AI, Autonomous Vehicles, and Channel Orange
Hi again. Let’s go.
How do you feel about generative AI? Do you feel like you know how it works and why it got popular?
I genuinely want to know.
It’s the fastest adopted consumer technology ever for a reason, but obviously generative AI comes with its own set of drawbacks. I’m really curious how people feel, what people know about it. Have you played around with ChatGPT or its competitors? Do you think it is overhyped, underhyped? A lot of the readers of this newsletter are artists of some sort. I really want to know what you think.
Obviously I have a lot of thoughts, lol.
Why don’t we have cars that can drive themselves?
We do, actually. Two companies in San Francisco, Waymo and Cruise, had/have fleets of driverless cabs rolling through the city streets. Using cameras, radar, lidar (radar with lasers), and a number of other sensors, the vehicles could reliably navigate.
But in October of last year, a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian twenty feet, leaving her in critical condition. Human driven cars do things like this all the time, but what made it particularly unsavory, to the government and to the public, is two things:
It is an early example of how to litigate, in court and in public, what happens when a company strikes a pedestrian, not a person.
Cruise tried to nonchalantly cover up their own vehicle’s level of fault in the accident.
What resulted was government investigation and intense public scrutiny. Both Cruise and Waymo have been forced to scale back their operations and have had agreements with the city struck.
Frankly, in the United States, the widespread adoption of personal autonomous vehicles is a long way off. Seemingly every utopian Silicon Valley technologist and deified investor forgets that the relationship between technology and humans always moves in the direction of human → technology. Because of this, they forget to do their cultural analysis, their sociology, their basic consideration of the things that could go wrong when dealing with the irrational, the random, the emotional human.
As much as companies would like to make money driving us around in autonomous cabs, it does not seem to be something that actual human beings would like to trade off their learned habits for. Hell hath no fury like a deeply ingrained human bias toward the familiar.
In pursuit of using technology like it’s around 20 years ago.
I’ve been attempting to reconfigure the way I use my personal technology. I have too much around me that can capture my attention, and I am trying to be more mindful, present, and intentional about my use of my devices.
In this effort, I’ve been reflecting on how using technology used to feel.
I remember when my house had one computer on which I could use AIM and play games on Miniclip. The computer was a desktop that sat in one corner of my living room. Only one person could use it at a time. I had a Gameboy and then a Nintendo DS, devices where you could play one game at a time. Time in front of the TV was only time in front of the TV and not “time in front of the TV with my phone and my laptop, texting and watching TikToks and doing a sudoku.”
One device, one at a time.
I worry that we can’t, that I can’t go back to how it used to be. But I do genuinely miss that feeling.
I’m taking any advice people have for being more intentional about their device use.
arachne music corner
I want to have a space to highlight music I’ve been listening to.
Technology and art are impossible to disentangle. One depends on the other, and vice versa. This week, I want to highlight the postmodern masterpiece Channel Orange by Frank Ocean, and talk about its relationship with technology.
When the album dropped in 2012, American society was at a recognizable inflection point of cultural change around the Internet and technology. Obama had been the first president on Twitter, streaming was truly starting to take hold on platforms like Netflix and YouTube, and every single smartphone had two cameras - one on the front, one on the back. The collapse of monoculture had been underway, but the early 2010s saw a dramatic period of media and political fracture that we are still in the midst of today.
This is why I think postmodernism has come to be the artistic theme of the last 15 or so years. As observers, the public has more and more and more vying for its attention. We are bombarded with the eclectic, the ironic, and the cognitive dissonance of a technological landscape that all at once delivers chipper commercials for dog food and videos of a US supported genocide. It is truly everything, it is truly everywhere, it is truly all at once.
Thankfully we have music like Channel Orange, an album in which Frank Ocean provides a sonic channel surf between different genres, samples, and modalities. There are about 5 or 6 all time great songs on this album, all with different vibes, that reinterpret traditional/tragic social norms. Channel Orange provides a context through which to view the information-entertainment landscape we’ve arrived at today, one in which the literal and the figurative, the sincere and the sardonic, and the shameless and shameful are co-mingled. It is music for the “11 Household Objects You’re Using Wrong!! Number 8 Will Shock You!!” age. Listen below: