Insights 6.13

Design: 

• A solid take on the promise and failure of "maker culture" and the work that needs to be done to reorient society for a more open and less resource intensive future. Access to tools and new technologies isn't enough- ultimately we are creatures that try to bend the world to our desires, no matter how costly, destructive or empty the outcomes might be. We will have to be persuaded to depart from the stylistic and material expectations of mass produced goods and put more care into the design of open products if they're going to have a chance of upsetting the status quo. 
• Keurig's soda machine, the Keurig Kold is being discontinued. We mentioned a bunch of reasons we thought it was a bad idea back in December and it looks like most people felt they didn't need another wasteful, costly kitchen gadget. Unfortunately when a company the size of Keurig makes a product bet that goes to market and fails, many are affected. Over 100 people are expected to lose their jobs. 

Upgrading Ourselves: 

• Manual laborers might end up being the first cyborg class. Using (and abusing) your body is a fact of life for the manual laborer and experimenting with how to push the limits of the body to boost productivity has long been part of the unofficial job description. Whether it's construction workers fueling themselves past fatigue with methamphetamine or factory workers getting high on break to make it through the high-stress tedium of meeting daily quotas, labor pressures prompt us to compromise our minds and bodies in order to keep up. Using wearable technology to increase powers and maintain human relevance in the face of full automation, old age, or injury seems like a positive development. When/if the technologies of augmented labor pass from the surface of our skin to its interior, it becomes a very different question.

Building Things: 

• What it would cost to build Apple's iPhones in the United States. As the article points out, it's not just the costs- the logistics would be far more difficult and the domain knowledge, scale and flexibility of the workforce in China doesn't have a parallel in the U.S. right now. 
• The recent story about Foxconn replacing tens of thousands of workers with robots is looking more like techno-optimist bluster than cold hard fact. The amount of money sloshing around via government incentives and initiatives for robotics in China seems to have provoked some dubious claims in the race towards a shiny future. 
• A company that has made huge strides in automated manufacturing is LEGO:This recent video behind the scenes of production demonstrates how much making happens totally apart from human hands. The simple, homogeneous nature of LEGO's products (lots and lots of ABS plastic) makes it a good candidate for automation vs the tiny, complex set of sub-assemblies that go into something like an iPhone.

More next week.

Insights 6.05

Design: 

• Neural networks making novel, recognizable images. The results are in a sort of uncanny valley territory, or maybe like looking at off-brand greeting card illustrations while under the influence. 

Bias and Brains: 

• Airbnb has a racism problem. Which is to say, society has a racism problem. Airbnb's distributed nature and the amount of personal choice given to hosts and guests makes it difficult to discover and police patterns of discrimination until after the fact, once harm has already occurred. As of now punitive actions stop at banning a user from the platform, turning it into a game whack-a-mole for bigotry. While it's unreasonable to expect technologies to fix deep, systemic problems like racism on their own, at a minimum they should not exacerbate the situation by reintroducing old problems in new forms. 

Up in the Air: 

• Walmart is working on drones for warehouse inventory management. Known for their penny stretching practices (they reuse 75 cent cardboard boxes and encourage traveling reps to bring hotel pens back to HQ) they've started to pour some serious money into technology initiatives as political pressure for a higher minimum wage continues. 

Building Things: 

• Researchers are hoping that machine learning will be able to unlock innovations in material science, a field where useful discoveries are the rare outcome of difficult and tedious testing. While human insight and analysis will still be a significant part of the process, the idea is that the AI will be able to shortlist the candidates most worthy of further consideration. 
• Differing laws and national priorities mean that giant tech companies spanning the globe are required to re-inscribe political borders into their otherwise pervasive and amorphous services. While the most massive of tech companies are averse to adapting their offerings to fit more restrictive laws (whether that's surrounding privacy or political censorship), when the market opportunity is great they have sometimes made significant concessions and garnered criticism from those on the other end of the political spectrum. When it comes to medium and small countries it turns into a game of chicken- which party needs the other more and at what point does the cost of leaving citizens on the wrong side of a digital divide become too great? 

More next week.

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.