In a strange synchronicity after my robot post yesterday, our Sunday paper business section carried an article called “Robot surgery faces lawsuits.”
The source for the piece is listed as Bloomberg News, and this appears to be original story, posted on their website March 5. No cute robot pictures this time, and no comments from me except to suggest everyone read this: Robosurgery Suits Detail Injuries as Death Reports Rise
At least a decade ago, when I worked in IT, I read a story online that I treasured like those special Dilbert clips everyone posts in their cubicle. Supposedly, a software engineer making $90,000 a year outsourced his job to India, paying an engineer there about 20% of his salary (a handsome wage in India at the time) so he could split his workdays between online courses and video games. As the story went, the code he got back from the Indian engineer was so good that he had to introduce bugs now and then to maintain credibility.
I loved telling the tale, though I figured it was probably just a nerd urban legend. Today I found an identical case that is documented. Well, identical except for location and inflation: the country is China, and the US engineer’s salary is given as “six-figure.”
A “critical infrastructure company” in the US contacted Verizon security services to see why there were so many network logins originating in Shenyang, China. At first the company thought they’d been hacked. Later it turned out the VPN token had been supplied to the Chinese firm by an employee the Verizon report names as “Bob.” Bob was described as:
“mid-40′s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the company, family man, inoffensive and quiet. Someone you wouldn’t look at twice in an elevator.”
Bob showed up every day at the office. Here is Verizon’s report on how he spent his days ( http://tinyurl.com/ajm7oan ):
NPR’s coverage of this story contains a link to the Verizon report, which notes that Bob had a reputation as the best developer in the company http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/16/169528579/outsourced-employee-sends-own-job-to-china-surfs-web
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What’s just as interesting as Bob’s story is my reaction to it (and probably yours). First, I assume that if Bob had the smarts to engineer this deal, he got a non-disclosure agreement from the Chinese company. Such documents, to protect business secrets, are routine in all sub-contracting operations.
Beyond that, I found that along with humorous admiration for Bob’s escapade, I felt critical because he wasn’t “playing by the rules” – even though in the course of my own career, I watched all the rules change.
When I finally “settled down” and got a “real job,” I joined a technology company that boasted of never having a layoff. The first one came about 18 months later, and before I left, I saw scores of empty cubicles of people whose jobs had been sent overseas. These days we all know people who played by the rules and got screwed.
In the end, I wouldn’t want Bob’s karma, but his story illustrates something we hear again and again: nowadays workers are on their own. Company loyalty in response to employee loyalty is largely a thing of the past, and everyone has to take responsibility for their own careers, including use of the tools of the digital age. For anyone reading this post in a cubicle and thinking of Bob and tropical islands, here is some recreational reading, referenced in the NPR story – The Four Hour Workweek, by Timothy Ferriss.
As the sergeant used to say in the classic cop show, Hill Street Blues, “Be careful out there!”
In 1984 I joined Intel as their graphic workstations were shrinking from video arcade sized units to large desktop computers. In my spare time, I sometimes played with a Commodore64 and saved quarters for Space Invaders. The first IBM personal computer did not roll out until the following year.
That was the state of technology when Max Headroom was born. The creation of a British trio, George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton, Max was an artificially intelligent, disembodied personality who lived in cyberspace before the term was coined. Computer animation wasn’t advanced enough to portray the computerized look the group was after, so filming Max required a four hour makeup session that actor Matt Frewer described as “a very painful, torturous and disgusting enterprise.”
Rocky Morton described Max as a “very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host,” but he was also “media-wise and gleefully disrespectful,” which endeared him to younger viewers.
Max appeared on American TV in 1987, as a talking head – literally – in a TV newsroom in a dystopian near-future dominated by large corporations and television. Although he became a spokesman for “The New Coke,” and appeared on Sesame Street, only 13 shows aired.
Part of the problem was that Max was down right irritating, with his visual and vocal stutter and an op-art background that was the best computer animation could do at the time. Here is a 3o second sample from his Coke commercial:
The fact remains that Max Headroom was decades ahead of his time. In one episode, for instance, terrorists blow up all TV towers in the city, pushing the population to riot when they find they have nothing to watch. In the nick of time, city officials pacify everyone by distributing hand-held video viewers loaded with old reruns.
Remember, this was 1987, when the best technology Hollywood had to offer wasn’t enough to capture the vision of Max’s creators.
So what brought Max Headroom to mind right now? Beyond Max’s “dystopian future dominated by large corporation and television” that is. Why today, December 3, 2012?
Yesterday, after a series of storms, I ventured out to the supermarket and walked in just as they played the Christmas carol holiday song I hate most, “Little Saint Nick,” by the Beach Boys. I had to compliment the store, however – the sound was just barely audible. Not loud enough to cause real annoyance, I thought, but enough to keep silence at bay, which might cause people to riot.
That brought Max to mind. “Ha-ha-ha-happy Ho-ho-holidays, everyone.”
The Popinator prototype – under development at Popcorn Indiana
An article in the Huffington Post food section puts it like this: “The problem with popcorn these days, is that it doesn’t pop directly into your mouth as nature intended.”
No more! Intrepid engineers at Popcorn Indiana have a working prototype of a voice activated popcorn cannon that calculates the trajectory to your mouth and launches a kernel when you say, “Pop.”
I am seriously encouraged by the Popinator. Who says America has lost its edge? Creativity, engineering prowess, and humor – a potent combination!
A video released by Google earlier this month serves as an introduction to their Project Glass, which aims at putting smartphone apps on a pair of voice controlled glasses. You can watch the clip now or at the end of this post. I suggest you invest the 2 1/2 minutes upfront, since the clip is kind of wild and provides the context for the rest of the article.
I discovered Project Glass in a New York Times op ed piece, “The Man With the Google Glasses,” by Ross Douthat, published April 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-man-with-the-google-glasses.html?_r=4
Douthat says that regardless of whether the project comes to fruition, this video speaks volumes about our collective condition – a mix of unbelievable technical expertise and ever-deeper alienation. As a writer, I couldn’t construct a better illustration of this than the final scene in the youTube clip. Our protagonist can video chat and share a gorgeous sunset with his girlfriend, and he has to – she’s nowhere near the apartment where he lives. In a digital world, “sharing a sunset” has more than one meaning!
Douthat quotes an NYU sociologist who says that more Americans now live alone than in nuclear families. Similar stats tell us similar things that we already know or sense. Douthat presents both optimistic and pessimistic assessments of the impact of online media on our social connections or lack thereof.
He also adds a note of caution about the political ramifications of the trend. He quotes sociologist, Robert Nisbet who believed that “in eras of intense individualism and weak communal ties, the human need for belonging tends to empower central governments as never before.” Douthat suggests that old time totalitarianism is not a likely prospect, but says that “what the blogger James Poulos has dubbed “the pink police state” which is officially tolerant while scrutinizing your every move — remains a live possibility.”
This reminded me of a piece in February on MSNBC concerning Samsung’s new generation HDTV’s, with internally wired cameras, microphones, and options for 3d party apps, which could allow someone to peer into your living room. “Samsung has not released a privacy policy clarifying what data it is collecting and sharing with regard to the new TV sets…Samsung has only stated that it “assumes no responsibility, and shall not be liable” in the event that a product or service is not “appropriate.” http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/in-america-television-watches-you/
In truth, I’m not too paranoid on that score, since the average evening at our house is so quiet the spies would go to sleep.
What stays with me from the video is the sense that the Google glasses turn the entire world into a version of my computer screen, where the world “out there” is wallpaper for the applications I’m running. The phrase these days is “virtualization,” though in one sense, it’s nothing new.
Various artists, philosophers, and spiritual masters have told us “reality” is more like a dream than we know. Physicists teach nothing is really solid. Biologists explains that we don’t see rocks or trees “out there.” What we see are photons striking the rods and cones in our retinas. Behavioral psychologists have established that at a certain level, our brains do not know the difference between “real” and imagined events. As James Hillman put it, “Every experience has to begin as a psychic event in order to happen at all.” In this sense, the human mind and senses perform the fundamental act of virtualization and have done so for millennia.
Does this mean I’m going to sign up for a pair of smart glasses when they hit the market? Nope. They’re a bit far along the nerd scale, even for me, and actually, the prototype is more than a little creepy. It’s not hard to imagine surreal scenes on the street with smart-glassed pedestrians trying to navigate around each other, and even worse, smart-glassed drivers reading and responding to their emails.
All kidding aside, once this idea hits the streets in some refined, future incarnation, it will likely be one more seductive technological tool/toy to learn to use in a way that serves us and not the other way around.
The First Gates 