Living The Future Shock

Techno-Junk 

I have a lot of techno-junk. A lot of times, it starts out being the cool thing, but as I keep using it, it just ends up being kipple. I've been using my second 160GB iPod Classic for like 6years. Now I have the choice of moving to an iPod Touch with 128GB or shelling out big and using my phone as the music player. Given that I simply have the iPod Classic as my car audio thing, it's not likely I'm going to shell out for the biggest-capacity iPhone 6S as a music player. I'm going to move to another dedicated audio player and be done with it.

The iPhone has made the point and shoot camera redundant. I have an old Canon G9. In the olden days of 2009, it was a pretty cool compact camera. Of course the camera on the iPhone ate its job, so now it sits on the shelf un-used, and worse still it's far too obsolete in spec to be waved around in public lest people think I am a retro-fetishist. Which goes to show tech isn't worth spending money on until it becomes necessary to have that tech. I've given the Go-Pro cameras a wide berth as a result. They look like a lot of fun if you like strapping the camera on to moving things, but it's hard to argue a need for one on a day to day basis. It's usually easier just to grab the iPhone and shoot video.

Still, I have weird techno-junk which are noise-making devices of various types. These don't go obsolete; they merely extend the sonic palette for recordings so they don't tend to be as bad an investment as a camera. As good as iRig is on the iPhone, it is simply no match for the Catalinbread WIIO pedal for its ability to make my guitar sound like Pete Townshend's tone on 'Live at Leeds'. It never really goes old as a piece of technology; although the desire to want to sound like Pete Townshend on 'Live at Leeds' sort of dates a lot faster than any bit of techno-junk.

It's not all bad news. I have an app on the iPad that can fire samples of an old Mellotron with great accuracy. I have a whole array of synths on the iPad, I could do anything from Kraftwerk style blips to fairly modern trance music sweeps. The option anxiety that arises from my iPad alone is substantial, so it is doing a great job as this sort of noise-making machine. And of course one day it will become this obsolete little tablet that I can't wave around public, but while it can make all these noises, it's going to remain one of my important noise-source units.

The speed at which things become obsolete has me in a bit of a headspin when I survey the things that are going out of date in my lifetime. The LP record lasted about 35years; CD Players lasted about 25; The Walkman went 15years somewhere in there, 20 if you count the portable CD iteration; the iPod era went for about 10years. I feel immense pressure to move on to streamed music but it just runs hard against my instincts. Film cameras of still and moving variety went for decades before digital knocked them off, but the reign of the stand alone domestic digital camera lasted all of 12 years by the time the camera in the phone ate up most of that market. Somewhere in there there was the U-matic video tape which seemed to be around since the 60s for about 25years, and VHS tape which lasted as a popular format for about 20years. DVDs as a media format really only lasted 12 years before HD video and Blu Ray supplanted it; and Blu Ray has really only gone 5 years as a mass consumer format before Netflix and streaming services have killed that market.

You can chalk all of that up to Future Shock. Computers too are accelerating in a disconcerting way. I went 5years with with the G5 PowerMac, 4years with the Tower Mac, and now 2 years with the Mac Mini, and I'm already thinking maybe I should be upgrading the computer soon if I want to be able to edit 4K Video.

As you can see, not only are the product cycles getting shorter, the actual lifespan of any given tech is getting so short. My first iPhone was the 3GS because I was a late adopter. I went three and a half years until it was so obsolete I couldn't show people I was still using it; so that put me onto the iPhone 5S which I've had for 22months - and well, it too is feeling slow, old and obsolete next to the iPhone 6S. I couldn't have imagined that, back 22months ago when I got my 5S. I fear for the lifespan of iPhones and smartphones as a technology, in general. With the pace things are going, there might not be much left in the future of smart phones. I might buy an iPhone 6S the day it goes on sale, but it is in danger of becoming super obsolete, well within the lifespan of its 24month contract.

That's all on the one hand. Contrasting against all that is my pair of Optonica Speakers from the 70s which still sound great. They sound full, broad, punchy and rich. The Arcam Amp powering it is from the mid-2000s, while the CD player is a 5 plate Sony from the late 1990s and it still works great. I have guitars and basses that date to the 1960s and 1970s that work perfectly well, pedals that date to  the early 1980s that still work perfectly well, a 1985 Roland synth that still works fine, and other bits and pieces from somewhere in the last half century that still do what they're designed to do. Somewhere in storage is a top of the range VHS player, and a turntable. All of this stuff still works.

And so gradually you end up being a weird mosaic of tech ownership. I feel like I live in the Bradbury building of 'Blade Runner' ("Good evening JF!") of my own devising and I didn't necessarily plan things that way. I am, to confess, a little more than simply shocked about all this. I never imagined what it would feel like to end up so layered up with the experience of technology. It's even true of this very blog too. When I start blogging over a decade ago, I was the only person in my circle doing it and everybody else was incredulous or disinterested. Now that decade has passed, blogging went from being a fad to a phenomenon to then being reduced to microblogging, and now this kind of blogging -writing out full sentences with the pretence of ecriture - has become somewhat quaint in its archaic-ness.

I write all of this down because I think there is great scepticism about the rate at which things change. The delusion we've been given in our childhoods was that it would be gradual, and mostly linear. The lived experiences inform us that it is rapid and ever accelerating. People think Ray Kurzweil's description of an ever-accelerating technological progress as being fanciful, but I have to tell you the subjective experience of this notion is far more true than the persistent critique that somehow technological development is going to plateau and level off. I won't vouch for the technological Singularity, but I will say that the future change is going to speed up even more.

From The Pleiades Mailbag - 22/Oct/2014

The Gough Whitlam Articles

Digging in to the Pleiades mailbag today...
Some poignant articles have been written in the wake of Gough Whitlam's passing.
Here's one from Helen Razer that's worth a read. This bit stuck out as particularly worthy:

It’s tricky to do this and not least because the cultural and political right has done such a marvellous job these past 40 years of rewriting Whitlam’s reforms as naïve. While it is certainly true that the man’s cabinet behaved, at times, like toddlers unchained in a left-wing lolly shop, it is also true that the Ideology V.2 that grew in the rotten bog of ’70s stagflation had much worse consequences for the nation and the world than the purchase of Blue Poles.  If you want delusional thinking on political management of the economy, there is no better place to look than Milton Friedman whose works would influence all western liberal democracies, including our own, from about the day Whitlam was ousted. Friedman’s thinking led to inequality. Whitlam’s led to a brief moment of reform with some stubbornly enduring heritage. If Whitlam was history’s most naïve politician, then last night’s X-Factor Grand Final was a glorious moment of uplifting hope.

Here's one from Michael Pascoe.

He had done all and more that a man might reasonably think possible to do. 

His contribution had been huge and the years were reducing him. And even Gough had suggested that even Gough might not be immortal. To recall a phrase, it was time. 

So why does his inevitable and any-day-now-for-the-past-several-years death strike such a chord? 

I think it's partly because of the invidious comparison with what our nation has become.
The optimism, the positivity, the change, the opening up, the justice, the independence, the betterment of the nation, the internationalisation that Whitlam sought and represented has been replaced after four decades with a more general negativity, with so little ambition, with a conservative determination to uphold the status quo or even return to some earlier imagination of it, with white-bread nationalism resplendent. 

I fear we don't mourn Gough, but ourselves.

There's a lot of truth right there too. Pleiades also dug up this beauty from somewhere on the internet:

It was the Whitlam Government that:-1. ended Conscription,2. withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam,3. implemented Equal Pay for Women,4. launched an Inquiry into Education and the Funding of Government and Non-government Schools on a Needs Basis,5. established a separate ministry responsible for Aboriginal Affairs,6. established the single Department of Defence,7. withdrew support for apartheid–South Africa,8. granted independence to Papua New Guinea,9. abolished Tertiary Education Fees,10. established the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme (TEAS),11. increased pensions,12. established Medibank,13. established controls on Foreign Ownership of Australian resources,14. passed the Family Law Act establishing No-Fault Divorce,15. passed a series of laws banning Racial and Sexual Discrimination,16. extended Maternity Leave and Benefits for Single Mothers,17. introduced One-Vote-One-Value to democratize the electoral system,18. implemented wide-ranging reforms of the ALP’s organization,19. initiated Australia’s first Federal Legislation on Human Rights, the Environment and Heritage,20. established the Legal Aid Office,21. established the National Film and Television School,22. launched construction of National Gallery of Australia,23. established the Australian Development Assistance Agency,24. reopened the Australian Embassy in Peking after 24 years,25. established the Prices Justification Tribunal,26. revalued the Australian Dollar,27. cut tariffs across the board,28. established the Trade Practices Commission,29. established the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service,30. established the Law Reform Commission,31. established the Australian Film Commission,32. established the Australia Council,33. established the Australian Heritage Commission,34. established the Consumer Affairs Commission,35. established the Technical and Further Education Commission,36. implemented a national employment and training program,37. created Telecom and Australia Post to replace the Postmaster-General’s Department,38. devised the Order of Australia Honors System to replace the British Honors system,39. abolished appeals to the Privy Council,40. changed the National Anthem to ‘Advance Australia Fair’ (confirmed at 1977 Referendum),41. instituted Aboriginal Land Rights, and42. sewered most of Sydney. (Hard to believe, isn’t it, that Sydney wasn’t even sewered 40 years ago???)Mind you it took ‘em all of 3 years!!!

3 years of furious reforms. 

Soft Landing in China?

There are two big assumptions about the Australian economy going forward. One is that property rices will never go down, even if they don't exactly keep going up. The others that iron ore and coal exports are going to pay for everything, and that China is going to keep on gorging itself on our commodities exports.

Here's an article that begs to differ.

Back in 2009, problems for China were external. Now, apart from still sluggish export demand from Europe, they are pretty much home-grown. China is suffering from massive debt hangover from the stupendous multitrillion-dollar stimulus its government sprayed in every direction in response to the GFC. The country is also hindered by an economy that continues to misallocate capital, is far too reliant on state-owned enterprises, and a population that is beginning to age before the country has reached even middle-income status. 

As its hedges its bets a little, the government has been pumping money into the banks and providing low-level stimulus, so some economists reckon that official figures may lift in the fourth quarter. But next year ain’t looking as good, with many economists predicting sub-7% growth. 

But if the official figures — much derided by many economists — look bad, the key measures, to which Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has previously said he pays most attention, look decidedly worse. The so-called Keqiang Index consists of electricity consumption, rail freight and credit growth. 

“Electricity consumption improved, up by 2.7% year on year in September after a 1.4% decline in August, but is still the second-lowest print in 18 months. Railway freight traffic fell further, down by 6.2% y-o-y after falling by 0.2% in August. New RMB loans rose more than expected, but outstanding loan growth slowed to 13.2% year on year from 13.3% in August,” analysts at investment bank Nomura said. 

With that on the table, the forecasts from the Australian Treasury, which underpin the budget, are already starting to look a little loopy. Treasury’s global GDP growth figures for this year and the next two years are now consistently ahead of the latest forecasts from the World Bank — this year by 0.7% and next year by more than 0.5%. In a world where growth is only 3% to 3.5%, such differences — of up to 20% — are meaningful.
Treasury’s forecasting 7.25% growth for China next year after 7% for this year. Those now look a little high, but it’s the figures underneath these big picture estimates that look even more divergent from the emerging reality. 

Treasury has Australian metallurgical coal exports doubling over the next four years to 300 million tonnes, but the latest forecast from UBS expects these to top out at 175 million tonnes by 2017.

It feels like the RBA might be a little too optimistic with its forecasts. In turn, we might be headed for a pretty big recession the next time China hits a snag. That being said, China seems to keep on coming up with ways to cheat the slow down. It's a desperate thing for us, but its even more desperate for the Chinese leadership. Perhaps this tends to focus their minds on their issues harder. So far they keep on bailing out strategic companies and banks without handing out a big stimulus.

But one does wonder about the sudden ballooning debt and the demographic issues.

The Singularity Gets Its Serving

Look, I'm actually a convert to Ray Kurzweil's Singularity vision. If you haven't heard about it by now, here he is doing a Ted talk explaining his diabolical thesis he came up with based on grabbing empirical evidence. People tell me it's fanciful but... I dunno, I have to hang my hat on something, so I choose to hang it on humanity and tech. :)
This is his talk from 2007. 

In the seven years since, we have Siri, we have Googleglass and the Apple watch, he's been pretty accurate. Just today a guy with a broken spine got up and walked and that was down right miraculous by scientific standards only 3years ago. 

People may laugh, but I get what he's saying about the accelerating curve. The cutting edge of tech is going places a lot faster than they ever have before. One would underestimate where things are going at one's own peril - and that is for better and for worse. 

Anyway, Pleiades thinks I'm a little too optimistic about all this, so he sent in this little crit. It's a pretty cool video.