Insights 5.29

Design: 

• A capstone project of sorts - how Massimo Vignelli designed his own funeral. 

Feeding the Future: 

• This data visualization shows how the typical daily diet for someone in the U.S. has changed over the decades - far less whole milk and red meat (offset by an uptick in chicken) and an explosive increase in the amount of cooking oil consumed. Notably, animal derived nutrition is still a significant share. As carbon concerns grow and lab-perfected substitutes to animal proteins get eerily accurate thanks to venture capital pouring in, it's likely that we will see a slow drift towards fewer creature sourced calories. We're praying that Soylent won't be prominent enough to have its own category in 10 years. 

Automatons: 

• A Foxconn factory has reduced its human labor force from 110,000 down to 50,000 after expanding their use of robotics. This has big implications for countries that have been spending heavily to boost nascent manufacturing industries, hoping to become production centers for complex goods like appliances and smartphones in part based on having lower cost labor than China. With massive investments in robotics and a tightly knit supply chain, labor cost increases are looking like a less important part of the equation, making it entirely possible that China will be able to maintain its standing as the world's workshop.
• Google may have found a buyer for Boston Dynamics in Toyota. 

Roadmapping the Future: 

• From polymer science to GPS, the research and development priorities set by militaries with the aim of killing one another more effectively find their way into our day to day lives, albeit in greatly transformed ways. As a means to generate something that could be reasonably recognized as progress, the pay for swords and hope for plowshares model has always been dangerous. That it sometimes delivers on the promise of a better future says more about our human capacity for creative subversion than the inherent benefits of such a system. The Wall Street Journal has an article on the development of railgun technology and it is filled with the repetitive beats that accompany each new era of betting on death: huge budgets that siphon resources (money, materials, energy - the railgun itself requires a powerplant that could run 18,750 homes) an unquestioned attraction to the aesthetics of power and violence, and rattling off stats that quantify the technology, never speaking qualitatively of impacts on human lives when it works as intended. It is inevitable that in our collective resourcefulness many will find aspects that can be bent into benevolent forms but in hacking a circuitous path to progress out of what was designed for destruction, it's hard to believe we are pulling from the best of our possible futures.  

More next week.

Insights 5.22

Design: 

• MIT researchers used additive manufacturing to develop some very interesting hair like structures that can produce linear and/or rotary motion, be used as input devices or mechanical adhesives. It's a project that demonstrates the real power of 3D printing comes from taking advantage of how printing processes work, rather than how well the outputs can replicate something like injection molding geometries. 

Virtually There : 

• The phenomenon of "time dilation" in VR means sometimes people have no idea how long they have been disembodied in the digital ether. 
• VR can have a visceral grip on our human senses (in some cases breaking down any sense of separation between our physical, tangible bodies and our digital twins) there are serious concerns about the ethical risks involved. With the potential for too real scares in our entertainment or torture that traumatizes while leaving no visible trace, we are entering uncharted territory. While almost any new technology entering the mainstream carries with it a wave of unwarranted and ill informed panic, the very unusual abilities of VR to play with our brains and bodies suggest that at least a bit of extra caution is warranted.

Automatons: 

• Chinese appliance company Midea is acquiring a majority stake in Kuka, a big player in the industrial robotics sphere. China's rapidly increasing labor costs combined with a commodities glut and irregular patterns of production demand makes buying into a deep fleet of robots a logical (if politically tricky) bet. While adding manufacturing jobs is a standard political trope in election cycles, in reality the future of production will belong to the countries and companies that are most willing to make aggressive moves away from human labor in factory roles. 

Technology Odds & Ends: 

• As part of their sprawling research and hardware efforts, Google has developed a "gigapixel" camera to capture the fine detail and texture of artwork. It scans across from detail to detail with robotic positioning, using a combination of laser and sonar to measure distance and focus accordingly. It goes to show how Google's mission of organizing the world's information has grown in breadth and depth over the years, reaching for as much omniscience as the state of the art (and R&D budgets) will allow. 

More next week.

Insights 5.15

Design: 

• DOOM and Dial-Up: The influence of early computer games on the internet's structures and aesthetics overall.

Watching the Watchmen (with data): 

• Some open data sleuthing demonstrates that the NYPD is in the habit of writing phony parking tickets (fining people for perfectly legitimate spots) and it adds up to millions of dollars per year. Perhaps cities should reward findings like these with something like the bug bounties that software companies pay out when someone spots a security flaw in their code. 
• GPS tracking of highly toxic "e-waste" that is supposed to be recycled finds that it is often simply and irresponsibly exported. The promise of recycling is more myth than science: the majority of materials are dramatically downgraded while using up a bunch of energy for transport and reprocessing, and many factories refuse to deal with the complications of recycled input materials. The situation is even worse for heterogeneous goods like consumer electronics, as many products are simply too complex to be disassembled and recycled cost effectively. The positive hype around recycling persists because it allows us to consume as much as possible while maintaining a sense of doing the right thing (reduction and reuse receive comparatively little attention, at least in the U.S.). There are some promising possibilities on the horizon like Apple's disassembly robots, but until externalized costs are felt by manufacturers, give "recycling" the close, cynical read it deserves.

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• You can build your own artificial pancreas if you think the FDA isn't moving fast enough. The story of the technology itself is not new, but the fact that building these systems is gaining wider acceptance and adoption and moving from fringe hacker activity to flirting with the mainstream is telling. This seems destined to become a template for building technologies into our bodies outside of clinical contexts - if your neighbor is doing it, it starts to feel a lot less risky and exotic. 

More next week.