years old this is a picture of me with
my Commodore 64 and I’ve been
inseparable from computers ever since my
unconventional background has taken me
through art and engineering and design
but through all of that my relationship
to technology has remained intense and
informed why this background I feel an
urgency to share with you today what I
see as a weakness spanning the world of
engineering all the way to art I see
this unhealthy inclination to cling to
to extremes and this this is an art all
the way to engineering on the one hand I
see people at this one extreme where
they have this attitude of blind
optimism where they think that
technology is going to solve every
problem and there it will not go wrong
on the other hand I see people clinging
to this other extreme of unconstructive
pessimism and they cannot see any
alternatives for different ways to live
with technology I encourage you to have
a more balanced approach a critically
optimistic approach you have to be both
hopeful about the future of technology
as well as critical so that you can
predict when it will go wrong so why do
I care about this so much well I think
it helps to tell you a little bit about
my background I’m not just trying to
criticize the people around me I was
guilty of this kind of black and white
extreme thinking for many years until I
was forced to change for nine years I
thought I looked at technology from the
point of view as an engineer I studied
computer science at Brown and then I
went to Google where I was a software
engineer and I was one of the biggest
app developers in the world at that time
my apps had several million users each
and I realized that one engineer can
indeed impact millions of people either
creating incredible delight or
incredible frustration for so many and I
really loved the impact I had at that
company but it also taught me a lot of
humility and it made me really want to
be more thoughtful about what I use my
skills to put into the world so I
decided I was going to have a greater
role in envisioning the future of
technology so I went back to graduate
school to study art and design I first
went to the Rhode Island School
design and then I went to the MIT Media
Lab and now I’m here at U of M where I
am a professor so while I was at RISD I
decided to paint all of my computers
from memory so this is my Commodore 64
again which you saw in the photograph
before except this is a painting I did
for memory this is my Dell Dimension
Pentium 2 which is one of my grade
school computers also painted from
memory and while I was doing a series of
paintings I noticed something really
kind of familiar and weird about them
you might recognize these as screenshots
from the 1987 computer game maniac
mansion which was a classic adventure
game from that time and I played a lot
of games that looked like this so you’ll
see just like in my in my paintings
there’s this very odd use of perspective
there’s this strange attention of to
detail to details like vents and windows
and all the scenery outside the windows
is very abstract but in the case of the
game the reason it’s abstract is because
the pixels were really huge but this was
all showing up in the way I was
remembering the physical spaces around
my computer’s growing up and so this was
really an aha moment for me I realized
that we are all cyborgs but we don’t all
realize it when I made this series of
paintings I realized that I was a cyborg
for sure I could not disentangle who I
was from the from the technology that
shaped me as I had grown up so when I
was at RISD I was still in my yay
technology I’m very enthusiastic I love
technology phase of my life and so a lot
of my artwork really reflected that
enthusiasm like this piece where I
decided to sing all of my C++ code aloud
to my computer so I’m gonna just play
that for a minute it goes on for a
really long time and it took me a very
long time to get to do it without making
a mistake I’ll have you know that what
was that
no suppose clothes Brown up setup OpenGL
grace open for right now per side window
but there must be programmers in this
room I think oh well anyway what I was
thinking about when I made this piece is
if there are programmers in the room you
know what I’m talking about we talked
about being in the zone I used to talk
about being in the zone and it is a very
desirable state to be in it’s this
ecstatic flow state and it feels like
the code is just flowing out of your
fingertips
and you don’t even have to translate
your thoughts into code anymore and it’s
you know empowering it feels almost
godlike and it’s just a really awesome
feeling but in order to have this
feeling you really have to adapt
yourself to the interface so to be in
the Enza in the zone state you are
giving up some of your humanness and
becoming more machine and it the
important thing to realize is that when
you’re in this sort of a flow state you
can only think what the programming
language allows you to think and so this
generalizes to other types of interfaces
as well user experience designers strive
for this within their designs the goal
is that you forget that the interface is
there and you only are thinking about
what you want to do so this is another
piece I made when I was at RISD that was
still about my love of technology and
what I really wanted to do was to
translate how programmers felt about
their code to a wider audience so I you
know two programmers code is almost
poetic we use words that sound poetic
when we describe it so I took all the
aesthetic qualities of code structure
and I mapped it to sound so this is a
generative C++ program called code that
sings itself that goes through its own
code line by line and sana Phi’s it so
I’m gonna just play this for a little
bit it goes on forever so I did was I
map the line length to the melody and
all the punctuation gets mapped to
rhythm and
the whitespace gets mapped breathing and
a lot of other things happen too but
so the entire program gets revealed on
the screen line by line as it sings
through its own code and what I wanted
to happen was that as I refined my code
and it became more elegant the music
would become more beautiful too and
that’s what happened but the good times
with technology did not last and like
many people who use computers a lot I
got really bad repetitive stress
injuries in my wrists and so I actually
was unable to use the computer for
almost two entire years and you can
imagine that for somebody like me who
cares about computers a lot that was
pretty horrible
so I was forced to use Dragon Dictate to
interact with the computer and it did
not work for me at all and there was one
day I was trying to type I think I was
typing for like an hour and I only
managed to get like two sentences on the
screen I was so frustrated I finally
cried and this dictation software was
still running so this is dragon dictates
interpretation of my crying and then I
had yes it’s a it’s sad but you can
laugh and then I had the Mac OSX
screener read it out loud to produce
this poem which is kind of it which is
dark but actually funny so you could
yeah feel free to laugh laugh at my pain
in my event will will him him him him
him him him him him him him Kim Kim Kim
Kim Kim and him and him and him and him
and him and him will will will will will
will will will will will him and him and
him and him and him system will you who
are the women who will fund will be
there the young guns or it will go or
little I will yes low point I also
uncanny word choices I have to say being
injured what happened it is it really
interrupted the seamless ecstatic flow
you know relationship I had with the
computer and the way I kind of dismiss
was another turning point for me with
technology and the way I describe it is
that before this moment I was looking at
the world through sparkly clean glass
and I couldn’t see the glass at all I
only saw the world beyond it and then
after I got injured it was like the
glass got dirty and all I could see was
the dirt being injured really for
me to reflect on my relationship with
technology much more deeply and I
realized that technology had a very
controlling and effect on me that I
didn’t quite like and I started to
wonder a lot more about how to design
interfaces and technology more ethically
and more positively so in order to teach
ethical thinking for technology I use
science fiction so you can tell I’m kind
of geeky and it probably won’t surprise
you that I’ve also been reading science
fiction since I was little too for the
last several years I’ve been teaching a
class called science fiction prototyping
and I taught it year for the first time
this year and what do I do is students
read science fiction novels and short
stories and watch films and they build
functional prototypes inspired by what
they read I build functional prototypes
for science fiction in my work as well
but one of the reasons I really like
science fiction for teaching ethical
thinking is because I can have students
from many different disciplines all in
one class and because they read the same
story they have a shared vocabulary to
talk to each other about technology and
obviously science fiction inspires
people to be much more imaginative than
normal which is good but for me the most
important reason to read science fiction
is that it teaches people to think
extrapolated ly about what happens when
technology scales upwards so Ursula K Le
Guin who is my very favorite sci-fi
author she said that science fiction is
not prescriptive it is descriptive and
what she means by that is that science
fiction authors are critiquing the
present they are looking at what is
currently popular at what people are
currently worried about are currently
excited about and then they extrapolate
that into the future imagining what will
happen if those trends continue to grow
unchecked
Frederick Poole’s said that a good
science fiction story should be able to
predict not the automobile but the
traffic jam and maybe even the car crash
like this famous example of a cheap
getting hacked over the cloud and the
driver losing control and driving into a
ditch so I think that if we can learn a
little bit of that extrapolate of
thinking that science fiction authors
are so great at we can get insight into
the ethical repercussions of what
happens when our technologies go to
scale so let’s just take one moment to
think about scale imagine that you go
from checking social media a few times a
day at to a hundred times a day which is
pretty close to where we are now imagine
you’re getting on
of notifications from various online
services per day are you turning into a
robot who’s just responding to
interactions coming to you from afar or
is this actually helping you be a more
efficient human being what happens when
quantified self technologies instead of
them being something you choose to use
they become something that is required
of you to wear what happens it when one
of your five senses is entirely mediated
through a single technology which is the
ultimate goal of AR and mixed reality
and finally what does it mean if what’s
driving all of these technologies is
profiting off of harvesting your
personal data in order to keep your
attention on advertising so these are
the kind of questions you have to ask
yourself before you even start to build
anything in the very earliest stages of
your designs if you can think like a
sci-fi author when you start to design
something you will end up with better
results and this is why I say that
reading science fiction is like ethics
class for inventors so we see the need
to be able to think speculatively about
technology and what happens when it
scales up but what kind of specula
thinking is required are we going to
accede to dystopian warnings or to
utopian visions when we look at
technology are we going to look for the
horrors are we going to look for the
possibilities it is really tempting to
fall to one of these two extremes on the
one hand all this new technology is
exciting and it does inspire you to
think that we’re going to solve some
major world problems with it but we
can’t forget that technology can go
wrong and can be used for evil we can’t
be blindly optimistic we also need to
ask ourselves is technology the right
solution maybe technology isn’t
necessary at all there’s this idea of
techno solution ISM which is the idea
that every problem can be solved with
technology to put it simply when you
have a hammer in your hand everything
starts to look like a nail and when you
work in technology sometimes it seems
like every problem can be solved with an
app and there’s as prevailing attitude
that the more technology we have the
more data we collect the smarter objects
that we’re going to have more objective
truths more efficiency and a better
world and if you think that’s true I
would really encourage you to read more
science fiction
so on the other hand there’s a real fear
that we’re kind of getting swept up in
this rapidly changing technological
landscape and I agree with that but we
can’t fall into the trap of
unconstructive pessimism either and I
see that kind of pessimism manifesting
itself in three ways
first I sometimes see people who get so
sarcastic and so critical that they can
no longer can envision any alternatives
or how we might live with technology
another way it sometimes shows up is
that people become such a perfectionist
that if they can’t do something
perfectly they won’t do anything at all
and that’s not gonna help and then
finally some people think the only way
to you know deal with all this
out-of-control technology is to try to
avoid it as much as possible and that’s
simply unrealistic again I am guilty of
both of these things I too AM seduced I
too AM skeptical and because of my
background you saw that
before I was injured I enthusiastically
wanted to apply technology to everything
and then once I was injured I just hated
technology and I was really negative
about it and I could see the dangers of
both of these extreme attitudes one of
the dangers is that it divides people
into insular groups who don’t talk to
each other and these people need to talk
to each other for these optimistic
builders of Technology who really mean
well if you can’t start to think
critically about where things might go
wrong you may cause unintended harm and
for the people who tend to be maaan the
more critical side you risk getting
paralyzed and not doing anything or your
voice not being heard at all and your
voice should be heard technology will
never be purely good or purely bad what
we need is people who can operate
between these two extremes we need
people who embody critical optimism we
need people who can envision a positive
future with technology technology but
have a healthy dose of criticality such
that they can see where things might go
wrong and either prevent or mitigate the
consequences here’s my advice to you so
how to be a better critical optimist
learn to think more extrapolated ly
about what happens when technology
scales up if you’re a builder of
technology one of these more optimistic
types learn to critique and be critiqued
you can ask your artist friends about
that for the people who are on the more
critical side of Technology who might
stay on the periphery of technologies
development
I encourage you to be more hopeful and
more active and maybe you can even build
something I think the emergence of maker
spaces and rapid prototyping
technologies is very exciting and it
allows a whole new population to both
propose and prototype hopeful
alternatives and finally if you are
finding if you’re finding yourself
having a really hard time being
optimistic then actually my advice to
you is to think about how technology can
be whimsical because when being
whimsical is a form of positivity – and
it’s sometimes easier and it cultivates
a sense of possibility in yourself and
in others so in conclusion I want you to
all embrace critical optimism and that
means banishing paralyzing fear as well
as any comfortable naivete and you need
to avoid black and white thinking and
maybe you could try some medium grey
thinking or maybe some light grey
thinking and finally I encourage you all
to read a lot a lot more science fiction thank you