That's So Meta

Never did I think I would ever have the slightest interest in anything that came out of the demon-haunted orifices of Facebook (sorry, Meta), let alone listen to anything the Zuckerbot had to say. Nevertheless, last week's Meta Connect has me genuinely excited.

First off, I've seen a few outlets expressing surprise because for some reason they thought the metaverse was already dead. This is of course nonsense. As I noted on the first post I did on the metaverse back in 2021, a timescale of five years was plausible but definitely on the optimistic side of things. I was a bit more skeptical a couple of months later, while in March this year I revised a plausible framework (for mass adoption) to the end of the decade. Not for a moment have I ever had the impression that the metaverse is anything imminent; postulating something as being about 5 years away is basically synonymous with allowing a large margin of error. I've never seen Meta claim the ultimate vision of the future is anywhere near nigh. Quite where people have got this impression, I don't know.

Anyway, I've noted throughout my coverage of this that the whole concept is hardware dependent. Thresholds of comfort, price, battery life, affordability etc. must all be overcome for XR to rival (say) mobile phones in significance. The hardcore fans like to claim that the Quest 2 was a huge upgrade from the Quest 1, but I've tried both and honestly it's not. It's incremental : better resolution, more processing power and that's it.

The Quest 3, though... this is sounding like a much bigger deal. Not a revolution that will usher in a new era of human existence, but a much more important step towards changing how we access the digital world.

In the Meta Connect event itself, we got the official launch of the Quest 3. I've seen several hands-on tests with this, and so far as I can tell it seems very impressive indeed. On the Quest 1 and 2, the passthrough gives you get a blurry, grainy, warped, over-exposed, black-and-white view of the world that's enough to stop you bumping into things but nothing much more than that. On that last link, you can clearly see that on the Quest 3 even small real-world text is readable. In full colour, with a massively improved light balance and far less distortions. 

And of course, it gets significant (but more incremental) general performance upgrades. But one can cross a threshold either through one giant leap or many small steps, and here too things look important. We're getting close to, though perhaps not yet equalling, the graphical fidelity of PC VR in a standalone device.

But wait, there's more ! Meta also announced other significant developments. First, their AI program continues apace, generating (for some reason) AI characters tailored to specific tasks. Most eye-catching of these was Snoop Dog as a Dungeon Master. Quite why anyone in the world would want this, other than for momentary shits and giggles, I know not*, but the branding is likely on-point. Most people seem to like pointless celebrities for some reason, though I was more interested in their developing a no-code AI development platform to open this customisation (eventually) to the masses. Plus, they announced far faster and higher-quality AI image generation, which will be directly integrated into WhatsApp in the near future. Job concerns aside, this is the democratisation of creativity.

* The Zuckerbot asks, "why not ?". But I say, why Snoop Dog when you could have Brian Blessed or Ian McKellen ? What's wrong with you, you weirdo ?

Finally there was a return of sorts to the metaverse with their smart glasses. These are much (!) cheaper, better looking and more functional than Google's ill-fated foray. They don't offer metaverse access in the conventional, image-based sense; they don't overlay any visual imagery on what you see. Instead they provide access to Meta's AI, allowing you to query what you see wherever you are (as well as recording and even streaming video and photographs). Although I don't personally want them, I think this is a pretty neat trick. It incorporates the digital world directly and instantly into the regular world, so in that sense they can be said to be metaverse-compliant.

What does all this mean ? For that we go to the "first metaverse interview" (I recommend watching the very beginning and then skipping to 30 minutes in). Watching this, I have to say I felt like Vash in Star Trek : The Next Generation, holding with awed reverence "a piece of the future". Now the interviewer is, it must be said, quite annoying and half the content is just him saying how impressed he is... but... he might be right. If the uncanny valley hasn't quite been fully crossed, the expedition is well on their way up the far slope to the sunny uplands beyond. The degree of realism, the subtlety of expression and nuance of emotions the avatars convey, is far beyond anything I've seen before.

When we get to this quality more generally - and we're not there yet in any meaningful way, since this is just a proof of concept that takes hours to set up per person in a dedicated scanner - we have to confront Morpheus' admittedly-cliché question, "What is real ? How do you define real ?". It's easy to dismiss the metaverse as overhyped techbro nonsense when it's all dumb cutesy cartoon characters, but when you have something with such a visceral sense of presence, when it reaches that level of realism... then it's rather harder to ignore. And some commercial apps (like Brink Traveller) already reach comparable quality for static landscapes... so this is absolutely something we can do. It's going to happen, ready or not.

And that, as per the interview, really lays out the vision of the metaverse and what it means. It's the seamless integration of digital and physical reality. You just can't do that with a phone or desktop PC.

Now, feeling like I've soiled myself, I have to say I wholeheartedly buy into the Zuckerbot's vision of this (extremely serious caveats about whether I trust him notwithstanding). He's right to say we need physical reality, that going on hikes, being in nature, talking with friends, using physical hardware - this all matters very much. But he's also right to say that the digital world is meaningful too. Content isn't any less important because it exists only digitally. The right approach is to use the differences of the two to complement each other. Which is why I found the VR Oasis hands-on test of the Quest 3, though the guy seems lovely, to be quite baffling in its claims that augmented reality isn't really that important compared to fully-immersive virtual reality.

As discussed in the interview, when you can have such a lifelike interview with someone, when you can connect with anyone in this way... why wouldn't you ? Zoom, it seems, won't last five minutes when such a technology is widespread. Likewise, the Quest 3 already allows you to bring digital objects into your reality in a semi-permanent way. The question here really is why not rather than why. Yes, absolutely, you need many objects to be real, solid, physical things. You can't have a VR toaster. But many others you don't. You want a pinball or snooker table, you don't need one. You want a full-size dinosaur skeleton, you don't need one. Unless you're an actual palaeontologist, I suppose, but even then, a virtual model sounds pretty useful to me !

The biggest potential impact of the Quest 3 is for me productivity. It appears to begin to breach several important thresholds : comfort (better weight distribution and so narrow you can reportedly drink while wearing it), accessibility (no need to set up boundaries any more), performance, and flexibility (being able to freely and without hassle switch between real and digital worlds). But while I'm longing to set up Stranger Things portals to the upside-down all over my home, the thing that I think is potentially really impactful is, of all things, the integration with Microsoft Office. If I can have multiple windows acting as giant, lifelike monitors wherever I am, if it's comfortable enough to use for work for extended periods... that's a big deal. If I can keep different windows open showing me the figure I need to write about full-screen whilst still being able to write about them... that makes a real difference to how I work. How much of a difference, time will tell.

Of course the Quest 3 itself won't have us all wearing goggles the entire time. The photorealism of the avatars is still only a working prototype, not a mass-market consumer product. So no, the Quest 3 will not itself usher in the metaverse (no, you still don't need "metaverse officers" !)... but it's making it look an awful lot closer, and a lot less like the delusional pipe-dream of a typical Silicon Valley twatface. 

The end of the decade, the Zuckerbot says, is when we might have glasses rather than goggles for delivering genuine lifelike "holograms", when the digital and physical worlds collide. And for all his myriad faults, I really want to see what happens when they do. And I'm tired of the constant luddite anti-tech rhetoric. The optimistic vision is just so very much more appealing.

Making Meta Beta Feta Data

I put down a few thoughts on Facebooks' "Metaverse" project back when it was announced, but given that they're really going all-in on this lately, I think I'll jot down a few more. For this, I watched the keynote speech by developer John Carmack at Facebook Connect and read a transcript (because I honestly can't stand the sight of his ugly head) of an interview with Zuckerberg.

I'm at least as conflicted about this as I am about billionaires funding space travel. Human space fight is an intrinsically and highly valuable experience and I'm convinced we should be supporting this as much as possible, over and above robotic probes. The recent race for re-usable rockets has done more for this than any government projects since the Apollo era, the hopelessly expensive Shuttle project notwithstanding. All the same, this doesn't mean that the leading proponents of this aren't generally a bunch of self-entitled, exploitative, profit-mongering jerks. It is a great and bitter shame to me that these people have tainted what should be an inspirational and unifying human endeavour, something that we should see as a goal of improving life for all of us on Earth, not to allow some elitist twats to try and escape it.

Facebook's VR project is even worse. The company is, simply put, a bag of dicks, and Mark Zuckerbot has all the empathic awareness of a mad robot hell bent - literally - on world domination. Yet I love their Oculus products and use my Quest headset on an almost daily basis. I am... conflicted.

Let's start with the practical aspects. The "metaverse" is not a great name, but it is adequate. It appears to refer to this blending of multiple realities : the ordinary real world, the purely virtual world, and the use of augmented reality to combine the two. The idea appears to be that these new, virtual worlds would become as integral to daily life as the conventional world of flesh and stone. So I'm fine with the name, despite the inevitable deluge of hilarious memes.

Even Facebook is not so ambitious as to think it could dominate every aspect of this metaverse, and is even proclaiming that it doesn't want anything like a walled garden - but it does want to become a key player in it. Still, is this goal even achievable, or desirable ? The timing of Facebook's announcements is certainly more than coincidence given recent scrutiny, but this does not mean it's a doomed gimmick - not by a long shot.

I like very much Carmack's analogy of mobile phones. He made this comparison for two reasons. First, that practically, mobile phones have become highly successful and replaced a slew of different devices. Access to a metaverse could potentially offer similarly staggeringly profitable benefits, but I'll get back to that in a moment. Second, he notes that there are plenty of lapsed VR users, who bought a headset but rarely or never used it - a phenomenon not seen in phones*. So to some users, the device effectively has negative value : they already have it, they paid money for it, but they're actively choosing not to use it. Clearly that has to change for a metaverse to become feasible.

* Carmack is worth listening to, I think - he's quite honest about the practical problems, even if he does seem to buy into the "only connect !" mantra.

I think mobile phones are an excellent analogy for another reason : thresholds of convenience. We had mobile phones back in the 1980s, but hardly anyone had one. They were large, cumbersome, expensive, silly executive toys. I don't doubt they added value to their users, but that came with such high non-financial costs that their eventual explosion as a market wasn't at all obvious or inevitable.

An anecdote may help illustrate this further. When I was ~12 I remember reading a technology magazine that boldly predicted we'd eventually all have mobile phones. The magazine depicted them, rather oddly, as pendants we would wear everywhere, though we might have to move in range of antennas in order to make an actual call : outside of this they'd be no more than pagers. And I remember thinking that the magazine's depiction of someone making a phone call on the beach was very silly - who in the world would want a call on the beach ? Ridiculous ! Likewise, no-one seemed to predict the success of text messaging : why would anyone prefer this to an actual conversation ?

So I'm wary of claims the metaverse will add the necessary value Facebook thinks it will. It might just be a silly gimmick, this is entirely possible. All the same, it might succeed. It would be foolish to dismiss this possibility based on the limitations of current headsets or past 3D flops like cinematic movies (in particular, the latter are a qualitatively different experience than true VR).

Hence, thresholds are key. Carmack notes that once the Oculus dropped its price by $100, sales spiked. Likewise I think this applies to convenience too, more than it is about actual functionality. If you could immerse yourself in a 3D world, or augment the real world with 3D, lifelike imagery, as easily as you can currently say, "Hey Google", why wouldn't you ? If wearing the necessary device was no more burdensome than a pair of ordinary spectacles, if you could do this comfortably for the entire day so that its features were available when you needed and could instantly be dismissed when not, why would you choose not to have this ? Why would you choose not to opt in to this larger, enriched world ? To allow both your existing 2D content and a new world of 3D content together however you wished ? It would be like denying yourself access to the entire internet or every public library. Sure, some parts of the internet are best avoided, as are (presumably) some libraries. And some people do indeed choose to avoid both, but their numbers are negligible. The vast majority to not deliberately deprive and disadvantage themselves in such a way.

(Carmack leans toward the software aspect of the VR as being more important for increasing value than hardware. I have some sympathy for this : for myself, the iDaVIE app is almost to the point where I would use VR routinely for work. But for truly mainstream use, I think we're still at the point where hardware needs to improve before developers will be interested in writing programs to use it.)

Of course, these thresholds gloss over a wealth of practicalities : how to make the glasses visually appealing, how to have a long battery life, how to deliver high-end performance, what level of graphical fidelity would be acceptable as a minimum standard, etc. My point is that if you could create such a device, it's hard to see why any ordinary person wouldn't want it. So I do think the metaverse in principle has every shot of going mainstream. We all use smartphones to the extent that making them even more convenient and powerful definitely would add a great deal of additional value, not least in having far more engrossing conversations and fostering more productive collaborations than in primitive Zoom calls. 

I could spell out a rosy vision of an augmented reality lifestyle, where one routinely has 3D calls with distant relatives and gets to experience distant places without the high-energy demands to actually visit them; where one replaces phones, computers and screens in general with a pair of lenses. I could wax lyrical on the utopian possibilities... I think it not outrageous that a metaverse, using data, could even help us making better feta cheese (hence the silly title), or other ordinary activities where the internet doesn't normally come into play. 

In short, just imagine an activity, and try and imagine how augmenting this could help - what you could do if your imagination was as clear as day, and accessible to anyone you chose to share it with. Most activities have possibilities in such a case, I think. Not all by any means, but a hell of a lot.

But alas, this is Facebook, so we all know such grand utopian visions aren't worth dwelling on. I only mention them to point out that there are potentially enormous positive aspects, just as there are with Facebook itself. It would be foolish indeed to pretend there aren't : Facebook wouldn't have so many users were it not doing at least something right. So burying one's head in the sand isn't going to help. Furthermore, while I doubt this sort of system is going mainstream in the next five years, Facebook seems quite determined to plough billions of dollars into this. Even - especially! - if you don't buy in to the benefits, it's worth being at least concerned about the possible next big crisis in social media.

We all know by now that Facebook is horrendous, so I trust I don't need to spell this out for anyone. I do not believe Zuckerberg at all when he claims he's so passionate about social media or fostering connections between people - his company seems to have a single overriding goal in all things, and enriching human existence isn't it*. But at long last it seems the great political blocs have realised that having such huge profiteering being driven and governed by anger-inducing manipulative news feeds isn't a way towards a utopian dream, and have stirred themselves away from the trivial question of whether regulation needs to be employed towards the much more difficult questions of what, how, and how much.

* While interesting, I do not much agree with this piece on how social media doesn't lead to echo chambers or polarisation : yes, by getting people of conflicting views together it does expose that conflict, but it does exactly nothing to help and often clearly makes things worse.

Questions about whether social media companies should be treated as publishers remain difficult, in my opinion. I think of social media as something wholly new, possessing attributes of all sorts of older media together with something radically different. It is neither like someone organising a town hall meeting nor like a postal service delivering a latter. It has aspects of both, coupled with the extraordinary capability of reach fantastically large audiences in an interactive way that is simply impossible elsewise. 

Rather than wondering whether they are publishers or not, we need entirely new terminology - and new regulations to go along with it. Social media has given rise to memes and deepfakes, and this sort of art as communication is only going to get orders of magnitude more common in a metaverse.

Similarly, painting Facebook as a villain, though - and I can't stress this enough - is very, very easy, it may not be all that helpful. Just saying, "don't use it" clearly doesn't work. Profiteering is a fundamentally amoral, not immoral, activity. For this reason the actual metaverse is more likely to be closer to dystopian than utopian (think DRM problems writ large), but that doesn't mean to won't be desirable enough for people not to want it - or indeed to make its use a practical necessity for everyone else. The threshold of quality standards needed to make a profit is not the same as the threshold to ensure everyone has a wonderful time, which appears to be the foundational myth of the free market.

So is the metaverse coming or not ? I lean towards "probably, but not yet". Maybe in five years we might have a high-end device capable of the sort of features needed, but it won't be affordable. My suspicion is that VR will remain something of a niche activity for several more years, though it may well go to console-scale mainstream when it comes to gaming. Among my friends, this is almost the case already (and I've never even interacted with any of them in VR).

Unfortunately this means it's going to have to continue to put up with the usual sort of idiots who criticise anything they themselves can't see the immediate and instantaneous value of. And if VR can't make good on the convenience criteria, then it may well eventually go the way of 3D televisions - the doubters do have a point. But against this, the immersion of VR is just too much fun, the potential for education too great. The doubters aren't so much wrong as they are very narrow-minded. And if we do reach a full metaverse, it won't - most assuredly - just be because the likes of that twit Mark Zuckerberg told us to : it will because we deemed the costs to be worth the genuine value offered. We should be prepared for a much more sophisticated response to this than simple Luddite rejectionism : if it works, we won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

Welcome to the metaverse ?

There's a recent piece in Wired which is so awful I refuse to repeat or link it here. Basically it says that Facebook's determination to push ahead in becoming a "metaverse" company is akin to lavishing praise on a "rich white kid". That is, developing virtual reality is apparently racist because they should be building schools and hospitals instead.

A much better piece on the metaverse can be found here. Basically, the concept is much like that Futurama episode where they surf the web in the year 3000. Instead of reading text and watching YouTube videos, it's a vast, sprawling 3D simulation of a city. Websites are buildings, stores, etc. - it's a "real" place you can wander around in and talk to people as you would in real life. Zoidberg - sorry, Zuckerberg's vision is basically this, after a fashion.

So, is this (a) technically achievable in five years as per Facebook's vision, (b) desirable in principle, and (c) seriously, does it have to be Facebook ? Here's my take as a proudly Oculus-wielding VR acolyte who sincerely wishes Mark Zuckerberg wasn't a thing.

To the first one my guess is yes but with major caveats. Of course, no-one is really envisioning that walking around the internet as a literal simulated city would be in any way practical. Rather, imagine something more like a super-advanced version of Microsoft's HoloLens : the ability to bring up well-rendered, 3D graphics wherever and whenever you are, using data from across the internet. Essentially, portable augmented reality on demand. 

The technical state of VR is looking pretty rosy. Headsets are getting lighter, more powerful, and cheaper. Standalone headsets can do some pretty impressive things, but couple them to a PC and the graphical quality improves dramatically. Given developments like the Steam Deck, I don't think it's at all crazy to postulate affordable, entirely standalone (that is, a single purchasable unit), wearable, PC-quality VR within five years. Maybe it won't be run by the headset itself, but by a Deck-like device in a backpack, or streamed wirelessly from a remote server. 

(Actually I'm a bit surprised that there's been so much focus on developing more powerful headsets rather than just giving them dedicated streaming equipment to let a PC do the heavy lifting, but the point is there are a variety of solutions to this part of the challenge.)

My expectation of a device needed to make the metaverse feasible would be something much closer to a beefy pair of glasses than the current helmet-like googles. Something weighing 1-200g or so, that's no more difficult to put on and no less comfortable than regular glasses. It may or may not have a separate accompanying wearable device to do the main computations. The glasses themselves would include high-resolution colour cameras to provide a 3D display of the real world, together with a LIDAR scanner and of course accelerometers. This is not too far off the capabilities of current high-end smartphones.

The two key features are the need to be wireless and to provide real-world visuals, both of which VR can do today but in a severely limited fashion. With a wire, all other improvements are almost neutered, since you're still tied to a clunky external device : convenience is destroyed, and climbing into the metaverse would be something you'd have to dedicate special time and effort to. This is fine for games, but useless for regular productivity. Currently, the wireless PC streaming works pretty darn well on the Quest, but not all routers meet the ideal capacity and not everyone has or needs a high-end gaming PC, hence the need for a standalone package.

The requirement for real-world visuals is that a big problem for VR is the space requirement. Again, it's fine for dedicated gaming if you have to set aside an area, but not much fun for productive work if you have to clear out a space every time you want to use it (especially in small, crowded offices). Having a simultaneous clear view of reality - I mean one that's good enough that you could tolerate it for hours at a stretch - would eliminate this need. Being able to overlay graphics* means you could use real surfaces as an advantage rather than a hindrance (and using a screen instead of clear pane allows the possibility to switch back and forth between VR and AR as required). This is only just about possible right now, and the impact is not even close to being fully realised. But in five years, with Facebook's resources ? Probably possible.

* And they have to be high-quality graphics. Currently things are sufficient for immersive gaming, but not for reading the large quantities of text that actual work requires. There are people who swear by VR apps for productivity, but my experience thus far has fallen far short of what I need.

So would this be desirable in principle ? Yes, but as to whether it will really be something widely adopted in five years, I'm very skeptical. It might be technically feasible in five years but it will take a lot longer before the levels of reliability and adoption become close to what Facebook hopes. VR devices are threshold-limited : get anything slightly wrong and everything becomes worse. None of the technical requirements are outlandish, but they all have to be done well or it just won't work. Getting to the required level of quality and especially price in five years would be a big challenge, given the rate of development of Oculus devices.

Similarly, would people really be likely to adopt this en masse as Facebook hopes ? Here the Wired author has an abysmal lack of imagination. Suppose you could bring up technical documents on a whim, arranging them in three-dimensional space around you however you like. Instead of needing multiple expensive monitors, or arranging multiple desktops, your whole environment would become a giant screen. But then also imagine bringing in collaborators, who could walk around your virtual world inspecting documents as they please, annotating and drawing, making physical gestures... this is a huge change. Would you ever want a conventional monitor again ? I doubt it. At most you'd want a physical keyboard for the tactile experience of typing.

I think the full implications of a true 3D AR interface are only going to become apparent when we've got one. We'll start with reproducing existing GUIs, for familiarity, but from there things will diverge in unpredictable ways. 

The convenience of this is key. If it's an expensive piece of equipment that's laborious to set up, that makes the experience qualitatively different from the case of being no more burdensome that putting on a pair of sunglasses. Sure, if my main task is managing spreadsheets, a clunky, pricey headset would offer only disadvantages. But if it's so easy to put on that it's no burden, and if it lets me do all the same stuff I do in conventional interfaces and more, why would I ever opt out ?

Likewise the potential everyday uses are manifold. I go on holiday, I see something interesting - I instantly bring up information with a wave of hand, with no need for bringing out a phone and typing out a query. I remain fully immersed in the environment I've come to enjoy but with a richer experience, not a diminished one. I no longer walk along the streets glued to a phone and bumping into lamp-posts. I bring up instructions on cooking, maps, DIY... I can examine objects and animals, history and science in a way I could never do otherwise. I experience more of life than I would otherwise, not reduce myself to a tiny screen.

But don't mistake my meaning here. This is not some glorious technocratic solution to all the ills of the world. Those who aren't interested in a topic won't become more interested just because it's in VR. It'll just make things better for those who are, and provide convenient, more effective assistance in certain situations. Making good into great is a hell of a lot easier than making bad into good.

So yeah, I can buy in to the potential of a genuinely revolutionary AR/VR "metaverse" that would break out of the current niche appeal of VR and be used routinely in regular office jobs; it needn't be a Utopian solution to all problems to still offer huge advantages. But just as the technical achievements will be bottlenecked by the weakest link in the chain (to mix metaphors), so too do the details of the interface matter. Which brings up the third and final point : does it have to be Facebook ?

Or perhaps it would be fairer to envisage the ways this could go wrong. The scope for privacy violations is huge. A bad interface could make organisation next to impossible, and transitioning from the familiar displays to something so wholly new won't be easy. There will be a lot of tasks that don't benefit from AR/VR at all. It could be overwhelmed with notifications, adverts.... to say nothing of the even greater potential for misinformation and manipulation. It won't bring about the dystopian real world that everyone cheerfully brushes aside in Ready Player One, but it could potentially have equivalently awful consequences.

There is no question to me that a VR metaverse is desirable. Equally, a metaverse could be awful. It doesn't follow that all forms of metaverse are wonderful any more than it follows that they're all abhorrent. They are neither. VR, to me, is a wonderful and enriching technology, but no purely technological safeguards can prevent misuse. I think it's utter cynical, knee-jerk reactionary garbage to claim Facebook shouldn't work on this because they could do something else instead, but equally, we've already seen what happens when we're cavalier about social media technology. If we don't learn the right lessons about regulating information, any new technology will only make things worse.

Life Under Lockdown (VI)

It's been a while since doing one of these because there's precisely bugger all to report. This is the end of history : all days are the same, time has no meaning. Which is fine by me - the amount of stuff to binge watch remains inexhaustible. We've recently gone through the entirety of Star Trek : The Next Generation, The Borgias, and The Last Kingdom, and we've still barely made a dent in the mountain of high-quality entertainment to explore.

(Shirley has some very interesting insights into Star Trek from the perspective of a human resources manager. I'm trying to persuade her that we should co-author a blog post on this, but she doesn't think anyone would be interested. Nerds of the internet, I summon thee !)

Also, I finally finished The Talos Principle. It took me 32 hours, which is way longer than its suggested 15-20 hours. And I had to cheat several times. If I don't solve a puzzle within about 15 minutes, chances are I'm completely flummoxed and could spend an indefinite amount of time fruitlessly doing the same thing over and over again. Likewise, the sigil puzzles are okay when they're small, but just frustrating when they're large. So eventually I stopped seeing the point of them and looked up the answers online (I looked up hints for the main puzzles rather than walkthroughs, expect in a few cases).

That said, I enjoyed the game a great deal. I'm hoping to do the expansions in VR when my Oculus Quest finally arrives. I'm also thinking of trying a Total War game again, a franchise I haven't touched in probably too long. All those medieval dramas are definitely having an effect.

Since "what I've been watching on Netflix" is nearly as dull a topic as "what I did on my holidays", what about The Virus ? Unfortunately my favourite tracking website appears to now have some weird issues on desktop PCs so I had to download the image from my phone, hence the crappy quality.

Basically, a lot of countries are now seeing a continuing plummet (though what the hell's going on with Spain and France I've no idea). There's been a claim floating around on dubious sources that the virus behaviour follows a time-dependent, predictable pattern regardless of lockdown procedures. I'll not link to that since I find it highly suspect, but if anyone know what I'm on about, I'd much appreciate any links to detailed critiques. Is there anything to it or not ? It strikes me as wrong-headed.

On the Czech-specific front, generally the news is good. Daily cases peaked at over 300, but now we're back in the tens - even the low tens. The reproduction number has been below 1.0 for several weeks.

More worrying are the political developments, which, from the view of an English-speaking immigrant, appear to be as though the government suddenly went mad. Initially, everything seemed to go about as well as could possibly be expected - swift, decisive, appropriate action. Even though the Czech intensive care capacity is a mere 500 beds, at one point we were even importing patients from other, more badly-affected countries. Then there was a successful legal challenge that the government actions were unconstitutional : instead of implementing them under one act they should have used another, apparently. The very next day, instead of re-implementing using the correct act, the government moved their ending-lockdown schedule forward two weeks. So instead of noises from the Prime Minister about the borders being closed for a year, they're already open - albeit only in principle, but this is expected to become a practical reality (with Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia) by July.

(In the thoroughly excellent Xenophobe's Guide to the Czech Republic, it says, "What keeps them from being quite unbearably astute is a knack for screwing up when it really matters." Indeed.)

I'm all for re-opening borders, but I'm thoroughly confused about what's going on here, and more concerned about the easing of local lockdown measures. When the government decides not to re-implement its emergency powers under a different act (because that would involve paying people compensation) and instead moves it schedule forward, that doesn't fill me with confidence - even if they bring out some epidemiologists to say it's okay. Instinctively, I'm against easing the lockdown right now - surely, waiting an extra couple of weeks would get those case numbers down further and make it easier to track and trace. But perhaps I'm wrong - perhaps the numbers are already low enough that we can move back towards a containment strategy. We'll see soon enough, but my guess would be a second wave and a brand new lockdown. I'd be happier if they'd say more about their track-and-trace program.


I should also say something about the UK's response. I believe firmly in giving credit where credit is due, and what the government has done seems to be more or less correct as far as I can tell. Construction of the Nightingales was genuinely impressive, and while there were problems (like insufficient staff for the number of beds), I submit that similar mistakes would occur under any government. You're going to have problems in an unprecedented crisis regardless of who's in charge.

Similarly, from a purely political perspective, I think the PMQs we've been having lately have been the best in many years. Both sides actually praised each other ! No braying nonsense or waving of papers, but some actual proper feckin' intelligent discourse - yes, even from Dominic Raab, on occasion. I agree with him that we should wait for the expert advice on how the virus is progressing before deciding on a lockdown strategy, although if we can't be told when or what, it would have been nice to hear something about how the strategy is being formulated. Who's involved ? Are they running simulations ? Are their behavioural scientists and epidemiologists involved as well as politicians ?

More worrying has been the fiddling of testing figures. Look, this 100,000 a day by some arbitrary deadline isn't the issue. I would have been perfectly happy if they'd said, "we're not quite there, but we expect to be there soon". Instead they confounded the issue with definitions of testing capacity versus tests carried out and so on, which just feels petty. And the claim that capacity wasn't being used due to lack of demand was a barefaced lie.

As for newly-minted opposition leader Starmer, for me he's got the balance just right. I don't accept critics who say he should stick the knife in and never say a good word about the government - that is wrong. During an emergency, you don't stop to say, "who's fault is that ?". You say, "how can I help ?". Afterwards, well that's a different story. But during the actual crisis ? No - there are bigger issues than who-did-what. When people say or do something wrong you call them out on it (if only to stop them hurting themselves even more), but you don't, during the event itself, go back to pick over all the mistakes they made that led them to that point.

That said, the media are right to say that they should be holding the government to account : it's the politician's job to pull together right now, but the media still have a duty to find fault. If the government can't be criticised when its inactions lead to thirty thousand dead, well, we're in a sorry state of affairs indeed. If there's nothing much wrong with what the government did, it has a hell of a lot to answer for for when it did it. That is not yet a matter for the politicians, but once the dust settles, it most certainly will be.

The robots are coming to give you jobs

Or at least, they're coming to give you jobs in Spain according to this study. Whether this is true everywhere or if this data is accurate I know not.

Figure 1, constructed from the ESEE dataset, provides a clear indication that firm heterogeneity in the adoption of robots matters greatly for the labour market effects of robot technology. It demonstrates that firms that adopted robots between 1990 and 1998 (‘robot adopters’) increased the number of jobs by more than 50% between 1998 and 2016, while firms that did not adopt robots (‘non-adopters’) reduced the number of jobs by more than 20% over the same period. From macro-level information on robot use, as employed in the existing literature, it is impossible to identify and investigate this striking pattern in the data.

We reveal strong evidence for positive selection, that is, we show that firms that adopt robots in their production process are already larger and more productive than non-adopters before adopting robots. Looking at firms’ internal skill composition of labour, we establish robust evidence that, conditional on productivity, more skill-intensive firms are less likely to adopt robots. Intuitively, a more complex production process requires a larger share of high-skilled workers; since these workers are more difficult to replace, there is a negative relationship between the skill intensity of the firm and the gains from automation. Finally, our data show that exporters are more likely to adopt robots than non-exporters, since the gains from doing so can be scaled up to a larger customer base.

What this desperately needs is - unusually - an anecdote. Let's say their numbers are fine. What does this look like on the ground ? Does greater automation mean that new jobs are created (e.g. "to build and maintain those robots !") or that greater production power now needs more staff to do existing jobs that robots currently can't do ?

I'm very much on the fence regarding the predictions that automation will soon render huge numbers of people redundant. On the one hand, I do not believe that everyone can do every job, so replacing menial work could plausibly leave large numbers of people with nothing to do. On the other, not every manual job can yet be done by robots. So robots replacing humans in a limited set of tasks then requires more people to do the remaining manual labour, hence creating more jobs so long as those cannot be automated. That implies there is an end point, a threshold beyond which automation will indeed cause job losses rather than gains... but that, conceivably, is a very long way off indeed.

Robots and firms

The rise of robots has sparked an intense debate about the labour market effects of their adoption. This column explores differences in robot adoption across firms and analyses the labour market effects of robot adoption at the firm level.

SpaceX's new rocket goes retro

Sooo shiiiiiny....

Short-hop tests could begin in February or March. “This is for suborbital VTOL tests,” he said in one of tonight’s tweets. “Orbital version is taller, has thicker skins (won’t wrinkle) and a smoothly curving nose section.”

Musk said he plans to provide a detailed update on the Starship architecture in March or April. The first scaled-up, orbital-class prototype should be done around June, he said.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/elon-musk-says-spacex-assembled-starship-test-rocket-shiny-retro-look/

Robo-delivery dogs, because why not ?

This seems more likely than aerial drones.

Via Joe Carter.

Originally shared by Randy LaVigne

#ItsAmachineWorldAfterAll
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/robot-delivery-dogs-deployed-by-self-driving-cars-are-coming/

The future past, according to ordinary people

I like these answers because they're from ordinary people writing to a newspaper, not futurologists.

From the downright bizarre...

"Invasion is made impossible by the intellectual, self-acting pyro-aqua vengeance bombs."

... to those that were just a little bit out on the date...

"England will by her very policy of national aggrandisement slowly sink into the condition of a second-rate power (somewhat like Sweden of the present day), and her fall will in the end by [sic] accelerated by those whom she has in former years befriended. In 1988 she will have no weight in the Councils of Europe."

... and the one written in the poetically vague style of Nostradamus :

"An island city containing several rather large gardens. Over it an uncrowned king shall reign, though the tongue of syren shall sway St. Stephen's. The chancellor's hair, uncovered by a wig, shall hang down to the woolsack. Heat shall be drawn from clouds and light from running water. Armies shall meet in the air and vessels glide over land and sea without either wind or steam to drive them. Servants shall neither speak nor see, and yet do their work well. Though Neptune threatens, the lion and eagle shall be bound together with bonds of steel."
https://www.indy100.com/article/victorians-people-future-predictions-1888-1988-england-thread-8704311

Theresa May's confidence vote

I bet she wins. And then we're stuck with a deal everyone hates.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-46535739

The latest developments in fusion power

I presume I don't need to state that I view this with interested skepticism, but I'll state it anyway.

Some private energy firms reckon they are surmounting these practical challenges faster through the use of new materials and technologies. Oxfordshire-based Tokamak Energy is working on spherical tokamaks or reactors that use high temperature superconductors (HTS) to contain the plasma in a very strong magnetic field.

"High temperature" in the context of this branch of physics means a distinctly chilly -70C or below. "They've been by far the most successful to date," says Jonathan Carling, the firm's chief executive. "A spherical tokamak is a much more efficient topography, and we can drastically improve the compactness and the efficiency. And because it's smaller, it can be more flexible, and the cost to build is also lower," he says.

The company has built three tokamaks so far, with the third, ST40, built from 30mm (1.2in) stainless steel and using HTS magnets. This June it achieved plasma temperatures of more than 15 million C - hotter than the core of the sun.

The firm hopes to be hitting 100 million C by next summer - a feat Chinese scientists claim to have achieved this month. "We expect to have energy gain capability by 2022 and be supplying energy to the grid by 2030," says Mr Carling.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46219656

The dark side clouds everything

I watched a fair old chunk of the May-versus-Parliament Brexit's Got Talent On Ice show. It seemed like too much of an important event to miss, so I will venture some thoughts, just for the hell of it.

The one thing that can be said with confidence is that everyone hates the proposal. Even May probably hates it, but she isn't allowed to say so. Brexiteers hate it because they hate all that is good and true in the world it creates further attachment to the EU without a clear course of action or exit strategy. Remainers hate it because it takes us further away from the EU (managing to persuade both sides that it does the exact opposite of what they wanted is quite impressive really). The Lib Dems hate it because it's shite. Jeremy Corbyn hates it because May is pretending not to hate it. Backbench MPs are calling for a second referendum, or to go back to Brussels and try again, or to extend Article 50.

It would take a parliamentary miracle* to get it passed. Stranger things have happened, I guess, but it's not looking likely.

* As Pratchett said, just because it isn't nice doesn't mean it isn't a miracle.

As an aside : it might not necessarily be the worst deal possible - it may even be the best one possible in the circumstances (under the silly constraints in which May operates, e.g. trying to get Brexit to actually happen), but it isn't what anyone wanted.

So, what are the possible outcomes ?

1) Parliament votes for the deal and we stay in the same stupid situation we're in now.
2) There's a leadership challenge before MPs even vote.
3) There's a vote and May's deal is narrowly rejected.
4) There's a vote and (as currently seems likely) the proposal is roundly rejected.

(1) probably won't happen. (2) is unlikely - it would behove any challenger to wait until they've got numbers on their side.
(4) is the most likely. If so, May can either try and patch something up (which seems impossible given how long it's taken to get this far), try a different Brexit strategy completely (which is what a lot of Tories are calling for, but none of those options seem even remotely sensible or feasible in the time allowed), or ask for an extension of Article 50. That seems about the only plausible way to salvage something out of May's debacle - but again, this would be hugely unpopular with everyone.
Alternatively she could pull a blinder and call for a second referendum. But she won't, because no-one likes the agreed deal, no deal isn't feasible and she knows it, and the Brexiteers won't let her put down Remain as an option.
A leadership challenge seems the most likely outcome of this (either called by other Tories or by May herself to force their hand, though that seems less likely). A new Tory leader might have a mandate to hold a second referendum, in order to prevent the need for a general election (though this may well fail). God alone knows what chaos that would reap within the party, whichever option they supported.
(3) Is unlikely and is the hardest to predict what would happen. I would guess it be something like (4), but might give May an edge in any leadership contest.

I don't really see any plausible outcome which doesn't involve yet more political chaos and infighting. It's entirely possible we could face both another election and a second referendum. There's very little chance of Brexit simply being aborted, and no-one with any sense would even guess which way a second referendum would go. Both parties face fundamental ideological splits on Brexit, and Labour still face them on even more basic principles as well.

I don't like it.

A special journal for controversial ideas

It will be interesting to see where this goes. Hopefully the peer-review process will ensure it doesn't become a free-for-all of every nutjob under the sun. There's not very much detail in the article, though there's a link to a 30 minute radio programme.

Academics who are frightened to explore controversial topics, in case it provokes a backlash, will soon have a safer route to publish such work. An international group of university researchers is planning a new journal which will allow articles on sensitive debates to be written under pseudonyms. They feel free intellectual discussion on tough issues is being hampered by a culture of fear and self-censorship. The Journal of Controversial Ideas will be launched early next year.

Prof McMahan stressed that the new cross-disciplinary publication will be fully peer-reviewed in line with normal academic standards. "The screening procedure will be as rigorous as those for other academic journals. The level of quality will be maintained," he said. He and his colleagues are establishing an intellectually diverse international editorial board with representation from the left and the right, as well as religious and secular thinkers, to ensure the journal is not identified with a specific viewpoint. They will soon issue a call for papers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46146766?fbclid=IwAR2jOhAbQ4wrHW9eRDl1_XyqJgdSQmt68_r9fJg3n1IU95BtjmS21k_gGpg

Predicting the surface of Europa

Equatorial regions of the potentially life-supporting Europa, which harbors a huge ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy shell, are probably studded with blades of ice up to 50 feet (15 meters) tall, a new study suggests.

Here on Earth, exceptionally cold and dry conditions, such as those found in the Chilean Andes, can give rise to rows of jagged ice towers called "penitentes" (Spanish for "penitent," so named because they often look like people kneeling in penance). The driving force behind penitente formation is sublimation, the transition of a material directly from solid to gas form. An initially smooth snowpack sublimates at different rates in different spots, causing small pits to form in some places. Sunlight bounces around in these pits, boosting sublimation further in the depths and eventually creating fields of spiky ice towers.

So Hobley and his colleagues calculated sublimation rates around the surface of the Jupiter moon and then compared those with the rates of other erosional processes. The researchers found sublimation to be the dominant factor on equatorial Europa, the regions within 23 degrees of the moon's equator. And sublimation has likely carved penitentes into the ice there, the study team determined. These are some serious putative penitentes, too: Some fields could feature towers up to 50 feet (15 m) tall, spaced about 23 feet (7 m) apart, the scientists found. Here on Earth, penitente heights typically range from 3 to 16 feet (1 to 5 m).

There's some observational support for the existence of Europa penitentes as well, the researchers reported. For example, radar waves beamed at Europa from big Earth-based dishes such as Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory show signs of bouncing off multiple surfaces on the moon — a result that Hobley described as "really weird."

https://www.space.com/42051-jupiter-moon-europa-ice-towers-lander.html

We cannot avoid the need for geoengineering

I tend to agree. First, we should stop the damage that's being done. But even with the best will in the world that's going to take time, and then we'll still need to undo what we've already inflicted. Though I don't think spraying sulphates into the clouds is going to be the way forward.

Here’s what’s going to happen: Every year for the foreseeable future, scientists, activists, and citizens concerned about climate change will have a discussion in one form or another about geoengineering. There will be editorials and vague proposals in journals; there will be think pieces on the need not to do it, but to talk about it. These will increase in volume and urgency as our situation becomes ever clearer, perhaps starting right now, with the release of the latest and most dire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

But then, one day, you will look up, and the planes will be in the sky. They will be dumping tiny aerosol particles designed to deflect bits of sunlight back into space. Maybe this will happen when 10 million people have to vacate coastal Bangladesh and start pouring into India. Maybe when the last resident of Kiribati finally gives up hope and moves to Fiji.

Maybe a few billion dollars per year could retrofit some planes and send them into the stratosphere, where they would endlessly dump out sulfate aerosols until the planet starts to cool. And by most scientists’ estimates, it would cool the planet. Those simple facts are the driving force that will turn our never-ending conversation cycle of scary-but-necessary-but-dangerous-but-crucial into planes in the sky.

Of course, that doesn’t negate all the problems with solar radiation management’s use. It doesn’t fix ocean acidification. Once we start this project, some models say we really, really shouldn’t stop. There is a danger that geoengineering will lead to complacency in the fight to transition away from fossil fuels. And finally, this would be a planetary-scale experiment with so many variables as to make firm predictions of the results nearly impossible.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/geoengineering-is-inevitable-1829623031

Glasses to block your view of distracting screens

IRL Glasses block LCD/LED screens through horizontal polarized optics. By flattening and rotating the polarized lens 90 degrees, light emitted by LCD/LED screens is blocked, making it look like the TV or computer in front of you is off. IRL Glasses are in beta. This means they are compatible with most TVs (LCD/LED) and some computers (LCD/LED). IRL glasses do not yet block smartphones or digital billboards (OLED).

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ivancash/irl-glasses-glasses-that-block-screens

Visions of future past reviewed

Let's review our progress as anticipated a century ago.

1) A robotic barber. Nope, don't have those.
2) A battle Zeppelin. Nope, don't have those.
3) Aerial intracity taxis. Not quite yet, and if and when we do, they won't look like that. And we definitely won't launch aircraft with wings as the primary means of lift by dropping them off a platform about 3 metres off the ground.
4) Ariel postmen. No, and winged aircraft can't fly that slowly.
5) Errr... riding undersea, giant (robotic ?) seahorses ? Umm, no. Very no.
6) A roomba. Yes ! Though they look a bit different.
7) Umm... errr... going diving and throwing fishing lines through the surface of the water to catch seagulls. No, and... why ? Just, why ?
8) Using a birdman suit to arrest misbehaving pilots. Not quite, though this is surely even better : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VPvKl6ezyc
9) Manned surveillance drone. Almost !
10) Some kind of super super super fast egg incubator ? No, because that's not how eggs work.
11) Using wing suits to battle giant eagles and steal their eggs. No, for lots of reasons.
12) Racing giant fish underwater. Srsly.
13) A robotic orchestra. Well, sure, I guess.
14) A mobile home. Yes, but not this literally.
15) Feeding books into a machine and turning a crank that turns them into sound delivered via headphones. I guess... kinda ?
16) Robotic beauty parlours. Nope.
17) Armoured cars. Yes ! Though it's not typical to ram your opponent.
18) An aerial bomber. Yes !
19) Underwater croquet. Well, it's not mainstream.
20) A whale pulling an underwater tour bus. Umm, no, but I want one.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/

Measuring how groups affect our stated opinions

This is not an article, it's a "watch this space for a forthcoming interesting result". So an announcement about an announcement, but at least it looks like quite an interesting one.

Tonight around 50 of us are gathered in the Phoenix Arts Club in Soho to take part in one of Richardson’s “mass participation” studies. We are each logged onto a specially configured website that enables us to move a dot around on our touchscreens, which moves a corresponding dot on a large screen at the front of the room. Our collective thoughts are up there for all to see (and for Richardson to measure). When everyone moves their dot, the screen resembles a swarm of agitated bees.

When we get the hang of it, he throws out his first test question: “Have you ever cheated on a test?” The ‘nos’ move their dots to the left, the ‘yeses’ to the right. We answer first in isolation, with all the dots hidden, and then as a group. What Richardson wants to know is whether the two conditions produce different results. Are we more honest when we answer alone? Do we change our story in response to others?

The main experiment begins – and now we are asked our opinions. “The UK should leave the EU,” proffers Richardson. Almost all the dots swarm left to no. “London tube strikes should be forbidden by law.” Much hovering of agitated dots as we all look for safety in numbers. “Someone who buys food for their friends has the right to take a larger share.” A collective gasp of outrage, followed by a surge to the left. But how many of us demur when the dots are hidden? Unfortunately, the final results are not delivered on the night (they’ll form part of a PhD thesis).

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160113-are-your-opinions-really-your-own?ocid=global_future_rss

Blue origin is almost ready to fly people

Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, says it’ll push its New Shepard suborbital spaceship “to its limits” during its ninth flight test. The test is set to take place as early as 8 a.m. PT Wednesday.

In a tweet, the company said it would conduct a high-altitude escape motor test to check the procedure for an emergency late in the flight sequence. A follow-up tweet said Blue Origin’s website would offer live video and commentary from its West Texas test facility, starting 20 minutes before launch. So far, flight tests have been conducted autonomously, without a crew. But the Kent, Wash.-based company says it’s aiming to start sending people on quick trips to the edge of space by the end of the year.

For the third time, a test dummy nicknamed Mannequin Skywalker will be sitting in one of the crew capsule’s passenger seats, collecting data about the quality of the ride. There’ll also be a variety of scientific payloads in the capsule, designed to take advantage of the few minutes of weightlessness experienced at the top of the up-and-down trajectory.

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/blue-origin-gets-set-high-altitude-escape-test-new-shepard-suborbital-spaceship/

I predict Theresa May's demise

I don't see even May managing to survive this one. She can't even look her colleagues in the eye. According the BBC, Boris' resignation was announced even before the letter was received...

Phillip Hammond for PM ! Or Richard Hammond ! Or John Hammond, even tough he's fictional and dead....

I've got absolutely no clue whether to be optimistic or pessimistic any more. All is farce and farce is all.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/photo/117129681268939588976/6576237017159245490?icm=true&iso=false&ftu=false

Lab-grown meat : on shelves by 2021

In vitro meat for public consumption may become a reality relatively soon. Tetrick said that "before the end of 2018 is an accurate timeline" for some products to be offered in a number of restaurants in the United States and Asia, starting with chicken nuggets, sausage and foie gras.

Other companies forecast that we're a few years away from seeing clean meat in your local grocery store. Shapiro believes we will see clean meat on store shelves by 2021.

Clean meat will be sold at a premium when it's introduced. Though his first hamburger in 2013 was $330,000, Post claims that when it is offered to the public, it will be "maybe $11 for a hamburger." Friedrich said clean meat "only totally supplants animal meat when it becomes cheaper."

Natural reluctance may have been part of the reason why 80% of respondents in a 2014 Pew survey said they would not be willing to eat meat grown in a lab -- but that might be changing. A 2017 survey showed that nearly a third of people would be willing to eat clean meat regularly or as a replacement for traditional farmed meat.

I eat meat, but ggaaaarrrghhh what's wrong with people ? Lab-grown meat is ickier than animal flesh ? That doesn't made a single damn lick of sense.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/01/health/clean-in-vitro-meat-food/index.html