Concentrated Technology

This morning I thought of something I wanted to do at work. To make sure that I remember it when I get to the office, I sent myself an email.

On Saturday we were going to have dinner at our friends’ house. We wanted to bring a nice bottle of wine as a housewarming gift, so I turned to my photo library and scrolled through it until I found a photo I had taken several months ago of a bottle of wine that I liked. That’s what we picked up at the neighborhood wine store.

These are two common examples of how the multi-purpose cellphone is displacing other methods of keeping up with your tasks and maintaining useful information. There may be some people out there who use paper reminder pads and to-do lists that stick to the refrigerator door, but it’s got to be a shrinking number, as more and more functions are concentrated into that handy handheld device that fits into your pocket.

It’s interesting, too, that the technology concentration effect isn’t limited to replacing paper methods, but also applies to other software on the cellphone, too. I’m confident my iPhone includes standard apps that are specifically intended to provide digital substitutes for to-do lists and reminder statements, but I’ve never used them. I don’t like swiping through multiple pages of app icons to try to find the right one. Because email and the photo library can easily perform those functions–and a lot of other ones, too–I’d rather just use them so I can focus my phone use on a limited number of multi-functional apps.

I don’t know if I’m alone in that impulse or whether others, too, are trying to eliminate cellphone screen clutter and bringing focus to their phones, but the concentration process reminds me of a TV commercial that was broadcast when cellphones were new and apps were a novelty. It featured different apps that did different things and used the tag line “there’s an app for that.” If they were making that commercial today, maybe it would show multiple features and the tag line would be “there’s one app for that.”

Rating Requests

Yesterday I had an appointment. Last night, when I got home, there was the inevitable email with the request for a rating and a review. I groaned inwardly. Sometimes I delete ratings requests, sometimes I fill them out to be a good customer. Last night I hit the delete button. I just wasn’t in the mood.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had it with getting requests for reviews every time you have any kind of appointment or use any kind of service. For example, our computer calling app at the office requests a review after every call. Seriously? I’ve long since stopped doing that, but I’ve found myself wondering: if you really wanted to give a meaningful evaluation of a video phone call on a 10-star scale, what would distinguish a six-star rating, say, from a seven? If the image freezes and you have to wait for 10 seconds for the other participant in the call to unfreeze, how many stars should get deducted? Should you adjust the rating if the frozen picture of the other participant is hilariously unflattering? What should be the impact, objectively, if there is some kind of audio fuzziness or other glitch in the call?

Say what you will about old-fashioned desktop phones–they may have cluttered your desk, and the fact that the cord often had to be unsnarled was annoying, but at least they didn’t beg you for reviews every time you hung up the receiver. Ma Bell evidently had too much pride for that.

The review request overload leads me to two conclusions. First, any time you see some commercial enterprise bragging about their reviews, take it with a hefty grain of salt. It’s going to be the product of responses from only a tiny fraction of actual customers, and those people who did respond probably didn’t really give much thought to the ratings they were assigning. And second, I wonder what would happen if businesses started to advertise that they will never, ever, bug you for a review if you use their services. All things being equal, I’d gladly choose a service provider who agreed in advance to leave my email inbox free of sniveling requests for reviews.

A Shopping Cart Story

We’ll be heading out to the grocery store to do some shopping this weekend. When we get there, we’ll use a device so familiar to Americans that we typically don’t really give it much thought: a grocery cart. We’ll disengage the closest one from the long line, wheel it in, and start heading up and down the aisles.

The humble grocery cart is such an integral part of the whole supermarket experience it’s hard to imagine one without the other. It’s one of those devices that seems so obvious now, viewed in retrospect, that you’d think it wouldn’t even need to be invented.

But it was, of course. The grocery cart was the brainchild of Sylvan N. Goldman, seen above, who was a grocer in Oklahoma. In the 1930s, Goldman bought the Humpty Dumpty grocery store chain and introduced a number of new ideas–including, most notably, the grocery cart. Goldman came up with the idea in 1937, in his carpentry shop, and his groundbreaking invention received a patent in 1939. His first device was a grocery basket that attached to a frame with wheels. The baskets could be removed and stacked and the frame could be collapsed and easily stored. Goldman formed the Folding Basket Carrier Company to manufacture it.

Goldman’s ingenious idea swept the nation and revolutionized the grocery business. Shoppers who formerly were limited to what they could fit into a handheld basket now could buy even more. Throw in the concept of people driving to grocery stores, and you’ve got the two basic elements of the modern American big grocery store run. Goldman’s daintier device quickly morphed into the big, heavy, honker grocery cart that we all know so well. I do, in particular, because my first job, at the Big Bear supermarket, involved going into the parking lot at the end of the day and retrieving every orphan cart that had been left behind by shoppers and returning them to the store.

So when we will be loading up our cart this weekend, we’ll have Sylvan Goldman to thank. Now, if we only knew the back story of the unlucky shopper who got the first “folding basket carrier” with a rogue wheel . . . .

Forced Obsolescence

In the ’50s and ’60s, American automakers became famous for implementing an approach known as “planned obsolescence.” The idea was to roll out new features and appearance changes every year–adding a bigger tailfin here, a new hood ornament there, an FM radio option, an increase in horsepower, and perhaps a new form of power steering–so that a hapless person who bought a new car three years ago would look at their perfectly adequate vehicle with a sense of embarrassment and decide that they needed to buy a new one just to keep up with the times.

The new tech companies have gone one step beyond planned obsolescence, into the realm of forced obsolescence. That’s what happens when the tech companies just stop supporting the old tech that seems to work just fine, requiring you to purchase and switch to new tech. You don’t just want to change to keep up with the Joneses, you have to change if you want your device to work at all.

This is what happened with our Roku device, which is probably more than five years old. It has worked like a charm. Several months ago, however, we started to get messages when we tried one of the streaming service channels advising us that the channel was no longer available on our antique Roku device, At first I resisted doing anything about it, figuring that one less streaming service is not that big a deal. But now other services have started to drop off, too–so I’ve knuckled under and bought a new Roku device that hopefully will get us back to full streaming capabilities.

It’s irritating, but what are you going to do about it? The tech companies will tell you that they had to stop supporting the old device because of security risks, so the switch to the newer, faster, safer device is really for your own good. But his forced obsolescence approach also happens to provide a lot more certainty for tech company bottom lines, because the switch to the new product is no longer dependent on unpredictable consumer tastes and decisions. The tech companies figure that if they’ve got the ability to eliminate the X factor, why not do it?

Faces On A Screen

We were out to dinner at a casual spot last night–one of those places that seems to have TV screens covering every inch of wall space. As we sat down and I looked around, I was struck by how many of those screens featured close-ups of talking heads at that moment.

If your TV is tuned to a news show, or any kind of sports talk show, you’re bound to see a lot of faces on a screen. And now, with so much of daily communication happening through video calls on your computer, you get the same point-blank exposure to human faces on screens at work, too.

This didn’t used to be the case. Once, news shows or sports shows would feature footage of actual news events or highlights of key plays from a big game, with an occasional shot of an anchorman or a reporter on the scene. As some point in the past, however, somebody decided that actual film of events wasn’t really needed–probably for cost reasons–and head shots of people arguing with each other about the event would suffice instead. Add the onset of video calls into the mix, and the result is that we now get a steady diet of head shots, like the big screen footage of Big Brother in the Apple 1984 ad.

Babies are known to be naturally attracted to human faces, and studies have found that adult brains tend to look for human facial characteristics in various objects, like the fronts of cars. If in fact we’re hard-wired to appreciate human faces, this must be a golden age for homo sapiens, because I think it’s safe to say that this generation is seeing more close-ups of other human faces than any other generation in history.

Icon Language

Lately I’ve been in the midst of a surge of new technology. I’ve got a new laptop, one with a pristine keyboard and new functionality and new ways to connect to my desktop monitor. We’ve also rolled out some new programs recently that I’ve been trying to use. And yesterday I had to delete and replace some apps on my phone because of weird glitches they were experiencing. It’s been tech immersion time.

Whenever new tech is involved, there are new icons to master. The top row of keys on my new laptop, for example, are all identified exclusively by icons. Fortunately, most of them are self-evident, and clearly address things like screen and keyboard brightness, airplane mode, volume controls, and a mute button–but some are squarely in unknown territory. One button has a rectangle between two lines, and another features three diamonds. Their meaning is not intuitive–to me, at least. What could three diamonds signify? Beats me, but that’s a button I’ll never touch for fear of potentially devastating unintended consequences. Its function is as much of mystery as that of the three shells in Demolition Man.

New icons also mean new reflexes need to be developed. The meaning of the new icons might be puzzled out if you can study them at your leisure, but they aren’t well-suited for a snap decision. Yesterday I was on one Teams call when I received another Teams call. I didn’t want to have the second call’s beeping interfere with the first call, but when I looked at the icon options, with the interlocking Venn diagramesque circles with red and green phone receivers, it wasn’t clear which option I should choose to disconnect the second call and proceed with the first. Alas, I choked and selected the wrong icon, rudely putting the first call on hold and moving to the second call, which required me to apologize all around.

They say that when you reach a certain age, learning a new language is a good exercise, because it builds new neural pathways, enhances mental flexibility, and might even fend off dementia. Perhaps learning the new icon language will have the same effect.

National Park Throwback

The lobby of our lodge at Big Bend National Park includes this curious object, which must be mystifying to every visitor under the age of 50. The phone booth was built into the structure of the lobby, and I assume the National Park Service just thought it was too much of a hassle to remove it. A sign in the phone booth says: “Payphone does not work. For entertainment only.” That made me wonder if people like getting their picture taken in it.

I did actually use the booth to make a cell phone call, because the lobby area gets good reception. Those booths were uncomfortable and cramped, but they still serve their purpose. in fact, I’d like to see more phone booths. Wouldn’t it be nice if people stopped having their loud cell phone conversations in public, and instead stepped into a phone booth so we didn’t have to hear their end of the conversation?

Trial Ending, Trial Beginning

A few months ago we signed on for a service for a promotional period. We liked the service and decided that when the promotional period ended we would renew it. Then one day we received a notice from the service in the mail that stated, in large font, all capital letters: ”YOUR TRIAL IS ENDING.”

That statement could not have been more inaccurate, because the real trial was only beginning. The real trial, of course, was the challenge of renewing the service in a world that is designed to encourage you to do everything yourself, on-line. 

Our mailed notice gave us a new promotional rate and three options for renewal: scanning a QR code, entering a website address, or calling a customer service number. No rational person wants to call a customer service number and enter the “your call is important to us” prolonged hold zone, so I started by scanning the QR code, figuring that would be the quickest method. The code took me to a website, but when I tried to enter my information I kept getting odd error messages that told me my renewal couldn’t be processed. 

By then, my naive initial hope for a speedy and painless process had faded, and my mindset became one of grim determination to do whatever was necessary to see the process through to conclusion.  

Next I tried to renew by typing the website link for the renewal offer into my browser. That approach required me to go through a few layers of text message and email multi-factor authentication, then typing in few twelve-digit codes–all of which were masked, so you didn’t know whether you had made an error in your typing. That time-consuming process didn’t work, either, for some reason known only to the computer, so finally I gave up and just called the customer service phone number, knowing that I would inevitably be put on hold for an extended period–which is exactly what happened. 

Ultimately, though, talking to an actual human being who knew what she was doing worked, and I succeeded in getting the service renewed. If I’d just called the 1-800 number initially, I would have saved myself time, annoyance, and aggravation. Could it be that the deep-seated instinct to avoid calls to a customer service line is wrong? I’ll try to remember that the next time I’m given options for how to accomplish something on line. 

Deciphering The Charred Scrolls Of Herculaneum

Modern technology often seems like both a blessing and a curse. Here’s a story that falls into the “blessing” category.

Most of us have heard about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. That same eruption also covered another Roman city, Herculaneum, in pumice, volcanic ash, and gases. After well-diggers discovered parts of Herculaneum in the 1700s, excavators looking for Roman statues and other treasures uncovered a villa that included a number of objects like the one pictured above. The objects were initially thought to be logs, but were later determined to be bound papyrus scrolls–but centuries of being buried in volcanic debris had taken their toll. The scrolls were too brittle to be unrolled and read, and attempts to do so caused the scrolls to crumble into ash.

Ever since their discovery, scholars have been hoping to be able to somehow unroll and decipher the charred scrolls of Herculaneum. It is a tantalizing prospect, because the scrolls conceivably could contain previously unknown works, like a lost poem by Homer, a play by Sophocles, philosophical works by Aristotle, Socrates, or Plato, writings by Cicero–or even contemporaneous accounts of Jesus of Nazareth or the early days of Christianity. The story linked above recounts how a few dedicated people are trying to read those scrolls–and how, using AI technology, they have made real progress, to the point of determining that some of the scrolls are writings by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet.   

It’s a fascinating story, and it isn’t clear when, or how, the story might end. The villa where the charred papyrus scrolls were found hasn’t been fully excavated, so no one knows for sure how many scrolls exist, or their condition. And there’s a problem with trying to answer those questions: there’s a modern Italian town called Ercolano that was built on top of buried Herculaneum, and a complete excavation and survey would require residents to be relocated and the modern town destroyed. If the scroll-readers and their AI technology can make a compelling case that a complete excavation might provide hugely important historical insights, how would authorities balance the interests of the citizens of Ercolano against the possibility of retrieving a lost trove of human history?

It’s not hard to see why some people have become obsessed with discovering and deciphering a potentially vast cache of previously unknown writings, to see what those writings address and whether they shed new light on a period of great historical, religious, literary, and philosophical significance. And it’s nice to know that AI technology isn’t just useful for creating clickbait articles on the internet, but might actually be the key to unlocking the long-buried secrets of the past.

Cryptocurrents

If you live in Texas or California, you know first-hand that the electrical grid system in those states have faced recent challenges. With growing electrical use generally, aging infrastructure, and new electric consuming facilities coming on line, our electrical systems are facing challenges as never before.

And recently they have begun facing a new challenge: large-scale Bitcoin mining operations that are adding to power consumption demands in American electrical grid systems.

I ran across this interesting article about the impact of Bitcoin mining–which uses huge banks of computers in data centers–on the electric system. The article noted two important points: Bitcoin mining in the U.S. has surged over the past three years, and the Energy Information Agency estimates that large-scale Bitcoin mining operations now consume about two percent of the electricity generated in the United States. Two percent may not seem like a lot, but as the article points out, it’s the equivalent of adding a new state to the power grid.

One of the things that has attracted Bitcoin mining operations to the U.S. is low electrical costs. Some of the data centers have located in areas near underutilized power plants, causing spikes in electrical generation by those plants, but others have commenced operations in states, like Texas, where there are already stresses on the electrical grid. 

Obviously, electricity is an essential power source for homeowners and businesses, and the recent issues some power grids have experienced have highlighted the importance of power generation–including what processes are used to generate electricity, and where they are located–but also power use. The movement of cryptocurrency mining operations onto our electrical grids is one of the power use issues that will have to be addressed to reach a crucial goal: ensuring that our electricity infrastructure is reliable and supplies ample power, so Americans aren’t at risk of crippling grid failures during heat waves, cold snaps, or other periods of peak usage. 

“Memories,” Undemanded

For some time now, Facebook has included a “memories” feature that picks out Facebook posts from the same day in years past, pulls them out of the dustbin of history, puts them on display, and lets you know that you’ve got a “memory” to revisit. I’m sure Facebook thinks the “memories” feature is a great idea, and there probably are people out there who like it, but I find it jarring and off-putting, for several reasons.

First, the Facebook use of “memories” is inaccurate, because frequently I don’t remember the “memory” at all. Sometimes that’s because the Facebook “memories” algorithm selects something someone else has posted where you might have been identified, or it picks an incident that was so trivial that you’ve long since forgotten it. When you’re picking random Facebook posts from years past, that’s bound to be a pretty common scenario. 

Second, the “memories” feature is a powerful reminder of just how much information Facebook has stored about you. You may not remember what you were doing or thinking about on this date 13 years ago, but Facebook definitely does! I typically just share my blog posts on Facebook and really don’t post much else, but that’s still a lot of “memories” to choose from. If you are a more frequent poster, you’ve created quite a record that Facebook can dig into and resurrect. 

And finally, if you’ve been on Facebook for a while, some of the “‘memories” that the feature revives might well be unpleasant ones. Over a lifetime, there are bound to be some things–the loss of loved ones, a friendship gone sour, participation in something that now is the source of some embarrassment–that you’d rather not be randomly reminded of. I’d prefer that a mindless algorithm not dredge them up.

All of that is why I really don’t pay attention to anything the Facebook “memories” feature posts. I’d rather just go with the actual memories I carry around in my head. 

A Screen Too Far?

This week, Ford and Lincoln showed off the newly redesigned 2024 Lincoln Nautilus. You can read a Car and Driver article about it here. As the photo above shows, the car’s interior definitely has a cool, technology-laden vibe. 

The remarkable thing about the new Nautilus, however, is that it has two display screens. There’s the screen on the center console, just to the right of the steering wheel, which is pretty standard these days. But if you look above the dashboard, hard up against the bottom of the windshield, you’ll see another screen–a 48-inch, panoramic “infotainment” display screen that extends the width of the vehicle.

As a Popular Science article on the vehicle explains, the panoramic screen has the highest resolution Lincoln, and its parent company Ford, have ever offered. What is displayed on the screen, and where it is displayed, is customizable, and when the vehicle is set in park the panoramic screen will allow the passengers in the car to engage in gaming activity or watch video-streaming apps. Later, Ford plans advances that would allow the panoramic screen to support video conferencing, too.

Interestingly, one impetus for the new technology is the desire to have a standard platform going forward for new Ford and Lincoln vehicles, including specifically electric vehicles. Ford recognizes that electric vehicles take longer to charge than internal combustion cars take to gas up, so the new dashboard array is intended to prevent the driver from getting bored while the charging process is underway. Rather than checking your watch and fretting about how long the charging is taking, you can pass the time playing a game or surf for the latest YouTube videos.

The Nautilus is the next step in the long-term trend to add more and more technology into motor vehicles–which presents a challenge to Luddites like me, who tend to be tech-averse and use only a tiny fraction of the tech on their current cars. I just want the car to deliver me safely from point A to point B and don’t want to wade through a thick owner’s manual trying to figure out how to program different functions. But obviously, there is a broad range of people who really like this new technology and will happily take whatever time is needed to create a panoramic display loaded with apps suited to their individual tastes.

With the new, customizable panoramic screen and programming options, the Nautilus nudges cars farther away from their roots as a simple mode of individual transportation to rolling entertainment centers. And it makes you wonder: how many screens and display items and lights and gizmos can one car’s interior hold?

Into Deepfake Territory

Today is the New Hampshire Republican primary. The Granite State not only will hold the first primary in the country–on the Republican side, at least–but it also has recorded another, more troubling first: the first apparent Artificial Intelligence-generated “deepfake” hoax of the 2024 election cycle.

According to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office, a number of residents of the state received a robocall purporting to be from President Joe Biden telling them not to vote in the primary because “voting only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.” There’s only one problem: Biden didn’t record such a robocall, nor was it actually sent by the person shown as the caller. The fake robocall apparently used AI to convincingly mimic the President’s voice, to the point of using some of his familiar phrasing. The New Hampshire AG is investigating what it sees as an illegal effort to suppress voting.

Who would have engineered the fake robocall? We might never know, but it is clear that AI makes it much easier to create phony photos, like the one above, phony voice recordings, and other fakery. Thanks to AI, the ability of foreign countries, political opponents, or self-proclaimed pranksters to implement “dirty tricks” or disseminate misleading information has increased exponentially. The Biden robocall is likely just the first effort in what may be a barrage of deepfakes and phoniness. 

My grandmother used to say “believe none of what you hear, and half of what you see.” In our modern AI world, you really aren’t able to absolutely believe what you learn from either of those senses. As we roll forward into an election year, voters will need to raise their skepticism threshold, restrain their natural credulity, and be on guard against being hoodwinked. We’re heading into deepfake territory

Excitable Email

We’re trying out a new email system at the office. It has an AI feature that suggests simple responses, and also proposes the next word or phrase as you begin to type. The idea is that you will be more efficient and productive if you are helped along in responding to the barrage of emails that hit the inbox every day.

It’s a good concept, and Lord knows that we can use help in responding to the daily email onslaught. But here’s the thing: the tone of the proposed email responses is often a bit too excited for my tastes. They suggest liberal use of exclamation points–far more than I would use in the normal course–going well beyond the standard “Thanks!” response to include messages like “Great!” or “Terrific, thanks!” I think some of the simple suggested responses may also include emojis, although I’ve tried to shut that out of my conscious mind.

Since AI responses are based on some kind of training, the excitable response proposals mean that someone has trained the AI on the notion that boundless enthusiasm and lots of exclamation points are good things when responding to emails. I’m not sure that is the right way to go. One of the tough things about email communications is how to bring an ongoing thread to a respectful, but definite, termination point. Indicating that you are thrilled by a humdrum response to a question you posed may just precipitate further responses by someone who thinks you are eager to learn exactly what they did to answer your request for information–and no rational person would want to prolong an email chain unnecessarily. Or, such a response may cause the other party on the thread to wonder whether you are being sarcastic, or have an appallingly low excitement threshold, or have guzzled 15 cups of coffee already.

One of the challenges involved in the use of content-generating AI in the business world will be striking just the right tone. When it comes to email responses, being a fountain of positive, exclamation point-filled energy may sound good in the abstract, but may not be the right course in practice.

A New Method For Manipulation

People have been trying to manipulate financial markets and make a quick buck ever since financial markets were first created. The concept is so ingrained in our economic culture that it became part of the plot of a funny movie, Trading Places. But last week we saw a new approach to market manipulation, updated to the internet age.

On January 9, a tweet appeared on the X (formerly Twitter) account for the Securities and Exchange Commission that stated: ”Today the SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.” The financial markets quickly reacted to the announcement about the SEC’s approval of Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, resulting in millions of dollars of activity. There was only one problem: the tweet wasn’t true. Some malicious actor gained access to the SEC’s X account, published misleading information, and presumably made some money as a result. 

It isn’t clear what happened here; people initially assumed that the SEC account had been hacked, but the SEC’s chairman has said: ”While SEC staff is still assessing the scope of the incident, there is currently no evidence that the unauthorized party gained access to SEC systems, data, devices, or other social media accounts.” That’s not exactly reassuring, because if a hacker didn’t send the phony message, some “authorized” person must have. And after the incident occurred, the X platform stated that the SEC had for some reason decided not to use two-factor authentication on its account, which would have required any user to verify their identity through two inputs and might have prevented the fake tweet.

Congress is looking into what happened here–as it certainly should. Financial markets are delicate and reactive, and too many people have too much money at stake to take any manipulation attempt lightly. If you are going to make important announcements via tweet, then obviously basic security techniques, like two-factor authentication, should be used. 

But lawmakers and the SEC might also consider a more basis issue–how should important decisions that might affect the markets be announced? Is a tweet, with the attendant risks of misuse by “authorized” or “unauthorized” persons, really the best way to disseminate a key decision? Would it make sense, from a security standpoint, to go back to the days when such announcements were made by real, known authorized people at a briefing at a governmental location that has been scheduled in advance for that specific purpose? That might be slower and more old-fashioned, but it is a lot harder to fake.