I'm pretty AI pessimistic, but I still found the more optimistic AI story refreshing and nice. A reminder that new technology is actually supposed to make our lives better, not just funnel a lot of money from a lot of people to a small number of share holders (ie. "create value").
It's extremely believable that the downfall of some public good like Abelique would be primarily sales and marketing getting in and trying to steer it and advertise for profit, and it being otherwise gamed. It's so hard for something to just be good for everybody; somebody always wants to maximize their own benefit, even at the expense of everybody else (relevant example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862865).
Well that’s exactly what happened to Facebook, and YouTube.
People don’t really tend to believe it but when I worked at Facebook inventing features for users, 100% of the time our discussions were based in “how do we improve community and happiness and squash divisiveness and hate?” and never about revenue. Until influencers took over the internet. Then more and more we started being told not to ship things that were fun or socially good because it would break viral loops or undermine the market dominance of Universal Music or some such shit. So I quit.
Your comment is reminding me a lot of the ideas in a short book called “Program or Be Programmed” by Douglas Rushkoff. I think specifically it’s the idea about how digital technology has a “social bias” that can conflict with the interests of businesses on the internet.
BTW, if you liked this, Clarkesworld is currently doing a subscription drive to recover from the damage caused by Amazon ripping up the kindle subscriptions program. [0]
Please consider a subscription. It's literally 4$/month, super cheap, just reading one fun story a month makes it worth it to me.
Kind of reminds me of Debord's concept of spectacle. The sheer mediation of life through images being its own sort of Abelique that steers our thoughts and patterns in everyday life every bit as much as an app. Not just the things people usually think of when they read a chapter or two of Society of the Spectacle and put it down, but also things like how our neighborhoods look, how signs and streets suggest to us how to go about our day, etc.
One of his (or, more accurately, the Situationist movement he was a leading figure of) more interesting ideas was that of the dérive. You would do it as a small group or alone, and the idea was to just wander through the city, making choices arbitrarily rather than taking the path of least resistance. The goal is to expose yourself to new things you might not have encountered and meet new people that your respective roles in the spectacle wouldn't have encouraged meeting.
One of my favorite observations to make is that Pokemon Go (funny enough, was mentioned in this story) was an accidental dérive app for a brief moment there in 2016. People walked around the city following pokemon leads rather than the normal visual and psychological cues of the environment, and I know some people who met that way. The end of this story, as well as the way in which the app was a totalitarizing force without being a repressive one, kind of reminded me of that.
I recommend not only the dérive in particular, but flânerie in general.
A dérive can be done digitally* as well as in person; frex I have found the YouTube bubble to be somewhat like a large ship: on short timescales, it's going to go where it was heading, implacably, but on longer timescales, where it winds up has a lot to do with where, over time (in the case of YT, weeks to months), you have been steering it.
(slightly more tangentially: I wonder if TAD was able to finish TempleOS due to his aleatoric development schedule, which forced him to tackle the parts he didn't like instead of going down rabbit-holes solely in the parts he did like? He would call it divine inspiration; I might call it dérive-driven development)
:: :: ::
If one believes that on beyond the written Torah, and the oral, the natural world is a third component, then, rather than continually selecting ("borer") a narrow subset, periodically opening oneself to the range of its experiences almost becomes a mitzvah. For, in their comments upon Devarim, did not R JefAi say "feed your head" (SP 67), and also R CroStNaYo then add, to "teach your children well" (DV 70)?
(for an intragenerational equivalent, compare a Pioneer House motto: "having learned, teach your buddy")
* is the blessing for the one who studies at night (by the LCD's glow?) to be, during the day, watched over by machines of loving grace?
The idea is to take a bunch of photos from the same area, to get a virtual focus when you align and average them (I used hugin to do the alignment and a simple python script to average them).
The very first one, is a series of photos take as I walked towards the lion, which tends to very weird things to the background, compressing it.
One day, I'd like to take a Raspberry Pi (or a few of them) and build a 16x16 camera array, so I can get a smoother look.
I was wondering what crazy kindergarten cult or little person village produced identical tricycles and clad their kids in identical pink parkas... Then I realised it was some kind of time lapse.. Nice work!
Great short story. Several times while reading it, I wished that I could download Abelique on the app store and try it out - I guess I'll have to settle for picking up my sketchbook instead.
I love speculative fiction! I've been more interested in it ever since I started reading Ted Chiang - he also has great speculative short story collections like Stories of your life (which arrival was based on)
There was a time when I was locked in a windowless room for several months and practically the only thing I had was this book (which the above was published in) and almost everything in it is amazing:
Some of the elements of this reminded me of a Daniel Suarez book, Daemon. I don’t want to call out which elements in particular because that might be too spoiler-y. Daemon is a super quick and fun read though.
I wasn't paying close attention while starting reading and then the story sucked me in. I thought it was a genuine story, then doubt started to kick in, and then i saw the word --spoiler alert-- "fiction" at the end.
Why would i think abelique was a real app, the story were a non-fantasy? These days so much new AI trickery is popping up, that it starts to amaze less and less. So Abelique and the whole cult around it, including reddit sub, can just as well be real. If the category were tagged non-fiction, I would have believed it.
Am I the only one that went looking for Abelique in the app store? Darn... can't find it, maybe it got shut down? Or pulled for violating Apple's TOS?
It wasn't until I saw mention of nominations for a Hugo award that I realized I wasn't reading a (very compelling and surprisingly well written) app review.
I'm currently reading Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, and even though "algorithm" means something slightly different in the two ("actual algorithm" vs "algorithm-meaning-AI"), it almost feels like Naomi Kritzer's short story is the optimistic (but fictional) version of the more capitalist-driven, bland, and less human- and culture-focused reality described by Kyle Chayka.
