Future Tense

Future Tense Newsletter: Human Supervision Required

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Human and robot shaking hands

muratsenel/thinkstock.com

Greetings, Future Tensers,

You will read no more harrowing and hilarious testament to the state of our times this week than this interview with a woman whose robot vacuum spread dog poop all over her home. It’s a silly story, but it’s also one that conveys an important reminder: Most robots still need a supervision, a lesson that Uber has already internalized: It’s releasing self-driving cars that somehow also have two human drivers onto the streets of Pittsburgh. In some situations, though, finding the right people to loop in can be tricky: It might, for example, be a bad idea to have Reddit commenters help teach a computer to talk.

At a more mundane level, that need for human involvement speaks to why the new game No Man’s Sky, with its quintillions of algorithmically generated planets, turns out to be often dull—except when it’s sublime. Even when computers do manage to make intriguing things on their own, it’s not always clear how we should understand them. Indeed, copyright law still applies ambiguously to computer-generated artwork, partly because our existing standards and norms are built around the assumption of human authorship.

Here are some of the other stories we read while rethinking the strength of our passwords:

  • Cyberwar: The recent NSA data breach presents a number of enigmas, not least of which is what the hackers were actually seeking to do.
  • Free speech: Trying to apply First Amendment guidelines to online spaces is a mistake, Kate Klonick argues. We should be thinking in terms of norms and platform governance instead.
  • Surveillance: If you want to understand racially biased policing more fully, you have to look at the technologies authorities use to monitor the populace.
  • Cyber history: In 1991, when a Russian coup attempt shut down many conventional communications channels, the internet helped spread information throughout the embattled country.

Accelerating,

Jacob Brogan

for Future Tense