Kevin SlavinI’ve lived my whole life in New York City, so I’ve always been obsessed with why things are the way they are in New York. What’s interesting is that when you trace them, most of the reasons were generally around the needs of people and the stuff they did, like move crates from ships, or take trolleys. But if you look at how a lot of things are being shaped now, the criteria have nothing to do with humans. That’s weird.
I think about this every time I go to the airport. I check in on my phone, and it produces a code, and I go to the airport and hold up something that’s designed for a machine to scan, and that’s my ticket. At the same time, I’m presenting information to a person, to prove that I’m me, and really, they have a list of everyone who should be on the airplane. So what am I really doing? I’m transferring like eight bits of data on a screen, carrying it from my home to another place, so a computer can authenticate a connection. It’s like a sneakernet approach. It’s helping a computer speak to a computer; you’re just the messenger.
My concern is not that the machines are going to become so smart. My concern is that they’re actually kind of dumb, and they require us to accommodate them. And that we do.
