0.0 Sitrep

Sunday, 27 October 2019, 10:15am.

I’m writing this on Alaska flight 764 to Washington National (Reagan) to prep for and kick off the content committee meeting for the Code for America Summit I’m co-chairing. Friday was a crazy work day, so I didn’t practically have the chance to write this on my intended day.

Normally, I’d kick myself for this. The plan I’d set out was to write on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, with the subscriber edition going out on Fridays. But in the last few years I’ve learned that something thing that’s guaranteed to put me into what has previously sometimes been a pretty serious bout of depression, it’s being inflexible about my expectations for myself. I have to admit, it could’ve been worse this time. This time, I’ve got you lot who’re paying me to write, and it’d be disingenuous for me to think that wouldn’t change my relationship to writing this at all. Of course it does. But now I can think to myself:

• my writing is not me (which, to be fair, was the point of this in the first place)

• anyone who’s seriously upset by this can decide to stop paying

• literally no one has died (as far as I’m aware) as a result of me missing my arbitrary plan of writing on Fridays

Sure, I can be sad and upset that I didn’t get to stick to my plan. The other way of looking at this is that I could’ve tried to stick to the plan. Old me (you know, the last ship of Theseus me) would’ve been more likely to do this, to push through a hectic work day, head home to a more complicated than usual whirlwind of family logistics, head back out to a somewhat hastily arranged social engagement and then stay up late to write. Current me can look at that and say, frankly: fuck that shit. That’s not going to be good for anyone. I’m going to be tired, I’ll probably end up staring at the screen trying to squeeze words out and maybe even resenting it. Getting even less sleep will make me even more of a surly dad the next day. Nobody needs that. I can give myself a pass.

Galaxy brain me (who, to be honest, I wouldn’t even have been aware of their existence until about half a year ago) is now thinking, after the fact: you know what, I bet I could’ve spotted this. I bet something I could do next time, if I spot a crazy Friday happening, would be to carve out time for writing this. Or if I didn’t have time to carve out for writing it o Friday, then I could include a note about it on the Wednesday episode. I’d feel less bad about skipping out on one without telling anyone. People might not care! Some people might give me feedback and tell me: hey, that’s OK. Everyone has super busy days every now and then. Who knows what that might be like.

This might sound all mindful and easy to be cynical at. To be fair, it’s super easy for me to make fun of, too. But if I’m honest, I feel better this way. I don’t like feeling horrible, I don’t like feeling stressed and anxious and like a failure. I’ve learned to understand that it’s easy for those feelings to escape and affect people, especially people I love. They might understand why it’s happening, they might be sympathetic to me, and they might not like it either.

So that’s why I’m writing this on a Sunday and not a Friday.

1.0 Some extra bits

1.1 I have a cue light to show you when I’m joking, if you like

This bit prompted by this thread.

I did not have a great reaction to Interstellar (2014), the Christopher Nolan movie, when it came out. I saw it in San Francisco with friends and it was certainly a very big, overwhelming experience that had lots of church organ and WAAHHHHHHHM in it. I mainly remember leaving feeling quite irritated about quantum gravity and love, but also quite fulfilled in a sort of nerd sense at the single-stage-to-orbit ranger craft and, unsurprisingly, the TARS and CASE robots.

I watched it again recently - I think it was on sale at iTunes - and sort of had it on in the background while I was most likely messing around on Twitter, and realized that the reason why I like TARS and CASE isn’t just because of what feels like a juvenile attraction to cool-looking robots that are sarcastic. (I am reminded, though, that there’s no real reason why TARS and CASE should both present / appear to present as male). I mean, I am sarcastic and it is always nice to recognize fellow sentient sarcastic beings.

I think a better—more considered—reason for why I appreciate the robots is because of the screens they have on their front that look like they’re displaying logging and diagnostic messages. Now, the screen looks cool because it’s showing computer things: scrolling text and all that stuff, so I get that aesthetically, it’s a shorthand that emphasizes to the viewing audience that these are Computer Robots doing complicated Computer Things. Sure. The existence of the screen and what it’s doing is a signal that has importance separate from the information literally displayed by the screen.

But! The existence of the screen also feels like it acknowledges a tension between a seamless exterior (the robots are very clean, with lines only at their joints), and the need to understand what’s happening on their insides.

At first thought, this might not appear to make sense for robots we were told were surplus from the Marines. You might not want a screen displaying logging and diagnostic information that’s visible to enemy combatants - in a world where you’ve got robots, um, binoculars or things that let you see other things from very far away might be pretty common. But only imagining TARS and CASE in combat situations is pretty narrow-minded. It may well be that they’re more like power-loaders or Boston Dynamics robots than ones that run around storming beaches or whatever it is that marines do. (Sorry marines! I’m sure you do a lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with beaches!)

Anyway: things that show internal state. Logs and things-that-look-like diagnostics are one way of doing that. (I’m now thinking that to use the screen that way with the TARS/CASE robots, you have to press on one of their limbs while turning them on, boot them up into Recovery Mode and then choose to reboot with —verbose).

Another way is verbal feedback: there’s nothing stopping something that can talk from providing verbal introspection that’s useful to others even if it’s something humans aren’t particularly good at it. We see this when Cooper tries to reconfigure TARS’ personality settings:

Cooper: Humor 75%

TARS: Confirmed. Self destruct sequence in T minus 10… 9…

Cooper: Let’s make that 60%.

TARS: 60%, confirmed. Knock, knock.

Cooper: You want 55?

We also see it in another fictional robot: GERTIE, from Duncan Jones’ movie Moon (2009). I love the design of GERTIE for using emoji-inspired faces to provide feedback to its user and context to its communication.

There’s a benevolent reason for GERTIE’s use of emoji - in the movie, the main character is all alone and it’s just to see another… face, right? But there’s a potential in-movie explanation, too: GERTIE might not be aware of it, but there’s a need to manipulate the sole human on the remote station and keep them pliant. Seeing faces that activate a whole bunch of sub-conscious processing would probably help with that.

In the real world, Baxter (2011) and Sawyer (below) from Rethink Robotics (acquired by HAHN in 2018) were industrial robots that were also designed to work alongside humans (cobots, for collaborative robots) on production lines.

There is a whole thing about the ring light Amazon’s Echo that feels like it could be used for more context other than red (turned off because the kids are using it too much) and orange (a package is in transit, is going to arrive, has arrived, ALL OF WHICH ARE THE SAME COLOUR OF ORANGE, and at least 30% of the time spoil a surprise). And there’s the now disappeared breathing/sleeping light that used to be on Apple laptops, now replaced by no visible indicator whatsoever that your laptop is charging and thus really annoying me that time I plugged my laptop into the wall, my iPad into my laptop and then woke up to find my iPad had charged and my laptop was out of battery. THANKS, TIM APPLE.

1.2 Some other extra things

• Your regular funny reminder that Darth Vader is basically a PMP certified management consultant who gets flown in by his boss to fix delayed projects.

• Erika Hall had a funny thread about “the tech equivalent of angel dusting: adding a small amount of an ingredient just so you can claim it’s present, even though the amount is too small to have any effect whatsoever?” which I’ll probably write about in another episode.

• I’d forgotten about the John (not Joan) Baez Crackpot Index, which is used to provide entertainment when dealing with people who get in touch with physicists (or mathematicians, etc.) about groundbreaking new theories of everything.

OK, that’s it for this extra bit. Thank you for being the kind of person who’s supporting my writing by exchanging coins for typing!

As ever, write notes and I read them and then I reply to them, at some point, honest. I totally do. See you in the next episode.

Best,

Dan