Uber for disembodied companionship

Kashmir Hill worked as an invisible boyfriend/girlfriend for a month. We are already living with one foot in the near future.

With each job, I would see the person’s first name, last initial and hometown; “how we met;” and my own assigned name, age, and which of six personality types they’d given their Invisible. Now I’m adventurous and fun. Now I’m cheerful and outgoing.
 
There were 3 major rules:
1. I was always supposed to be upbeat in my messages.
2. I’m not supposed to break character.
3. No sexting. (Photos are blocked on the service.)
 
I’d get the story of how we met and the last 10 messages we’d exchanged. This setup is designed to create the illusion of continuity; ideally, an Invisible Boyfriend would seem like a steady, stable presence in a user’s life, instead of what it really is: a rotating cast of men and women. And it is both: a woman who works for the service previously told me she prefers playing the role of boyfriend because she knows what a woman wants to hear.
 

Hill probably got paid more for this article than she did for her work as invisible companion.

It’s hard to put a price on love. But Crowdsource did. It’s worth a whopping five cents. That’s how much I got paid to write each of these texts.
 
If I spent an hour answering texts, and took the full five minutes to write each one, I’d be making 60 cents an hour, far below the minimum wage. This is legal because all the workers on the platform are classified as independent contractors rather than employees. “Contributors have a tremendous amount of control over their decisions—for example, when to perform a task, when to complete it, and even if they want to complete it at all,” said Jeffrey H. Newhouse, an employment lawyer at Hirschler Fleischer, by email. “That means the contributor isn’t an employee and, as a result, employee protections like the minimum wage don’t apply.”
 

Not surprising considering the required skill set is the ability to write with decent grammar, that's reasonably commodified.

As with Uber, the laborers already fear displacement by technology like self-driving cars.

I assumed that, when artificial intelligence is good enough, Invisible would just cut the crowdsourced humans out of the equation and use chat bots, which you don’t have to pay per message, instead.
 
No, he said. “Having humans in the flow is the key to the service,” said Tabor. “There are things that only humans can respond to and understand, like inside jokes.”
 

Loneliness continues to be one of the great problems being tackled by technologists. See also: Her, The Diamond Age.

IoT

Daniel Miessler thinks we're underestimating the Internet of Things.

IoT isn’t about smart gadgets or connecting more things to the Internet. It’s about continuous two-way interaction between everything in the world. It’s about changing how humans and other objects interact with the world around them.
 
It will turn people and objects from static to dynamic, and make them machine-readable and fully interactive entities. Algorithms will continuously optimize the interactions between everyone and everything in the world, and make it so that the environment around humans constantly adjusts based on presence, preference, and desire.
 
The Internet of Things is not an Internet use case. Quite the opposite, the IoT represents the ultimate platform for human interaction with the physical world, and it will turn the Internet into a mere medium.
 

Great succinct read on the key technical components that will make up his vision for IoT.

The Internet of Things is a terrible name, which doesn't help matters. Miessler suggests four alternatives though they don't catch me on first read. Something less tech jargony, not terrifying (the phonetics of daemon aren't great though it's a cool word), shorter (a la the singularity). it sounds silly but a name is all that gives a futuristic scenario like this a personality right now.

Kubrick posters by Tomer Hanuka

I'm a huge fan of Tomer Hanuka's art, and several of his prints hang in my apartment. The ones that don't are the ones that sold out before I could get my hands on one of them, much to my grief.

He's working on a series of posters for Kubrick's movies, four of which are done already.

The Divine, a graphic novel by Boaz Lavie with art by Tomer and his brother Asaf, ships next week. Looks great.

Hanuka also created one of my favorite New Yorker covers, the Valentine's Day cover in 2014, titled Perfect Storm.

Disrupting reality

Most television viewers don't realize just how much of what they watch contains a lot of visual FX, or “virtual reality” if you will. Check out this reel from Stargate Studios.

Sometimes, the only thing that's “real” is the main actor. Increased computing power and advances in visual effects software and techniques mean we're only going to see more and more productions turn to the trusty green screen. More and more, the cost of shooting against a green screen and drawing in a background is lower than shooting on location. That's a sea change that has happened more quickly than most viewers realize.

It's not a short step, but perhaps not more than a few vigorous hops and a few cranks of Moore's Law to imagine the same convenience tradeoff happening in our own lives, the swap of physical reality for virtual reality. As long as the quality is good enough, the lower cost/higher convenience solution wins out. For virtual reality, that bar is not to match reality exactly. It is simply belief.

We're finally at the point in history when we have an alternative to the shadow costs of the real world.

Reality is bloated.
 
It started off as a lean, mean MVP with a minimal feature set — hunting and gathering, procreating, a little story-telling around the fire, fighting for dear life — but now every last use case has been crammed in. There are so many layers of cruft on this thing, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.
 
This is one of the ultimate drivers of consumer VR — not (just) to provide experiences we couldn’t have otherwise, but to replace many of the crappy physical experiences we slog through every day. Business travel. Middle school. Conferences. You know: pain relievers, not vitamins.
 
There’s been no choice until now, since we’ve been living in a platform monoculture where the monopoly provider hasn’t had any competition to keep it honest. Thankfully, that’s about to change.
 

That's Beau Cronin on unbundling reality. It's perhaps one of the greatest disruptions we'll live through this century.

Why are apes skinny and humans fat?

Scientists studied dead humans and bonobos in an effort to understand why humans became the fat primate. What happened when chimps and humans diverged? It's not clear, but the results thousands of years later are.

...humans got fat. Chimps and bonobos are 13 percent skin, and we're only 6 percent skin, but we compensate for that by being up to 36 percent body fat on the high end of average, while bonobos average 4 percent. That's a wildly disproportional fatness differential.
 

From an interview of one of the authors of the paper.

So what happened on the path from common ancestor to Homo sapiens?
One of the things is, you've gotta shift the body around and change the muscle from the forelimbs if you're a quadrupedal ape. Our ancestors—and most apes—can venture into open areas, but they live in forests. They're really tied to having tree cover available, because they get hot.
 
So we developed fat so we could get away from forests?
Compared to the apes, we have less muscle, which is an energy savings, because it's such an expensive tissue. Two important things about the way we store fat: We store it around our buttocks and thighs, but you want to make sure that you're storing fat so it doesn't interfere with locomotion. You don't want it on your feet, for instance. So you concentrate it around the center of gravity. And you also don't want it to interfere with being able to get rid of heat.
 
What was the benefit of having fat down low and weak arms?
If you're moving away from the forest and tree cover, you want to be able to exploit food in a more mosaic habitat that has areas of bush and a few forests around rivers. You want to be able to move into a lot of different areas. So you've gotta get rid of your hair, and really ramp up those sweat glands. Our skin has really been reorganized for a lot of different functions.
 
Do chimps and bonobos not have sweat glands? 
They have sweat glands. They're not really functioning. All primates have eccrine sweat glands in their hands and feet. Monkeys have them on their chests. [But] they're not stimulated by heat.