Yesterday I posted The problem with letting algorithms make most of our decisions, discussing how removing all knowledge obstacles can make us less adept at dealing with challenges. As is often the case, within a few hours of posting that I came across two more articles that addresses the same issues. First, from Kyle Baxter’s very interesting essay On the Philosophy of Google Glass:

Page’s idea — that we would be fundamentally better off if we had immediate access to all of humanity’s information — ignores [how we develop knowledge]. It provides facts, but elides conclusions and connections. What’s worse, it starves us of opportunities to use our skill for critical thinking, and since it is a skill and is therefore something that must be developed and practiced, it starves us of the chance to develop it.

I find that troubling. Glass is not a technology that is designed to amplify our own innate abilities as humans or to make us better as humans, but rather one that acts as a crutch to lean on in place of exercising the very thing that makes us human. I don’t find that exciting. I find that disturbing.

And then, from Smart cities and smart citizens, an editorial in Sustain Magazine (which I’ll reference more over the coming days):

Furthermore, [Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica] argues that current smart-systems thinking could lead us down a dangerous path towards passive citizens. As citizens — and city leaders — devolve their decision-making and responsibility to technology, their awareness of their environment diminishes in line with their ability to do something about it.

“If you automate too much stuff, people stop thinking about the issues. Yes, it might be more efficient to make the lights go off automatically, but it stops us thinking about it, we’re not engaged — and when we’re disengaged that’s not a good idea. We want people to think about something like carbon. Besides, we can turn the lights off on the way out — it’s entirely possible, we’re quite a smart species potentially!”

I find it fascinating how the Internet sometimes feel like one organism, always thinking and debating the same issues from many different angles. From Google Glass to Architecture to self-driving cars, it seems that currently we’re collectively worried about the impact of smart technologies on our lives.

Image source: Knight Rider’s KITT - My finished replica!

Nicholas Carr asks some serious questions about things like self-driving cars and our increased reliance on algorithms for decision-making in Moral code:

As we begin to have computer-controlled cars, robots, and other machines operating autonomously out in the chaotic human world, situations will inevitably arise in which the software has to choose between a set of bad, even horrible, alternatives. How do you program a computer to choose the lesser of two evils? What are the criteria, and how do you weigh them?

Clive Thompson picks up the thread in a very interesting Wired article called Relying on Algorithms and Bots Can Be Really, Really Dangerous:

The truth is, our tools increasingly guide and shape our behavior or even make decisions on our behalf. A small but growing chorus of writers and scholars think we’re going too far. By taking human decision-making out of the equation, we’re slowly stripping away deliberation—moments where we reflect on the morality of our actions.

But even stepping away from the morality issues, there are some other undesirable side-effects to algorithmic decision-making:

Or as Evan Selinger, a philosopher at Rochester Institute of Technology, puts it, tools that make hard things easy can make us less likely to tolerate things that are hard. Outsourcing our self-control to “digital willpower” has consequences: Use Siri constantly to get instant information and you can erode your ability to be patient in the face of incomplete answers, a crucial civic virtue.

The argument is that smart technology has the potential to strip us of our grit. And that’s a big problem, particularly if you subscribe to what author Paul Tough calls “the character hypothesis”: the notion that noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

The hypothesis is that character is created by encountering and overcoming difficult situations. Therefore one of the big dangers of algorithms making our decisions for us is that if it removes challenges from our lives, it reduces our ability to develop grit and build character. It’s like an Axiom for our brains.

Update: I came across a couple more articles about these issues. See More on algorithmic decision-making.

John Pavlus wrote a great piece about the phrase “intuitive interfaces”, and comes to the following conclusion in I’m Boycotting “Intuitive” Interfaces:

I think what we all want from technology are interfaces and interactions that feel familiar, legible, and evident. They should teach us in ways we would like to learn, and speak to us in a way we can understand. This doesn’t mean that technology ought never to surprise or challenge us. But desperately seeking “intuitive” feels, to me, like a kind of techno-animism. Interfaces aren’t magic, and we don’t really want them to be. To borrow from Timo Arnall: interfaces are culture. And like any pieces of culture, what they ought to do is simple: they ought to connect.

Cliff Watson in Teens aren’t abandoning “social.” They’re just using the word correctly:

What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.

You know what kids call that? School. For kids who still go to school, Facebook is boring. If one of their friends does something amazing or amazingly dumb, they’ll find out within five minutes. If they’re not friends with that person, it will take 15 minutes.

That’s interesting, but very different from the sentiment in two other recent articles on how teens use Facebook. First, from the fascinating and scary What Really Happens On A Teen Girl’s iPhone, in which a teenage girl describes Facebook more like a prison than anything else:

“I’ll wake up in the morning and go on Facebook just … because,” Casey says. “It’s not like I want to or I don’t. I just go on it. I’m, like, forced to. I don’t know why. I need to. Facebook takes up my whole life.” […]

“If you don’t get 100 ‘likes,’ you make other people share it so you get 100,” she explains. “Or else you just get upset. Everyone wants to get the most ‘likes.’ It’s like a popularity contest.”

And then from Slate’s Teenagers Hate Facebook, but They’re Not Logging Off, an article on a recent Pew study on social media usage among teens1:

“I think Facebook can be fun, but also it’s drama central,” one 14-year-old girl said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a ‘like,’ that they wouldn’t say in real life.” Said another, “It’s so competitive to get the most likes [on a Facebook picture]. It’s like your social position.” Ninety-four percent of American teenagers maintain a Facebook profile, but that doesn’t mean they have to like it. “Honestly,” one 15-year-old girl told Pew, “I’m on it constantly but I hate it so much.”

Whether Facebook is boring, a prison, or some bizarre combination of both, it seems that reports of its decline among teens have been a little premature. I don’t think “a trap you can’t escape” is a good way to ensure continued user growth and satisfaction, but that seems to be the position Facebook finds itself in at the moment.

I half-joked this morning (on Facebook, of course) that I’d like to start RealLifeBook, a site where you don’t leave out the ugly pictures and difficult parts of your life. I wonder if that’s part of the problem that makes Facebook feel like a place you hate but can’t leave — it looks like everyone else is always happy, so you can’t be yourself, and you get caught up in this endless cycle of trying to out-happy your friends to get the most likes.

Damn, do we have to rethink a few things about how the web works…

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1. danah boyd also posted some thoughts on the Pew report, and as always it’s very insightful. ↩

When I wrote The hype, benefits, and dangers of Big Data a few months ago I thought it would be my only post about Big Data, and then I’d move on. But 2013 appears to be the year of Big Data, so you can’t turn a corner on the web without bumping into an article about it. Looking at Google Trends, it’s clear that interest is at an all-time high:

So I wanted to point out just a few more articles that range from calling for a more tempered approach to Big Data to an all-out assault on its value and validity. Let’s start with the juicy one…

In A More Thoughtful but No More Convincing View of Big Data Stephen Few reviews the book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think and uses it as a way to articulate his distaste with the whole thing:

Data exists in a potentially infinite supply. Given this fact, wouldn’t it be wise to determine with great care what we collect, store, retain, and mine for value? To the extent that more people are turning to data for help these days, learning to depend on evidence rather than intuition alone to inform their decisions, should we accept the Big Data campaign as helpful? We can turn people on to data without claiming that something miraculous has changed in the data landscape over the last few years. […]

As data continues to increase in volume, velocity, and variety as it has since the advent of the computer, its potential for wise use increases as well, but only if we refine our ability to separate the signals from the noise. More does not trump better. Without the right data and skills, more will only bury us.

It’s a long article, but very detailed and highly recommended as a well-reasoned counter-argument to the Big Data movement. Others are a little more pragmatic, suggesting that we improve on the promise of Big Data rather than destroy it. In Coffee & Empathy: Why data without a soul is meaningless1 Om Malik states:

What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.

It’s important to take this further and say the soul Om talks about needs to come from qualitative methods like ethnography. That’s why I like Dave McColgin’s point in his article How Will Big Data Change Design Research?:

In our field of designing products and experiences, the ‘why’ stays at the center of our process and creativity. Many designers work mostly on new products and services for which there may not yet be reliable data available. […] While Big Data can inform designers on how to improve once they put something out there, it is design research that provides principled guidance towards good solutions all along the way. Big Data can’t help us do that right now.

Tricia Wang’s Big Data Needs Thick Data is another excellent plea for ethnographers to get involved in the Big Data movement, to produce what she calls “Thick Data”:

Big Data produces so much information that it needs something more to bridge and/or reveal knowledge gaps. That’s why ethnographic work holds such enormous value in the era of Big Data. […]

Big Data reveals insights with a particular range of data points, while Thick Data reveals the social context of and connections between data points. Big Data delivers numbers; thick data delivers stories. Big data relies on machine learning; thick data relies on human learning.

And finally, Martin U. Müller and Marcel Rosenbach look at some of the scarier implications of Big Data in Living by the Numbers: Big Data Knows What Your Future Holds:

Is it truly desirable for cultural assets like TV series or music albums to be tailored to our predicted tastes by means of data-driven analyses? What happens to creativity, intuition and the element of surprise in this totally calculated world?

Internet philosopher Evgeny Morozov warns of an impending “tyranny of algorithms” and is fundamentally critical of the ideology behind many current Big Data applications. Morozov argues that because formulas are increasingly being used in finance and, as in the case of Predictive Policing, in police work, they should be regularly reviewed by independent, qualified auditors — if only to prevent discrimination and abuses of power.

I personally think there is the same value in data that there has always been, and that the Big Data movement isn’t so much about the size of the data sets, but the ability to extract more of that inherent value (signal) from the noise. But an algorithm will only take you so far. As always, knowing what and how much is not very useful without knowing why. And Big Data will never be able to tell us why…

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1. What’s that? You think I’ll just automatically link to any article with the word “coffee” in the headline? I resent that accusation, sir or madam! ↩

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Charles Miller starts his post On Google Glass with a story about the history of cell phones, and then makes a keen observation:

I’m pretty bad at predicting the success or failure of new technologies, but I just think it’s a little too early to write off something as potentially game-changing as Google Glass based on how it looks today, what it costs today, or based on the fact that we’re currently entrusting one of society’s most socially tone-deaf groups (nerds) with the question of when it’s appropriate to wear them.

My mom was one of the first people in our neighborhood to have a cell phone, but she was so embarrassed by the thing that she ran into a bathroom every time she received a call. So, yes, Google Glass sounds pretty creepy (now), and they look pretty silly (now), but it might not be like that 2 years from now.

Liat Ben-Zur wrote a great post for AllThingsD called Connecting Things to the Internet Does Not an Internet of Things Make. His main issue with the current crop of connected devices is lack of cross-platform integration:

Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to one another, meaning they cannot benefit from the data, context or control of nearby IoT devices. That is why we currently need a separate app to control — and interface with — each connected thing we buy. This may be acceptable in the near term, but it cannot scale.

This made me think of Ian Bach’s article Designing Connected Products:

What’s more, when it comes to creating a smooth connected experience, focusing on the ‘things’ from the start can actually be somewhat of a decoy. Spend some time with any service or product that relies on data jumping from place to place and you’ll quickly realise it’s in the ‘gaps’ between things that design really matters. Problem is, gaps are easy to overlook, incredibly tough to design for and much less sexy than the ‘things’.

Image source: Ian Bach

Ian comes from a different angle, but I think these points are related. Cloud services connect the ‘gaps’ between things, but it’s incredibly hard to fill the gaps well, so most companies keep their solutions proprietary since they see it as a competitive advantage. And that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in: great physical products with reasonably ok cloud services, but because the services don’t talk to each other the products aren’t nearly as useful as they could be.

(First link via @kbaxter)

Nick Bilton in Disruptions: Even the Tech Elites Leave Gadgets Behind, an article on the growing (not just hipster any more?) trend to step away from technology every once in a while:

As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels.

The “phone stack” is becoming increasingly popular as a way to force people to talk to each other over dinner. Sad, but necessary.

Photo credit: Roo Reynolds on Flickr

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