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Economy

How Elite Users Getting First Access To Tech Reinforces Inequality

By Andrea Peterson on May 2, 2013 at 4:15 pm

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Wearing Google Glass (Credit: NDI Twitter)

Close your eyes and think of the last person you saw wearing Google Glass. While it may have been Madeleine Albright, it’s more likely the wearer looked something like the stream of dudes pictured on the White Men Wearing Google Glass Tumblr. While the Tumblr is obviously a self-selecting sample, it reflects all too well most depictions that accompanied media coverage of the device so far. But the real issue is less media coverage and more an inherent level of early adopter privilege that allow some more access to and influence over emerging technology.

And being part of that early adopter class isn’t just about who gets to play with the fun new toys first, it’s about who has the ability to influence the development of uses for technology that will guide future products and how the device is rolled out to a larger audience. While the technology itself is neutral, the ways society decides to use it are not — and due to a variety of social and economic factors, an elite class often gets to make the first decisions about how technology is used before it trickles down to other classes who might have different, perhaps even more immediate, needs for it.

As Jamelle Boiue pointed out earlier this year, implicit networking connections and economic opportunities have made influencers in the tech sphere a fairly homogenized group that includes a lot of white males. While communities of color are huge users of technology, they are often underrepresented among those providing commentary that helps craft the future of the space or designing the actual technology — as are women.

When Google’s own Sergey Brin inadvertently confirmed assumptions of who the initial audience for Google Glass would be when it comes to gender by contrasting using Google Glass with the “emasculating” experience of a smartphone at a TED talk, it was likely just poor word choice. But it also hit a little close to how women using technology are stereotyped and reinforced the logic behind the findings of some research suggesting cultural stereotypes drive women down other career paths despite aptitudes for math and science.

But the lack of that female input in the early stages of development and user testing can result in tech overlooking resources or services more geared towards their needs. Remember how Apple’s Siri couldn’t find abortion providers, but could find strip clubs and escort services?

The systematic exclusion of minority and female voices from the development and early use of tech products is an unintentional byproduct of a larger system of social and economic inequality that is by no means exclusive to this particular device. But the White Men Wearing Google Glass Tumblr can be a vehicle to discuss how the structures controlling who has access to technological developments first influence its deployment, and if incorporating diversity into that system can maximize the benefits of technological innovations for all potential users.

Alyssa

Facebook’s Peter Thiel Says That Hollywood Is Driving People Away From The Tech Industry

By Alyssa Rosenberg on May 1, 2013 at 3:04 pm

In an interesting nod to Hollywood’s influence, tech titan Peter Thiel has suggested that his industry is being hurt hurt by its portrayal in Hollywood as a source of advancements with post-apocalyptic consequences:

Thiel, who made billions as a co-founder of PayPal and as an early investor in Facebook, told a standing-room only audience Monday that the high-tech industry is in “deceleration” due in no small part to movies like Avatar and The Matrix that make technological innovation seem “destructive and dysfunctional.”

Hollywood keeps making movies where “technology is going to kill you,” Thiel complained at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. He said the “Star Trek retread movies” are an exception. Thiel said other factors — like government regulation and a “risk-averse” business culture — also are hampering the tech industry, but it will be a “very good sign” when Hollywood stops making movies about scary new technologies.

I think this calculation is a bit off. Hollywood tends to portray technology in three broad categories: as a source of miracles and certainty in day-to-day life, as an industry that has large concentrations of smart, if socially awkward, people, and as a force that operates independent of its creators. Those first two categories are almost uniformly positive. And I think that the real damage would be done if science fiction suggested clearer connections between the current state of science and the possibility of future developments gone terribly wrong.

Technology really is everywhere in pop culture depictions of contemporary life, and almost uniformly portrayed as a source of good or an extremely useful tool. DNA matching is presented as so reliable on televised crime shows that it affects how juries view evidence, and how lawyers decide their cases. And it’s hardly the only technological miracle to make regular appearances on crime shows. Bones, a procedural I enjoy quite a bit, features everything from the Angelator, a computer simulation tool that can recreate all sorts of crime scenarios, crack codes, match faces, and pour through data, to the inventive experiments of Jack Hodgins who’s presented as a genius at analyzing particles and organic materials. And that’s just in the matter of biological science. Pop culture has adopted rapidly from presenting computers in and of themselves as magical portals—an early Veronica Mars episode treats the Internet Movie Database as if it’s something of a miracle—to treating them as tools that ordinary people can achieve wonders with, whether they’re empowered by blogging or tweeting (or sleuthing through social media), or hacking publications, databases, or processes, be it for good or evil. These are all tools that can be used for any number of ends, be they cruel or kind, but the capacities of technology are firmly under the control of the human beings who employ them, rather than independent entities with wills of their own.
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Alyssa

Blogs Aren’t Dead. They Won, And Now They’re Evolving.

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 30, 2013 at 10:33 am

In a provocative piece at The New Republic, Marc Tracy traces the rise and decline of the blog, a form that has essentially conquered the distribution of information online, but whose ubiquity has made individual personalities less important:

When he started a blog, it was on his own—other than a small handful of strange, Web-only creatures, in 2001, what magazine wanted a blog? By 2005, the answer to that question had changed, allowing Sullivan to ensconce his blog in larger institutions—Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, in chronological order. This was the golden age of the personal blog: The Internet had empowered a few strong writers to create their own brand (if you were idiosyncratic—say, if you were gay, English, Catholic, and heretically conservative—then all the better) and a few strong big brands to create their own small brands (Media Decoder was launched in 2009, and finds its roots in TV Decoder, a blog that was started when the Times poached writer Brian Stelter, who like Sullivan, Klein, et. al had built a following on the Internet as a personal brand). Meanwhile, readers interested in reading the best that had been thought and said on the Internet had no choice except to follow along—the best they could do was to use RSS to focus on the feeds they tended to find interesting.

But today, Google Reader is dying, Media Decoder is dead, and Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is alive in new form. This year, Sullivan decided that he was a big enough brand, commanding enough attention and traffic, to strike out on his own. At the beginning of the last decade, the institutions didn’t need him. Today, he feels his best chance for survival is by becoming one of the institutions, complete with a staff and a variety of content. What wasn’t going to work was continuing to have, merely, a blog.

What Tracy really means, he clarifies, is that “What we are losing is the personal blog and the themed blog. Less and less do readers have the patience for a certain writer or even certain subject matter.” Obviously, it’s true that the first-mover advantage for blogging is gone, and that fewer people are coming on line as individual bloggers. When I started working at ThinkProgress two years ago, it was already evident that this was a way that fewer and fewer people were getting full-time writing jobs. And what was even clearer was that publications like The Atlantic and the Daily Beast that were hiring lots of individual bloggers were doing so as a way to populate channels. The key technology now is less the publishing platforms that let people write short posts and publish them in a continuous stream, and more the ability to cross-post, so a piece can live both on an author’s individual page, or in the feed on a relavent subject or for a relevant section.

Or as Michael S. Rosenwald, who wrote a blog for the Washington Post called Rosenwald, Md., put it: “We’ve been rethinking blogs here at the Post. Many of us bloggers are moving over to personality pages. In one place, you’ll be able to find all my stories for various sections of the paper (Page One, Metro, Outlook, Sunday Business) as well blog posts about life in Maryland and the rest of the region. Click here for the link to my personality page, which you can bookmark for easy access.”

And I think this is a situation that signals less the decline of blogs than their evolution. Readers can continue to follow the feeds of individual writers they prefer, or whole sections that they find interesting, depending on whether they’re interested in a particular perspective or a larger news feed. If blogging started out as a way to accomodate the way writers wanted to publish their work, it’s now come to serve a different end in giving readers flexibility in how they curate what they want to read, and publications the ability to accomodate them. That’s not death, precisely. It’s more like metamorphosis.

Alyssa

New Microsoft Technology Could Let People Watch Different TV Shows On The Same TV—At Once

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 26, 2013 at 12:07 pm

I’m at the Creativity Conference, a joint project of Microsoft, Time Magazine, and the Motion Picture Association of America, this morning, and I’ll have more to come on President Clinton’s remarks this afternoon. But one of the presentations I’ve been struck by most so far is that from Steven Bathiche, a distinguished scientist (seriously, great job title) on some of the technologies they’re developing. Specifically, he talked about how the company, in working on sending separate images to each eye for an individual user so they can see images in 3D, decided to also work on sending different images to different users from the same screen. The example he used to illustrate a potential application? Two people who resolve their differences about which television show to watch by watching different shows—on the same television, at the same time.

That’s a fascinating idea, of togetherness while having separate experiences. So much of the development of technology for the distribution about technology has been about allowing us to separate ourselves from each other, whether it’s DVRs that let us access content from any television in a house, or apps that let us watch television on any device we want, cloistering ourselves off from each other with headphones. Microsoft’s technology, if it gets fully developed and distributed in households, would bring us back into physical proximity, though it would probably still keep us separated from each other because we’d have to wear headphones—setting up your eyes and your ears to receive separate signals are very different projects. And I wonder if it might actually be more alienating to be sitting with someone who appears to be having the same experience with you, but in fact is off in an entirely different world.

But it’s a reminder of how valuable television that’s appealing enough to bring a critical mass of people together in a room at the same time slot still feels. It’s rare. But it still feels like a different and exciting experience.

Health

The Left Should Celebrate Technology And Growth, Not Disparage It

By Ruy Teixeira, Guest Blogger on Apr 24, 2013 at 1:30 pm

Wouldn't infinite free food for all be a good thing?

The New Republic has just published an interesting essay by Tim Wu on the book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by tech entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and journalist Steven Kotler. The book pretty much delivers on its title, describing a future of abundance that is within our grasp, provided we seriously pursue the promise of new and emerging technologies. Reviewer Wu is not so enthusiastic. While he grudgingly acknowledges that these technologies may deliver more stuff and that that may be good for some people (e.g., in less developed countries), he sternly admonishes those among us who might be tempted to think a future of abundance would actually be a good thing:

The unhappy irony is that Diamandis prescribes a program of “more” exactly at a point when a century of similar projects have begun to turn on us….[I]n the rich and semi-rich parts of the world …we are starting to see just what happens when we reach surplus levels across many categories of human desire, and it isn’t pretty. The unfortunate fact is that extreme abundance — like extreme scarcity, but in different ways — can make humans miserable. Where the abundance project has been truly successful, it has created a new host of problems that are now hitting humanity.

Huh.  But what about, you know, the people who don’t starve any more in developed countries, who have electric lights and can go to school and don’t have stay in their villages all their lives and so on.  Well, Wu does allow that:

None of this should be taken to downplay the triumphs of the great abundance project of the last century. In the rich parts of the world, most do not fear starvation or a lack of the basics, for perhaps the first time in human history. That is nothing to overlook.

Nothing to overlook indeed!  And what are these terrible problems brought on by abundance that have brought us to, according to Wu, the point where we must get off the abundance train and don our hair shirts?  Obesity!  Information overload! And (shudder) too much credit!  (Interestingly, while he is pretty hard on Americans’ use of credit cards, he has nothing to say about the real abusers of credit, the big financial institutions who brought us the economic collapse of 2008.)

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Health

How Smartphones Are Revolutionizing Home Care For Alzheimer’s And Autism Patients

By Sy Mukherjee on Apr 22, 2013 at 12:10 pm

As technological innovation empowers consumers to take greater control over their lives, the health industry has taken particular advantage of emerging internet and mobile devices. The burgeoning mHealth industry — which involves using mobile devices to improve health care delivery and outcomes — has exploded in the last five years, allowing everyday Americans to access better information about medical conditions and provide better ongoing care to themselves and their families. Now, creative new apps are helping home care workers better assist Americans with Alzheimer’s and autism.

mHealth apps are particularly useful for monitoring patients with ongoing and chronic medical needs, since such programs provide a multitude of services to keep track of medication schedules, exchange notes with doctors and professional home care workers, and even track the patients themselves. That comes in handy for caretakers such as Laura Jones, who had to keep working full time to provide her 50-year-old Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband with health insurance:

Using Comfort Zone, which is offered by the Alzheimer’s Association starting at $43 a month, [Jones] was able to go online and track exactly where [her husband] was and where he had been.

Her husband carried a GPS device, which sent a signal every five minutes. If Jones checked online every hour, she would see 12 points on a map revealing her husband’s travels. She would also get an alert if he left a designated area.

Eventually, the tracking revealed that Jones’ husband was getting lost.

“He would make a big funny loop off the usual route and we knew it was time to start locking down on him,” she said.

Conveniences like that may be difficuly to pin a numerical value on — but they make an enormous pragmatic difference in the lives of real Americans. By being able to track her husband, Jones doesn’t have to entrust such care to a salaried full-time worker, and has the freedom to be more intimately involved in her husband’s care.

When it comes to conditions that tend to onset earlier in life, such as autism, mHealth apps can offer an interactive medium that makes it easier to engage with autistic children:

Lisa Goring, vice president of Autism Speaks, said tablets have been a boon to families with autistic children. The organization has given iPads to 850 low-income families. And the Autism Speaks website lists hundreds of programs — from Angry Birds to Autism Language Learning — that families have found useful.

Samantha Boyd of McConnellstown, Pa., said her 8-year-old autistic son gets very excited when the iPad is brought out.

“There’s no way he’d be able to use a keyboard and mouse,” she said. “But with the iPad, we use the read-aloud books, the songs, the flash card apps.”

Other popular applications include the inexpensive pillbox app “Balance,” which lets users schedule alerts for their complex treatment regimens, and CareGiver apps that let families find and monitor professional caregivers who serve their loved ones. Not only does this kind of technology empower consumers — it also cuts down on health care costs. Pillbox apps are particularly promising on this front, since noncompliance with treatment regimens is a major contributor to bloated U.S. health care spending. And overall, organizations like Allie Health World estimate that the use of mHealth could double access to health care services while lowering administrative costs through better data collections — even potentially reducing seniors’ health care costs by 25 percent.

Health

What The Late Robert Edwards, In Vitro Fertilization Pioneer, Can Teach Us About Anti-Science Hysteria

By Sy Mukherjee on Apr 11, 2013 at 11:00 am

With the passing of England’s Sir Robert G. Edwards on Wednesday, the medical community has lost a giant. Edwards, a biologist and professor emeritus at Cambridge, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his groundbreaking work on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) with physician Patrick Steptoe in the 1970s. Together, Edwards and Steptoe pioneered the techniques that led to the birth of Louise Joy Brown — the first ever “test tube baby,” as the media would come to call her.

The countless innovations that Edwards and Steptoe discovered on the way to that watershed moment continue to spur new developments in science to this day, from improved methods of laparoscopic surgery — which Steptoe created in order to facilitate egg extrication — to stem cell research. And IVF itself has allowed millions of couples around the world to have children. However, the controversial nature of the duo’s work induced a significant amount of fear-mongering by the press, the British government, the medical research community, and the Roman Catholic Church. They were accused of trying to play God, and the Medical Research Council — England’s equivalent to the National Institutes of Health — refused to fund Edwards’ and Steptoe’s research for fear of public backlash, even after Brown’s birth.

But as the New York Times reported after Edwards won his Nobel Prize, the outspokenly liberal biologist was not one to bow down to the establishment’s pronouncements that his research was unethical, proactively taking the fight to his critics:

Though in vitro fertilization is now widely accepted, the birth of the first test tube baby was greeted with intense concern that the moral order was being subverted by unnatural intervention in the mysterious process of creating a human being. Dr. Edwards was well aware of the ethical issues raised by his research and took the lead in addressing them.

The objections gradually died away — except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church — as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family. Long-term follow-ups have confirmed the essential safety of the technique. [...]

Both Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe had to endure an unremitting barrage of criticism while developing their technique. Dr. Steptoe “faced immense clinical criticism over his laparoscopy, even being isolated at clinical meetings in London,” Dr. Edwards wrote in the journal Nature Medicine in 2001 after receiving the Lasker award. “Ethicists decried us, forecasting abnormal babies, misleading the infertile and misrepresenting our work as really acquiring human embryos for research.”

Dr. Edwards fought back, forming alliances with ethicists in the Church of England and filing libel actions — eight in one day — against his critics. “I won them all, but the work and worry restricted research for several years,” he wrote.

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Alyssa

Neill Blomkamp’s ‘Elysium’ And Technology As An Escape Hatch For The Upper Classes

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 10, 2013 at 12:09 pm

Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 is one of my favorite science fiction movies of the last five years, and his follow-up, Elysium, is probably the movie I’m most looking forward to this year, and I’m glad to see that the first trailer for it doesn’t contain any signs I should contain my enthusiasm:

One of the things that I think the best dystopian fiction gets at is the idea that technological advancements will not be distributed equitably or universally, and in fact, that technology may be used to provide an escape hatch for the most privileged people in society. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the anti-aging treatment that’s developed by Mars’ first settlers goes to the wealthiest people, who are often associated with multi-national corporations, first, while the much larger and poorer segments of the population are denied it. In Alaya Dawn Johnson’s excellent young adult novel The Summer Prince, the main characters live in a society that’s physically stratified, the most powerful living on the highest levels of an enclosed dwelling, and the least on the lowest levels, which are most affected by both sewage and the results of agricultural production. This was something that actually struck me particularly strongly on my trip, which was my first experience with resort travel, a system that, from your pickup at the airport by a preassigned shuttle, to the huge gates you pass through on the way to your actual hotel, is designed to make sure you have as little contact with the actual country you’re visiting as possible.

Given that Blomkamp was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and that his family migrated to Vancouver to get away from South Africa’s extremely high crime rates, it makes sense that he’s particularly attuned both to physical separate by class and race, and the possibility of exit from a system that seems to have failed. It was that awareness that make District 9, in which a stalled alien spaceship united black and white South Africans, who joined together to ghettoize the lost extraterrestrials in a township system like the one that was once used to restrict the movement of black South Africans, such a smart and moving piece of science fiction. In that movie, someone went from the privileged side of the divide to the underprivileged one and discovered that he couldn’t go back again, that there are strict rules for who you have to be to live in a comparative paradise. It looks like Elysium is flipping that divide in having Matt Damon crash the gates of a heaven near to earth, surprising the residents of that gated community with his capacity to get inside. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets there.

Health

FDA Launches Investigation Into Widely-Used ‘Robot Doctor’ After Complaints Over Safety And Cost

By Sy Mukherjee on Apr 9, 2013 at 4:50 pm

Last month, ThinkProgress reported on the controversy surrounding the daVinci surgery unit, a high-tech machine that allows doctors to remotely conduct surgeries from the comfort of a computer screen through the use of robotic arms. Innovations such as daVinci, while holding promise for certain procedures, don’t always end up improving U.S. health care in the aggregate due to high prices, inadequate product testing, and aggressive marketing driven by profits. Now, with doctors’ increasing use and heightened awareness of potential safety and cost issues with the robotic unit, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is launching an audit into the product.

The Associated Press reports that federal regulators and some medical professionals are rethinking daVinci’s efficacy in the face of elevated costs and increasing reports of complications from the machine’s use as more hospitals purchase the system:

[The] Food and Drug Administration is looking into a spike in reported problems during robotic surgeries. Earlier this year, the FDA began a survey of surgeons using the robotic system. The agency conducts such surveys of devices routinely, but FDA spokeswoman Synim Rivers said the reason for it now “is the increase in number of reports received” about da Vinci.

Reports filed since early last year include at least five deaths.

Whether there truly are more problems recently is uncertain. Rivers said she couldn’t quantify the increase and that it may simply reflect more awareness among doctors and hospitals about the need to report problems. Doctors aren’t required to report such things; device makers and hospitals are.

It could also reflect wider use. Last year there were 367,000 robot surgeries versus 114,000 in 2008, according to da Vinci’s maker, Intuitive Surgical Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. [...]

But an upcoming research paper suggests that problems linked with robotic surgery are underreported. They include cases with “catastrophic complications,” said Dr. Martin Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon who co-authored the paper.

“The rapid adoption of robotic surgery … has been done by and large without the proper evaluation,” Makary said.

daVinci was rushed into the market through the process of “premarket notification,” which allows manufacturers to bypass rigorous FDA safety testing by claiming that their products are similar to previously-approved devices. This isn’t to say that daVinci is inherently faulty — procedures such a laparoscopic surgery also had high associated costs and led to medical complications when they were first introduced, but were improved over time and are now common procedures.

However, considering Intuitive Surgical’s aggressive push to get hospitals and doctors to buy the units — a push that included greatly reducing mandated safety training in order to drive sales — it’s possible that daVinci didn’t go through the right amount of scrutiny before its release into the market. And as more and more hospitals declare their intent to use the system, the FDA’s investigation becomes especially important for patient safety and national health expenditures.

Alyssa

Why The Judge Who Struck Down Digital First Sale In New York Isn’t Helping The Copyright Debate

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Apr 2, 2013 at 2:04 pm

For those of you who were hoping that we might figure out a sane way to resell digital content in the same way there’s a thriving secondary market for used books, CDs, and movies, seem about to be disappointed after a New York judge, in a sweeping decision, rejected the idea that files are objects in the same way that other means of delivering content are:

The company believed that the lawsuit that followed was one of “first impression” insofar as the plaintiff — Capitol Records — might wish to have it declared that the first-sale doctrine didn’t apply to digital goods. Supporting ReDigi’s side was Google, which unsuccessfully attempted to file an amicus brief. Other tech companies also had a stake; Amazon, for instance, has gained a patent on a market for “used” digital music and movie files.

The record industry wasn’t seeking a big declaration. In its own papers, the plaintiff only said that letting users buy and sell previously purchased tracks on iTunes amounted to a “clearinghouse for copyright infringement.”
Nevertheless, on Monday, U.S. District Judge Richard Sullivan went swinging for the fences; unfortunately for ReDigi and those hoping for a vibrant e-market of used song files, the judge wound up completely rejecting the company’s position. He did so not only by turning to the law of copyright but also the law of physics, declaring the “impossibility” of what ReDigi was touting. “The first-sale defense,” he wrote, “does not cover this any more than it covered the sale of cassette recordings of vinyl records in a bygone era.”

This strikes me as a decision that goes against the interest of both consumers and content providers. If content providers want individuals to get on board with the idea that files are property, and that the transfer of them without compensation causes damage to creators, an important part of that idea is that files are distinct objects, rather than ephemera that can be copied at no loss to them from a production standpoint, or loss of their ability to sell other downloads. I also am not sure how Judge Sullivan’s understanding of physics transfer to cyberspace, but perhaps he’s never bumped up against the memory limits of an iPhone before. From a business standpoint, it would obviously be preferable to content companies if they were the only people who retained the right to sell those objects. But that’s an idea they had to surrender on with physical objects a long time ago, learning that it creates a more stable market and preserves product standards to let people resell objects they’ve purchased than to block the first sale doctrine and see illicit copies of textbooks, burned CDs, or bootlegged VHS and DVD copies of movies begin circulating among people who aren’t actually a market for those products in their new, unused form.

Digital resale, I’d think, actually represents an opportunity for content companies to get more of their money back from resale than the resale of physical objects. If resale can be brokered through the original venues that sold the tracks, movies, or books, those venues could write contracts with publishers, studios, and record labels that let artists and content companies get some money back from those resales, along with both the sellers and the venues. A stable and brokered secondary market is probably the only way to guarantee that people who sell files will really get them off their computers—I imagine iTunes could write its code such that if you resell a track through the service, then try to upload it to iTunes without paying for it again, the file would be disabled and you’d get a warning, in the same way Amazon could probably scrub all versions of a track you’ve resold from its cloud storage. Having both sides in the digital content debate acknowledge that files are objects could produce a kind of detente, in which content companies grant consumers some more rights to do what they want with the objects they’ve purchased in exchange for consumers’ acknowledging that if they’re getting money off resale, there is in fact value in individual copies of files.

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