BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-06-06 Tu

Mind-blowing "Across þe Spiderverse", Apple Vision Pro, augmented reality; supply-chain normalization; Accidental Tech Podcast on Apple WWDC; Mollick on the end of dissipative performative writing...

…effort, Danaher & Sætra on techno-moral change, Nolan on the terror of those who find their wealth cannot purchase respect, & Azhar on the chip boom…

MUST-READS:

Must-Read I: Better þan a Golden Age for Video Experiences: The creative team of cousin Phil Lord and company really has outdone itself here:

Sonny Bunch: ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Review: ‘The best-looking half-a-movie you’ll see all year!… It is hard to say how gloriously refreshing Across the Spider-Verse is to see on the big screen, an explosion of controlled chaos that rather deliberately sticks a finger in the eye of the immaculate-but-fussy-feeling computer animation of Pixar and the smoothly competent but uninventive stylings of Illumination…. It’s the sort of movie that demands to be rewatched at home, frame-by-frame, to soak in the insane amount of effort that must have gone into crafting each discrete second of cinema…

Plus:

Must-Read II: Visual Computing:

Matthew Panzarino: First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good: ‘No corners cut. Full-tilt engineering on display…. Hardware… very good… 24 million pixels…. If you have experience with VR at all then you know that the two big barriers most people hit are either latency-driven nausea or the isolation that long sessions wearing something over your eyes can deliver. Apple has mitigated both of those head on… a system-wide polling rate of 12ms… no judder or framedrops… slight motion blur… in the passthrough mode but it wasn’t distracting…. A lot of completely new and original hardware. Everywhere you look here there’s a new idea, a new technology or a new implementation…. The eye tracking and gesture control is near perfect…. Passthrough is a major key… a real-time 4k view of the world around you…. Text is actually readable…. The Personas Play. I was HIGHLY doubtful that Apple could pull off a workable digital avatar based off of just a scan of your face using the Vision Pro headset itself. Doubt crushed. I’d say that if you’re measuring the digital version of you that it creates to be your avatar in FaceTime calls and other areas, it has a solid set of toes on the other side of the uncanny valley…. It’s crisp as hell…. 3D Movies are actually good in it…. Yes, it does look that good… the platonic ideal of an XR headset. Now, we wait to see what developers and Apple accomplish over the next few months and how the public reacts…

And as for the $3500 price? Remember that the 1984 Macintosh—128K RAM, single 400KB floppy drive, 9-inch diagonal black-and-white screen, Motorola 68000 processor of 70,000 transistors running at 8MHz (by comparison an Apple silicon M2MAX has 70 billion transistors running at 3GHz) cost the equivalent of $6,500 today.

Plus

Must-Read III: Where Are Our Information & Communications Technologies Taking Us?: Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FBJCKI/> provided in its subtitle and text the idea of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in the direction of which which our ML and TM technologies are tending. Now Apple Vision Pro is carrying us in the direction of Walter Jon Williams’s oneirochronon from his 1992 novel Aristoi <https://www.amazon.com/Aristoi-Walter-Jon-Williams-ebook/dp/B007QQBRXU/>. Here is how he describes it, at the beginning of the novel:

The Aristoi celebrated in Persepolis…. Persepolis, in the Realized World, was an interesting artifact. It shaded by degrees into “Persepolis,” the real place becoming, with its illusory/electronic deeps and towers, an ever-flexible, ever-unfolding megadimensional dream. Persepolis, the place, had been reconstructed on its original Persian floor plan, and sat on its reconstructed plain at the meeting of the reconstructed Pulvar and Kor, where it took its place as the (largely symbolic) capital of a reconstructed Earth2. The city was inhabited only a few days each year, when Pan Wengong… most senior… convened the Terran Sessions…. “Persepolis,” the dream, was a far more interesting place. Most of the people who came here did not do so in the flesh but through the oneirochronon, and the two cities superimposed on one another in ways both intricate and obscure. Earth2’s archons and senators strolled along the corridors, holding conversations with people others could not see. Corridors that dead-ended in reality possessed doors and branches in the oneirochronic world. Some led to palaces, dominions, grottos, and fantasies that did not exist on Earth2, or indeed anywhere, but were instead the special habitats of oneirochronic Aristoi, some of whose bodies were long in the grave. In these palaces the inhabitants danced and discussed and feasted and loved- there had long been competition among them to design the most dazzling sensual experiences for one another, delightful unrealities more striking, more “real,” than anything experienced in the flesh. To Persepolis, the dream, came Gabriel. Demons buzzed insistently in his head, but he kept them on a tight rein…

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ONE IMAGE: Supply-Chain Normalization:

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ONE AUDIO: Þe Accidental Tech Podcast Apple World-Wide Developers’ Conference:

<https://overcast.fm/+R7DULchq8>

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Very Briefly Noted:

1. Thomas Jefferson: To Walter Jones, 2 Jan 1814: ‘A belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution had some weight in [George Washington’s] adoption of the ceremonies of levees… pompous meetings… and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible…

2. Our World in Data: Excess Mortality in the COVID Plague Years…

3. Dave Guarino: What might better accountability systems for government technology (and customer experience) look like?: ‘“Any of these outcomes/measures will necessarily reduce a messy human problem to narrower dimensions,” you say, fists clenched, so committed to the user, the person. I know. I agree. But, well… Tough cookies. Welcome to The State. You cannot escape the legibility trap in use of the state apparatus — you can only reduce its lossiness…

4. Chris Anstey: Diversity Dividend Pays Off for Some US States: ‘Bryson and Cervi… “real GSP in New York grew faster between 2010 and 2019 than it otherwise would have because of the high proportion of LGBT individuals who reside in the state”…

5. Gillian Tett: Why Wall Street is trying to shake up the 2024 race: ‘American investors fear a Biden-Trump rematch, but… history shows that third-party presidential candidates in the US have always performed very badly…. Many of the ultra-wealthy feel like political “orphans”...

6. Jason Kingdon: Robots to Invade the Back Office: ‘The aim of these replicants is to displace back-office workers who spend their time on… data entry, invoice filing, CRM updates, claims processing, and all manner of routine swivelware…. These are the robots that will deliver a 30X return to those organizations that choose to use them. One of the most interesting characteristics of these software robots is the importance of mimicking human users...

7. W.H. Auden: Good and Evil in “Lord of the Rings”…

8. Antara Haldar: Revisiting the Behavioral Revolution in Economics: ‘Economics has progressively acknowledged the significance of the biases that drive individuals and firms to behave irrationally. But… owing to economists’ resistance to change…. The core principles of the prevailing economic model remain largely unchanged.

9. Azeem Azhar: India’s new curriculum: ‘India has recently excised evolution, the periodic table, and energy sources from its school curriculum… [also] analysis of democracy, pluralism and political dissent. If this is rolled out across the country, it’s terrible news for India…

10. Duncan Black: The Anti-Trans Alliance: ‘Just the weirdest group of people. Glinner, Meat addict, the Harry Potter Lady, the full reporting staff of the New York Times, various Nazis...

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¶s:

1. Azeem Azhar: Chip Rush: The AI revolution has made demand for microchips explode, and chip manufacturing companies are more valuable than ever. After announcing its Q1 financial results, Nvidia has become only the fifth publicly-traded American company to be worth $1 trillion, a feat only managed by the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. State-of-the-art generative AI models need thousands of GPUs for their operation - and Nvidia controls about 88% of the GPU market. Nvidia added more than $150bn in market cap in one day. Intel, the chip giant of the PC era, only has a market cap of $120bn. The firm blew mobile and appears to have missed the transition to AI too! (For a longer read on Nvidia’s journey, I recommend this analysis)…

2. Hamilton Nolan: These Vampires Can Have Everything Except Our Love: ‘Psychoanalyzing the cancel culture panic…. The only reasonable way to discuss cancel culture is not “Why are kids these days canceling people?”— it is “Why is this objectively unimportant niche phenomenon suddenly such a large part of mainstream discourse?” The most basic answer is “Because so much of mainstream discourse is produced by a narrow demographic of upper middle class middle aged uncool people who have never worked outside of media or politics or academia or nonprofits and whose nightmare is getting made fun of by college kids.” But on a more fundamental level, it’s that deep yearning for the things that cannot be purchased…. Though it would seem, rationally, that a bunch of not-rich college kids heckling a guy who makes $100 mil a year would mean nothing to him, that is not the case. The idea of being mocked and shouted down by the unwashed masses strikes fear in the heart of the powerful because it is emblematic of their inability to buy that respect that cannot be bought…

3. John Danaher & Henrik Skaug Sætra: Mechanisms of Techno-Moral Change: A Taxonomy and Overview: ‘Technology affects moral beliefs and practices in three main domains: decisional… relational… perceptual…. Six primary mechanisms of techno-moral change: (i) adding options; (ii) changing decision-making costs; (iii) enabling new relationships; (iv) changing the burdens and expectations within relationships; (v) changing the balance of power in relationships; and (vi) changing perception (information, mental models and metaphors). The paper also discusses the layered, interactive and second-order effects of these mechanisms…

4. Ethan Mollick: Setting Time on Fire and the Temptations of the Button: ‘Now, there are a million implications to outsourcing our first drafts to AI… but I want to focus… the coming crisis of meaning. A lot of work is time consuming by design. Take, for example, the letter of recommendation…. The fact that a professor takes the time to write a good letter is a sign that they support the student’s application. We are setting our time on fire to signal to others that this letter is worth reading…. Consider all the other tasks where the final written output is important because it is a signal of the time spent on the task, and the thoughtfulness that went into it. Performance reviews. Strategic memos. College essays. Grant applications. Speeches. Comments on papers. And so much more… We can view the destruction of busy-work as freeing. We do not have to set our time on fire as a signal. We don’t have to do work that is mere ceremony. Doing that will require thoughtfulness from organizations and leaders as they redesign work for our new AI-haunted world…