Spatial Machinations
Via Muki Haklay.
The Digital Geographies Research Group of the RGS-IBG held the annual symposium at the University of Sheffield, under the theme “Justice and the Digital”. These are partial notes from the day
The symposium opening session focus on the important question “What’s Justice got to do with it?”
Saw this via Twitter somehow…
Employment generation is crucial to spreading the benefits of economic growth broadly and to reducing global poverty. And yet, emerging economies face a contemporary challenge to traditional pathways to employment generation: automation, digitalization, and labor-saving technologies. 1.8 billion jobs—or two-thirds of the current labor force of developing countries—are estimated to be susceptible to automation from today’s technological standpoint. Cumulative advances in industrial automation and labor-saving technologies could further exacerbate this trend. Or will they? In this paper we: (i) discuss the literature on automation; and in doing so (ii) discuss definitions and determinants of automation in the context of theories of economic development; (iii) assess the empirical estimates of employment-related impacts of automation; (iv) characterize the potential public policy responses to automation; and (v) highlight areas for further exploration in terms of employment and economic development strategies in developing countries. In an adaption of the Lewis model of economic development, the paper uses a simple framework in which the potential for automation creates “unlimited supplies of artificial labor” particularly in the agricultural and industrial sectors due to technological feasibility. This is likely to create a push force for labor to move into the service sector, leading to a bloating of service-sector employment and wage stagnation but not to mass unemployment, at least in the short-to-medium term.
There’s a really nice piece by Tarleton Gillespie in Issue 04 of Logic themed on “scale” that concerns the scale of social media platforms and how we might understand the qualitative as well as quantitative shifts that happen when things change in scale.
But the question of scale is more than just the sheer number of users. Social media platforms are not just big; at this scale, they become fundamentally different than they once were. They are qualitatively more complex. While these platforms may speak of their online “community,” singular, at a billion active users there can be no such thing. Platforms must manage multiple and shifting communities, across multiple nations and cultures and religions, each participating for different reasons, often with incommensurable values and aims. And communities do not independently coexist on a platform. Rather, they overlap and intermingle—by proximity, and by design.
…
The huge scale of the platforms has robbed anyone who is at all acquainted with the torrent of reports coming in of the illusion that there was any such thing as a unique case… On any sufficiently large social network everything you could possibly imagine happens every week, right? So there are no hypothetical situations, and there are no cases that are different or really edgy. There’s no such thing as a true edge case. There’s just more and less frequent cases, all of which happen all the time.
…
No matter how they handle content moderation, what their politics and premises are, or what tactics they choose, platforms must work at an impersonal scale: the scale of data. Platforms must treat users as data points, subpopulations, and statistics, and their interventions must be semi-automated so as to keep up with the relentless pace of both violations and complaints. This is not customer service or community management but logistics—where concerns must be addressed not individually, but procedurally.
However, the user experiences moderation very differently. Even if a user knows, intellectually, that moderation is an industrial-sized effort, it feels like it happens on an intimate scale. “This is happening to me; I am under attack; I feel unsafe. Why won’t someone do something about this?” Or, “That’s my post you deleted; my account you suspended. What did I do that was so wrong?”
I’ve had a sort of moment of realisation this morning that a bunch of tabs I’ve had open, saved, reopened (etc etc) for the past few months are all more-or-less about doing speculative work around A.I., automation and suchlike.
This is interesting for me cos I wrote a PhD (and I am by no means the only one) about rationales for and forms of speculative practice in computing R&D (my fieldwork for this was, soberingly, now approximately ten years ago). It’s also interesting cos I have, in the last eight or so years, pitched for funding to do this sort of work and miserably failed three times.
I think what interests me most is the ways in which story telling is more-or-less the method. I’m not sure how good we are at this, as academics. There’s some good work that analyses speculative things, such as architects visualisations, but I’m not sure I’ve seen much work doing speculation that is not design-oriented. I am not seeking to criticise speculative design practices, I really admire that work, I just wonder if there is a way of de-centring the ‘design’ bit to engage in broader forms of ‘speculation’. I’m also not sure how one can tread the line between evoking particular kinds of scenario/ story (or dare I say imaginative geography) and affirming them. Likewise, I don’t think it is sufficient to simply refer to Black Mirror – it’s fun but it’s not the only way of doing speculation about technology (as afrofuturism demonstrates). I don’t think we want to merely replicate the sorts of ‘visioning’ practices of the likes of Microsoft, Samsung or Beko, not because they’re not interesting but because I’d like to think academics doing this kind of thing want to critically reflect on, not simply propose (or impose!), possibilities. Playful examples that I think are successful include Superflux’s excellent “Uninvited Guests” – though again, this is perhaps more design-oriented: it’s more about the function in relation to the individual rather than the kinds of world that are necessary for those functions to work.
I do not claim any special insight here – I’m curious about speculative methods – they seem to have some analytical/ explanatory/ critical power but also that also seems to be rather hard to negotiate. In practice, I think you may have to be in the right context, and I’m not convinced academic geography is (without quite a bit of work, given particular kinds of disciplinary assumptions and proclivities – happy to be proven wrong!), and you may have to work with non-academic partners in a way I am not skilled in doing. Good examples, I think, are work like Anne’s Counting Sheep project, which is a canonical example of interesting and provocative speculative design. As I’ve said – I’m not so sure about where non-design-oriented work sits and how this is, or can be, done well. I’m interested in some of the attempts anyway, and here’s some examples, listed below.
UPDATE: Sam Hind shared this piece from Warwick concerning issue mapping techniques that allowed for speculative reflection on driverless cars:
Surfacing Social Aspects of Driverless Cars with Creative Methods, Noortje Marres, Rebecca Cain, Ana Gross, Lucy Kimbell and Arun Ulahannan – “The Warwick workshop explored the potential of creative social research methods – such as design research and debate mapping – to surface still hidden social dynamics around the operation of intelligent technologies in everyday environments, and to complement more established approaches to societal testing of these technologies.”
This made me also think of the speculative policy making practices that arose from “Open Policy” work at the British Cabinet Office’s PolicyLab, which I think involved folks from Strange Telemetry and Superflux.
Crafting stories of technology and progress: five considerations, Cian O’Donavan & Johan Schot – From Technology Stories the website of the Society for the History of Technology comes this brief post that refers to the longer report from the International Panel on Social Progress concerning the fairly classic Science and Technology Studies issue of how to tell stories about “progress” without necessarily resorting to (unreflexive) forms of determinism. There are four ‘stories’ by several researchers linked from this article that address a number of issues:
Economic Science Fictions, edited by William Davies – I’m not really sure why the “science” is in the title but there we go… From the blurb: “Rooted in the sense that our current economic reality is no longer credible or viable, this collection treats our economy as a series of fictions and science fiction as a means of anticipating different economic futures.”
Designing the future, Justin Reynolds – reviews the above book on the New Socialist site, with some interesting commentary.
Future Perfect conference/event, coordinated by Data & Society – characterised as “speculative fiction in the public interest” this event was first run in 2017 as an invitation-only thing but had an open call in 2018. From the 2018 event blurb: “Future Perfect is an annual workshop and conference dedicated to different approaches to understanding, living in, and challenging dominant narratives of speculative fiction in a time where powerful actors in technology and politics treat the future like a foregone conclusion.”
Robot Futures, Illah Reza Nourbakhsh – “Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings.”
Via Tony Sampson. Looks interesting >
This topic has been getting a lot of TV/Press coverage here in the UK.Here’s a video of a symposium discussing artistic resistance, critical theory strategies to ‘internet addiction’ and the book Are We All Addicts Now? Convened at Central St Martins, London on 7th Nov 2017. Introduced by Ruth Catlow with talks by Katriona Beales, Feral Practice, Emily Rosamond and myself…
@KatrionaBeales @FeralPractice @TonyDSpamson @EmilyRosamond & @furtherfield
This keynote from the NIPS 2017 conference by Kate Crawford is excellent – a good resource for anyone interested in thinking and communicating about the issues of bias in AI.
Spot the difference:
Both Microsoft.
Interesting conference from the project led by Chris Speed.
Panel sessions include Session 1: Power, Transparency and Accountability in Blockchain for International Development, Session 2: Peer-to-Peer Economies (A): Natural Resource Governance, Session 3: Peer to Peer Economies (B): Supply Chains and Development, Session 4: Crypto-philanthropy and development: The Future of Giving? along with lunchtime demonstrations of platforms and designs.
Panel submissions are closed but there are limited spaces available to register. For more information please contact k.symons@ed.ac.uk.
Registration essential. Contact c.cooke@ed.ac.uk to register.
Updates to follow on the day!
Ocado, online groceries delivery service in the UK, some time ago pivoted into providing automation solutions for other retailers. They have a division, or separate company, called Ocado Technology, which offers other retailers systems for fulfilment centre automation: “Ocado Smart Platform” [buzzwords ahoy!]. So, while the above video is interesting, insofar as it demonstrates yet another not-exactly-hospitable factory-like code/space, what is perhaps more interesting is that this system seems to have been developed not only to fulfil Ocado orders in Wiltshire/Hampshire but also as an advert for what Ocado technology does. See this report from Reuters: Ocado’s robot army courts global food retailers.
Ocado have promoted previous automated systems through videos too. The same claims about ‘machine learning’ and so on were made about a fulfilment centre system that looks a lot more like an airport baggage sorting system around five years ago.
I’ve become mildly obsessed with these videos of automated factories and fulfilment centres – they have become a sort of genre unto themselves. There are clearly ways in which promotional videos–made by the equipment/tech firms responsible for creating the systems or the firm implementing them–get translated into video news stories. Likewise, there are ways of talking about the ‘robot’ nature of these things. All of this demonstrates our ongoing negotiation of norms of understanding, describing and rationalising the technology, it’s implementation and what it may or may not portend for work and so on. If you’ve read this blog in the last year you may remember I talk about this stuff as the formation/formalisation of an ‘automative imagination‘.
As a sort of throw-away aside – the displacement of labour involved by Ocado’s, and others’, systems of automation may well be important too. If you ramp up the capacity to ‘fulfil’ orders in the distribution centre then you need to expand the capacity to get them delivered. We don’t have driverless vehicles on our roads, yet, so this possibly means fewer pickers and packers and a lot more delivery drivers.