Everything Is Too Easy

Today, a short look at a BBC article claiming that the modern world is making everything too easy. Yes, really.

It is, of course, all about the age-old argument as to whether making things easier makes us stupider. There's a fair point to be made for "use it for lose it", but the question should really be about when and whether skill atrophy actually matters. There's no point worrying that your driving abilities will degrade if you switch entirely to public transport, and so long as you can guarantee your new option is reliable and available, there seems no point at all in bemoaning this (I've covered this issue before, of course). Indeed, the switch should be the whole goal. That's how progress is supposed to work, or it wouldn't be progress at all.

Likewise, the ancient Greeks believed that warm showers would make them weak and effeminate, whereas most modern people would say that cold showers just make them miserable rather than toughening them up. There are more than enough other issues to deal with without also having to suffer needlessly. I believe we generally do better when our basic needs are met rather than having to struggle for them : I prefer to live in Star Trek's comfortable, scientific Federation rather than with Dune's tough, religiously fanatical Fremen. Struggle should be reserved for the things you want, not the things you need.

Still, there is a case to be made that it would be a Bad Thing if your overall intelligence started decreasing because you stopped trying to think for yourself. You do need to actually engage your brain, and all skills are maintained by continuously operating near their peak levels. What I struggle to see is how it's ever possible (except maybe if you're far too rich) to make your life such utterly comfortable, so devoid of any challenge whatsoever, that this ever becomes of any actual concern to anyone at all.

While modern technology can streamline day-to-day life, making everything from dating to food delivery more efficient, it may come at a cost: early data suggests that our attention span may be shortening, critical thinking capabilities weakening, emotional intelligence fading, and spatial memory getting worse as we offload human tasks to our devices. The technological optimisation doesn't seem to be making us happier, either: despite the continual digital assists and enhanced communication of social networks, people still report high levels of stress and loneliness.

Yeah, but that's the result of social media tending towards interactions with people we'd never want to engage with in real life. You then have to spend ages dealing with stupid people under the dubious grounds that you'll otherwise end up in an echo chamber*. This is partly because most people are, in fact, very stupid, and partly due to algorithmic rage-bait manipulation.

* This apparently something unique to social media : of course, you can walk away from morons in real life, but online we're expected to deal with them calmly and rationally and take them very seriously for some reason. Some people even argue that deleting comments on your own posts is censorship ! Madness. Would you insist on reading every spam letter that comes through your door ? Of course not.

That's why a growing number of people are restoring to the hottest new trend: "friction-maxxing", or rebuilding tolerance for inconveniences. The idea is to find tasks or ways of doing things involve a level of difficulty, time or patience. This could, for example, involve going "old school" and swapping digital tech tools for analogue solutions, such as reading rather than watching YouTube, navigating by road signs in place of Google Maps or calling a friend for advice instead of consulting ChatGPT.

But our brains operate on a "use it or lose it" principle, says Mark. Experiments in animal models show that effortful learning keeps new neurons in the brain alive. Studies also show that cognitively-stimulating activities like learning an instrument, reading, playing games and doing puzzles can preserve cognitive function as we age.

I don't get it. Who is finding their life so convenient that they miss the difficulties ? More importantly, HOW CAN I BECOME ONE OF THESE PEOPLE ? I find that one incomprehensibly weird. How are you not just exchanging one set of difficulties for another ? For example, if I no longer have to worry about how to write the code, I simply have more time for thinking about the problem I wanted to solve in the first place. I can't imagine ever reaching the end of the chain, as it were. Yes, it's good to have some amount of very low-level technical knowledge (some degree of grit for the mill, I guess), but I can't imagine who's living in such a utopia that they've already reached a state of post-scarcity difficulties. I'm a lot happier, not stupider, if I don't have to deal with segmentation faults.

According to one band of experts, the features of our digitised existence – constant notifications, 24-hour news and endless social feeds – can hijack this attention system, resulting in cognitive overload, mental fatigue and trouble focusing.

Much like the research on the effects of technology on our mental capacities, the studies of digital detoxes show mixed results. Some breaks from technology lead to better mood, improved focus, lower stress and more social connectedness, while others show the opposite or null effects. One 2014 study found that restricting screen time at a five-day nature camp improved preteens' emotional and social intelligence, while another 2019 study of university students found an increase in loneliness after abstaining from social media for one week.

Now that one makes a lot more sense. I can definitely see problems with "everything devices", like phones : I have a tendency to stockpile stuff for later consumption rather than immediately reading what interests me; I definitely fall into the infinite scrolling trap.

As per a quite different recent post, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, to a degree I even welcome distractions of my own choosing. I find it helps keep my focus maintained for longer overall if I split it up into chunks, every so often checking something very simple (like a news feed or social media) that doesn't derail my train of thought. Usually, this sort of back-and-forth doesn't become a problem when working, but I'm as guilty as anyone of scrolling on my phone rather than actually watching TV. Especially if I'm watching a show on my computer... the temptation to just quickly check the feed again is, for whatever reason, quite hard to resist. 

But to me this not a technological issue, it's a design choice. I love my digital notebook because it's total lack of features mean I use it for writing notes and reading long web articles, and that's it. Single purpose items, be they digital or otherwise, innately demand more attention because you can't just flick a button for more content. Moreover, so long as I put my phone away, I'm not tempted to go and check it. A single purpose device doesn't feel boring : once you're given something to do, and nothing to distract you from it, you'll just do that thing instead of trying to do dozens of things at once. Printed books do this, but so do well-designed digital products.

But even if friction-maxxing isn't the end-all solution we've been waiting for, "it doesn't hurt", says Mark. "If people are putting in effort, it makes them more intentional and thoughtful." Analogue hobbies such as crafting, gardening or reading – which involve friction as opposed to scrolling or streaming – can act as "active meditation", calming the mind and reducing stress. One 2024 study of more than 7,000 adults living in England found that those who engaged in crafting or the creative arts were more likely to report significantly higher life satisfaction, a greater sense that life is worthwhile and increased happiness. 

"I realised that a good life isn't an easy life," Semple says. "There's an enjoyment that you're cheated out of when you take the easy route."

And this is fair. Most analogue activities are innately more focused because there are no equivalents of "everything devices" or constant notifications. Multi-functionality has its place, but it's not easy to stay to track with such things. The real difficulty is perhaps the web itself. It doesn't make any sense to have a separate physical device for every website or digital tool : some purposes, like photography, can easily and sensibly separated, but many others simply can't. 

What's the solution ? Self discipline is part of it, but it's hardly the whole answer. On a totally different video, I liked the point that it's simply not fair to expect people to be able to resist something that's designed to capture their whole attention. So better designs are also needed, e.g. alternatives to infinite scrolling, more nuanced control of feeds, easy options to control which notifications come through and when (Gmail and DuoLingo, shut the fuck up already)... I don't think this would actually be difficult to do and it would cost exactly nothing.

The problem is getting corporations to see that making us engaged with more and more things but each for less and less time is, in the long term, a stupid metric to gauge product success, and that providing us with one good service is better than the option of a hundred crappy ones. How we reign in this tendency, I don't know.

Dun Manifestoin'

For the longest time, my friends used to insist I was anti-technology. This was despite that I used Linux long before any of them did, had dealt with the agony that is the vi "text editor", that I know multiple programming languages, routinely use LaTeX instead of Word, do CGI as a hobby, operated the then-world's largest radio telescope as my day job... I mean, what gives ? My whole life is mainly digital, for crying out loud.

It was because at the time, I didn't have a mobile phone, and still to this day have never used Facebook.

I mean, good grief.

But despite a largely digital existence, I do not align myself with the "techbro" culture that dominates Silicon Valley and certain sectors of reddit. Cryptocurrency I believe is an outright scam while NFTs aren't even at that level of credibility. Believers in such things are at best extremely foolish and misguided techno-Utopians, which is not a description I'd apply to myself. I would, however, very happily profess to being a techno-optimist.

That is, until I discovered the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Now I'm going to have to be very much more careful in applying that label to myself, because I don't want to be associated with such things. I'd sooner spit at the author in the street than join that club.

First (and be advised this post is mostly prologue), let me clarify what I mean by utopian and optimist in this context. I'm an optimist in that I believe technological development is generally, but not exclusively, a positive thing that makes life better. I believe some problems are purely or largely technological in nature, and that solutions to such problems lie mainly in further development : if your code has bugs, the usual solution is to fix the bugs, not delete the code. I believe some aspects of life can be best improved with R&D rather than political or economic solutions. I believe that the desire to learn more is inherently a good thing, that knowledge for knowledge's sake is a valuable end unto itself, that tool use, curiosity, and the desire to improve our material conditions are innate parts of the human condition, not some peculiar by-product of modern civilisation. 

"Life is not a problem to be solved,", said Frank Herbert, "but a reality to be experienced". I agree. But part of that experience is in the joy of solving problems, finding things out, experiencing new realities. There is no paradox or contradiction here, only a pleasing linguistic irony.

And note the many provisional clauses above, because these really are vital : mainly, generally, some, usual. Not all problems are technological or even material, and even not all of these are necessarily best solved through research : sometimes it may be necessary to take a new development and burn it in the fire. In the main I doubt this, but sometimes this can happen. 

Herein lies the difference, as I see it, with techno-utopians a.k.a. techbros. They omit all these caveats. They essentially claim that all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of problems are technological in nature and thus can only be solved through further development. A techno-optimist might make some exaggerated claims as a rhetorical point of persuasion, or at most get carried away in the moment; a techbro really believes the most outlandishly optimistic projections. A technoptimist might say that maybe technological solutions are the largest, pluralistic aspect of a problem but not the majority; a techbro would say that they are either totally dominant over everything else or that nothing else matters at all.

In short, tech optimism accepts the limitations of technology without denying its importance. Techbros think that all problems are materialistic and nothing else matters much in any sphere of life. Techbros insist that actual miracles will occur within the very near future (but never quite right now), and, perhaps most importantly of all, demand everyone else believe the same thing. Techbros are very much against unbelievers whereas technoptimists think life's too short to join such a silly cult.

All this lengthy introduction means I can now deal with the so-called "Manifesto" very briefly. Honestly, it's the stupidest thing I've ever read in my entire life. Most of my notes scrawled on it are expletives. It's not often I read someone's stuff for the first time and immediately wish unpleasant things to befall them, but this is one of those times.

And remember, I have literally argued with people about triangles. When I say this is even stupider than that, this claim should have some force to it.

As this perfectly respectable article points out, manifestos are supposed to fire up your own base. They aren't intended to rigorously prove a point or consider alternatives. They're chest-thumping, emotive pieces. Fair enough I suppose, but this feels like a really stupid issue to write a polemic about. If I weren't so darn busy, I'd probably be tempted to write my own counterpiece of vitriolic nonsense in response. 

Fortunately I just don't have time for that. I think I've probably given enough of the gist of the bits of the manifesto-polemic I do agree with (and there are a few) already, so I'm just going to pick a few highlights of the bits I most detest. Here I omit all the extremely irritating "we believes" which begin practically every sentence.

Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking.

There is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

Centralized planning is doomed to fail, the system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death... Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.

Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich everyone can get.

Central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us. 

Our planet is dramatically underpopulated, compared to the population we could have with abundant intelligence, energy, and material goods. The global population can quite easily expand to 50 billion people or more, and then far beyond that as we ultimately settle other planets.

However, we are not Utopians.

We are not victims, we are conquerors.

A Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.

My expletive-laded hyperbolic comments include such simple things as "fuck off and die", "I hope you boil", "please die now quietly in a ditch somewhere", "seriously, fuck off", "you are utterly mad", "you're all idiots and I hate you", "HAH HAH HAH HAH !" (in response to "we are not Utopians"), and, "you're like what would happen if Stephen Pinker and Rutger Bregman made a baby and dropped it on its head".

I mean, I did think about righting a proper rebuttal. I did consider pointing out the contradiction in saying that technology makes all work redundant but also generates more work. I thought about ranting about just how much of this verbal diarrhoea is about market forces rather than technology. And I thought about pointing out, in fairness, that yes, perhaps research and development will allow ever-more progress in technology and economic growth without causing ever more depletion of the natural world (human economics being a largely artificial construct anyway), while all the while having nothing but the most scathing attempt for the notion that the planet could or should support 50 billion of us.

But I decided to do none of that. This rambling bit of effluence is clearly not aimed at fostering rational argument, so I see no need to bother. 

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.

Forward the Metaverse ?

A couple of recent articles prompt a quick check-in regarding the progress (or lack thereof) about the metaverse. You might want to read this post first so I can avoid repeating myself. 

First, this one has some intriguing news about upcoming hardware releases. 

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. 

“The main north star for the team was from the moment you put on this headset, the mixed reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural,” he said. “You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing you can see perfectly well. You can put anchors and things on your desktop. You can take your coffee. You can stay in there much longer.”

This would be a significant development, to the point I'd be wondering if I should upgrade my Quest 1. Recall that, in my opinion, the potential for widespread adoption of mixed reality is all about thresholds, and right now, the threshold for convenience isn't that great. You have to prepare yourself for VR as though you were going for a short hike. You can't just slap on the headset and go but have to define boundaries, prepare a clear space, and if you're using a PC you have to set up a wireless link (woe betide you if you're using a cable, poor fool !). Sure, things have progressed leaps and bounds, but this is still a significant burden. 

And I would stress that the Quest 3, like the Quest Pro, is still only a step forwards. Compare the situation to gravitational wave detectors. Each incremental advanced increased the sensitivity a little bit, but only when a critical threshold was breached did this have any real consequences. The Quest 3 is another step along that road : necessary, but not the final goal.

More intriguing is that something more like the final product necessary for true metaverse immersion does seem to be in the works :

Meta’s first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, are designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world. There will be an “internal launch” for employees to test the glasses in 2024, according to Himel. A version won’t be released to the public until 2027, when Meta will launch what Himel called its “Innovation” line of AR glasses for early adopters alongside a “Scale” line of the less advanced smart glasses and the second generation of its neural smartwatch.

So, basically in keeping with my original post, mixed reality as a normal experience towards the end of this decade doesn't seem implausible. If, that is, Meta can figure out a sensible business model, which given their recent troubles does seem to be giving them some grief.

Now last time I said that the hardware development might be more important than the software, but I think I'm going to revise my opinion a little here. The "if you build it they will come" approach is not correct. Rather it should be they can come. You've got to cross that technological barrier for a metaverse to even be possible, but that by no means guarantees that it will actually happen.

There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. 

Which is good because it's a running joke in the Quest community that they'll be offering the same games in ten years as they are now. Development of new apps and games is absurdly slow, and the Quest apps do an appallingly bad job of promoting new ones (except for flagship projects) when they do appear. Kudos to them for having the "App Lab" that means developers can realise projects which don't meet their full standards, but they do a lousy job of promoting this.

The situation is perhaps akin to HD TV. HD content is undeniably better than SD, but if there's nothing to watch, the technology is pointless. On then to the second article :

So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it’s done reasonably well. And I think we do need to look at it as a gaming console. Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games. VR early adopters in the consumer space buy headsets to play games. Devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and the PSVR (which sold around 5 million headsets by 2020) were adopted by consumers to play video games, not dick around in a barely built metaverse.

And the push for the Quest 2 to be a metaverse device hasn’t especially resonated with consumers. Rabkin told staff that “sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they’re just not as into it” as the early adopters. Those early adopters were eager to play games, and that’s what they saw when they slipped the headset on. New users are seeing ads for stuff like Horizon Worlds, which, again, is such a mess even the people who make it don’t want to play it.

And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it’s kind of ignoring that core gamer audience and not doing a whole lot to build it. Beat Saber, arguably VR’s killer app, is four years old, and no other VR game has really captured the zeitgeist in a similar fashion.. Steam and Sony are both very aware that killer AAA game experiences are necessary for a VR platform. That’s why we’ve got excellent titles like Half-Life: Alyx and Horizon Call of the Mountain. They’re invested in the software as much as the hardware. Meta isn’t.

I don't see the appeal of Beat Saber myself but the point stands. Meta is building a series of improving games consoles but forgetting to provide any content for them. Fair enough that the ultimate goal isn't gaming but something much more far-reaching. But to get there, you've got to give people a hook. And  the games developed by Oculus Studios were very, very good, whereas the avatars that Meta are coming out with are just so soullessly corporate that nobody who's actually not a robot is ever likely to use them.

Personally I stand by my long-running opinion that they should focus on the headsets as an interface. Have all the heavy work done by an external PC or other device; that's ultimately what AR glasses are surely going to have do anyway. Focus on getting extremely good wireless access to said device and market them as being able to play all your favourite games in A/VR. Right now, gaming is pretty much all they're good for. Yes, routine productivity will be possible eventually, but it isn't right now*. So yeah, aim for the metaverse, but provide gaming and social events as the means by which you'll get there.

* There are some diehard fans who swear the few "productivity" apps which do exist are genuinely useful, but personally I think the sheer cumbersomeness of the headeset (and the low resolution), combined with the lack of mixed reality, makes this a complete non-started right now. They're enough to demonstrate future potential but nothing more than that.

I remain convinced that VR is far more than a gimmick; the potential for such devices as being equivalent in prevalence to mobile phones is very real. But we're not quite living in that future yet, and the road to it is (as should be expected) a bumpy one. Still, that Quest 3 is sounding pretty tempting...

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.

Compassion fatigue and energy supply

Most people reading this are probably visiting from the Pluspora social media network, where I'm modestly active. It's an acceptable substitute for Google Plus, mainly thanks to the community more than the site itself (which is, frankly, crap). You can get some genuinely intelligent, protracted discussion going there about all kinds of topics, largely without having to deal with trolls or lunatics. Challenge someone's argument and most of the time it at least doesn't immediately descend into a shouting match. That alone is more than adequate compensation for the interface that looks like it wandered out of the mid 1990's having forgotten to put any clothes on.

Nevertheless, at times scrolling through the feed is highly unpleasant. Not because the content people post is wrong, and only in part because a lot of it is very bad, but mainly because so much of it is damn depressing.

When I say "bad", I do mean bad. There are opinion pieces masquerading as fact. There are random, unsourced factoid memes aplenty. There's activism championing a plethora of moderately interesting causes. And there's a tonne of stuff which does literally nothing at all except evoke an emotional response. 

What exactly am I supposed to do with this ?

I have absolutely no idea. There's a lot of stuff which seems to be intended just to make people angry, or blame some group for the follies of some other group. I don't doubt the sincere intentions of those posting it, nor do I even doubt the validity of most of the claims made, but much of it has simply no real function. It makes me momentarily angry, then I forget about it, and after a while I just feel depressed because of the horrible things going on in the world. Most of it is utterly irrelevant to my day-to-day life which is, to be blunt, really quite a pleasant experience, but much of social media seems to be hell-bent on convincing me that it isn't and/or isn't supposed to be.

Look, according to my feed for the last twelve hours, I should be worried about :

• Algorithms ruining privacy
• Overgrazing by cattle
• Drug-resistant microbes
• Amazon's efforts to suppress a book about capitalism
• Climate change
• Kids falling behind in school and how we should blame the parents
• Men not being in touch with their feminine side
• The difference between Republicans and Democrats both being ineffectual in office
• Men shaming slutty women too much
• Some weird shit about 8-inch sharks in goldfish bowls
• Republicans not caring about anyone except billionaires

And that's leaving aside all the totally random pieces of emotional drivel. Mind you, it's also leaving aside a lot of positive stuff and genuinely interesting articles, but you get the idea.

Again, it's not that I doubt the validity of the causes. It's just that it's stuck forever on the "raising awareness" stage, with no concrete plan forward, no concern for whether it's preaching to the choir or actually having a meaningful effect on people who might actually benefit from it, and most of it really boils down to a simple expression akin to saying, "I HAVE AN EMOTION RIGHT NOW". A great deal of it is so petty that it almost makes Harry and Megan sound interesting. Sometimes, it's all feckin' exhausting.

This leads me on to... energy supply ! Of course, what else ? 

Bear with me just a little longer. I promise this will all tie together soon.

We've learned two relevant but completely disparate things from the pandemic. First, that most people are in fact content to follow the rules. What they won't necessarily do is volunteer to do anything beyond them. And that's perfectly understandable : if the rules say it's safe to meet up with another household, a relatively small proportion won't take advantage of this. And second, we've seen that energy supply is by far and away the dominant factor (leaving aside agriculture and industry and other factors in climate change) that needs to tackled if we're to move to a greener future. Getting people to reduce their energy usage just isn't going to cut it - not even close.

What's the connection between all this ? Well, the article linked below finds that if you change people to green energy, most people won't voluntarily switch back, despite it being more expensive than fossil fuels. Like organ donation, it's far better to have an opt-out model than opt-in. The burden of switching, even if not particularly difficult, is enough to put people off. And people are willing to pay a bit more for cleaner energy. Of course, we shouldn't judge those who do switch back to fossil fuels - I would bet heavily that most of them simply can't afford the extra expense.

So why don't most people voluntarily switch to green energy in the first place ? The same reason they don't get organ donor cards : it takes time and effort that they don't have. It's not that they don't care. It's that they're overwhelmed with other things to do. This is why the burden should lie firmly and specifically with those who make the rules, not (only) on the general public. People are pretty good at following the rules, but they expect those rules to be sensible. That they don't voluntarily switch to cleaner energy doesn't mean they don't want to, or even that they're put off by the higher prices - it's just that they're overwhelmed with other things. They don't have the spare energy left to give it its due attention. They're busy satisfying their own needs, not because they're selfish, but out of raw necessity.

It isn't only social media, of course. It's everything. Not only are you supposed to work hard and long hours, but then you're expected to listen to the endlessly depressing news and then you're expected to care about a billion different causes of which pretty much none are either relevant, important, or anything you can do anything much about anyway. Modern society -at least in its virtual incarnations - is a bit like being trapped in an orphanage for depressed lepers who run an animal sanctuary but is now on fire. Pratchett said, "do the good that's in front of you", but bloody hell it's hard to know where to start.

In Utopia for Realists, the author makes the point that many impoverished people do not claim benefits they're perfectly entitled to : the burden of filing the claim is just too much, especially given the circumstances. And in The Happy Brain, the author notes that even being happy continuously is a tiring process. So I would suggest that a variant of compassion fatigue can affect everyone. If you're being asked to continuously care about everything, to have a passionately-held opinion on just about every possible topic from toxic masculinity to unjust labour laws in the cheese-making industry, you'll end up doing... nothing. It's like being pulled in a dozen different directions all at once. If you were asked instead to just do one simple thing, I suggest the results might be markedly different.

This is not the only possible interpretation, of course. It's also possible that this is just sheer human nature, that we tend towards inaction unless a specific threshold is reached - either that of a reward or a punishment. But I would suggest that compassion fatigue does at least play a role in shifting that threshold if nothing else.

And all this goes both ways. It's possible that most of those who don't switch back do so for the same reason, and if they were less overwhelmed with other things, they might actually prefer to have cheaper but more polluting energy. But here too the burden must fall on the politicians and energy companies. A vast reduction in personal energy use, or other lifestyle changes, is simply impossible. Leaving it up to individuals or corporations is as loopy as saying that people should follow their "common sense" during a pandemic. It just won't work. 

Thankfully there's a positive take-home message form all this : changing the rules does work. People are reluctant to change voluntarily but they will change if gently prodded. And there are very easy ways to prod them so gently that they don't even notice, like making green the default. So stop badgering people. Stop shaming them for not cutting back on energy use. Pressure instead governments and energy suppliers to default to green options, giving opt-out options for those who really need them. And surely this is where all activism must ultimately focus : not on changing the attitudes of a weary populace, but in the actions and policies of those with the capability to effect real change - part of which should be designed with the goal of making said populace considerably less weary.

Climate change: 'Default effect' sees massive green energy switch

When Swiss energy companies made green electricity the default choice, huge numbers of consumers were happy to stick with it - even though it cost them more.

Can't see the trees for the search engine forest

Fed up with Google ? Would you like a search engine that's not only trying not to be evil, but actually do good instead ? Perhaps Ecosia's worth checking out.

Founded by Christian in 2009, Ecosia makes its money in the same way as Google - from advertising revenues. It earns cash every time someone clicks on one of the adverts that appears above and beside its search results. Ecosia then donates 80% of the profits it makes from this to tree-planting charities. To date it has funded more than 105 million new trees, from Indonesia to Brazil, and Kenya to Haiti. As obviously not everyone clicks on the adverts, the company estimates that, on average, it takes 45 searches to raise the 0.22 euro (20p; 26 US cents) cost of planting of one tree.

And unlike the billionaire founders of Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - he promises to never buy a super yacht. "While they have big yachts I have an inflatable dinghy that I take to lakes. Ego consumption is not appropriate in a world where there's climate change." Christian would, in fact, struggle to buy a yacht if he ever wanted one, as he put two legally binding restrictions on the business - shareholders and staff cannot personally sell shares or take profits outside of the company. 

All of its electricity comes from solar power, and 80% of its users are said to be 29 or younger. Its search engine uses Microsoft's Bing's technology, with whom it has a long-term arrangement. "They really like what we are doing," says Christian.

It'd be tough indeed to demand any more of them, unless you insist that the entire staff be vegans who live in tree houses and survive on nothing but rainwater and dead leaves. Now, I'm not overly-fond of of Google, but I'm not exactly against them either. Would I prefer to use a search engine that plants trees for me ? Of course ! The question then becomes : is it any good ?

Let's try a few examples. Since Ecosia is powered by Microsoft, I suppose this is really testing Bing. But that's okay, since absolutely nobody - literally nobody at all - uses Bing anyway.


Search : fish
Google's first result is a selection of thumbnail images of fish, followed by the Wikipedia entry for fish, a map entry showing fish restaurants, some links to educational websites about fish, then a selection of YouTube videos. It's a pretty comprehensive take on the search term, if a bit cluttered. On the right there's a couple of snippets about the animal and something called the Friendly Interactive Shell.

Ecosia's page is a lot cleaner. Wikipedia appears as a snippet on the right, followed inexplicably by a snippet about Derek William Dick, whose stage name was fish. Never heard of him. In the main section, the first result is a fishing game, followed by a somewhat eclectic selection of fish-based links - some about actual fish, others about artists and games and suchlike. There's also a selection of news results.


Search : astronomy
Google gives me the Wikipedia entry as a featured snippet on the top, with a larger entry on the right and a selection of "people also searched for" results. The main section gives me a Q&A section, followed by a list of astronomy websites, interspersed with local results and news stories.

Ecosia gives me Astronomy Magazine in its right-side snippet. The main section is entirely links to astronomy websites, including some in Czech.


Search : philosophy
Ecosia gives the first result as philosophy.com, which, bizarrely, is a skincare products site. Google omits this. Other than that they're both about equal.


Searching for an address
I looked up my home address and the results were basically equivalent, except that Google comes up with Maps while Ecosia doesn't.


Calculations
Both gave the same results for simple addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Ecosia assumes trigonometric calculations use degrees while Google prefers radians, though both allow you to just type in the units. Google comes up with an interactive calculator, Ecosia does not. Google also lets you do simple graphs, which Ecosia doesn't.


Image search
Google annoyingly creates a huge sidebar when you display and image, whereas Ecosia highlights the centre of the screen instead, which is a good deal less intrusive. Google (in Chrome) now needs an add-on to get the direct image link, whereas this is native to Ecosia.


Based on these quick field tests, there's not much to differentiate the two. I still like my Google homepage because I'd had it forever, and it provides ready access to gmail and the other services I still use, but I set my search bar engine to Ecosia. I'll try and develop the habit of using the search bar instead of going to the home page, if only for the sense of self-satisfaction that I've made a small contribution to planting some trees.

The search engine boss who wants to help us all plant trees

The BBC's weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Christian Kroll, the founder and chief executive of internet search engine Ecosia. Christian Kroll wants nothing less than to change the world. "I want to make the world a greener, better place," he says.

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.

Do you wanna build a cyborg ?

I found this to be a very nice summary of the promise and peril of augmented humans. I won't add much commentary here because I don't know what the answers are.

In 2013 I built a proof of concept system called SuperGlass. Based on research from one of my academic labs, our system could recognize the expression of a face and write the emotion on Glass’s little heads-up screen, allowing an individual with autism to more easily perceive whether the person in front of them was happy, sad, angry, or something else. Simply wearing Glass while continuing everyday social interactions with others allowed these [autistic] kids to learn that secret language of facial expressions; it’s the real-time version of the flashcard-based emotion-recognition training using cartoon faces on cardboard... A team at Stanford has shown that it can improve their expression recognition, even when not wearing it. Our pilot even found that it helped foster empathy. 

But the more I experimented, the more I realized that I didn’t want to “cure” my son’s autism. I didn’t want to lose him and his wonderful differences. SuperGlass became a tool to translate between his experience and us neurotypicals (a scientific term that means “your brain is boring”). It didn’t level the playing field—it just gave him a different bat to play with. 

In an era where jerks like me are building AIs to replicate human tasks, your value to the world will become what makes you uniquely human. The more different you are, the more valuable you become. My son is therefore priceless.

I get that that's a rhetorical point, but still, it seems worth stating that not all differences are valuable or ever will be valuable. Surely that's the crux of the whole dilemma.

As a naive hearing person, it never occurred to me that anyone would choose deafness. But I learned that some parts of the deaf community consider cochlear implants to be genocide: an erasure of their unique languages, way of life, and who they are... Much like autism, I’m often confronted with the dilemma of “curing” people of who they are, versus giving them the tools to share those rich differences with the world. But how can we respect someone’s humanness while also giving them the choice to become more like the majority of humans?

After all, sometimes what it means to be human is tragic. A car accident, fall, or even poverty can take a child’s future away from them... If we know we can make a difference in these people’s lives, isn’t not intervening as morally perilous as augmentation run amok?

The only thing I can state with any confidence, and even this with great caution, is that the "choice" element is very important in terms of respecting humanness. The problem with that comes from the issues discussed below, that such technologies potentially offer such huge advantages that the majority won't see using them as much of a real "choice" at all. Sure, you do technically get to choose whether you want electricity or not, but for the vast majority that's not a real choice at all.

In theory, anyone might have access to new neurotechnologies. But in reality, those most able to take advantage of them are likely to be the ones who need them the least. Simply being born into poverty and stress robs children of their cognitive potential, whereas having wealthy parents dramatically impacts a child’s outcomes, even working memory. 

Where do we draw the line between boosting human potential and eroding our humanity? Any system I build follows my most important technology design rule: You should not only be better when you’re using it, you should be better when you turn it off. Neuroprosthetics shouldn’t replace what we can do for ourselves—they should augment who we aspire to be.

I don’t want to “cure” someone of themselves. Especially not my son. I want them to be able to share that self with the world.

Why I'm turning my son into a cyborg

Imagine if everyone spoke a language you don't understand. People have been speaking it around you since the day you were born, but while everyone else picks it up immediately, for you it means nothing. Others become frustrated with you. Friendships and jobs are difficult. Just being "normal" becomes a battle.

Facebook prepares to max out on stupidity

Well, maybe.

Over the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has spoken at length about his grand plan for fixing Facebook. In short, it involves “pivoting” - as they say - to a more private social network. One which focuses on closed spaces, like groups or messaging, rather than the public News Feed.

Okay. Now, if such closed spaces were such that you could basically never find them unless you already actually knew existing members in the real world, then that might not be such a bad move. It would be (in principle) much harder to harvest data and thus manipulate feeds. It would also make the platform more akin to something like a telephone service, where the content is not a product of the technology.

Does anyone have much faith that it will work out like that ? I doubt it.

On Monday, ProPublica revealed the existence of a private Facebook group which contained disturbing jokes allegedly posted by US Border Patrol agents. The investigative site said comments included mockery of migrants that had died in custody, as well as aggressive, sexist remarks about prominent female politicians. The group has existed for more three years and has almost 10,000 members.

And the Washington Post detailed a flurry of groups offering bogus cancer treatment “advice”, such as to "use baking soda or frankincense” instead of chemotherapy. These groups are able and allowed to flourish - the Post reported at least two with more than 100,000 members. Facebook said it provides related news stories to posts that might contain misinformation, but we don’t have any statistics on how effective this measure is.

Which strongly suggests that Facebook will just become what it is now except with everything brushed under the carpet. I'm on MeWe, which is also totally hidden from view, and that's a problem. Granted, there are plenty of situations which privacy is required - but there are also plenty where it isn't. No-one is suggesting that telephone calls should all be public any more than anyone would propose that all Parliamentary sessions be held in secrecy.

The thing about social media is that it has fundamental differences from traditional communications systems. It can't really be compared with telephones or letters, which are only suitable for contacting small numbers of people you already know. It's not like going round to a friend's house for a chat if you're talking to ten thousand people - a meeting of that size would, if held in the real world, inevitably be public. Social media enables privacy (or perhaps secrecy would be a more appropriate word) of unprecedented size and scope, and that's a problem. We can't even begin to understand society, much less remedy its problems, if we don't even know what social norms are in the first place.

“This vision could backfire terribly,” warned French journalism professor, Frederick Pilloux, in 2018. “An increase in the weight of 'groups' means reinforcement of Facebook’s worst features -  cognitive bubbles -  where users are kept in silos fuelled by a torrent of fake news and extremism.” 

Make no mistake: few, if any, of the problems Facebook is “working hard” on at the moment would have come to light were it not for external pressure from journalists, lawmakers, academics and civil rights groups. The examples I’ve raised here pose a question: is Facebook fixing itself, or merely making it harder for us to see it's broken?

And I would also doubt just how effective this would be at avoiding the problems of data harvesting and manipulation anyway. It will only switch the arena in which the interested parties operate and make them harder to spot.

I would suggest that all groups over a very small threshold size (say a dozen) be completely public, fake news be removed, feed manipulation of any kind (except that of direct user control) be ended , and revenue be driven by something other than advertising.

Facebook may be 'pivoting' to something worse

In short, it involves "pivoting" - as they say - to a more private social network. One which focuses on closed spaces, like groups or messaging, rather than the public News Feed. He unveiled this plan in March, a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal hit.

Come fly with me, let's plug and fly away...

An article about the future of flying which doesn't mention Zeppelins. Hurrah !

Alice is an unconventional-looking craft: powered by three rear-facing pusher-propellers, one in the tail and two counter-rotating props at the wingtips to counter the effects of drag. It also has a flat lower fuselage to aid lift. Alice will carry nine passengers for up to 650 miles (1,040km) at 10,000ft (3,000m) at 276mph (440km/h). It is expected to enter service in 2022.

Crucially, electricity is much cheaper than conventional fuel. A small aircraft, like a turbo-prop Cessna Caravan, will use $400 on conventional fuel for a 100-mile (161 km) flight, says Mr Ganzarski. But with electricity "it'll be between $8-$12, which means much lower costs per flight-hour. We're not an environmentalist company, the reason we're doing this is because it makes business sense."

Is it just me, or is that a really quite astonishing drop ? If so, that's a very powerful motivation indeed for companies to switch. Anyone still using fuel is going to look like a crazy person. I was assuming that electric planes would initially be much more expensive than conventional ones.

The big problem with this is that 80% of the aviation industry's emissions come from passenger flights longer than 1,500km - a distance no electric airliner could yet fly. Yet the UK has become the first G7 country to accept the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 - a huge challenge for the air travel business with 4.3 billion of us flying this year and eight billion expected to do so by 2037.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my broad understanding was that aircraft emissions are basically negligible in terms of mass, but may be disproportionately important because of their direct delivery to high altitude and the production of contrails. I couldn't begin to guess what that means for carbon offsetting, but my impression was that agriculture is a far bigger challenge.

So logically, is the only answer is to ditch long-haul flights? This obviously isn't an appealing prospect for the industry. Rolls-Royce's Paul Stein says starkly that the world would be in a "dark place" if we stopped travelling. He argues that in a global economy "where peaceful co-existence comes about from travelling and understanding each other, if we move away from that I am very concerned it's not the direction mankind should be going in".

Why the age of electric flight is finally upon us

Aerospace firms are joining forces to tackle their industry's growing contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, with electric engines seen as one solution. But will this be enough to offset the growing demand for air travel? This week's Paris Airshow saw the launch of the world's first commercial all-electric passenger aircraft - albeit in prototype form.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...

This makes me start humming the Sharky & George theme tune...

Sea bass, for example, have been observed diving to the bottom of the sea when they hear a loud noise. Might they do the same, in a predictable manner, when encountering an underwater vehicle? "We have a fairly good feeling that we will see that response, we just need to quantify it," says Dr Helen Bailey, research associate professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. 

"We can implant miniature depth sensor tags on the fish so we can detect the movement, and there is already the technology in place for that to be a real-time system." She says there's no reason why an army of black sea bass couldn't provide a cost-effective warning system against enemy subs.

This feels like what would happen in Aquaman and Saruman got together with Mark Zuckerberg.

Snapping shrimp, found all over the world in shallow water at latitudes less than about 40 degrees, continuously snap their claws together, creating a constant sound signal that bounces back off surrounding objects. As with conventional sonar systems, measuring the time it takes for the sound signal to return, and its strength, can reveal the size, shape and distance of underwater objects. 

"The concept doesn't rely on the shrimp changing its behaviour in any way when the vehicle approaches, it just uses the sound it creates," says Ms Laferriere. This is important because you don't want your surveillance system to be detectable or to make its own noise that interferes with the sensors. "It's a passive system," she adds. "It will be low-power and capable of detecting even the quietest vehicles."

So basically a giant information-gathering system about hitherto uninteresting details about fish. They should call it Fishbook, or possibly MyPlaice. Maybe Grouper Plus, if it doesn't catch on. Or Fins Reunited. Twilapia, if desperate. I'll stop now. Anyway, I'd be more interested to know what this could help us learn about fish than using the poor unwitting things as spies.

How fish and shrimps could be recruited as underwater spies

We have a long history of trying to use animals as spies, weapons and warning systems, but the latest plans to use marine organisms as motion sensors may be the strangest yet. When a beluga whale was spotted wearing a harness recently, some speculated that it had been trained to spy for the Russian army.

Oi've got a lurvey comboined spaceship-aerrroplane

Cornwall the hub of a spacefaring nation ? But... but it's Cornwall ! Home of cream teas ! Beekeepers ! Faaaarrrmers who say, "oooh-arrrrrr !" a lot for absolutely no reason ! Sleepy country villages by the seaside ! This is literally true, I've been there. Obviously it would be better to launch from a nice tall Welsh mountain....

 The UK government and Cornwall Council are prepared to invest up to £20m into Newquay airport (Spaceport Cornwall) to make it a base for Virgin Orbit. Orbit is the satellite launch system currently being developed in the US by Sir Richard Branson. This system intends to despatch rockets to space from under the wing of a converted Virgin Atlantic jumbo jet. If everything comes together it could see the jet, called Cosmic Girl, operating out of Newquay in the early 2020s. 

This rocket has yet to have its maiden flight but Mr Pomerantz said this should happen before the end of the year. "That's what we're aiming for." At the moment, Cosmic Girl is running simulation missions out over the Pacific Ocean from California. Very soon, the jumbo will do a drop test in which the rocket is released from under the wing and allowed to fly free - but without igniting the rocket motor. This will check the booster's flight characteristics. Assuming that goes well, Virgin Orbit will then move towards the first full-up orbital test of LauncherOne. 

Julian German, the leader of Cornwall Council, commented: "Cornwall is the birthplace of innovation and technology and space is at the heart of our 21st Century economy. "With assets like Spaceport Cornwall, world-class mission control facilities at Goonhilly Earth Station and superb digital connectivity, Cornwall will play a vital role in the growth of the global space economy."

Push on to take Cornwall into orbit

The UK government and Cornwall Council are prepared to invest up to £20m into Newquay airport (Spaceport Cornwall) to make it a base for Virgin Orbit. Orbit is the satellite launch system currently being developed in the US by Sir Richard Branson.

The future of mankind depends on pornography and illegal torrenting

Kudos to Space X for having not just the grand dream of starting a space-faring civilisation, but at least trying to figure out a way to fund it. Grand visions are limitless, but this is one of few even remotely plausible schemes as to how to get enough cash to make it happen.

On Thursday (May 23), SpaceX plans to loft the first 60 spacecraft of its planned Starlink megaconstellation, which is designed to provide affordable internet service to people around the world.  But don't expect a signal right away. Six more launches with 60-satellite payloads each will be needed to activate Starlink, and six more after that are required for the network to provide "significant coverage," SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.  

There's a "fundamental goodness" inherent in improving internet access, the billionaire entrepreneur said in a call with reporters on May 15. But there should be a lot of money in the enterprise as well — perhaps up to $50 billion per year for SpaceX. "Total internet-connectivity revenue in the world is on the order of $1 trillion [annually], and we think maybe we can access about 3% of that, or maybe 5%," Musk said. 

"We think this is a key steppingstone towards establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon," Musk said of Starlink. "We believe we can use the revenue from Starlink to fund Starship."

There's a nice article on the specifications of the Starlink satellites here. They sound impressive. And while it might be nice to think that governments will finally see sense and fund space exploration instead of war, it probably isn't going to happen. Having a company which actually wants to do something with its profits instead of just buying all its executives a superyacht... well that's very nice as well.

Best of all is the notion that we could fund the start of an interplanetary civilisation because we're all desperate for the three biggest uses of the internet : downloading movies, sharing pictures of cats, and watching boobies. That's a vision of humanity I can get behind. It may not be particularly grand or noble, but let's face it : it is realistic.

But it this approach economically credible ? I don't know, but it strikes me as high risk. It's not clear to me what advantages the proposed network offers over existing ones. Granted, some networks are crappy and treat their users badly, but can this one offer anything different and/or at a lower cost ? I doubt there are sufficient numbers of people in remote areas who are able and willing to pay enough money that Starlink can ignore existing internet users. What do they have to offer that terrestrial companies can't ? Does any new ground-based network have any hope of achieving 3-5% of the global revenue or would that be ludicrously high ?

How SpaceX's Starlink Internet Satellites Could Help Humanity Colonize Mars

(Image: © SpaceX via Twitter) The satellites that is about to launch to Earth orbit could help humanity settle the moon and Mars someday. On Thursday (May 23), SpaceX plans to loft the first 60 spacecraft of its planned Starlink megaconstellation, which is designed to provide affordable internet service to people around the world.

SABRE : it's actually gonna work

The SABRE air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours. To work, it needs to manage very high temperature airflows, and the team at Reaction Engines Ltd has developed a heat-exchanger for the purpose. This key element has just demonstrated an impressive level of performance.

"We're now able to prove many of the claims we've been making as a business, backed up by very high-quality data," REL's CEO Mark Thomas told BBC News. "In this most recent experiment, we've near-instantaneously transferred 1.5 Megawatts of heat energy - the equivalent of 1,000 homes' worth of heat energy."

In 2012, REL put the pre-cooler in front of a Viper jet engine and sucked ambient air through the heat-exchanger. The gas stream immediately dropped to minus 150C. Now, the company has flipped the set-up, putting the jet engine from an old F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber in front of the pre-cooler to drive hot gases directly across the piping array. The completed Colorado experiment replicates the thermal conditions corresponding to flight at Mach 3.3, the record-breaking speed at which the American SR-71 Blackbird spy plane used to operate.

"This technology has wide application, not just in the immediate, obvious domain of high-speed flight but across the aerospace industry more generally, and into more commercial applications - anywhere there's a significant heat-management challenge and you're looking for ultra-lightweight, miniaturised, high-performance solutions," Mr Thomas said.

Let's hope we do actually manage to capitalise on this then. It looks like we'll soon need all the advantages we can get.

Super-fast engine tech in new milestone

UK engineers developing a novel propulsion system say their technology has passed another key milestone. The Sabre air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours.

Turning air into oil

A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies. British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.

Carbon Engineering says that its direct air capture (DAC) process is now able to capture the gas for under $100 a tonne. With their new funding, the company plans to build its first commercial facilities. These industrial-scale DAC plants could capture up to one million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year.

Carbon Engineering's barn-sized installation has a large fan in the middle of the roof which draws in air from the atmosphere. It then comes into contact with a hydroxide-based chemical solution. Certain hydroxides react with carbon dioxide, reversibly binding to the CO2 molecule. When the CO2 in the air reacts with the liquid, it forms a carbonate mixture. That is then treated with a slurry of calcium hydroxide to change it into solid form; the slurry helps form tiny pellets of calcium carbonate. The chalky calcium carbonate pellets are then treated at a high temperature of about 900C, with the pellets decomposing into a CO2 stream and calcium oxide. That stream of pure CO2 is cleaned up to remove water impurities.

The captured CO2 is mixed with hydrogen that's made from water and green electricity. It's then passed over a catalyst at 900C to form carbon monoxide. Adding in more hydrogen to the carbon monoxide turns it into what's called synthesis gas. Finally a Fischer-Tropsch process turns this gas into a synthetic crude oil. Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification.

"The fuel that we make has no sulphur in it, it has these nice linear chains which means it burns cleaner than traditional fuel," said Dr McCahill. "It's nice and clear and ready to be used in a truck, car or jet."

I'd have to wonder about just how clean this is, but I don't agree with the concerns about this being used to allow more fossil fuels or that reducing energy consumption is in and of itself somehow a good thing. Carbon sequestering is something that ought to be encouraged. Humans have already caused enough damage to the planet and have a responsibility to clean up after themselves. It's like waking up hungover in someone else's house and realised you've made a horrible, horrible mess : do you just run away or do you, in a ghastly fit of sobriety, at least offer to help them clean up ? Of course if you do find you're actually not as sober as you thought, then you stop, make your apologies, and leave them the hell alone, but to not make the initial offer is just really rude. So we should absolutely try for all clean forms of power. If this is carbon neutral, or better yet carbon negative, then I see no reason whatsoever to avoid it.

Climate change 'magic bullet' gets boost

British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP. But climate campaigners are worried that the technology will be used to extract even more oil.

Climate change : we can fight the enemy, and he is us

We already know the technological solutions needed to, at the very least, reduce climate change. What seems like a much more difficult problem is how we go about persuading people to enact those measures. But we also understand human reasoning and irrational behaviour at least reasonably well : our default comparisons are relative, recent, and local, and our conclusions are influence by those around us. Most of the time we do not simply independently examine the evidence. The fact that people are irrational does not, however, mean that we have to give up trying to get them to do rational things. We simply have to change tactics : stop trying to rely on the evidence, and exploit their cognitive biases and especially societal network effects.

Psychologists have identified more than 150 cognitive biases we all share. Of these, a few are particularly important in explaining why we lack the will to act on climate change:

• Hyperbolic discounting - this is our perception that the present is more important than the future.
• The bystander effect - we tend to believe that someone else will deal with a crisis. 
• The sunk-cost fallacy. We are biased towards staying the course even in the face of negative outcomes.

The good news is that our biological evolution hasn’t just hindered us from addressing the challenge of climate change. It’s also equipped us with capacities to overcome them... We can imagine and predict multiple, complex outcomes and identify actions needed in the present to achieve desired outcomes in the future. 

Unfortunately, this capacity to plan to ensure a future outcome breaks down when large-scale collective action is needed – as is the case with climate change. As individuals, we know what we can do about climate change. But addressing the issue also requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities. The larger the group, the more challenging it gets. Remember the bystander effect? But in small groups, it’s a different story.

Recognising the power of small groups, Exposure Labs, the film company behind Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, is using its films to mobilise communities to take local action on climate change. For example, in South Carolina, a US state rife with leaders who deny climate change, Exposure Labs shows a film to get a conversation started, inviting people from various interest groups – like the agricultural, fisheries, and tourism industries – to talk about how climate change affects them personally. They then work these small groups to identify practical actions that can be taken immediately at the local level to make an impact – something that helps generate the political pressure necessary to compel lawmakers to pass relevant local or state-wide legislation. When local communities shape the narrative around individual interests, people are less likely to succumb to the bystander effect and more likely to engage.  

When small groups are involved in coming up with solutions themselves, they experience the endowment effect: when we own something (even an idea), we tend to value it more. Second, social comparison: we tend to evaluate ourselves by looking at others. If we’re surrounded by other people in a group who are taking action on climate change, we’re more likely to do the same.

How brain biases prevent climate action

We know that climate change is happening. We also know that it's the result of increased carbon emissions from human activities like land degradation and the burning of fossil fuels. And we know that it's urgent. A recent report from international climate experts tells us that we are likely to reach 1.5C of average global warming in as little as 11 years.

Using pigeons as drones

Nowadays, some birds are trained to take down pesky drones.  Back before drones became a cheap and easy way to acquire aerial imagery, a German inventor proposed using pigeons to capture photographs of the earth from above.


Curious to see where his pigeons were flying, he devised a way to capture pictures of their flight path.  In the early 1900s Julius Neubronner developed an aluminum breast harness to which a lightweight camera was attached.  The camera was equipped with a timer that would take a picture every thirty seconds.  This contraption was attached to a homing pigeon in order to capture aerial photographs. While aerial photographs taken from balloons and kites had been taken some 20-30 years earlier, the perspective of seeing the landscape from above was still a novel and exciting view for most people.  The unreliability of flight paths and quality of the aerial photographs compared to  made the pigeon aerial invention a short-lived strategy.

As eloquently noted in Popular Science Monthly, volume 88, 1872, p.30-31 :

"It is a strange medley, the air-ship, the last and most daring invention of man's brain, rising in the early dawn to search out and photograph the foe's movements, and the graceful pigeon, so frequently mentioned in the stories of early days, soaring, perhaps at the same moment, to act as an aerial scout."