#14: Interactive plants | Web non-privacy | Asimov on creativity
art | science | digital culture | design | creativity | words | tech
science | design | tech
Plants that sense, move, and measure
What is a world like in which plants don’t just sit, grow, photosynthesise, and generally keep us alive?
I’ve had students in the past play with the idea of making plants touch sensitive so that they act as a button or switch in a simple fashion but the state of the art is much more advanced. One of the leading groups in the field is the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, which has a Cyborg Botany project.
Their goal is to
…merge and power our electronic functionalities with existing biological functions of living plants.
They produced a nice video that describes what they are doing (see it below). It shows how they they turn a plant into a sensor, how it can inconspicuously detect motion, remotely observe and activate the closing of a Venus Flytrap, and then they imagine a bunch of possible future ways to integrate plants into our interactive environments.
This kind of works make me think about future steps for the work Zach and I are doing with novel ways of growing plant-like things. (I previously wrote about some of those experiments here and here.) For example, when we 3D print our living structures, can we also integrate sensors and actuators, actually embedded in them to create a cyborg plant from creation rather than as an augmentation?
digital culture | tech
Creeping privacy intrusions on the Web
We’ve all seen those “I’m not robot” boxes on websites that ask us to click them to prove we’re human.
Other versions ask us to type in an obscured word or click every box that has a cat or car or traffic light in it. The latter aren’t always trivial and it’s easy to miss something and have to try again.
They are all version of the reCAPTCHA system. (CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.) The system is incredibly intricate and the technology changes often to avoid spammers and malicious actors who want to reverse engineer the system and figure out how to automate the process, seeming to be human without being human. (Other bad actors just pay “farmers” very little money to sit and click these things all day.)
One of the mechanisms of the “I’m not a robot” technique seems to be observing micromovements of a mouse or other signifiers of the less-than-precise motions humans make.
However, Google considers the slight inconvenience of occasionally failing a reCAPTCHA too much to ask of users. It can be annoying, true, but what have they implemented instead?
reCAPTCHA version 3, recently released, doesn’t even appear to be there at all. It is completely invisible to the users (except potentially for a very small hard-to-notice logo in the corner of the window). The system performs a risk assessment and if the risk is considered high can ask for additional tests of humanity. (Well, testing human-like behaviour—Google doesn’t yet seem to be able to test for being humane or benevolent, a far more useful tool.)
One part of how the new version works is to check whether you have a Google account that you are logged into and checking for the cookies stored on your computer. If you don’t have an account, you are deemed higher risk and might have to face additional tests. That creates a subtle encouragement toward having and using Google accounts, which is great for Google but then allows them to collect more data on us.
Website administrators are encouraged to embed the version 3 code in all pages on their sites so that the system can learn more about behaviours. But that also means our behaviours are being tracked in intricate detail. What will Google do with that data? We don’t know because they won’t say.
It’s one example of how we buy convenience by giving up privacy, and it keeps creeping up on us, usually invisibly.
Another example of this came to light in the past week. Now that Skype is becoming almost unusable in many cases (ever since Microsoft decided to buy it and “improve” it), more people are using the rival service Zoom.
Activating a Zoom video chat from a website or email link on a Mac often requires you to click on that link and then click again to activate the Zoom app on your computer. Zoom, in it’s wisdom, decided that having to click twice instead of once was a deal-breaking inconvenience. Their solution: install a web server on your computer that runs in the background always looking for those clicks to start sessions. Now you only have to click once and your life is easier than you could have imagined.
You know there’s a downside coming, right? The downside is that that web server can be activated by all kinds of malicious actors. For example, simply visiting a website with the right code on it can activate your camera and begin watching you, without alerting you to the fact. And this happens even when you’ve finished your Zoom session. If Zoom finds you have managed to disable the web server on your computer, it just starts it up again.
One security tester built a webpage that automatically connected everybody who visited it to the same big video chat session without any of the people having to agree to it.
There is a workaround but it’s technical, prevents Zoom from working at all, and is well beyond the capabilities of most users.
What do we do? My solution is to implement a hack that prevents Zoom from operating at all, then reversing the hack when I need to have a Zoom session, and then reimplementing the hack. That is not a solution available to most people.
The decision on how to handle a situation like this is an individual one but those of us in privileged positions do have a choice. Many people don’t even get the choice because of the real necessities of privacy. That locks off significant functionality of the internet for many people.
With technology like this, it’s no wonder that Mark Zuckerberg, who probably knows more about privacy violations than most, keeps a little sticker over his computer camera.
creativity
“How do people get new ideas?”
About 12 years ago, I was considering the state of the magazine I was running and brought my team together from around the United States to one location to spend a few days working through the future. On the first day, we had a brainstorming session to generate some wild ideas to really push where we could go and then come back to reality having explored the potentials. We talked about this process up front so we would all have the same expectations.
Quite early, one member of the team put out an idea that clearly wouldn’t happen but was really interesting because it pushed in a new direction. To me that seemed a great contribution and I was excited about where it could lead us. Unfortunately, somebody present who had a considerable amount of power and seniority shut the idea down instantly saying it was ridiculous and a waste of time to even be thinking about such things.
My heart sank as I realised that one response completely sabotaged the entire session, and potentially the point of the retreat. It’s one reason (of many) why I don’t like and no longer use brainstorming sessions. There were other factors at play here, of course. I felt it was essentially necessary to just abandon the session and move on to do something else. Nothing was going to come from it when people would be scared to actually voice interesting ideas.
Why tell this story? It came to mind when reading a 1959 essay by Isaac Asimov about creativity. It was recently re-published in Technology Review. These paragraphs triggered the memory:
“But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.
“If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.”
The following lines also struck home and is consistent with the kind of feeling I try to achieve when I run creative ideation sessions with my students:
For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in the essay and it still feels very relevant despite some of the outdated language. Worth reading.