SITALWeek #327
Welcome to Stuff I Thought About Last Week, a personal collection of topics on tech, innovation, science, the digital economic transition, the finance industry, tardigrades, and whatever else made me think last week.
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In today’s post: Minecraft passes 1T views on YouTube; The Matrix Awakens; remote worker monitoring and the potential productivity boom for white collar jobs; Apple wants to track your location to keep people from stalking you with AirTags, and it's maddening; Facebook says "it's not us, it's you", demonstrating a complete lack of awareness about their own product and business; how to nudge your not-so-free will; and much more below.
Stuff about Innovation and Technology
Minecraft’s Storytelling Success
Minecraft crossed one trillion cumulative video views on YouTube. The feat accomplished by the virtual world building game, owned by Microsoft, is testament to a highly engaged user community. Minecraft’s chief storyteller explains: “The reason why Minecraft has been so successful on YouTube is because YouTube videos are a way to tell stories. So, then when you have Minecraft, and you can tell any story you want in a Minecraft world, it’s a big reason why we have so many people creating Minecraft content.” In 2020, Minecraft had 200B views – more than twice the count of second-place Roblox.
Jiggling Mice
Mouse jigglers are a growing category of devices used by remote workers to keep their mouses moving and thus avoid “away” status flags. The invention is a reaction to the nonstop surveillance of some remote workers that is testing people’s sanity. Clearly, the necessity of such a solution underscores a much bigger issue with how many companies are approaching remote work, focusing on presence rather than productivity. Better.com’s CEO recently came under fire for laying off 900 workers over Zoom, later claiming that company software showed many of them were working only 25% of the hours they were logged in for. The CEO, who apparently has a track record of insensitive comments, is now taking some time off. It's possible that we see a productivity surge (and accompanying wave of layoffs) as companies find out that many white collar jobs can be done in a fraction of the time when you eliminate unnecessary meetings, hallway gossip, office distractions, etc. For the remaining jobs we'll also see software continue to monitor and assist people as they work, further increasing productivity.
Head ‘Em Up, Move ‘Em Online
Biden has signed an executive order asking 17 government agencies to take their services online. The goal is to improve public access to services for the agencies with the highest friction interactions and reduce the “time tax” for such things as applying for a passport, filing taxes, etc.
Apple Compounds Privacy Failure
Due to the serious privacy and safety concerns of Apple’s AirTags, the maker of China-built phones would like Android phone users to download an app to track the secret presence of potentially nefarious AirTags. Or, how about this Apple: why not shut down AirTags instead of making them other people’s problem? Apple’s insane spin on urging people to download the Android app, which I find freaking hilarious, is: “We are raising the bar on privacy for our users and the industry, and hope others will follow.” The new Apple AirTags Android app can also track your precise location when in use. It’s rather mind-boggling that Apple would create a device that enables stalking and then 'resolve' the issue with an anti-stalking solution that can also be used to stalk you. This is the logic of Apple, and it's what happens when you put profits well ahead of user experience. But, probably no need to worry…surely Apple and their China-built hardware is 100% trustworthy with your potentially sensitive location data.
Shop the Look, Shop the Ad
Amazon Prime Video is offering a “shop the look” feature that tries to find similar clothes to a movie/TV character whose look you want to emulate. Amazon is also making video ads on Fire TV devices shoppable with one click from the remote. The TV ad industry has been talking about interactive, customizable ads for decades, and their vision is finally beginning to come to fruition. Thanks to its giant ecommerce business, Amazon has an advantage in shoppable TV vs. other connected video devices.
When Fees Become Vulnerabilities
In response to more consumer friendly challenger banks, like Chime and Step, Capital One is eliminating overdraft fees. The move is said to “cost” the firm $150M a year. The WSJ reports that US banks will earn $33B in fees and charges this year, which disproportionately impact low-income households. During a recent investment team discussion, Brinton said that the banking industry’s profitable fee system reminded him of how much Blockbuster made off of late fees back in the days before streaming. Indeed, Blockbuster made $700M a year in late fees, which was 15% of their revenues (and a much higher percentage of profits) at the time. The fees turned into a liability, with disruptor Netflix’ no-late-fee policy being one of the big advantages of the DVD-by-mail service. Rather than stacking fees upon fees for people who cannot afford them, app-based challenger banks can proactively warn people when they are in danger of overdrafting rather than waiting for the gotcha moment. I’m not defending people who overdraft their bank accounts, but clearly the analog-to-digital transition for many industries creates an opportunity to use technology to provide a better customer experience – one that offers customers more for less. Fees are not competitive moats, and they turn into a significant vulnerability in the transparent Information Age. When you look at just how much money is made by companies who choose not to help their customers out, there are a lot of vulnerable profit pools just waiting to be attacked across the economy.
What’s Real? Does it Matter?
“I understand that I don’t understand.” That’s how Carrie-Anne Moss responds to a question on virtual reality technology as she contemplates the shifting forms of entertainment and the impact on real life in this Verge interview about Epic Games’ Unreal Engine demo world, The Matrix Awakens. In the Epic experience, players are made to question which characters were filmed vs. rendered. The world features over 38,000 drivable cars, 35,000 simulated pedestrians, and over 10 million digital assets spread around a virtual city the size of Los Angeles. In the interview, Keanu also makes the humble plea: “Can we just not have metaverse be, like, invented by Facebook?” Amen bro.
If Facebook “Only Had a Brain”
In an Axios on HBO interview, Facebook’s VP of AR/VR, Andrew Bosworth, blamed people rather than the company’s own algorithms for the amplification of society’s problems: "Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing.” This is such a wild misunderstanding of how the human brain works that, if he really believes what he’s saying, then we should be absolutely terrified of every Facebook product. The strawman, or perhaps more accurately scarecrow, argument being touted here is essentially this: just because someone uses a rock to bash someone else’s head, you can’t blame the rock. It’s the same argument Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, has used in the past when he said that society doesn’t blame steel makers for gun deaths, therefore Amazon isn’t responsible for what their technology – like the AWS facial recognition engine – is used for. This type of reasoning contains a massive logical misstep in that it equates raw materials, like rocks or steel, with technology invented by humans. The rock was not created by humans with the intention of making other humans angrier and thus more likely to pick up the rock and use it for bad things, all in the name of selling advertisements. But, that’s exactly what Facebook is: an engineered tool designed to make people more likely to pick it up to bash someone’s head, minting money for Facebook in the process. The level of tone deafness at Facebook is truly stunning. I am not saying people aren’t to blame; rather, humans have an innate proclivity for tribalism, and the way to help out people and the planet is to fight that tendency rather than amplify it and pretend like it’s not your fault. Humans are flawed, and our brains evolve at the speed of biology, while technology is racing ahead faster than we can adapt. A better idea than blaming people would be to use technology to improve lives, not make them worse.
Miscellaneous Stuff
New Experiences Expand Free Will
Your brain operates by making predictions about what might happen based on past experiences available for reference. Choices made based on these predictions occur before we are consciously aware of them, but we are still left with an illusion of free will and agency. If you are concerned about your lack of free will, which I’d suggest you probably should be, neuropsychologist Lisa Feldman-Barrett explains that increasing your new experiences on a regular basis will shift the number/type of references your brain has for making predictions, granting you the opportunity to shift choices to more desirable outcomes: “You are continually cultivating your past as a means of controlling your future. This may be a form of free will, but it’s extended over time and therefore different from how we usually think about free will in the moment. If you practise a skill, whether it’s riding a bicycle, or talking to someone who believes things that you abhor, you hone your brain’s predictions until that skill becomes automatic and likely to be repeated. With practice and a little investment of energy, you can make some automatic behaviours more likely than others and have more control over your future actions. Perhaps not as much control as you might want, but more than you might think.” I wrote more about predictions and consciousness in #312.
Entangled Tardigrade
Scientists successfully entangled a living tardigrade and two superconducting quantum bits (PDF). It’s the first experiment to entangle a life form, made possible by the fact that tardigrades can survive exposure to extremely low temperatures. The research group set out to invalidate Bohr’s 1933 claim that quantum experiments could never be performed on living organisms. The catch, however, is that the current entanglement only worked because the tardigrade was capable of going dormant for the duration of the experiment. So, we are not much closer to using quantum entanglement to beam humans from planet to planet.
Plastic-Fueled Bacteria
As plastic waste accumulates around the world, nature is responding with an increasing number of microbes capable of consuming plastic. In a recent survey of microbial genes sampled from around the globe, some 30,000 enzymes able to break down ten different types of plastics were discovered. The more plastic in the environment, the more enzymes were found, as the plastic-chomping organisms evolve to take advantage of the 380M tons of plastic produced a year. It raises the question of what happens if one of these adaptable species becomes particularly voracious and goes after non-waste plastic, like the ubiquitous stuff in walls, cars, electronics, etc.? Scientists are also creating enzymes to target specific waste products, like single-use plastic bottles.
Stuff about Geopolitics, Economics, and the Finance Industry
How to Boost Labor Participation Beyond Wage Growth?
For thirty years up until around 2010, the growth in the US population of working-age adults (20-64) averaged over 1.5M new entrants to the marketplace a year. This was a combination of births (on a trailing twenty-year basis) and immigration. Starting last decade, the number dropped to under 1M, and then, in 2020, it went to ~zero. Population growth for working-age US adults is now projected to hover around zero for the next several years (there is a nice visual here in this Tweet from JBREC). Depending on the immigration situation, if other trends persist, growth could turn negative, resulting in a meaningful decrease in the working-age population. It’s a fairly simple math problem: you take births from two decades ago, retirements from Boomers (and ongoing excess deaths from COVID), and the gap in immigrants (around 1M people missing from the labor force each year compared to historical trends pre-Trump), and you have an explanation for the current – and future – labor shortage.
I know I have become a broken record on this topic, but absent a significant productivity boom, a surprisingly accelerated use of automation (for blue and white collar jobs), or a stunning reversal in immigration policy, I think we should expect that numerous industries will experience significant shortages and changes in service levels and/or how jobs are done in the near future. Of course, a shrinking workforce and increased retirees also means a decrease in consumption, which is not a particularly rosy economic outlook. Incentives to increase labor force participation beyond higher wages might be needed. For example, a reduction in income tax would be a nice way to boost after-tax wages. What other incentives through employers or from the government could increase the desire to work? Perhaps a shift to a standard shorter work week? Japan and Australia have seen much better work participation rates without wage increases (in contrast to the US), according to the WSJ. One explanation for that outcome is that, during the pandemic, Japanese and Australian government stimulus was tied to employers rather than workers, disincentivizing quits. It seems like there is something more (perhaps existential ennui?) behind the lower US labor participation than direct-to-citizen economic stimulus. Nonetheless, we are left with a situation in which several complex factors have combined to create a prolonged period of labor shortage in the US. If we look back to the mouse jigglers, an anticipated surge in productivity will be a major complicating factor for white collar worker demand. There is one future that looks stagnant and bleak with tech-driven job losses, but there are many other more likely futures where the economy continues to adapt and create new jobs, services, and opportunities as the nature of work evolves alongside technology.
SITALWeek will be off next Sunday🎁, we'll see you again in 2022.
✌️-Brad
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