Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
"*We futurists are still pretty good at jumping the gun there, because
American hegemony hasn't collapsed yet, and Europe isn't in any death
spiral."

Well, in my own defense, I did say *effectively* collapsed. And note
that this doesn't mean there's a new hegemon (like China) -- the set of
circumstances in which the US is able to push other countries around
is dwindling even without a new superpower in sight. (No defense on the
Europe thing; the EU hasn't turned around completely, but it's in far
better shape than expected.)

The future will always be more messy than we imagine.
  

    
Jamais, I don't think American hegemony has even "effectively
collapsed."  If the Chinese keep pushing everybody around over those
islands, "American hegemony" is gonna be propped up by everybody,
because hey, at least the Americans invade actual working oilfields,
instead of imaginary oilfields around lousy little rocks in the ocean.

That said, it's a good essay, though.  I often think about it, and
maybe the futurist trade will find some way to pull its socks up.
  

    <scribbled by brian Wed 20 Mar 13 18:19>
  

    
"Following on from John Payne's comments in <76>, are the robots
coming for our jobs? Is a certain amount of unemployment going to end
up as part of the system and, if so, what happens next?"

*It's so interesting to see this perennial question coming into vogue
once again.  When I was a pre-teen first discovering "science fiction,"
that automation dystopia story was all over the place.  Even on the
cover of TIME magazine.  See this Artzybasheff computer  monster, all
busy stealing guy's jobs?  Looks oddly familiar, doesn't it?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/8241732965/

Of course that issue pre-dates me by a long chalk.  It's also the folk
song of John Henry the Steel-Drivin' Man, who breaks his heart
defeating the boss's Steam Hammer.

I can tell you what's NOT gonna happen with "robots."  Nobody's gonna
defeat the logic of the assembly line by starting a Pre-Raphaelite Arts
and Crafts commune where people shun the Robot and make hand-made wall
tapestries.  That's been tried  eight thousand different times and
places.  It never works for anybody who's not Amish.

Framing the issue as "robots coming for our jobs" is rather a moot
point anyhow, because the blue-collar guys who "own" assembly "jobs"
have zero input on whether robots get deployed or not.  What practical
difference does that question make?  No modern salaried employee
anywhere has the clout to defend a "job" from "the robots."   The
investors deploying the robots are serenely unworried about Luddite
saboteurs or crippling labor-union strikes.  Those possibilities of
working-class resistance were de-fanged ages ago.  

So, you know, either they automate some processes at the cost of human
labor, or they don't.  Somebody's alway gonna try it, and in some
areas it works out rather better than it does in others, but the basic
robot story isn't robots, it's "whatever happens to musicians will
eventually happen to everybody."

Apparently this latest little robot-vs-job flap gets most of its
impetus from two things, a cool new assembly robot created by Rodney
Brooks and a typically Emersonian intervention from Kevin Kelly.

So, here I'll tell my Rodney Brooks story.  I met the guy once, at
some forgettable event in Washington DC, and after the panels were
over, Prof Brooks and I ventured into the bar.

So, I was nursing a whiskey sour, and I was like: "So, Doctor Brooks,
I know a little about your work, and --"

"Call me Rod!"

"So, Rod -- level with me about this MIT scheme you have to automate
the movement of insect legs.  How's that supposed to work, exactly?"

So, Rod was nothing loath, and he was pretty well going at it hammer
and tongs, while I was asking the occasional provocative sci-fi style
question -- stuff like "so, how does the cube-square law work out when
the robo-insects are walking on the ceiling?" -- because we sci-fi
writers dote on MIT.  

Then I happened to glance across the bar, and I saw that our bartender
was "frozen in disbelief."  He was so amazed by what Brooks was saying
that his glass and his cleaning cloth were rigid in his unmoving arms.
 This bartender had the affect of a sci-fi movie android with a power
failure. It was the only time I've ever seen that figure of speech as a
genuine aspect of human behavior.

So, I give Rodney Brooks a lot of credit, he's a fascinating guy, I'm
glad to see him kept busy on things other than, for instance, an
MIT-style Vannevar Bush Manhattan Project at an undisclosed desert
location.  I'm confident that Rod's new manipulator is pretty snazzy.  

But let me ask this: if an assembly-line device is going to "take our
jobs," wouldn't a 3dprinter also "take our jobs?"  Why do we treat them
so differently?   I mean, they're both basically the same device:
automated mechanical systems precisely moving loads in three dimensions
by following software instructions.  

So how come the Brooks robot is framed as a sinister job-stealing
robot, while a 3dprinter is framed as a printer, like, a cool nifty
peripheral?  Didn't digital printers also take a lot of "people's
jobs?"  

Besides, a Brooks robot is just imitating human-scale movement while
3dprinters create objects in micron-accurate ways that no human can
possibly do at all. So clearly the 3dprinter is a more radical threat
to the status quo.

Along this same line: Chris Anderson, late of WIRED, has got a new
book out about "Makers." I read it.  It's all about how network society
cadres with 3dprinters and open-source schematics and instructables
are going to create a "Third Industrial Revolution."  Great, right? 
Okay, maybe Makers take over the world or they don't, but how come
nobody says "A Third Industrial Revolution means those Makers are going
to take our jobs?"  Because they would, wouldn't they?  How could they
not? 

Shouldn't this prospect be of larger concern than Rodney Brooks'
latest gizmo, one among hordes of assembly line robots that have been
around for decades now?  An "Industrial Revolution" should *almost be
definition* take everybody's jobs.  But the general reaction to
Anderson's book is that the guy is *too optimistic," that he drank his
own tech-hype bathwater and is having way too much fun.  Isn't there an
inconsistency here?

Then there's the latest Kevin Kelly argument, which is more or less
about how robots are gonna take everybody's jobs, but fine, that's
great, especially if they're sexbots.  There's nothing sparkly-new
about this line of reasoning, it's very Automation Takes Command.  The
pitch is that robots take the dull dirty and dangerous jobs, which
frees us to become, I dunno, humane speculative creatives like Kevin
Kelly, I guess.

However, I don't believe automation has ever worked like that; there's
no creeping wave-line with "robotics" on one side and "humanity" on
the other.  Playing chess is very "human," but Deep Blue is a robot
that can kick everybody's ass at chess.  You can claim that "Deep Blue"
is not "a robot," but come on: just put a tin face on him and give him
a manipulator arm.  Instant "robot."  Robotic has never been an issue
of mechanical men versus flesh men, like in a Flash Gordon episode.

The stuff we call "robotics" today is more like Google's "robot car,"
which is not some Karel Capek man-shaped "robot" of the 1920s; the
Google Car is the Google Stack with wheels attached to it.  Similarly,
"Google Glass" isn't virtual-reality supergoggles, it's the Google
Stack with a camera, Android mobile software and a head-mounted
display.  Will they "take your jobs?"  How could they not?

If you lose your job as a bus driver because a Google Bus took your
job, you didn't lose it to a "robot," you lost your enterprise to
Google, just like the newspapers did.  Don't bother to put a sexbot
face on the silly thing, it's Larry and Sergei & Co.  Go find a
musician and buy him a drink.

Fighter pilots are "losing their jobs to robots," to aerial drones. 
Are those the "dull dirty and dangerous" jobs?  Heck no, because
fighter jocks are romantic folk heroes, like Eddie Rickenbacker and the
Red Baron and George Bush 1.0.  When most flight work is carried out
by "robots"  (actually by GPS systems and databases, but so what), are
we somehow going to discover a more refined and human way to fly?  Will
we be liberated to fly in a more spiritual, humanistic, Beryl Markham
poetic aviatrix kind of way?  I very much doubt that.  I'm pretty sure
we'll stop "flying" entirely, even if we anachronistically claim we're
"flying" when we're zipping around in sporty ultralights letting drone
systems do all the labor.

Bookstore clerks never had "dull, dirty, dangerous" work, they were
the mainstays of humanistic commerce actually, but Amazon is a Stack. 
Amazon's all about giant robot warehouse distribution logistics.  It's
all databases and forklifts in the Amazon stack, so of course "robots"
took the jobs of bookstore clerks. Bookstore clerks imagined they were
chumming around with the literate community turning people on the Jane
Austen, but the high-touch, humanly clingy aspect of this line of work
changed nothing much about its obsolescence.

So it's not that "robots" take "our jobs." It's more a situation of
general employement precarity where applications built for mobile
devices and databases can hit pretty much anybody's line of work, more
or less at random, without a prayer of effective counter-action. 
Right?  Let's move right along, then! 

That being the case, "what ought to be done?"  Well, if job security
of all kinds is going to be made precarious indefinitely, then the
sane, humane thing to do is clearly to socialize security and put
everybody on a guaranteed annual income.  Brazilian-style socialism:
keep your nose clean, keep the kids in school, and we fee you off and
you can go buy whatever produce the robots have cooked up lately.  

One might also invent some kind of Stack Fordism, where Facebook pays
you enough to hang out on Facebook making Facebook more omniscient. 
It's a lot cheaper than putting the unemployed into prison.

Obviously the American right-wing isn't gonna go for this wacky
liberal scheme; bailing out the "takers" of the 47% is their worst
Randroid nightmare.  But what people never understood about the John
Henry story is that we have no steam hammers left.  The robots "take
your job" and then the robots *keep changing at a frantic pace,* the
robots have the lifespans of hamsters.  We've still got plenty of
muscular, human John Henries, but his steam hammers are all extinct.

Look what happened to Nokia.  These Nokia guys had the classic Wired
magazine bulletproofed dream jobs.  They're not John Henry.  They're
creative class, computer-literate, inventive, super-efficient, global,
digital, Asperger's high-IQ types...  They got annihilated in 18
months. Not by "robots" but by Google and Apple.   However, well, same
difference really.  

What kind of "jobs" do Republicans have to offer themselves, when
their nominee was a corporate raider, and their top financier is a
weird Jewish casino owner up to the eyebrows in Macao?  That's not
exactly the Protestant work ethic happening, so, well, I dunno.  

It might still work, just needs more political pretzel-bending.  Don't
use the word "guaranteed income," farm it out to Fox News for semantic
re-framing.   Toss in the "values requirement" that your annual income
requires you to wear Mormon undies, go to tent revival meetings and
own and display a handgun. They'd line up for it.
  

    
Thanks, Bruce.

With regards to the robot took my job idea -- something that Paul
Krugman, Kevin Kelly, and Cory Doctorow have all decided to weigh in on
lately -- the one thing that everyone seems to miss is that there's an
entire sector that's going to be the last stand of human employment:
empathy-driven work, largely done by women.

Here's the piece I wrote about this a few months ago:
http://openthefuture.com/2012/05/the_pink_collar_future.html

School teacher, nurse, stylist, all sorts of jobs that may be
technically doable with a machine, but in practice depend upon empathy
and emotional awareness as much as technical skill. So what happens
when the most reliable work comes in the shape of work traditionally
done by women? Does it change gender role dynamics? Do wages get driven
down because of a flood of otherwise-unemployed men trying to get
these jobs, or do they go up because a nurse is harder to replace than
a surgeon?

Robots aren't going to be taking most of our jobs in the next decade,
but the writing's on the wall here.
  

    
Gender role dynamics are already changing, this is just a more
energetic nudge away from the lipstick mode of thinking. And wages are
driven down because demand for jobs exceeds supply, and then some. Then
again, you can churn out thousands of nurse-graduates, but how many
nurses have both affinity and empathy? So nurses might be cheap, but
really good nurses might be able to name their price. Either way, is
gender relevant?
  

    
Thanks, Bruce. As a follow-up, do you see the position and status of
the Stacks as stable? Are there wannabes waiting in the wings? I'm
thinking of the 'whale fall', where a dead whale is almost immediately
consumed by scavengers, of when a large tree is cut in a rainforest,
opening the space for competitors. Punctuated equilibrium? Is the
ecosystem metaphor useful, here, or are we looking at something else
entirely?
  

    
http://qz.com/39890/chinas-new-triumphalist-aircraft-carrier-coins-celebrate-g
rowing-military-might/

*I don't want to get all China-bashing this year; I happen to be quite
the Sinophile -- but do these shiny new coins with an aircraft carrier
on 'em give anybody a warm and cozy feeling?

*I'm sure that China can sell saber-rattling to the home team, but
somebody could screw up. Times of tension tempt adventurers. Imagine
you're a Chinese Moslem-separatist Al Qaeda guy, and reading a screed
like the following.  You might get all Bin Laden and think, "Wow, I bet
some cheap, bloody terror attack on distant Japan could result in my
oppressors in Beijing getting stomped, going broke, or both."

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/caught-in-a-bind-that-threatens-an-asia
n-war-nobody-wants-20121225-2bv38.html#ixzz2GAKA8VUy
  

    
JADP: "Bruce Sterling: The Complete Interview, 2013"
http://www.40kbooks.com/?p=13726

New fiction: _Love is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)_ published for
the Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Love-Strange-Paranormal-Romance-ebook/dp/B00ASBPAWY/ref=
sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357189013&sr=8-1&keywords=love+is+strange+bruce+sterli
ng
  

    
I dunno how I conflated the name of Aaron Straup Cope into "Strope" up
there in #52; I'm guessing it's neural damage.  

For the record, Aaron Straup Cope is Senior Engineer, Digital and
Emerging Media, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian
Institution (New York City, New York, U.S.A.); and I'd pay some
attention to him if I were you.

I'd recommend following Aaron Straup Cope and most any of his
colleagues here, including the bots.

https://twitter.com/bruces/new-aestheticians/members

Sorry Aaron; I'll have the plaque flushed from my brain as soon as
they come up with a quantified hack.


    
  

    
Thanks for sparing my blushes on the new novel there, Jon.  I don't
write as many as I used to, and they seem to be getting lots weirder.
  

    
"Netbooks" are dying because the Stacks are winning.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/31/netbooks-dead-2013
  

    
Thanks for the pointer to your new-aestheticians list Bruce.

https://twitter.com/bruces/ar-pundits is a beauty as well.
  

    
Talking about futurism and 'social futurism' - Jamais says in his
essay 'social futurism is significantly more difficult than techno
futurism. Without a clear model for socio-cultural change, and absent
the appearance of a Hari Seldon complete with almost infallible
mathematics of social behavior*, we have to go by experience, gut
instinct, and the intentional misapplication of training in History,
Anthropology, Sociology.'

Gut instinct, intentional misapplication of training - it all sounds
rather nice and interesting, but can something more concrete be said
about how 'social futurists' should work? Are there 'best practices' or
are we talking about an artsy activity depending on the originality
and inspiration of the futurist-artist? 
  

    
I like the term coined by my colleague (at
http://www.realityaugmentedblog.com/) Amber Case: cyborg anthropology.
In response to your question, Roland, I think we need more of these:
future-focused investigators who have a degree of human empathy and
understanding (as the best anthropologists will have), and are also
technology focused. Complex sociopolitical currents are hard to follow
and predict if you have a more purely tech-focused engineering mindset
(acknowledging that I'm perpetuating a stereotype).

And yes, maybe the cyborg anthropologist is more of an artist than an
engineer... and we're constantly pushing the envelope, extending the
meaning of "art."
  

    
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/01/02/al-jazeera-current-tv-
al-gore/1805685/

*I told you the Qataris were the victors of the Global War on Terror.
  

    
Ironic that their mission statement reads like something our own media
should be practicing...political footsie immediately follows.

"Al Jazeera shared Current TV's mission "to give voice to those who
are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide
independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no
one else is telling."

Time Warner's response...

"Al Jazeera has long struggled to get carriage in the U.S., and the
deal suffered an immediate casualty as Time Warner Cable, the nation's
second-largest cable TV operator, announced it would drop Current TV
due to the deal."

Time Warner Cable's mission statement: (http://tinyurl.com/a8elqu6)
Edited on: 2011-05-17
"Connect people and businesses with information, entertainment and
each other. Give customers control in a way that are simple and easy."

Well, apparently NOT! 
  

    
Roland, Jon's right: this is futurism as anthropology. At the
Institute for the Future (40+ year old non-profit foresight group,
based in Palo Alto), a significant plurality of the researchers there
come from educational backgrounds in Anthropology (including me, btw).

That said, I'm advocating in that essay for giving social, cultural,
and political drivers the same conceptual weight that we (in the
futurist-for-hire community) usually give the broad scope of stuff we
call "technology." I strive (not always successfully) to give it *more*
weight; a common line in many of my talks is that "technology is a
cultural artifact," and that we can't divorce our tools from the
society and desires that led to their creation.
  

    
Welcome, Jamais; thanks for joining us.
  

    
Thank *you*, Jon, for the invitation!
  

    
Thank you for your answer, Jamais. I'm convinced that futurism as
anthropology gives deeper and more relevant insights. But how do you
evaluate and compare competing accounts about dynamics and possible
consequences? I guess just judging their success in predicting
developments is not enough? 
  

    
I'm sure that eager readers won't want to miss out on this NORTH
Korean pop music.

http://musicformaniacs.blogspot.com/2011/05/pyongyang-rock-city-part-1.html
  

    
Roland, one of the major methodological changes in professional
foresight over the past few decades has been the rise and dominance of
the multiple-scenario approach. Taking different combinations of
potential drivers and different *manifestations* of those drivers lets
you come up with a set of plausible alternative futures. The idea is
that you can then test your strategies, assumptions, plans, etc.
against these different possibilities to better measure how robust said
strategies, etc., could be.

The analogy that I've taken to using in my talks over the past few
years is that foresight is like a vaccination -- it sensitizes the body
(of the organization) to potential risks that might otherwise have
been ignored until too late. That doesn't mean that you'll encounter
all of those risks, or that they'll play out exactly as predicted, but
you'll be in a much better position to identify them early.
  

    
Hi, everyone, and sorry I'm a little late.  Actually, a LOT late in
finally coming here to The Well in context of how many of my friends
are here and for how long.  I was talking with Jon Lebkowsky yesterday
about the SOTW posts and he said for me to jump in, and here I am.

FILTERING AS ONTOLOGY
I agree with Jon in regards to filtering content - right now there
seems to be an exponential burst this year and IMO sometimes it only
makes sense to aggregate and check trending, although the individual
gem gets lost.  But maybe as I said in an essay called Art in the Age
of Dataflow, maybe narrative today is indexical and trend-based, and
those who try to drink from the firehose are like the kid from that
classic scene from Weird Al Yankovic's UHF.  

So, so far some of us at RealityAugmented seem to be wingpersons of
pattern recognition and kindred Cyborg Anthropologists.  I like the
threads of humanity and empathy that are being associated, as I think
we're going to need these soon.

TURKS ARE REALLY INTERESTING
I also agree with Bruce on the Turks as being a group to watch.  I
wound up, in my early-adopter way, hanging out with the Istanbul Media
Art crowd, and they're really interesting, with a great insight.  They
have taken me to school for 3 PhDs in wold awareness and for that I'm
grateful.  A big hat's off to Iz Oztat, Eden Unluata, and Basak Senova
for that.

WHAT DID I THINK GOT MISSED IN THE FIRST FEW SALVOS?
1: The New Aesthetic is a complex beast.
What seemed to be an questionably thought out afterthought of a
'movement', and I like Ian Bogost's criticism of NA in The Atlantic in
that it lacks the ideology of previous movements and needs to 'get a
lot weirder'.

What I find interesting is that after the talk, Jasmes Bridle has
reopened the site as well as one devoted to drones, which has drawn
myself, Jordan Crandall, Trevor Paglen, Honor Harger, Ricardo Dominguez
and a host of others into an ongoing conversation that might have not
survived if it were not for a certain essay.  But here we are.  

The other thing I find interesting with NA as it has developed is that
it seems to have categorized into a number of different genres, such
as autonomous imaging (drones, et al), Glitching, and
algorism/autopoesis/generativity. All three of these fit the scope of
machine imagery, and as I'll talk about shortly on RealityAugmented,
it's a continuum of autonomy and control between the creator, audience,
and device.  

As I said earlier this year, since James Bridle was initially
interested in NA for a year, maybe I'll announce at SXSW that I'm
officially uninterested after a year, and I hope you take that as a dry
joke. Basically, I find NA interesting as an anthrological site as
much as an art movement.

2: DRONES AT COSTCO? Hello...?!?!
When Richard Grusin of the Center for 21st Century Studies showed me
his picture of this, it made me wish I had dentures to drop.  I then
shared the culture of toy drones with  my friend Art Jones, who was
then doing a performance called 'The Selector' in Karachi with the
State Department.  He passed on my links about the
abjection/abstractionof drone culture here in the States to the people
of Karachi with wonder and amazement.  It also caused me to create the
People's DIY Drone Brigade, which is allied with the Overpass Light
Bridage in Milwaukee.  I have yet to be arrested for taking a Costco
drone and having it surveill a Chicago Police Department Blue Box, but
we're waiting.

OPEN SOURCE CONVERGENCES
There are some amazing things happening out there in the open source
movement, from 3D printable databases to mergings between Arduino,
Android, and the Processing programming language (read: Java Lite for
Artists).  The fact that all of this stuff is starting to turn into one
big contiguous toolbox is pretty amazing - plug your phone into a
widget that can have any number of modules and hook that to your
MacBook, and go hack some Big Data with some off the shelf code.  Hell!
Go grab a 3D model and hack a little code to glitch the hell out of
the Venus De Milo.

ALL THE SHIT BEING FUNDED ON KICKSTARTER
Holy Cow. From Smartduino systems to Moore's Cloud (OK, that one
didn't get funded, but hey, it's wildly cool), there is R&D VC coming
out everybody's ears for anything remotely cool, despite the fact that
we're pretty burnt out by this point.  But man, I want that shiny
thing.

In addition, there are some awesome books coming out, like Generative
Design, which has the single best treasure trove of code for taming Big
Data I've ever seen.  The problem with being a futurist in these days
is what William Gibson once told me about writing near-future fiction,
it's as McLuhan said - being aware of the present looks just like the
future, as not only is everyone else living in the past, anyone nimble
enough to live in the present might as well be living in the future.
Therefore, being a futurist, is merely reportage from the front lines
today.

BRUCE MENTIONED THE 3D PRINTER GUYS, BUT IT'S THAT COOL.
I have two now.  This stuff is crazy - I scanned my friend and printed
her portrait out, and I take it to every restaurant we go out to, and
within 30 seconds, people are asking about it.  Autodesk is letting all
these cool tools I saw at TED 2010 out for free, like photogrammetric
3D capture tools and iPad 3D sculpting. I'm gobsmacked  by some of this
stuff.  Printed toys out for my Great Nieces this Xmas - they loved
the fact that I made them the toys.  Replicator - Earl Grey, Hot,
please.

This is enough ranting for now, and it only says that we are living
the Chinese curse of living in interesting times, and I'm glad to have
lists and friends like Jon to co-filter them.

Onwards!
  

    
Roland, there was a great interview on Inkwell.vue 238, back in 2005,
with Derek Woodgate and Wayne Pethrick about their book Future
Frequencies which touches on some of what Jamais refers to. Think you
might enjoy it:

https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?&c=inkwell.vue&t=238&q=0-19&
f=0