Predictive Shipping

Several years ago, I started one of my "In the Future" rants claiming that in the future you won't have to go online to order things from Amazon. They would just figure out what you need and send it to you. This would irritate students as I went on further to say that this is a good thing as they should not make their own decisions. Since they make horrible decisions, they should let algorithms make decisions for them.

Now, I have to admit, in all fairness, that I love annoying students with predictions about the future presented in such a way that is constructed to draw arguments. Then, as the arguments arise, I dismantle them. I do this for pedagogical reasons as one cannot think clearly about the present or the future if they can't get past their own cognitive biases. And there are always biases about future possibilities. But, pedagogy aside, there are some good reasons for these outrageous claims.

First, you have to ask - why would you interfere with a decision that a machine makes if your intervention is likely to produce a lessor, wrong, or even disastrous result. Consider the computer in your automobile that decides to change the gas/air mixture in your fuel injector or buffer the pressure you apply to your anti-lock brakes.Would you rather have a little window pop up on the dashboard saying "I'm going to apply brake pressure more evenly to keep you from going into a skid. Is this OK? Press Yes or No". That wouldn't do at all. Clearly, you want the computer to decide for you because your intervention can do nothing but produce an inferior result.

Second, there is abundant evidence that we don't make very good decisions.You might dismiss the previous example by saying that computer control of your car is very different from computer control of your shopping. To this I would ask - do you make good shopping decisions? Do you have any books you bought and never read? Any clothes you haven't worn, movies you never watched, cans of food you keep pushing to the back of the pantry and so on. Have you ever been to a restaurant that you didn't like, taken a job that didn't work out, or go on a date that turned out to be a nightmare. The truth is that you don't make very good decisions and allowing algorithms to decide for you might very well improve your quality of life.

Third, in this matter, we fall prey to erroneous thinking that has already been introduced in this blog. And that is evaluating a future technology in terms of the present rather that the future that the new technology brings about. We like to make our own decisions because we feel that decisions made for us will not be made correctly. We also think that we need to make out own decisions as we can learn form our mistakes. But, this reasoning is based in the present where decisions made for us might not be the best decisions. We feel that being able to make our own decisions is in our best interests. But is it. I will give two example where delegated decisions have proven superior.

When I was a kid, most people did work on their own cars. While you could always find a gas station that would be willing to change the oil, filter, or spark plugs, fill the tires with air, or set the timing, a lot of people were unwilling to relinquish the control over their car's engine. As engines and their computers became more sophisticated it became increasing more difficult to do your own work and more difficult yet to do it right. Now, you find very few people who do their own work. After all, the experts do it right, and affordably, so why would anyone get their hands dirty or oil spots on their driveway. 

If the car example does sell you then I would ask - do you own any mutual funds? Most people who have retirement accounts have the bulk of their money in mutual funds. They don't pick their own stocks. And, in most cases, if they did try to pick their own stocks they would just mess up their portfolios.  Once we realize that fund managers can do a better job and do it in an affordable fashion, why would anyone make their own investments in stocks. Granted there are a lot of people who still own stocks and I am one of them. But, we do it because we still think we can do better. But this will change over time. Once my stock portfolio takes a bad enough beating while my mutual funds are cruising along nicely, I will probably give in. And with Index Funds and Funds of Funds this day is approaching rapidly.

The point here is that we want to maintain control as long as we think we can do better. Once we realize we can't we are willing to relinquish control.

Sorry, I have to go. The doorbell rang. I hope Amazon is sending me something.

Will the World Wide Web Catch On?

Will the World Wide Web ever catch on? Today this question looks ridiculous. But, at one point in time the question was very serious. And that moment in time provides us with a revealing story about technology and its acceptance.

The World Wide Web was beginning to capture of attention of IT people in the early to middle 1990's. In order to take advantage of this emerging technology I developed an experimental course entitled "Corporate Web Applications". Most people, at the time, found this to be greatly amusing as the idea of using this glitzy technology for serious business applications was beyond the pale. Even to techies this idea was questionable as most websites were the very definition of poor taste with a garish montage of poorly chosen colors. And, of course, there was the outstanding technical problem of asynchronous database interaction. It did not look promising.

But, the larger barriers were not technical or graphic. They were the usual resistance to new ideas that people have when considering a new technology. As I mentioned earlier, you can always recognize this resistance to the new as people will resort to a standard set of talking points. I told my classes that in the future you would buy things over the Web. It would become the preferred place to shop and the first place you would go for information. But, as obvious as these predictions are in hindsight, they were anything but obvious at the time.

How can you buy clothes that you can't try on? How can you buy a book without leafing through it first? How can you buy any product that you cannot first touch. There seemed to be a prevailing belief that you some how needed to shake a box before you could buy a product. There were visions of clothes that didn't fit; products that fell apart as soon as you opened the box; and vendors who would not return emails, let alone products. And if that were enough, how could you give your credit card number to somebody at a strange website. This conjured up visions of some social misfit with a sleeveless shirt, spiked hair, tattoos, piecing, and endless chains hanging off of anything you could hook a chain to who had created this site for no other reason than to steal your credit card number. No that wouldn't do at all.

I recall a group project one semester where the students were illustrating the perils of shopping over the web. They began with a skit. A well built young man walks into the class wearing a t shirt that was clearly two or three sizes too small.

A woman in the skit, presumably playing his wife, says "Where did you get that shirt? It is way too small". 

He answers, "I bought it over the web and didn't have a chance to try it on".

She, then, responds, "I told you not to buy things over the web. You got exactly what you deserve"

The students in the audience nodded gravely in agreement. Yes, if you buy something over the web, you will get what you deserve.

Now, to put things into perspective, consider the following two statements:

1) You cannot touch the people in Second Life and you do not know who they really are.
2) You cannot try on clothes you buy on the web and you don't know who you are buying them from.

These are both talking points about emerging technologies. They are both true. But as we find out over time neither of them matter. They are both examples of how we evaluate a new technology in terms of the way the world is today rather than in terms of the world that they technology helps to create.

OK, What About Sex?

Sex is the big enchilada of the arguments against Virtual Worlds. People can imagine going to work or attending classes in a Virtual Worlds even if they don’t like the idea. But, sex is the show stopper. You can’t have sex in Virtual Worlds; at least not real sex. And if you can’t have real sex how can you procreate?  Resistance to Virtual Worlds is firm on this point. And people who raise this argument see it as the grand mal seizure of technological musings, throwing the possibilities of future Virtual Worlds into a tail spin of chaos. They see it as the one irrefutable argument against living in Virtual Worlds. But, it isn’t. And I will take on this argument now.

First, I would like to provide an analogy to put things into perspective. In the Middle Ages in Western Europe, towns were beginning to emerge and people were beginning to populate them in significant numbers. Imagine an ambitious younger person discussing the future of towns with an elder. The elder might point out that towns have a dicey future because people will eventually want to marry and raise families. But, in a town this would be difficult as you don’t know the families of prospective spouses so you can’t make good choices. Further, you don’t have the benefit of more experienced older people to guide you. And the midwives in the town, if there are any, will not be familiar with your family’s history and so won’t be able to help you if difficulties arise in child birth. These are all legitimate concerns but towns became prominent anyway, many eventually becoming large cities.

There is no end to the list of similar examples where things change in ways that were incomprehensible to people who were used to a different world. Today we elect King’s. People choose their own professions. Overwhelmingly most people don’t grow food. And on, and on. The point is that what you are used is nothing more than what you are used to. It is not reality. It is merely the way things happen to be done at the moment.

So, how might things change to accommodate the problem of sex in Virtual Worlds? Let’s start with the easiest and move to the more difficult to imagine. First, we might just make social accommodations. That is, the partners we choose for procreation come from a different pool and serve different roles than the people we work with or attend classes with. This is not all that farfetched as we seem to be moving in that direction anyway with dating websites.  So, let’s take it a step further. 

Imagine a future where procreation can occur through artificial insemination. So the people involved never have to meet.The idea of mailing reproductive material to the one you love probably sounds repugnant to nearly everyone. But, don’t forget that just a couple hundred years ago the idea of storing blood in bags for people who need transfusions would have been shocking as well. Taking the organs out of dead people to put them into living people sounds even worse. So, the idea of separating reproductive materials from their donors is not that different.  Another problem with this idea, in the minds of most people, is that it separates sex and reproduction. But, even that does not hold up upon inspection.  Even in today’s world, the amount of sex allocated to reproduction is a tiny fraction of the amount of sex dedicated to fun.  

Let’s take this one step further. We are not that far off from having artificial blood and artificial organs. So, it is not unreasonable to imagine that, at some point in the future, we will have artificial reproductive materials as well. If this happens, then the need for proximity in reproductive sex goes away entirely.It may take some getting used to. But we have gotten used to a lot in the past and will get used to more in the future.

I realize that these ideas are probably repugnant to most readers and I am not suggesting any of them as a desirable future. That is a different debate entirely. I am merely saying that what we are used to what we are used to and people in the future may well be used to something different.

To drive this idea home consider a future, perhaps a couple hundred years from now where reproduction is handled neatly by combining reproductive materials in a clinically controlled incubation environment. Then imagine that the technology is lost somehow. And it is your job to convince people to go back to the old way of doing things. How difficult would that be?

What About Hugs?

One of the talking points that people often raise in their resistance to the idea of Virtual Worlds is that the people in Virtual Worlds do not have any physical presence. This in turn leads to a host of derivative complaints. You cannot touch people. You cannot see their facial expressions. You cannot hug your friends or loved ones.You cannot trust someone if you cannot look them in the eye. And, so on.

There are three problems with this line of reasoning. First, it is a distinction between Virtual Words and physical presence that is used as a wedge issue simply because it is a distinction rather than a real concern. Second, upon reflection, it is probably not a real concern. And, third, even if it were an issue, the evolution of technology would more than likely eliminate it. It is like saying that I don't like people who are not from the United States because they don't speak English. First, it is probably not really true. Second, if it were true, it probably wouldn't be as big of a problem as I am making it out to be. And, third, the evolution of translation software has made different languages less of a problem than it used to be. So, let's look at these counter arguments individually in more detail.

While physical presence is a distinction between Virtual Worlds and the physical world, one has to ask how important this distinction really is. Do you really want to touch people that badly? I would cautiously suggest that if I were to start touching my students, I would have a much bigger problem than this one of trying to overcome resistance to Virtual Worlds. Touching is way over rated. Next time you go to the grocery store, I would encourage you to hug the cashier and see how well that works out. Or, next time you get pulled over for a traffic ticket, get out of your car and put your arm around the person writing the ticket. I am not saying that there is no circumstance in which touching is a good thing. I am just saying that its importance as a wedge issue between virtual and physical worlds in our daily affairs is vastly overrated.

Second, physical presence is not as big of a deal as most people claim. Back in the days of limited mobility people wanted to know the families of people that they married. This was considered a critical point. But, in today's more mobile society, more and more people marry significant others with little concern for their family background. It used to matter was town you came from and was school you went to. This is all rapidly eroding with the increasing mobility of society. Similarly, we used to think it was important to know about the people around us. But, in our modern age of personal privacy we have had to learn to get along without that information. Similarly, we believe that we need to see people faces, look them in the eye, and watch their body language in order to understand what they are saying and whether or not we can trust them. This is probably a similar convention which will evaporate over time.

Third, technology over time will advance so some of the information we seek from presence may eventually become available.Here are two examples. First, with the staggering amount of information available on the Web, it might be possible to find out way more about the people with whom we are interacting that we could even find out by just talking to them face to face. And just like the way  people on dating sites who won't provide a picture are ignored, we might just choose to ignore people for whom there isn't a sufficient amount of information online. Pursing the dating site analogy further, most people are skeptical of others who post pictures that are clearly decades old. If people avatars do no look like them, we might just shy away from them. Finally, as digital video technology advances we might be able to project real time facial expressions on avatars. So, no only will you be able to look them in the eye and see facial expressions in real time, but you can record them, watch the expressions over and over again at your leisure, and even run them through analytical software to see if they were telling the truth.

Suddenly, the physical world, where interactions are dicey at best, doesn't look so good any more.