The basic premise of this whole system is to create something which can record and affect sight and sound. On the visual side of things, there will be cameras which know what you're looking at which are constantly recording video and taking still pictures. On the auditory side, there are a set of stereo microphones which record everything you hear- ambient sounds, street musicians, conversations, etc. What we are left with is something like a first person movie of someone's life.
Think about how that would affect everything: the idea of subjective, non-transmittable experience begins to fall apart. If people want to know what a day in the life of a typical working class resident of Tokyo, they'll simply download a user submitted video of someone’s experience, which they can watch in fast motion or even real time. This way, they literally see through someone else's eyes, hear through their ears. Instead of kids sending their parents pictures after they move out, they'll simply send them a one hour clip or montage of what life looks like in their new city. Instead of simply relating stories to one another, we can pull up a clip, and show them: “You should have seen the look on his face,” becomes “here, you’ve got to see the look on his face,” because the machine is always recording, and therefore captures life in a way that conventional media simply can’t. Selection is now a post production process.
Think about how this would affect the “truth” of representations of political and social conflicts. Today we might hear that there were violent protests in Cairo, ending in countless injuries as police forcefully broke up the crowd. We have to accept this at face value and do our best to imagine the severity of the situation based on the slant and reliability of our source. When these devices are common place, however, this protest will have at least 1,000 different vantage points, which could theoretically be viewed 20 at once, on split screen to get a feel for how things really went. At some point, computer rendering will get to the point in which it could actually create a 3D replica of the scene in its entirety simply based off of the vantage points and camera tracking of many users being submitted and combined. This scene could then be watched in slow motion from above to see what really happened- a view previously available only to the gods.
On the subject of divinity, what this device also moves toward, is a technological recreation of ancient social constructs which we ended up destroying some time in the 19th century. Religious debate aside, what are the most basic consequences of the existence of god on the individual and society as a whole? It is the knowledge or at least the assumption that all actions, though secret to all earthly witnesses, are still seen, understood, and judged by an omniscient, divine being. This, coupled with the expectation of retribution for good and bad deeds has a profound effect on the free will of the individual and arguably beneficial consequences for the functioning of society as a whole. People who are scared of god do not steal just because no one is watching.
“You must mean ‘Yes’ when you say ‘Yes’. You must mean ‘No’ when you say ‘No’.”
-Matthew 5:37
So what’s very interesting is that through these technologies and their common use, what we’ll have essentially created, is an artificial deity- something which is constantly watching and recording what we do. Imagine an argument in this context:
A: “You promised that you would stop smoking after graduation!”
B: “No, what I said was that I would try to quit. I never said that I definitely would.”
A: “Oh no you don’t. I have it right here- look!”
Suddenly they both see an actual recording where he says, “alright, alright, I promise that I’ll quit right after graduation….” Argument over. But of course knowledge of the rolling tape would cause people to make fewer promises or follow the ones that they did make for fear of being considered a blatant liar. “Thou shalt not lie,” enforced by the new digital god.
You can already see this effect- there have been many reports of police brutality and corruption decreasing as cell phone cameras become more and more ubiquitous. Sure it still happens, but cops understand that there’s always the possibility of someone watching, and therefore it is less of a common occurrence. It’s important to remember that all of these things are double-edged though. Just imagine the new possibilities for false confessions and evidence as voice and video simulation become indistinguishable from the real thing. What will become of objective “truth”?
At any rate, these are the concerns not of the next generation or some arbitrary time in the future- they are our own. The seeds of this giant system have already been sown, and the hardware to make it work is about to be on the market. Almost everything I talked about is possible now, as in 2009, and the rest is only a few years (-5) and a tiny bit of effort away. The effects will be greater than anything we’ve seen for a long time- perhaps too great, too quickly. As we begin to augment the world around us, there’s always the direct risk of loosing touch with reality. Like a group of oblivious Ikaruses we run the risk of floating father and farther away from the solid ground of reality, only to suffer a painful awakening as we hit the ground, realizing that the world went to hell while we were busy being entertained by our metallic blindfolds.
“Use the internet to get off of the internet.”
I talk quite a bit about the use of this device with friends in a social setting, but this is perhaps only wishful thinking in an attempt to ignore the fact that much of these systems really encourage an introspective and anti-social existence. I’ve already been witness to or part of so many conversations that end in an awkward realization that neither of them have any common subjects to talk about: “you haven’t heard of this band? Well they’re really great, you should check ‘em out.” “Oh, maybe I will.” And it’s over. It’s important to start thinking about these things sooner than later.
“If we, in a small way, make human tasks easier by replacing them with a machine execution of the task, and in a large way eliminate the human element in these tasks, we may find we have essentially burned incense before the machine god. There is a very real danger in this country in bowing down before the brass calf, the idol, which is the gadget.” -Norbert Wiener, 1954
I learned how to shave online.
Think about that.
Yours,
Edouard Cabane
June 2009
Relevant links and updates:
Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.
Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.
Would you wear that device? I think I would. I can imagine that advances in hardware and batteries will soon make these as small as you like. And I can see them becoming as ubiquitous as wrist watches were in the last century. I see them becoming customized fashion statements.
Privacy disaster? You betcha.
But ten years ago we would have been horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day. I always imagine what a family in the 70s would think about all of their photo albums being posted on computers and available for the entire world to see. They’d be horrified, they couldn’t even imagine it. Heck, a life recorder is less of a privacy abandonment step forward than we’ve already taken with the Internet and electronic surveillance in general.
A Business Week article
talks about a ten year old Microsoft project called SenseCam (more here) that is just such a device.
It’s clunky today and doesn’t do most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph above. But a true life recorder that isn’t a fashion tragedy isn’t that far away.
In fact I’ve already spoken with one startup that has been working on a device like this for over a year now, and may go to market with it in 2010.
The hardware is actually not the biggest challenge. How it will be stored, transcribed, indexed and protected online is. It’s a massive amount of data that only a few companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) are equipped to really handle anytime soon.
But these devices are coming. And you have to decide if you’ll be one of the first or one of the last to use one.
Will you wear one? I will. Let us know in the poll below.
-----------
There’s nothing cool about crime, but Stamen Design comes pretty damn close to making it cool with the new site it built and designed, San Francisco Crimespotting, that launched today. The site offers a visual representation of reported crimes in the city during a set period of time. Various types of crime ranging from alcohol-related to theft to murder are represented by different color dots placed on a map of the city.
Not only does this visually show you possible trends in various types of crime, but you can manipulate both the date range an time range to further drill into the data. Not surprisingly, there are more crimes committed at night, but it’s interesting the trends in crime during some months versus others. If you zoom in, you can click on any of these dots to get more information about the actual crime, including the police report number.
As the site describes it, Crimespotting is “a tool for understanding crime in cities.” It also notes:
If you hear sirens in your neighborhood, you should know why. Crimespotting makes this possible with interactive maps and RSS feeds of crimes in areas that you care about.
We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.
The San Francisco launch follows the Oakland version of the site in 2007, as LaughingSquid notes. But the San Francisco version features several of the newer updates including the sort-by-hour and days feature.
One thing that would make the site even better is if there was real-time data for crimes being reported. Unfortunately, much of the data is days or even weeks old, as the site clearly notes along the top. But the APIs for this data could lead to even more interesting uses. You can find out more about those here.
The site is quick to note that it is in no way affiliated with the city of San Francisco or the SFPD. Again, it just uses the publicly available data to build these maps.
No comments:
Post a Comment