Seeing like a simulation ⊗ The “Whisperverse” ⊗ Risks vs. Harms: Youth & social media

Seeing like a simulation

Really enjoyed this piece by Celine Nguyen for The Los Angeles Review of Books, reviewing Chaim Gingold’s Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine. As the title implies, it’s about the history and impact of SimCity, which Nguyen goes over in some detail, and expands in a few directions. Read for the memories of playing that game, for useful connections to systems, maps, models, and legibility, or for the last part about billionaire cities, especially the recent Andreessen-backed California Forever in Solano County.

One ‘side note’ to notice, she frames the book as “a compelling example of ‘software criticism’: a close interrogation of a single work that attends to its form, function, and sociohistorical context.” While “art, literary, and architectural criticism are well-established disciplines,” the software equivalent is not. Nguyen mentions The Case for Software Criticism in WIRED, where Sheon Han bemoans that “‘a defining artifact of our time,’ is ‘under-theorized,’ despite its influence on our lives.” Quite right!

The piece also mentions the work of Jay Wright Forrester, which inspired Will Wright when creating SimCity. Allll the way back in No.65 (I really have to get all those archives moved over), I shared Model Metropolis published in Logic(s) Magazine, which also looked at this particular nexus of influence and the game. Reminder also that Celine wrote research as leisure activity, which I loved and shared a few issues back.

[During] a broader move ‘from warfare to welfare,’ … technologies like cybernetics and computer simulations, first developed for military purposes, were repurposed to “better plan and manage U.S. cities in the 1960s and 1970s.” […]

But as the aphorism goes: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The lack of empirical validation made Forrester’s book a problematic basis for policy decisions, but the “computational make-believe” of Urban Dynamics was perfect for creating an entertaining game. […]

it was the unreality of the simulated denizens that underwrote both the violence and the emotional connection. […] City […] inhabitants were mere data points—unimportant subjects to torture and trifle with, but their powerlessness and (imagined?) suffering also provoked empathy and care. […]

In the early stages of SimCity’s development, Gingold writes, many were skeptical that an open-ended game about urban planning could enchant players. But SimCity’s success may be less surprising when we consider how few people, especially those without billions of dollars in funding, have the ability to reshape their built environment.

The “Whisperverse”

“The future of mobile computing is an AI voice inside your head.” I’m sharing this one for three reasons. First, although very deterministic, ‘this is going to happen for sure you have no choice,’ I think it’s largely correct on the possibilities and perils of mobile computing + AI. Two, I love the coinage of ‘whisperverse.’ Three and back on the ‘technology wants’ vibe, notice that the author is Dr. Louis B. Rosenberg, the “current CEO of Unanimous AI” who “is known for developing the first functional augmented reality system at Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), founding the early virtual reality company Immersion Corporation (NASDAQ: IMMR), and founding the early augmented reality company Outland Research.” He strikes a decent balance of presenting the risks, but it’s pretty clear where he’s coming from. (Via The Nexialist.)

This future is the result of two technologies maturing and merging into one: artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Their combination will enable AI assistants to ride shotgun in our lives, observing our world and giving us advice so useful that we’ll quickly feel like we can’t live without it. […]

I often refer to this emerging branch of computing as “augmented mentality” because it will change how we think, feel, and act. […]

[The AI-powered Ray-Bans from Meta follow] the new paradigm that will soon define mobile computing. It has onboard cameras and microphones that feed a powerful AI engine and pumps verbal guidance into your ears.

Risks vs. Harms: Youth & social media

This is one of those articles where I might have dropped before the end but I didn’t because I’ve respected the author’s thinking for a while. Here danah boyd makes a solid case for the risks vs harms and where ‘we’ could push or legislate or change to limit those risks. Worth a read for that angle. However, the whole piece has to do more with the behaviour of people on these platforms, where it seems to me like the real problem, and the current uproar, are centered on the impact of algorithms, which aren’t mentioned. Most parents right now, in my corners of parenting and the web, are more worried about addiction or obsession than they are with bullying or privacy leaks. (More, not only.)

Risk management is a skill to develop. And while regulation can be used to reduce certain risks, it cannot eliminate them. And it can also backfire and create more risks. […]

It’s important to acknowledge that most of these harms involve people using social media to harm others. It’s reasonable that they should be held accountable. It’s not reasonable to presume that you can design a system that allows people to interact in a manner where harms will never happen. […]

Of course, there are harms that I do think are product liability issues vis-a-vis social media. For example, I think that many privacy harms can be mitigated with a design approach that is privacy-by-default. I also think that regulations that mandate universal privacy protections would go a long way in helping people out.

The destructo test

One more feature this week and no medium-length shares because I just had to bring up this one by Jon Evans. He proposes the destructo ad absurdum test, “if a technology were to vanish overnight, how many people outside that field would be profoundly affected?” He ran it five years ago on crypto (it failed), and his now sharing his thinking on whether AI also fails. It does, but how, and when it might pass makes for an interesting thought experiment and things to keep an eye on.

A Fermi estimate: there are ~30 million software developers worldwide; figure an average global salary of ~$35K/year; that’s $1 trillion/year. If AI makes that 20% more efficient, even if only by shoring up the reduce-technical-debt, add-test-coverage side of software rather than building sexy new things, that’s $200 billion/year of value. […]

Imagine a world in which everyone has a graduate student on call, to perform research, draft papers, run experiments, do paperwork, handle administrivia—to handle all the gruntwork and let you focus on what’s actually important.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Seeding Futures for Wellbeing: Catalysing Collective Imagination. “This booklet is intended as a collective imagination starter pack! We have created a reflection on the seven themes identified above with the aim of engaging with other interested parties, both locally and internationally, in processes of rigorous imagining and deliberation about how we could create the conditions for futures in which values-led capitalism, democracy and wellbeing could flourish”
• Icons of futures thinking. “Five core methods that can help us not only navigate the complex landscapes ahead but also redefine them.”
• 2050 Future Timeline. I haven’t explored much so far, but an intriguing speculative timeline “running from the present day, through the next century and beyond, all the way to the end of the universe itself.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Apple releases Depth Pro, an AI model that rewrites the rules of 3D vision. “Able to generate detailed 3D depth maps from single 2D images in a fraction of a second—without relying on the camera data traditionally needed to make such predictions.”
• How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design. “AlphaChip was one of the first reinforcement learning approaches used to solve a real-world engineering problem. It generates superhuman or comparable chip layouts in hours, rather than taking weeks or months of human effort, and its layouts are used in chips all over the world, from data centers to mobile phones.” (I dislike the way they use “superhuman” here. Dogs have a better sense of smell, we don’t call them superhumans.)
• Liquid Foundation Models: Our first series of generative AI models. “A new generation of generative AI models that achieve state-of-the-art performance at every scale, while maintaining a smaller memory footprint and more efficient inference.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Hidden in Midwestern cornfields, tiny edens bloom. “Farmers in the heartland are restoring swaths of the prairie with government help. The aim is to reduce nutrient runoff from cropland, and help birds and bees.” Looks beautiful in these images from the University of Iowa. (Both via Linkfest #25.)
• Can we eat our way out of the climate crisis? “Curbing the carbon footprint of what we eat won’t require an agricultural revolution. It's already happening in farms and ranches across the country.”
• Climate warning as world’s rivers dry up at fastest rate for 30 years, “Amazon and Mississippi rivers had record low water levels. On the other side of the globe, in Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong river basins.” Also this year: Dramatic images show the first floods in the Sahara in half a century. “More than year’s worth of rain fell in two days in south-east Morocco, filling up lake that had been dry for decades.”

Asides

• 🤓 ⚔️ 🎲 Dungeon-mastering emotions: D&D meets group therapy ◼ The new D&D Player’s Handbook makes the old one feel like a dictionary ◼ Why gaming is good for the workplace. (All via The Dice — 020.)
• 🤩 🖼️ 🇵🇪 An AI model helped uncover 303 previously unseen Nazca lines in Peru. “Included in the findings are various birds, cats, ceremonial acts, and even a killer whale wielding a weapon.”
• 😍 📸 The Best Panoramic Photos of 2024.