The Borg Are Waiting...Please Turn off and Stow all Electronic Devices

Public outcry over the requirement to shut off and stow our electronic devices during air travel seems to be reaching a fever pitch. On November 27 an article in the Technology section of the New York Times by Nick Bilton headlined, “Disruptions: Fliers Must Turn Off Devices but It’s Not Clear Why” hit the street. On 6 December the high profile actor Alec Baldwin created a sensation when he was thrown off an American Airlines flight for apparently refusing to unplug from from his game of “Words with Friends”.

In his article Bilton argues that it’s not clear how not turning off our electronic devices poses a safety of flight issue and that the time has come for these rules to change. He works some math to show that many travelers leave their devices on (intentionally or otherwise) and since we have not seen a catastrophic incident as a result, surely these devices can’t be disrupting to a planes electronics. His math works out to 11 million air travelers who have left their devices on over the last four years and since we haven’t seen a related incident it must be fine to leave our electronics on.

Many of us feel the affront to our personal freedom when we are asked to unplug. That disruption and growing sense of violation is on the rise in our society. In those with an over stuffed sense of entitlement the violation has been more severe and has manifested itself in the high profile public incidents that make the news. Regardless of the safety threat to air travel, is this growing sense of loss something greater?  Do we simply feel like our rights are being violated or do we sense something deeper? Is our evolutionary clock ticking?  Is that longing to be connected and remained connected some of the first vestiges of our collective emotions? Is it the hidden force of evolution that one day, many futures from now, will herald in us a real pain felt in our central nervous system as when neurons are forcefully severed from our physical bodies today? I think so...but clearly that day is still a long way off...but these very first emotions are  felt and cannot be denied.

But before that day we still have a growing problem to address. Should we get upset when we are disconnected during air travel?  Is the discomfort of the emotional pangs of being cut from the grid too high? Is the freedom we are forced to give up versus the added safety margin as Bilton suggests, simply too high?Many of these geniuses, Bilton and Baldwin included, are doing the risk vs freedom in their head and coming up with the answer that for them, the risk is simply not worth the inconvenience of powering down. This particular math is hidden the statistics unfortunately Bilton did the wrong math. Whereas I do not believe the FAA or the various airlines who restrict the use of electronic devices (with the exception of cell phones which they must) have done the math  it turns out that the math will continue to change over time. The radiation that electronic devices output in digital form vs analogue is far less than then it was in the old days. Although the number of users has increased considerably. I would argue more than 1% of people inadvertently leave their electronics on. The number is much higher than Bilton’s number yet still we have progressed without incident due to a cellphone or iPad intefering with  aircraft electronics.

However, Bilton and Baldwin’s desire to leave their devices on is not all about aircraft interference, at least not at the current levels and their relation to aircraft electronics. The rules are about living in a civil, as well as safe, orderly society along with the potential impact on the greater good. No where other than in air travel are we thrown together so close and must cooperate for such  good. We all submit to may indignities, inconveniences, discomfort so that we may reach our destination in one piece. The outrage may simply be a reaction to the last vestiges of personal freedom that are being stripped away when we are being told to unplug from the grid...same as we submit to searches and pat downs.

Beyond the combined potential disruption of 200 passengers each with cell phones and iPads all leaving them on...several hundred electronics devices, all concentrated inside an aluminum tube could produce effects that simply are unknown. Whereas all this interference may, in the end, not interrupt the aircraft electronics, it is a well known fact that 200 devices reaching out the closest cell tower simultaneously, will indeed cause cellular disruption. And it’s not just the closest cell tower, from 35,000 feet in the sky a large number of cell towers are in view...up to 200. As the each cell phone leaves and enters a new coverage area it sends out an inquiry, regardless if the phone is in use, only if it is switched on. The quick math shows that 200 phones reaching out to 200 towers can create quite a busy network. Even if you don’t use your cell phone in flight, and it remains on, your phone will be continuously entering a new coverage area. If you leave your phone on expect your battery to be dead at the end of a coast to coast flight even if you never use it. This figure tries to explain the relationship.

In addition to these 40,000 disruptions (keep in mind that is in one location and the location is changing continuously) using our devices reduces our attention that may be required during take off and landing. If you have your phone to your ear or your headphones on playing focused on your iPad how will you hear the flight attendants instructions in an emergency?

Also, consider the hard plastic, aluminum, and glass will also become lethal projectiles flying around during an landing incident.

Let’s not forget the important safety briefing at the start of the flight. This alone can compel the airlines to tell passangers to sit down and sit up, shut down and shut up, and pay close attention.

Finally, the mere annoyance to other passengers (noise abatement) for which the airlines must be able to reduce if only to increase the pleasant flight environment for us all.

For all these reasons, with the jamming of cell phone towers being number one in my book, the real culprit here is lack of education of the flight crew. When a flight attendant is asked why the devices must be powered down they should be able to give the complete and correct answer...not just that “the FAA regulations require us to do it”. A trained flight crew should be able to give the extended answer above. If they gave this answer I don’t think another question would be raised.  In some cases I don't think the flight attendants even agree or at least they are soft on the requirement and therefore people are let alone to get away with whatever they can. If they knew all the reasons perhaps they wouldn't be so soft on enforcement.   Baldwin seems like one of those types who might be used to getting away with things...regardless if he might believe himself to be a "American Treasure" which he might be.  Perhaps some flight attendant's haven't confronted him previously.

In the end, however, without this evolutionary hiccup our continued assimilation into the collective as I've reported previously, would have gone unnoticed. I for one, am glad these warning signals show up. I will be disconnected from the grid, not only on air travel, but when I simply don’t need to be.  I'm not ready to be assimilated.

You Never Had a Camera in My Head

The medium is the message, the medium is the message, the medium is the message. I can say it over and over again and painstakingly meditate on its meaning. I always get confused even though I’ve been studying this vague yet powerful construct of Marshall McLuhan’s for many years.

Enter Wafaa Bilal. Have you heard of him? He’s an Iraqi American artist who has made waves in recent years by producing art forms that have blurred the line between media stunt, public protest, and the boundary of art and real life.

He’s the guy who wrote the book, “Shoot an Iraqi”. This book is about a living art exhibit in which he confined himself at the Flatfile Gallery in Chicago. The exhibit was called “Domestic Tension” and it was Wafaa home for one month. Living art has been done this way before but he added a twist. If you visited him on-line not only could you video chat  he gave you ability to fire a yellow paint ball at him at 300 feet per second, all day, every day. I don’t know if that’s really domestic but it’s certainly qualifies as tension as over 60,000 paint balls were fired at him during his month long ordeal.

He’s also the guy who asked for people to vote for whom they would prefer to see water-boarded. An Iraqi citizen or a dog named Buddy. Wafaa received the most votes. It is rumored that he actually got the treatment.

Most recently he’s the guy that put 105,000 tattoos on his back. A tattoo artist inked a small red dot for each of the 5,000 Americans who have died in Iraq as well as an invisible ultraviolet dot for each of the 100,000 Iraqis who have died as well. Obviously when viewed normally the Iraqi deaths are hidden, and that’s the point. But when viewed under a black-light his tattoo serves as a sobering reminder of the larger cost of that war.

But all of these art forms have a well traveled lineage albeit with slight variations and levels of extreme. His latest artistic endeavor however could be a game changer. It’s called “The 3rd I” and you can find the link to this latest exhibit at http://www.3rdi.me.

Basically Wafaa has surgically imbedded a video camera in the back of his head. Imagines from the camera are sent live at the rate of one frame per minute to produce this art exhibit. Generally speaking, with the exception of the extreme measures he underwent to have the camera imbedded in his head, walking around streaming pictures doesn’t seem like a big deal considering everyone has a camera phone these days as well as the live streaming video that already comes from webcams the world over. How then is this new medium different, vastly different from emerging social norms as I now contend, and what is the message?

First, always remember that McLuhan has stated that content is disconnected from the medium. The content is not important. That’s why streaming pictures as a rate of 1 per minute versus streaming video in HD 1080i in 3-D doesn’t matter. Certainly it’s easy enough to do if he’s already going through the pain of imbedding a camera in his head. But, for the first time, here is a crystal clear example of a medium in which the content is completely unimportant and therefore separated from the medium.

The message however is extreme. Would you invite Wafaa to your house knowing he has a camera imbedded in his head and will be recording and broadcasting his every move… or is it your every move? Privacy issues immediately come to the fore. Wafaa claims to have been disinvited to a few social events and has already offered his employer the concession that he would cover the camera lens while he was at work, on the campus of the New York University, this apparently to protect the privacy of the students. What is so different from his medium than the medium of the same multitude of protected student’s who video text daily from campus?  Or for that matter the casual friend holding up a video phone at a private party to record a rising young pop star taking a bong hit to celebrate her 18th birthday? Of course the agents for Miley Cyrus report that the bong contained salvia and not weed but that’s hard to deduce from the video that’s already all over the internet.

But something more than privacy changes when the camera becomes biologically attached to you. That’s not to say Wafaa’s camera is always on or that there isn’t an off switch on version 1.0.  But the medium is fast approaching when the camera will always be on. Remember the Truman show? Truman (Jim Carey) is debating with God (The Character Christof played by Ed Harris). He says, “You never had a camera in my head”. Meaning that while there were hundreds of cameras capturing his complete life in the ultimate reality show, the cameras could never capture his private thoughts…the cameras were never in his head. Are we now moving one step closer to our private thoughts being netted together in one universal broadcast? Wafaa’s camera is on the back of his head. We will see in his photo exhibit exactly what he is not looking at, which by inversion rules out what he has deemed of interest. But the next imbedded camera easily looks forward and we know where that leads…we can’t hide from the occasional glance in the direction of the jogger in the bikini that shows up on the web. Currently we can still edit the contents of our camera phones before the pictures get home.

We also edit our tweets sufficiently to conceal all but what we want the world to know of our thoughts. I am happy, I am sad, I am tired, I am hungry, I just went through the car wash, My plane leaves in 30 minutes, I just saw Justin Bieber at the airport, I just ran into my friend’s wife at the gate, I just had a carnal thought, I just boarded my flight, I just thought about the plane exploding at 35,000 feet, The guy sitting next to me has an iPad, I am jealous, I want to steal his iPad, I have to quit tweeting the plane is about to take off, there’s something on the wing, I have gas, I love you,…artificial airline induced blackout period..., the plane just landed safely, see you in an hour…

Of course when Wafaa flys the guy sitting directly behind him will be not be able to figure out exactly why there is a robot eye staring straight back at him that keeps winking every minute. Keep your thoughts on the seat back and tray table directly in front of you. Keep your fingers away from your nose.

In March I blogged about our journey to becoming one with the Borg. See “Assimilation Has Begun” . It doesn't help that Wafaa’s camera is distinctly Borgish in style. And I don’t think in general Wafaa’s aim is to promote our general assimilation into a technological collective. He is an artist making political statements through his medium. His message is one of peace and it is achieved by opening our eyes. He has opened our eyes in a multitude of ways with this latest technique simply taking another bold step by physically opening a robotic eye into his world. His message is not contained within the images that will stream back to his art exhibit. His message is contained within the art form itself. And while this medium is certainly effective in leading us towards a greater understanding, it plunges us further into the abyss. We’ve already stepped into it and are falling fast. There’s no turning back. Ironically as Wafaa falls he will capture our images in free fall behind him, at one minute intervals.

Assimilation Has Begun

I’ve been a lifelong fan of Star Trek. When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out I was really hooked. Whereas the former was full of leadership anecdotes, and the exploits of one each, Captain James T. Kirk, the latter explored more explicit ramifications of life in space, technology, and our future trek through the galaxy albeit with the full effect of a perfect earth like gravitational pull. Perhaps the greatest contribution of TNG to SciFi and forward thinking futurists who have trouble seeing beyond the coming technology singularity is the concept of the Borg. The Borg didn’t firmly take hold of the Trekie culture until the release of the 8th motion picture of the Star Trek franchise and the first with the cast of TNG. The movie was “Star Trek: First Contact”. Who doesn’t remember the grim face of the new hero, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, as the Borg began their assimilation of his ship and crew? Finally he agrees to sacrifice the Enterprise in order to destroy them.

Maybe there is an advanced cyber-borg based civilization somewhere out beyond the reaches of the galaxy waiting for the day when we begin colonization of the planets, only to have them sweep down and assimilate us into their collective…or maybe they are already here.

I signed up with Google Voice about six months ago. I really have been jazzed by the technology which allows me to check my voice messages on my cell phone from my computer at work. Cell phones are not permitted in my office so I either have to take time to walk out to my car to check my messages, or I have to dial voice mail every few hours from my office phone. Neither option is very convenient. What is nifty and fast is getting an email with a transcribed text of the voice message someone has left on my cell phone directly into my inbox. Google Voice enables this to happen. Since I’ve toyed with the idea of buying voice recognition software so I could dictate messages and turn them into memos for the past couple of years, gaining access to the power of Google and the software they are using the drive the translation, for free, is staggering. So I signed up and as of today, I’ve called to check my voice mail messages approximately two times in the last six months. That bought back a significant part of my life and I no longer worry about missing an important message on my cell phone. Now this is not to say that the quality of the translation is all that good, in fact it’s not that good at all. But it’s sufficient to understand the nature of the message and to gauge its level of importance. My next call will be to take action on the message, not to call to check my voice mail.

As the last few months rolled by I seem to be doing an impromptu test of the quality of the voice to text translations. It’s a very interesting to see some of the messages that result. Some weird words can be created, and sometimes those words could be embarrassing to the individual who left them. I have noticed which of my friends tend to speak very clearly with not much of an accent. My friend from Arizona for instance gets translated with great accuracy. My neighbor from Brooklyn New York, however, is barely legible. One interesting result is that digits seem to be at or near 100%. Or I haven’t detected an error so far, even with my neighbor’s accent. And that I find very interesting.

Now I will tell you about the most interesting test of all. Yesterday my cable went out. I called the cable company to report the outage. Through an automated menu of options I was directed to further options and then advised that at my location they already knew about the outage and they were working to correct the problem. Then I was given the option for a call-back when they believed the problem was resolved. I missed the call-back when it came in so naturally Google Voice picked up and recorded the message from the cable company. I didn’t think about it at the time but the call-back itself was a computer generated message. A machine was generating a voice which was being recorded by another machine and then translated into a text message which was sent to my email. The machine voice nailed it. The scary translation accuracy of the computer generated voice was 97.25%.

Apparently I can now officially communicate with an artificial language more accurately then I can a real human voice. It's not scary in the sense that computers can talk better than us -- it's scary because the digital signal that represents the word "satisfaction" has been copied and pasted. Meaning the word “satisfaction” now has a digital signal. It’s sealed in stone. It’s permanent. The digital signature should, in theory, never change. Language as we know it, along with its unique role in human development will soon begin to stagnate. It will not change, and we humans will move toward the standard. Language will cease to evolve. As language technology propagates and becomes ubiquitous, it is not the computers that will begin talking like us; it is us that will begin talking like computers.

For instance, unwitting of what I was doing, I've already instructed some friends to speak more clearly when leaving a voice mail -- those from accent free zones already have voices that are translated accurately and need not change yet. And I do it too and have done so for some time. When face to face with a telephone menu with voice recognition, I try to speak more clearly, because I’ve already learned the frustration that will result if the call fails, so I move towards them. We are being assimilated. It works like this. First we will lose our accents, then we will speak in crystal clear monotone, then we will have chips imbedded in our head...isn’t that the Borg. The very idea that artificial intelligence is about making artificial things more like us is dead wrong. We will be getting closer to them. We have the biological ability to evolve, not them. They will not become human they will strip humanity from us. They will not turn into us and one day gain a soul. We will turn into them and one day be forced to lose ours. It seems that the Borg is already here and assimilation has already begun. Are you excited or scared?