Design theater

You've heard of security theater. As Bruce Schneier, who coined the term, defines it:

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11 -- their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.
 

Karen Levy and Tim Hwang argue we're going to see the rise of design theater.

Here’s a speculation of science fiction that is rapidly manifesting into a real nuts-and-bolts design debate with wide-ranging implications: should self-driving cars have steering wheels?
 

The corporate battle lines are already being drawn on this particular issue. Google announced its autonomous car prototype last year, drawing much attention for its complete absence of a steering wheel. The reason for this radical departure? The car simply “didn’t need them.”
 

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Take a step back: a steering wheel implies a need to steer, something that the autonomous car is designed specifically to eliminate. In a near future of safe autonomous driving technologies, the purpose of the steering wheel is largely talismanic. More than actually serving any practical function, the steering wheel seems bound to become a mere comfort blanket to assuage the fears of the driver.
 

This is a classic problem. Consumers refuse to adopt a new technology if it visibly disempowers them or departs radically from trusted patterns of practice. This is the case even when the system is better at a task than a human operator — as in the case of the self-driving car, which is safer than a human driver.
 

I'm not so sure a steering wheel is superfluous given what I know of self-driving cars today. Many situations can't be handled by those cars now, and may not be easy to handle for many many years, so I suspect most self-driving cars will need a steering wheel to allow manual takeover in such situations.

That aside, the piece is a fantastic read. I loved this link to an article about a car proposal from 1899 car that included a giant wooden horse head stuck on the front of the vehicle. Remember, if you ask users what they want, they'll say they want a faster vehicle with a wooden horse head in front.

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The first hood ornament: a giant horse head? Maybe in The Godfather someone was just trying to tell Jack Woltz they stole his car?

Not all design theater is nefarious. The authors elaborate:

How should we think about the ethics of design theater? Our initial reaction might be that misleading consumers about the nature of a technology is always wrong. In lots of areas, we enforce the idea that people have a right to know what they’re buying (consider rules about honest packaging and labeling, from knowing what ingredients are in our food to being informed about the possible health consequences of exposure to certain substances). But just as humans’ front stage performances are necessary for social life to function, it’s important for technologies to integrate into social life in ways that make them usable and understandable. Though some designers find skeuomorphism ugly or aesthetically inauthentic, it’s tough to find a serious ethical problem with a design feature that’s genuinely intended to guide usability.
 

There also doesn’t seem to be a tremendous ethical problem with theaters designed for certain laudable social purposes, like safety and protection. Nothing makes this clearer than artificial engine noise. Because modern electric cars are so much quieter than their internal-combustion predecessors, it’s much harder for pedestrians to hear them approaching. Since we’re used to listening for engine noise as a safety cue, a silent vehicle can more readily “sneak up” on us and cause accidents. Over time, if all vehicles become silent, many of us would no doubt lose this subconscious reliance — but the consequences of losing the cue altogether can be very dangerous in the shorter term, especially for pedestrians with visual impairments.

The end of routine work

In recessions of the 1960s and 1970s, routine jobs would fall during the recession but quickly snap back. But after the recession in 1990, something changed. Routine jobs fell and, as a share of the population, never recovered. In the recessions in 2001 and in 2007-09 they fell even further. The snapback never occurred, suggesting that many firms began coping with recessions by scrapping tasks that could be automated or more easily outsourced.
 

For his part, Mr. Siu thinks jobs have been taken away by automation, more than by outsourcing. While some manufacturing jobs have clearly gone overseas, “it’s hard to offshore a secretary.” These tasks more likely became unnecessary due to improving technology, he said.
 

In the late 1980s, routine cognitive jobs were held by about 17% of the population and routine manual jobs by about 16%. Today, that’s declined to about 13.5% and 12%. (The figures are not seasonally adjusted and so are displayed in the chart as 12-month moving averages, to remove seasonal fluctuations).

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But they are not among the labor market’s pessimists who fear that robots will render humans obsolete. Their work shows the economy has continued to generate jobs, but with a focus on nonroutine work, especially cognitive. Since the late 1980s, such occupations have added more than 22 million workers.
 

By Josh Zumbrun. The idea that U.S. unemployment has jumped to a higher plateau because of jobs moving overseas or because they're replaced by technology is not a new one, but it's useful to see data and charts to support the claim.

Brad Delong comments:

Note that these jobs are “routine” only in the sense that they involve using the human brain as a cybernetic control processor in a manner that was outside the capability of automatic physical machinery or software until a generation ago. In the words of Adam Smith (who probably garbled the story):
 

In the first fire-engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of those boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his playfellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labour…
 

And Siu and Jaimovich seem to have gotten the classification wrong: A home-appliance repair technician is not doing a routine job–those jobs are disappearing precisely because they are not routine, require considerable expertise, are hence expensive, and so swirly swapping out the defective appliance for a new one is becoming more and more attractive.
 

As any economist would prescribe, it's become more critical when thinking about one's career and education to focus on humans' comparative advantage versus computers. But I also recommend people focus on their own unique comparative advantage: any intelligent person can do many things, but what can you do better than most anyone else? In winner-take-all markets, more common in this third industrial revolution, it's ideal to give yourself the best chance to be one of those winners, and consider it a bonus that those areas often overlap with one's personal passions (whatever you think of the 10,000 hour rule, most would agree it's easier to sustain through so many hours if one is more emotionally invested).

It's also best to accept that one will have to learn new skills many times in one lifetime. It used to be that once you finished college, the education phase of life was considered over. This is already obsolete for many. Even most programmers, supposedly the most insulated workers from technological job obsolescence, have to learn new programming languages or technologies on the job every few years now.

In the future, education will generally be accepted to mean a lifelong process. Continuing education will be the default. An undergraduate degree will simply be a first milestone in signaling one's skills and sociability to potential employers. More time will have to be set aside to level up, and resources and services to support this lifelong education continue to proliferate. I view the need for lifelong learning as a positive. Who was it that said that you're young at heart to the degree that what you want to learn exceeds what you already know?

Seriously, who said that? I don't know. Add that to my list of things to learn.

Payments as social network

Generally speaking, Venmo peaks around 7 pm on the east coast of the US and stays fairly strong until about 3am, which is midnight on the west coast. The timing—and corresponding emoji—suggests the preponderance of Venmo transactions are people paying each other back for dinner and drinks.
 

Emoji use is markedly different at quieter times of the day. For example, the house emoji ranks highly from 7 am to 3pm EST. And the car and taxi emoji crack the top five between 5am and 8am EST.
 

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Some of these data are skewed by messages containing a lot of emoji. The “pile of poop” emoji only holds the top spot in the midnight hour because a single payment used it 1,116 times.
 

On the usage patterns for the payment service Venmo, as interpreted by the emoji used to tag public transactions.

I like to think I'm young at heart, but the fact that Venmo is also a social network makes me feel old. Payment transactions are one form of community interaction, sure, but looking through my Venmo feed feels like peering through a fog of data pollution. Perhaps the next generation of kids really does live with their default life privacy settings toggled to public.

Speaking of the pile of poop emoji, it seems only a matter of time until someone releases an app that allows you to broadcast when you are taking a poop. It should be a mobile app just called Poop. I leave it to the design geniuses at Apple to figure out what type of haptic feedback a poop notification should emit on the Apple Watch.

Beware of pickpockets

The Financial Times published a masterclass with pickpocket James Freedman 

Freedman's five tips for avoiding pickpockets:

1. Carry your Oyster card or travel ticket separately to avoid flashing your wallet or purse unnecessarily.
 

2. Don’t stand near the doors on a bus or train. These are prime spots for pickpockets.
 

3. Pickpockets often hang around near “Beware of Pickpockets” signs and then watch people instinctively tap their pockets, to pinpoint the valuables.
 

4. Don’t use the same PIN for all your bank cards and your phone.
 

5. Don’t keep your driving licence with your credit cards. Losing your cards is bad enough without giving the thief your address, full name and date of birth too
 

More on pickpocketing: this excellent profile of Apollo Robbins in The New Yorker, and a few links that are still relevant.

A cookbook from IBM's Watson

Robots taking all the jobs, cooking edition:

Steve Abrams, the director of IBM’s Watson Life research program, told Quartz that Watson scanned publicly available data sources to build up a vast library of information on recipes, the chemical compounds in food, and common pairings. (For any budding gastronomers out there, Abrams said Wikia was a surprisingly useful source.) Knowledge that might’ve taken a lifetime for a Michelin-starred chef to attain can now be accessed instantly from your tablet.
 

What separates Watson from the average computer (or chef) is its ability to find patterns in vast amounts of data. It’s essentially able figure out, through sheer repetition, what combinations of compounds and cuisines work together. This leads to unusual pairings, like Waton’s apple kebab dish, which has some odd ingredients: “Strawberries and mushrooms share a lot of flavor compounds,” Abrams said. “It turns out they go quite well together.”
 

The researchers are publishing a cookbook with recipe ideas from Watson, and it releases this Tuesday: Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson: Recipes for Innovation from IBM & the Institute of Culinary Education. I have not read the book, but some of the recipes sound intriguing (“Belgian bacon pudding, a desert containing dried porcini mushrooms”) while others sound, at best, like clever wordplay (“the shrimp cocktail, which is a beverage with actual shrimp in it”). Regardless, I'm purchasing a copy just out of sheer curiosity. Let's hope they turn this resource into an app or service instead of a book, I blame Watson's vanity for wanting this in the outdated format of a book.

To the extent that standout recipes and flavor pairings are a matter of pattern recognition, there's no reason a computer, with its infinitely more scalable hardware and software for that purpose, couldn't match or exceed a human. And, so, a variant of the infinite monkey theorem: given enough time, a computer will write the French Laundry cookbook (and win a third Michelin star).

To be clear, I'm okay with this. I just want to eat tasty food, I'm fine with employing computers to come up with more amazing things to feed me.

For now, however, the computer still requires a human to actually prepare the recipe. In a true demonstration of how far artificial intelligence has progressed, no sufficiently advanced computer wants the drudgery of life as a line chef. Better profits in cookbooks than restaurants anyway.

A new cooking show concept already comes to mind: Top Freestyle Chef. Like freestyle chess, in freestyle cooking competitors would consist of a human or a human consulting with a computer. I am ready to program this into my DVR already, as long as they don't replace Padma Lakshmi with a robot host. I'm as big a fan of artificial intelligence and robots as the next guy, but I think we're a long way from replacing this.