I've been giving a lot of thought over the past several months to the future of information technology and its implications for society and culture in the 21st Century. We face a future in which we will be - already are being - deluged with toys, but which will also have - already does have - many dark facets as well.
This summer, when I started working on this post, I had been looking at the whole spectrum of social and technological changes afoot in the world, and realizing the momentous changes I had predicted in my 2002 Rogue Wave white paper have finally begun to gain momentum.
This post, or the series of posts I hope it is going to start, is the reason I have been so quiet, and I apologize to my regular readers for this decrease in productivity. The problem is that the signs of change are so diverse and multitudinous that it is difficult to categorize them, and once categorized, to prioritize them. I got stuck on trying to wrestle this into a rational framework. As University of Michigan bioinformatics guru Dr. Brian Athey often says, "The perfect is the enemy of the good," and my months of near-silence are definitely an example.
As an example of my various dilemmas and conundra, I have an iPod Touch that came free with a MacBook I purchased over the summer. I am puzzled by it to no end. It's clearly innovative and has some downright revolutionary aspects, but it's hard to point out which feature or combination of features make it a harbinger of a technological sea change. I don't mean the iTouch in particular; it's really an iPhone without the phone, but with wi-fi instead of 2.5/3G connectivity. The iPhone OS is what they have in common, and that's got some revolutionary HCI (human-computer interaction) features, among them the first broad commercial implementation of a multi-touch gestural interface (the mouse and similar devices being the single-touch ancestor). But is the iTouch really just a dumber iPhone, or is it revolutionary in some way of its own?
The only way to sort through these ideas is to try to put them in writing, and that is the task I am setting for myself in this series of posts. Let's start with a look at the future of HCI, the realm of user interfaces and affordances.
First let's consider this YouTube video of a new technology from Image Metrics, the tech wizards behind the latest and most controversial Grand Theft Auto game. It's less than two minutes long, and yes, you do want the sound on when you watch it, and yes, it's safe for work.
Do you begin to see some potential here?
The dark side begins, of course, with the technology's potential for use in pornography, child pornography in particular. Soon it will be possible to produce porn without the use of human models. There's a good side to this, given that many participants in the current porn world are no doubt coerced into it, if by nothing more than their desperate economic condition. The dark aspect is that imagery that involves a virtual person is difficult to legislate against. Is it child pornography if the image is not of a real child? This issue already exists thanks to programs like Poser, and can only be exacerbated by the imminent commercial availability of this new Image Metrics technology.
But there's a bright side too. One area that comes to mind, because I know people interested in it, is in the realm of medical training. From a research perspective, one of the most difficult skills to teach is obtaining informed consent for participation in research from patients who are vulnerable, either by definition (in the US, 45 CFR Part 46) or situationally, e.g., in emergency situations or when the patient differs ethnically and culturally from the investigator or her designated requester.
Of course, training human subjects research investigators in how to do good informed consents is a trivial example of a much larger potential positive effect, in the realm of education as a whole.If I follow that rabbit trail, though, it would be a long time before I come back out onto the main highway, so enough said on that topic.
Enough said for this post, in fact. The perfect (i.e., fully researched and analyzed) is the enemy of the post, in the parochial realm of blogging. More to follow, very soon, I promise.
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