I’m preparing for a workshop as part of the Furtherfield Citizen Sci-Fi project and I thought you might be interested in some of the stuff that’s going on in the worlds of the science and tech experts that are participating in the project (i.e. blowing my mind with ideas as, along with local residents, we ‘world-build’ the Finsbury Park of the future).
Shock horror!
Amazon has patented a way of tracking hand movement to monitor their workers’ performance. Nothing Amazon do should shock; they’re a corporation fighting for dominance in a capitalist world.
Maybe they are planning on tracking movement, comparing it against the efficiency algorithms and punishing the transgressors. Wouldn’t that be a shot in the foot though? It presumes that the optimum movement has been found and precludes those clever inventive humans from improving what they do. That can’t be good for leading edge capitalism, can it?
Or maybe they’re going to use the workers movements to train the machine learning robots of the future.
Whichever it is, it sends an unpleasant tingle down my spine.
photo credit: corno.fulgur75 13e Biennale de Lyon: La Vie Moderne 2015 via photopin (license)
Now here’s a thing. A piece of wearable tech that automates flirting.
If it spots someone looking at you via its cameras it diverts its ‘eyes’ towards them and vibrates. As you turn it lets you know when you’re looking at the right person and if you’re both interested it turns its tentacles towards them.
Doesn’t it sound great?
But… I couldn’t help feeling that it looks so unusual its bound to attract attention and mistake a curious stare for sexual attraction. Or even better, that two wearers are tricked into a cycle of implied mutual attraction by mistake.
The more I thought about this the more I thought that maybe mutual mistakes aren’t such a bad thing. After all, who can tell what makes people attracted to one another and a little bit of feeling fancied always helps ease the flirting…