人算不如天算
I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
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I was asked to make a blog for the NYU IMA Low Res graduate program. (I started with no tangible experience in interaction design.) Math is nature’s poetry, and these are just diary entries.
Alter-Instagram
Reel
IMALR-GT-101-03
WHAT: IMALR-GT-101
Fractal chains of production and exploitation.
TED talks translation volunteers as low-paid labor.
Open-source tools lulling us into the false democratization of AI.
The tears and breastmilk of Tunupa running through my smartphone.
Non-human labor.
The dark afterlife of abandoned devices.
99.8% of earth removed in rare earth mining is waste.
Whoops. That’s seven-
Don’t get me wrong. All of this is fascinating, but it represents a version of my answer that is as zoomed in as my screen right now. If I’m being honest, I am irrevocably embarrassed to say that the most interesting thing to me is the undeniable apathy I felt when the AI Atlas first loaded. The most surprising is that none of what is outlined “surprises” me. And the most confusing is how I can be okay knowing so little about the products I use. Somehow, I even managed to rob myself of the right to claim self-aware hypocrisy (something I practice in regards to the food industry).
If all of this is true for Amazon Alexa, it is also true for the electronics sector as a whole. It is true for the iPad that I have charging right now. It is true for the phone that I can’t stop stealing glances at. It is true for the piece of equipment that I have beneath my fingers right now; a piece of equipment that I was misled to believe only takes up about a square foot of space. In reality, its biology seeps deeper than even the submarine cable infrastructure can touch.
MacBook Pro 16-inch, I apologize for violating your body without first respecting your anatomy.
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**Update** I was thinking about this from a spatial 3D perspective, but realized during the class discussion that we actually have to include the temporal dimension, time (specifically deep time). It’s bewildering that understanding the anatomy of Amazon Alexa also requires a measurement of time that we cannot fathom from our miniscule human lifespans. (Also, I might not be quite as apathetic as I thought.)