Uninfectious enthusiasm
The Spring 2013 issue of IEEE Technology in Society Magazine has Alexander Hayes writing about Google Glasses and other wearable technology that he says "is set to revolutionize the manner in which we interact with each other".
Putting yet another revolution aside for a moment, I vaguely recall reading some advice to the effect that writing fiction in the second person is unlikely to succeed. Reading the first few paragraphs of Hayes' article, I found that the same is probably true of non-fiction, and experienced the reason why: addressing someone in the second person makes risky presumptions about what that person thinks.
When Hayes asserts that "you [i.e., me] may agree that [Hayes' experience] is not dissimilar to your current relationship with this disruptive technology," he immediately seems hopelessly incorrect: I think my relationship with mobile phones is very little like his. (Daniel Kahneman, whose work I wrote about in my last entry, has a similar habit, though he usually at least qualifies his second-person assertions with "if you are like most people..." and some empirical research to back this up. And, when it comes to Kahneman's studies, I probably really am like most people.)
Apart from advice on writing, Hayes' article gave me cause to think about two things: the temptation for enthusiasts to project their enthusiasm onto other people, and the distinction between frequent communication and good communication.
When I'm grooving along to the gothic metal and industrial music that I love, for example, it's easy to forget that not everyone appreciates such grim and gloomy noise. I suppose that computer enthusiasts feel the same way: the latest gadget seems so exciting, and the revolution so palpable, how could anyone be blasé about it?
Hayes certainly seems to be a frequent communicator, to go by his own description of is mobile phone use, yet the opening paragraphs of his article completely mis-identified this reader. Of course Hayes had no way of knowing that I was going to be reading his article, but I was nonetheless reminded of the argument made in Susan Cain's recent book Quiet that talking a lot isn't the same as achieving a lot.
Yet excitement and noise attracts far more attention than sober reflection and quality time. More charitable commentators might describe such noisy excitement as "infectious enthusiasm", but I wonder if it only infects those who already have said enthusiasm.
Prediction, being popular and being right
Looking at the categories listed on the right-hand side of this blog, I noticed that the two I've used most are "prediction" and "mobile computing". This seemed ironic given that prediction and mobile computing are things that I mostly avoid. Of course the tags reflect the number of posts in which I've taken issue with buzzword-driven predictions and the black box fallacy. Reading the works of Duncan Watts and Daniel Kahneman recently gave me further justification for staying out of the prediction business, refined my dim view of it, and gave me some constructive thoughts on how to deal with forecasting.
According to both Watts and Kahneman, predictions made by supposed experts in a variety of fields are no better than random guesses. This, they suggest, is due to the prevalence of "unknown unknowns" in complex systems like politics, human societies, the economy, and the environment: in systems like this, there are invariably numerous unforeseeable influences that would-be forecasters can't even know that they ought to be thinking about, let alone predict. Experts nonetheless make bold predictions because confidence sells: few people have much interest in "experts" who can only give them uncertain and equivocal advice, so experts are under great social and financial pressure to make bold and confident predictions that, by and large, they won't be held accountable for anyway.
Reading the chapter of Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow on this, I was reminded of a misgiving that I had about Martin Seligman's work on positive psychology. Seligman observes that optimists frequently blame failure on specific changeable circumstances, giving the optimist hope that he or she can still succeed when trying again under (hopefully) other circumstances. Seligman contends that this is good for the optimist, who will persist, but seems to be largely uninterested in its consequences for everyone else. His favourite example seems to be the selling of insurance through cold-calling, in which the heroes are those optimists who persist despite being knocked back by nine out of ten potential customers. Seligman shows no interest in the fate of the nine out of ten people who had to endure an unasked-for sales pitch for a product they didn't want.
So it seems that being a bold and confident personality might be beneficial for an individual while being detrimental to the societies or organisations to which they belong. Kahneman cites the example of optimistic CEOs who make bold and impressive-sounding decisions that wind up losing money for their companies. (He also observes that the opposite might happen: the economy as a whole benefits from the optimism of would-be business owners who start ventures even though statistics indicate that only one-third of such ventures actually succeed).
Reading Kahneman's book (and maybe this blog), it's easy to feel like all prediction is hopeless. Of course there are plenty of things we can predict with great confidence: engineers, for example, routinely make accurate predictions about the behaviour of structures, machines and computers based on well-tested models of how the the world works. But few people find such predictions very interesting, perhaps because they are so routine. There's simply more glory to be had in making hopelessly inaccurate predictions and ignoring their consequences.
Potholes on the road to the couch potato
I've had a couple of conversations with work colleagues over the past few months in which the colleagues seemed to be surprised that I still rent videos from a physical DVD store rather than obtain them on-line. Prior to those conversations, I don't think it had even occurred to me that I could watch videos on-line — mainly, I guess, because I had a routine that I felt was working well and was in no need of change. I've also only fairly recently obtained an Internet connection plan with sufficient speed and capacity that I can actually watch movies over it.
When I later took a look at what was on offer at the on-line video store operated by Internet service provider, I found that said store features a much narrower range of movies than does my local DVD rental store, and that it charges more for each rental. On The Conversation last week, Matthew Bailes also writes about the monopoly-like profits that computer companies can extract once they've trapped customers in the company "ecosystem". (So much for the notion that on-line retailers would run rings around old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar retailers by eliminating the need to pay rent, maintain capital stock, or pay service staff.)
A number of the commenters on Bailes' article ask the obvious question: why, then, use the on-line service?
One comment on Bailes' article observes that "if there really is a monopoly, it's only a monopoly to people who are desperate to avoid going to a shop." I imagine some people might reasonably be in that situation if they live in a remote area, or they have restricted mobility, or, as I recently overheard another work colleague remark, it's raining and they can't be bothered to walk to the video store. But none of those are true of my work colleagues or I — nor of Matthew Bailes, as far as I can tell — and the weather would have be pretty serious indeed to prevent me walking ten minutes to my local store.
There was a time, I guess, when I'd buy bleeding-edge technology without a lot of thought as to whether or not it really was the most efficient way of meeting my needs. I think I was motivated in part by the hobby value of experimenting with such technology, and in part by the price: given that I have the skills and patience to set up a TV card in Linux, say, why pay for a stand-alone television even if the latter would be much simpler and easier?
I can't see much hobby or educational value in purchasing slick consumer products like Apple TV and Bigpond Movies, though. In fact, walking to the shop is more like a hobby these days: I enjoy the exercise, the contact with my local area, and the experience of looking around at all of items for rent or sale. And, thanks to the school of economics attended by Apple, Telstra and others, it even seems to be more financially rewarding.
Digital media and the, ahem, business model of the future
After lurking on the edges of the IEEE Society of the Social Implications of Technology for a while, wondering if I can and ought to get more active, I finally found the inspiration to contribute an article to The Social Interface, which was published last week.
Digital media and the, ahem, business model of the future is a topic close to my heart as both a researcher in intellectual property protection and a lover of music (and books, though the electronic book industry never seemed to make as many headlines as the former). The article grew out of what I perceived to be lazy and hackneyed advice to the music industry to "get a new business model" without offering any constructive suggestion as to what this magical business model might be, let alone show a willingness to make a living using whatever model the artists were supposed to adopt.
In one or two of the job interviews I did in the period after the conclusion of my time at the Multimedia Security Lab in Wollongong, I was asked what I thought the solution might be. Being thoroughly sceptical of bold predictions, I said something along the lines of "I don't know but we can keep experimenting and I'm hopeful we'll work something out."
Insofar as music is still being produced and sold, and music companies appear to remain in business, one might say that we have, indeed, worked something out, at least for now. It's hard to say exactly what it is, possibly because it's far more complex than what anyone could summarise in a pithy answer to an interview question. Maybe it's improvements in the user appeal and financial architecture of paid-for download services; maybe it's the recording industry's hounding of file-sharing networks; maybe it's a change in culture; maybe it's even those "movie piracy is theft" ads that film-goers continue to endure.
Most likely, it's combination of all of those things and more, and it'll continue to evolve as technology changes and new services emerge. At least I hope so, because I hate to think that there'll come a day when it's no longer profitable for artists to pursue their craft in the same way that I and other technologists pursue ours.
On the death of the PC, or, at least, small-w windows
This month, a couple of the magazines to which I subscribe presented some challenges to the black box fallacy. February's issue of IEEE Spectrum (p. 23) outlines the views of Jakob Nielsen on Windows 8, whose lab testing of the new operating system leads him to suppose that "Microsoft tried to almost optimize for the mobile scenario, and that’s why their desktop design falls through so bad." APC Magazine's extensive review in November 2012 came to a similar conclusion, albeit without the precision terminology that Nielsen uses to explain his views in the full interview about his experiments. In the March 2013 issue of the same magazine, Tony Sarno's editorial (p. 3) lambasts the view that "the PC is dying", to be replaced by the present fashion for tablets and smartphones.
Now, I suppose that a mobile computing enthusiast might assert that the PC is indeed dying and that Microsoft is therefore doing exactly the right thing in optimising its operating systems for mobile computing devices. More accurately, if Microsoft sees its market as consisting largely of mobile devices (rather than office computers and server farms), then maybe it is indeed doing the right thing for its commercial purposes.
Yet, if for no other reason than the size of the screens involved, tablets and smartphones are surely not going to replace server farms, home theatres, and probably not even office computers in the foreseeable future. Obviously it's Microsoft's own business as to what market they want their products to serve, but I haven't heard the company announce an end to its interest in the PC market, and all of the reviewers mentioned above clearly expect Windows to continue to serve this market. Unless we've all completely mis-understood Microsoft's intentions for Windows 8, it seems that Microsoft may have fallen victim to a form of black box fallacy in which there is one grand unified interface suitable to interacting with all kinds of device, regardless of the device's purpose or form factor.
Considering APC's Future of the PC Poll, however, did give me some first-hand experience with why someone might forget about PCs: they are, it has to be said, pretty boring. I could, no doubt, amply answer the poll's question about what can be done with a PC, but word processing, software development and the hosting of web sites don't much inspire me to "suggest a positive marketing message or slogan that PC makers can use in their marketing". Then again, maybe that's exactly how you'd expect an engineer to answer. I find soap, say, pretty boring too, but my local supermarket still moves shelves full of the stuff.
