Cyborg Anthropology

Amber Case is the orig­i­nal Cyborg Anthro­pol­o­gist. The­se are my some­what dis­joint­ed notes from a great talk.

Ambi­ent loca­tion and the future of the inter­face.

From solid to liq­uid to air: how we change state — but­tons on the phone are liq­uid, not physical.How do they become air?

An anthro­pol­o­gist would look at our phones and think they were babies. We have devices in our pock­et that cry and we need to pick them up and set­tle them down.
You need to feed them and put them to sleep at night.

We are 60,000 peo­ple in this room if you count the peo­ple we bring in with our con­tact lists.

You can add new con­tacts to your phone and it doesn’t get heav­ier. Print out all the doc­u­ments and images files on your phone? It weighs 2,000 pounds. 

Amber print­ed her Face­book wall on„, a wall. one mon­th worth of data cov­ered an exhi­bi­tion sized room.

Ethe­re­al stor­age is ephemer­al. Stone carv­ing is the most robust archival sys­tem we’ve found.

We are per­sis­tent pale­on­tol­o­gists, dig­ging into our email archives to find rem­nants of the past. 

Nick Rodrigues, Email Gar­den: fake grass grew at the rate he receive email. 

Tech­nol­o­gy and its dis­con­tents. It makes you look bad. We have super­hu­man pow­ers. We can click a but­ton and lis­ten to what’s hap­pen­ing on the oth­er side of the world. 

Cell phones: the new cig­a­rettes. Bus Stop? Phone comes out the way smokes used to. 

Steve Mann: Wore 80 pounds of equip­ment in 1981 and live streamed his life. You become inhu­man when you assume the posi­tion of typ­ing at a lap­top, scrunched down, shoul­ders slumped — he want­ed the tech­nol­o­gy to adapt to HIM, not the oth­er way around. Over course of two decades gear start­ed at 80 pounds then 40, then 20, then 10. Now it’s all in a head­set that does a laser pro­jec­tion onto his eye.

Dimin­ished real­i­ty: cam­era over one eye, pro­cess­ing loop around the back of his head, broad­cast cam­era in the oth­er eye. He can get aug­ment­ed real­i­ty mes­sages from wife mon­i­tor­ing the feed. He can erase brands from his image that he doesn’t want to see. 

Used one hand­ed twid­dler key­board to write, up to 90w­pm.

He edits Wikiepe­dia arti­cles when wait­ing for green at cross­walks.

Skeu­morphs: old tech sim­u­lat­ed in new tech — book read­ing apps that give you a crum­pling ani­ma­tion when you pag­i­nate. She real­ly real­ly hates this. Real­ly.

Kel­ly Dob­son: why do we teach machi­nes our lan­guage — let’s learn theirs. Build a blender you turn on by whirring at it. (Dan­ger: what if you have a dog??)

“Calm Tech­no­ogy” This just works, I get on with my life. Your actions become but­tons. Invis­i­ble inter­faces, trig­ger based inter­ac­tions.

Hap­tic Loca­tion: wear a belt that buzzes your skin every few sec­onds locat­ing North rel­a­tive to your body. 

Inven­tor wore it on his bike and dis­cov­ered he had a six­th sense. He always knew where is house was. He knew how far he was. Why use vision for map and direc­tion — should be com­pressed into anoth­er sense inter­face.

Your phone will be a remote con­trol for real­i­ty. Put a geofence around your home, lights come on when you cross it. Tell your house you’ll be home in 5 min­utes. Put a geofence at your bus stop, tell your phone to wake you up when you get there.