of cracks. Deep-sea divers breathe a mix of helium and oxygen, rather than the nitrogen-oxygen mix of normal air, which can be toxic and narcotic under high pressure.

Its biggest use is as a coolant. With a boiling point just a couple of degrees above absolute zero, liquid helium is the only thing that can keep large superconducting magnets cold enough to function. An estimated one fifth of the US’s annual helium consumption goes on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, which contain such magnets. It’s also needed in low-temperature science experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider.

Good thing we have a National Helium Reserve to make sure we don’t run out of this critical resource…right?

After the world wars, the US became the dominant supplier of helium. But helium prices didn’t cover the huge cost of maintaining the reserve, and, by 1996, the NHR was over a billion dollars in debt. So Congress voted to gradually shut it down and sell off the reserves. The 1996 Helium Privatization Act stipulated that all reserves be sold by 2015 to pay off the government’s original investment.

The upshot: Some 40% of the world’s reserve went on sale at bargain prices…At current rates of consumption, the world’s current known reserves will run out sometime between 2030 and 2040.

Why does this matter? For a lot of these use cases, helium is near irreplaceable. The article notes that next-gen MRIs may be able to operate at higher temperatures (negating the need for helium) but this is not guaranteed. Helium mining needs to begin in earnest, and not as a mere sideshow to natural gas prospecting.

Back to school

According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, it’s time to reimagine high schools for the 21st century. Both the “how’s” and “why’s” of modern American education should be up for debate.

There is so much potential for change if we creatively address how we schedule the school day, how we build learning spaces, how we deliver content, and how we structure the roles of adults vis-a-vis students. Take scheduling, for example. In my conversations with students, they say they pay attention in class 15–60 percent of the time. This is partly due to the teaching schedule. Research tells us that teenagers pay attention better when they sleep in later, move more during the day, and have shorter hours of direct lecture. It’s crazy to expect them to sit down at a desk and absorb information for 6 hours straight hours starting at 7:30 am. Yet, we have designed a school day that forces them to do so and punishes them when they don’t. Unless we redesign the system, we are going to keep delivering less-than-optimal learning environments for students.

…

Why do students “do” high school? One hundred years ago, this was pretty clear: A high school education was essential to moving up the economic ladder and gave people a much greater chance of landing a long-term, high-paying job.

Today, the answer is not so clear. Of course, graduating from high school and college still correlate with increased earning potential over a lifetime, but it doesn’t set people up for a lifetime of work. According to one study, 70 percent of jobs that will exist in 20 years don’t even exist yet. Clearly, students need to learn how to be adaptable and creative, and to ask good questions and figure out how to answer them. While there are some exceptions, the majority of today’s high schools focus on the regurgitation of facts (as evident in most AP curriculums). Almost nothing that US high schools formally evaluate is designed to actively develop or increase a student’s self-regulation or emotional awareness — skills that employers like Google most desire today.

Why does this matter? How long have talking heads been complaining about the American job skills gap with the rest of the world? It starts with primary and secondary education, and the need to examine unconventional solutions to the problem. In particular, as the SSIR article suggests, there is a need to incorporate modern research rather than relying on the way “things have always been done.”

Educators of the past were significantly less informed as to how the brain works, and valued rote memorization (increasingly meaningless in the age of the internet) over skills-building. This, at a minimum, should be grounds for rethinking a system built around antiquated 20th-century ideas.

“Get out of my kitchen, Pikachu!”

Have you downloaded Pokemon Go yet? According to Mark Wilson, it may be the game that brings augmented reality to the mainstream.

I can’t help but to wonder if Go is just in the right place at the right time given the larger technological zeitgeist — where Microsoft is teasing virtual workspaces with Hololens, and Snapchat is hiring special effects masters to make its augmented reality selfies that much more stunning. We’re simply getting more and more used to the digital manipulation of everything we see through our phones’ screens. Periscope’s live streams are filled with floating hearts, Facebook Messenger lets you slap stickers onto any photo, and virgin Instagrams require a “#nofilter” hashtag, just to validate the genuine nature of a memory frozen in time.

Last week, I thought we were another 10 years out from the tantalizing future promised by Magic Leap, where giant digital whales will splash onto a K-12 gym floor without anyone getting wet or harmed. But as I approach a small puddle at the local playground, where Bellsprout’s roots seem to be taking a drink, I realize the more obvious point: We’re not fast-approaching our augmented future. It’s already caught us.

Why does this matter? Obviously Pokemon itself isn’t exactly a ground-breaking subject. Industry experts have been predicting AR/VR has the future of gaming for a long time now—but now we’re starting to see its potential in practice.

On a side note, Pokemon Go seems to be lowering people’s barriers to the outside world, sending them to churches, police stations, and occasionally their neighbors’ yards. Maybe a good thing for our society’s aversion to human contact?

Actually useful wearables

Sorry folks, no sci-fi short story this week. Instead, let’s consider the future of wearables in the workplace, via Virginia Postrel.

The wearable technology startups that get attention make products a Silicon Valley executive or journalist might use — fitness trackers, virtual-reality gaming headsets, jewelry that delivers text-message alerts. It’s lifestyle stuff. But wearable development in the near future depends on more workaday equipment.

Call them work-wearables: computers worn on the body that help get the job done. Think smart glasses displays for manufacturing workers following complex assembly directions; voice-activated clip-on computers that help store clerks check inventories; or caps with sensors that make sure long-distance truckers aren’t dozing off.

Why does this matter? Postrel lists out several advantages to workplace wearables over consumer devices, including solving existing problems (instead of questionable use cases a la Google Glass) and the potential for immediate scale (in terms of business adoption, you can go from a few demo employees to full-scale rollout with a single contract). Expect to see these come to a workplace near you in the coming years!

GIF of the Week: Juno’s trajectory

Insane Statistic of the Week: 30% of millennials won’t date someone over their TV show preferences.

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