Monthly Archives: November 2019

Speculative Fiction 2 – Almost fictitious (prose)

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This is supposed to be fiction, right. Here we go.

 

Look what our sense of humour has devolved to. I laughed at a anthropomorphic rabbit kicking an anthropomorphic egg towards the camera today. I couldn’t stop giggling. Every time I watched the looping video, it was tracked. Every time I paused and hovered over content, my pause was logged, analyzed, sold to paying companies.

Everything is decontextualized, re-contextualized, remixed, and repurposed for a new narrative. Isn’t it great? Isn’t this media literacy? We’re finally reading ‘into’ everything, treating everything as a text, a statement, an opinion, and a deliberate choice. By letting ‘virtual’ reality become such a large part of analogue reality, we’ve questioned the notion of reality itself. Everything is recorded and reused. People are still trying to make sense of every individual comment, smile, characteristic, and silence. Copyrights are ignored, the line between personal and professional has been eliminated, and yet we are forced to continue engaging in the virtual by economic and socio-cultural demands.

Texts are not just read into, they’re being reused. Peace sign in a photo? You risk having your fingerprint stolen. Selfie with window catch-lights? You risk tipping off a stalker to your location. Have a built-in camera and microphone on your device? You risk having someone turn it on, watch you, and listen. Have an A.I. personal assistant? Your conversations are always being recorded, anyway. Be in too many photos and you risk having your identity stolen. Speak too much and you risk having words literally put in your mouth. Share your preferences, hobbies, routines, and they will be recorded, commodified, and used by strangers for their own gain.

 

Oh, right. This was supposed to be fiction.

 

the-curtains-were-blue-early-2000s-meme

A meme from the early 2000s that circulated on social media. The image is a commentary on how English teachers in the West extract symbolism from minute details in texts and expect students to do the same. This meme suggests that the extracted symbolism only has value if it consciously included by the author.

 

Speculative Fiction 1 – EXPCard

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Emi Wu finished typing the last of his translation of Death, Grieving, and Cognitive Measures of Sadness, confirmed that everything was up-to-code, and stretched back in his chair. Most of his recent work involved translating MOOC contents into Mongolian for psychology professors. It was easy for him, and left him plenty of time to work on personal projects and built up his EXPerience. His coffee was nearly empty but still warm enough to enjoy a moment’s serenity. Wu’s eyes idly flitted about the room and landed on a dusty, heavy, leather file case. It had belonged to his parents, stuffed full with family documents and a little attached tag, “Биднийг санаарай”. Remember us. He’d looked through it before; it included his mother’s and father’s résumés, non-standardized antique precursors to the EXPCard, that could be faked, needed supplemental proof, and could be destroyed like all flimsy paper. Wu chuckled every time he thought about how such a rudimentary system had survived so long. Skills had to be recognized by the individual and connected to experiences. People had to actually search for work, and apply to employers by delivering documents by hand or email. What if the company had no registered location because it was online? Did they just cast it into the wind?

The folder also held proof of their education. In the old days, people had to keep copies—again, on unreliable paper—of transcripts of the courses they completed, with arbitrary letter grades and percentiles to denote their performance in comparison to others enrolled in the same course. One in four people went to university and came out with mountains of debt, forgotten facts, and more flimsy papers. Now, Wu had only to pick what he wanted to learn online, make sure the EXPTracker on his account was switched on, and begin exploring, learning, and creating. Every accomplishment, every project, and every collaboration would automatically be added to his EXPCard, relevant skills extrapolated and added to bolster his skill set. He tracked his competence not with grades and degrees, but by the number of people who had searched the ledger, came upon his education and experience (read: data), wanted his combination of skills, and contacted him with contracts. No one needed to sell themselves to employers—EXPCard categorized, advertised, and linked everyone for them.

Snapping back to reality, Wu crouched back over his computer and opened up a message to the psychology professor:

Mongolian translation is done. If there are any problems 
or further needed translations in the future, I hope you 
will consider me for the task again.

Thanks again,

Emi Wu

Have I earned some EXPosure? Send it here: wu_emi623.exp.com/exposure

 

EXPosure; the other key currency of EXPCards. Built upon old-fashioned review systems and improved with the blockchain ‘trust economy’, EXPosure was a way for satisfied employers to vouch for your skills and service. They didn’t complain; complaints went directly to the EXPCard organization, and A.I. could follow a trail of in-app correspondences and identify extortion before it even reached the support centre. EXPosure bolstered skills differently than EXPerience; the former made service and social skills decay slower, while the latter slowed down decay of technical skills. The EXPCard creators built the system to make sure people didn’t just learn or just work, but kept doing both, and it worked. Sure, less than one in one hundred people now went to accredited universities (casually called ‘purebre(a)d chicken pens’ on social networks now), but more people were “generally proficient” with diverse skill sets. After the EXPCard boom, it turned out that being able to vary the work they do and use most of their skills gave people the fulfillment needed to pull a lot of people out of socially-developed mental illnesses.

He wished it had worked for his parents, too.

 

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Premise: “EXPCard”, a blockchain organization built on tracking informal education, takes off in the connected world. University enrolment plummets. People track their learning in EXPerience (personal accomplishments and projects) and EXPosure (others vouch for your service and accomplishments for them). Both of these incrementally lose value over time, to encourage “lifelong learning”. Resultingly, more people are “generally proficient” with a diverse skill set. They can pay to read other users’ educational history (read: data), to run searches for specific experience and skill set combinations, and to contact users through a secure communication platform for work.

Does potential decide expectation?

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In the first half of Dr. Shannon Vallor’s presentation on A.I., she refocuses our impression of how A.I. will shape the future as “augmented cognition”. A.I. will enable humans to do what they already do, but faster, or efficiently, and overall increase productivity. She also gives the example of self-driving cars. That’s all great, humans love improving efficiency; it’s even a tenet of critical thinking. However, her explanation put me on edge. Could there be such a thing as over-productivity?

History is littered with examples of advancements for the sake of efficiency that were revolutionary for some time, but eventually became the norm, became what is expected. Let’s take a look at the education system as an example. Just 30 years ago, 24.5% of males in the U.S. and 18.1% of U.S. females had completed 4 years of tertiary education. Finishing university and graduating with a bachelor’s degree nearly guaranteed one a stable entry-level position with a livable wage. As more and more people completed undergraduate degrees (34.6 & 35.3% respectively in 2018), they slipped closer and closer to “the minimum” requirement for work, even if the responsibilities did not require the kind of content learned in university. A report on Employment Outcomes for Bachelor’s Degree holders shows that, although unemployment of B.A. holders has decreased between 2010 and 2017, wages have generally not, meaning that, despite rising costs of living, education no longer guarantees a comfortable, stable start to working life.

This is just one example of improvements increasing expectancy. Technological advances in commercial electronics is another (remember turning on your computer in ’95, and going to grab a bite to eat while you wait for it to boot up?). MOOCs and the concept of lifelong learning is (to borrow Dr. Vallor’s metaphor) more gasoline to this fire; if we can learn something, can complete courses from overseas universities or contribute constructively to discussions during our commute to work, we should not be wasting time lollygagging. Increasing possibilities of what humans in a given capacity can do have led us to believe that we need to be as productive as possible, we need to burn ourselves out and maximize our efficiency and produce cutting-edge research, development, and academic advances by the time we’re 20, because life is a race and efficiency wins. At best, this mentality leads us to re-imagine how and why we do the things we do. At worst, it’ll propagate the idea that everything and everyone must be useful, and that’s a dangerous edge to walk.

Lastly, I would like to call upon the work of Martin Heidegger in support of concerns regarding seeing nature-as-technology and consequently as tool. From The Question Concerning Technology:

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining  district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be released either for destruction or for peaceful use. This setting-upon that challenges forth the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. ―p. 6-7

The core of ‘technology’ as a means to an end, and humans as a component of technology, posits human potential also as a means to an end.

-B

Predictive microcommentary on the state of our future

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These kinds of activities always make me wonder how much we influence the A.I. databases being sent back to whatever company programmed our keyboards (in my case, Google). They definitely get a lot of cursing and not-English from me.

The grammatical errors drove me crazy.

125 characters. I found myself wanting to say something specific, but the three options predictive text gave me did not allow me to go in the direction I wanted, so I had to make do with what it did offer. Less as an English teacher and more as a result of social and linguistic upbringing, I tend to place great importance on clear communication, which manifests in my written communication as correct grammar. I use a lot of punctuation, and often send follow up messages (or go back and edit messages) to correct auto-correct or punctuation mistakes. Since the predictive text feature doesn’t suggest punctuation, I can’t really say it is reflective of how I would normally express myself. You can see in the video that I got stuck at one point where there was no viable, grammatically-correct option, and I had to grit my teeth and try to ignore it.

The lack of contractions and admittance of not knowing reminded me of the kind of discussions I sometimes see in MET courses or academic opinion blogs. In reflection on the use of algorithms in public writing, I would like to reference The Allusionist’s podcast episode #102, “New Rules”.  The full stop has [perhaps not replaced yet per se, but] been fighting the period and commas for sentence-ending hegemony in the last decade. I know people who get annoyed by ten notifications, all a continuation of the same sentence or train of thought, divided by full stops, and I know people incensed at getting a message with the whole idea contained in one ‘wall of text’ with proper punctuation. What’s stranger is that we seem to never talk about it directly; I’ve only expressed my membership to the former to close friends in passing, by complaining about getting countless continuation messages from other acquaintances. I also think that this evolution in sentence-ending punctuation is what influenced algorithmic predictive text to not suggest punctuation, even though it suggests capitalized and lowercase variations side-by-side.

That’s it for my mini-reflection. The one note I do want to close on, is that, though it may not be often used by most people or it may even be used for entertainment as above, predictive text can be a godsend for people who struggle to swipe or type. Not everyone who uses phones is a digital native, or has full motor control or good eyes. Having the option to click on a full word from time to time instead of having to click every letter on a tiny keyboard when your hands are shaking is just one small accommodation that can reduce strain for the oft-overlooked demographics, and keep us all connected.

-B