What Are We Learning For?

This week was a fun week in the House O' Schmoid.  One of the Middle School Daughter Unit's teachers sent home an email that she was getting dangerously behind on a project.  I would not have freaked out too much if this had been the first time, but sadly... no.  This led to a series of conversations with teachers and grandparents and ex-wives and... eventually with the MSD herself.  Everyone agreed with the importance of education and learning how to learn.  Even the MSD.  Of course, after 'adulting', I spent some time thinking about what kinds of expectations I was setting up for her.

All I Wanted Was a Pepsi

We've all heard the 'what are you going to do with your life' speeches from various parents and counselors and therapists and institutional learning facilities.  That all of what we learn in school is going to be useful later when we have to earn a living.  And even the stuff that seems useless (the Pythagorean theorem is the usual whipping boy, but I've actually used that a few times a year), is useful in what it teaches around problem solving and the creation of good study habits.  And I certainly did my part to land all of that with the MSD.  But, in the face of mass automation of the work force and the potential of a 'post-work' society, are all of those worn parental speeches still valid?

I wrote about some of this last week around the context of the Superb Owl and concluded that highly specialized entertainment skills like those used in American Football might be safe from automation.  However, I was unable to come to any conclusion for the rest of us more average human specimen.  And then I see stuff like:

with its spacial awareness and fast reflexes and extra articulation and I start to wonder exactly what reasons can be fed to a twelve-year old that are truthful motivations.

What Jobs of the Future?

Higher level thinking jobs are turning out to be some of the first to go.  Watson is doing a better job diagnosing cancers than 'real' doctors.  And it's not the only one.  Banks are using bots to help with personal finance and to stop fraud, taking out both customer service and law enforcement with one set of automation.  That's on top of the heavy automation going into factory and menial service jobs.

(courtesy Fastcompany.com)

Going a step farther and looking at some of the jobs that are projected to be hot in ten years, and most of those are already well on their way to being automated.  Small plot farm bots exist.  Medicine at all levels, from nurse to surgeon to researcher, is quickly getting automated because it minimizes mistakes.  Even 'sex worker coach' is being replaced by waifu pillows and ubiquitous internet porn.

One Word: Repair

As a parent, it is hard to make a serious argument for focused life direction.  I've considered recommending that she finish high school and not go to college, but go to a trade school.  Something like plumbing or carpentry or becoming an electrician.  While there is a lot of automation going on in those fields as well, most of it is in new construction.  Not repair.  All of the pipes and wires and boards in our homes and offices will break.  And they will break in such a way that an automated, task specific contraption will not be able to fix it.  Or at least not at the same price as one of the hoards of out-of-work laborers.

Of course, those jobs are not sexy.  They don't have the panache of an athlete or movie star or Wall Street type (or internet blogger).  They are so not sexy that there is already a shortage in the skilled trades.  Which just means that those that can will charge more.  Thanks, Invisible Hand.

With all of that said, telling a pre-teen girl who is into drawing and guitar and wearing fedoras that she should be an electrician was not something I dropped into the 'get your work done' conversation.  Even those jobs (maybe, especially those jobs) require the critical thinking, planning and attention to detail that school work is supposed to help teach.

If it's properly funded and attracts the right teachers... but we won't need to worry about that because the teachers will all be Test Bots, Amazon Alexa and YouTube videos.

And with that, I'll head back to 'adulting'.

Web Parenting

Last week, I spent some time discussing whether or not the techno-corps (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, et al) were trustworthy.  The short answer is that I trust them to do what they say they are going to do in their Terms and Conditions.  I do not trust them to protect my personal information because 1) they can be forced to reveal that information by my government and 2) there is no such thing as a perfect defense against hacking.

But that's not the end of my thoughts on this topic because I am a parent.  My Middle School Daughter (the MSD that has been missing from several months of these posts) is swimming in these technical waters as well.  Teaching her how to navigate them is my responsibility, one that is almost more difficult to explain than why we have to say "Please" when we ask for things (instead of "Boop" or "NOW!").

Always Google

Keep in mind that she has never known a world without Google.  Knowledge is no more than an "Okay, Google" away.  Encyclopedias and research libraries are foreign to her.  She has had a presence on Facebook almost since before she was born thanks to her mother, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and me.  She's had no control or consent to these social media postings, but she also does not complain about them.  At least, not yet.

The point is that on-line is part of where she lives.  It's not the only place she lives but it is a part.  She hangs out with her friends on Hangouts.  She posts her artwork on Instagram.  She comments (endlessly) on YouTube.  She has three email accounts.  (But not Google+: "Nobody uses that, Dad!" eye-roll)

Technical Parenting

Most other parents that I know tend to restrict their children's use of technology: smartphones, tablets, the Internet.  The feeling is that kids need to spend time in reality, facing the physical world and its challenges.  And there is certainly some truth to this: the only way we all learn to roll with the punches is to by having survived a few punches.

However, the punches are no longer only physical punches.  Where is she going to learn how to deal with phishing scams?  Cyberbullies?  Nigerian Emails?  Not by avoiding them but by encountering them and asking questions.   Usually of me.  That is behavior that I want to encourage.

If I restrict her use of technology because of what might happen, then I teach her that technology is to be feared, or, worse yet, that it is forbidden fruit that must be used in secret.  Then she will not ask me questions about it because she will be afraid of being caught.

Instead, I am her technical support.  It's a role that I sometimes enjoy, sometimes dread, but at least it creates a habit of coming to Dad to get help.  I ultimately want her to be able to answer her own questions around technology, but for the moment this is a better solution.

Cyber Boundaries

Understand that I do not agree with all of the choices that she makes in her use of technology.  She feels entitled to comment on everything on YouTube, something that I do not do because I do not want to start a flame war.  But all of her comments get forwarded to my email thanks to Gmail auto-forwarding.  On top of that, the content that she consumes is not interesting to me, but she wants to share it with my and so I make the effort.

And there are boundaries.  Her Instagram account is private and I know who she has allowed to view it.  I follow her and know what she posts.  If she kicks me out, then the account goes away.  I know the channels to which she has subscribed on YouTube; I don't watch every video, but I know the general tone of each channel.  Some of them use swear words, but instead of restricting them, we have talked about it.  If she starts using those words in casual conversation, then she knows that the phone will go away for a while.

Features not People

The bottom line is that my daughter needs to learn to live in both the real world and this on-line world.  It has always been a part of her life and it always will be.  Both have rules of behavior and conduct, but she is not going to learn them by avoiding either of these worlds.  I certainly do not want Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook or Amazon raising my child.  Fortunately, by being her technical support, I can help her understand that these companies are features of the on-line landscape, not people who can be trusted.

Will this apporach always work?  No, but it seems to be working for now.  When it stops, I'll have to change how I parent the internet.  But change is nothing new; it's what technology is all about.

What I Will Do As Vice President

I've watched enough episodes of "Veep" (0.5) to know that the job is mostly cocktail parties where people try to peddle influence.  I've watched enough episodes of "West Wing" (all of them) and "House of Cards" (all of them so far) to know that there is more to the job: glad handing foreign dignitaries when the real President doesn't have time, playing bad cop with Capital Hill and pushing secondary agenda items for the party.

Pokemon Reality

The last two weeks have reminded me that I'm old and I blame Pokemon Go.  I'm a half-generation too old even to approach it as a nostalgia item.  Also, the MSD (Middle School Daughter, for those of you that had forgotten) is too tied up in UnderTale and listening to 8-bit soundtracks to care about Pikachu and friends.  No, my generation got Garbage Pail Kids and ain't no one making a phone game out of those.

(Source: Geekyrant.com)

So, I'm old because I don't want to go chasing around the southwestern american desert in the summer racking up data charges looking for virtual cockfighting contestants.  Instead, I want to look at the whole phenomenon as the first real use of Augmented Reality in a marketing campaign.

Moby Schmoid

Book Review Time

I want to depart from the basic tech commentary for a week and discuss a different aspect of technology and that's art of making a living in the tech space.

I was recently sent this NYT review by my mother (thanks, Mom.  I think).  From that, I bought Disrupted and read it over the course of a month.  It should not have taken me that long because it is not a long book or a difficult read, but I had to put it down a few times.  I'm not really going to review the book as a piece of literature (or not much), but I do want to talk about how HARD IT HIT ME.

Wearable Reality

One Too Many Hands

This week, instead of bagging on the state of home automation technology, I thought I'd step out into the realm of speculation.  Specifically, the future intersection of wearables and augmented reality.

That these two technologies, one emerged and the other emerging, have anything in common may seem either really obvious or not.  On the one hand, augmented reality will require a headset or glasses or contacts or something worn over the eyes (at least in the near future).  And that something will need to be connected, defining it as a 'wearable'.

On the other hand, the end goal of augmented reality is to create a seamless bridge between actual reality and the augmentations.  The headset/glasses/contacts need to disappear from the user's perceptions as much as possible allowing them to get lost in the experience.  The augmented reality that people at Microsoft and elsewhere are talking about is that experience, not the hardware.  Think of it like a Hollywood movie: we are excited for the story, not the projector.  The same holds true with AR: end users need to be focusing on the new capabilities and not how they are created (unless the creation tool limits those capabilities).

But what I really want to discuss is a third way (hand?) of looking at AR which may make it the ultimate wearable.  If we are using AR to define our reality and to share this redefinition with others who are also augmenting theirs, why not define our clothing, our look, our style through AR?

How Smart Are Things?

Oof, My Backend Hurts

Two items came to my attention this week regarding SmartThings:

• Some of the developer community picked up their toys and went home.  This appears to be in response to an increasing level of stability issues since Samsung took over SmartThings nearly two years ago.  I tweeted about this and got a nearly immediate response from the SmartThings twitter account.  Here's some more context.
• SmartThings published an apology/here's-what-we're-doing letter to their customer base, followed a few days later by another one.

I use SmartThings.  I've been a fan of their product since just before Samsung took them on and have visited with them at CES2015.  I think that, as a whole, the company's direction is the right way to go.  This stems from two things:

1. They are committed (still, maybe despite Samsung) to including as many other smarthome products into their ecosystem as will agree to work with them.
2. They have fostered a rich developer community that was (and, despite some vocal few, still is) working to expand their products' capabilities well beyond anything originally intended.

Some history

I started into the smarthome space because of NewEgg.  They had a deal on some WeMo wall switches and I bought a bunch.  I have enough electrical knowledge to install these without too much trouble.  And they worked great... for turning my lights on and off from my phone.  And that's where I ran into issues.  Like most smarthome enthusiasts, as soon as I started connecting things, I wanted them to do things on their own, to respond to changes in my home and not wait for me to tell them what to do.  Belkin's WeMo app has some of this: scheduling lights on and off, responding to motion sensors, etc.  

But there are limits to the official Belkin app's capabilities: no geofencing, no ability to respond to multiple conditions (if this AND this, then that), no ability to use one switch to control multiple lights in through the virtual realm.  Finally, despite the switches being full 802.11g devices, connected to the same router that my phone is connected to, the system still required that all commands go out to and then back from the Belkin cloud.  Security issues aside, this also significantly decreased their response time. (And no 3-way switch solution.  I'm slowly replacing the Wemo switches with Z-Wave as my paychecks allow).

One work around for all of this is the Android app WemoManager by MPP that sets up a local server on your phone or tablet that replaces the Belkin cloud.  It also adds all of the capabilities that I was looking for.  So, problem solved... until I started looking beyond the light.

I added a Nest thermostat.  Great.  Then some web cams.  Easy, peasy.  Then the garage door with a cobbled together Raspberry Pi relay system.  More complex, but fun to get into the guts a bit.

Installing all of this was great.  Using it was not.  I had separate apps, web pages and widgets to control it all.  I knew how to control it all, but it was a bit of a mess.  This point was brought home when I tried to install it all on the Middle School Daughter's phone (received at age 11 and then taken away anytime she pays more attention to it than to me or her homework).  She looked at all of the bits and pieces and gave me a "What-evs, Dad."

Enter SmartThings

Then, as if some God of User Interface heard my daughter's cry (maybe the spilled seed of Hephaestus?), SmartThings appears with their talk of inclusion for both manufacturers and hobbyists but geared towards the more casual user.  It sounded perfect.  I bought hub v1.  Then hub v2 a year later.

And it does work.  Mostly.  The Belkin Wemo switches don't adhere to the SmartThings "Smart Lighting" SmartApp consistently, but I am willing to believe that more of that rested on Belkin's shoulders than on SmartThings because the Z-Wave switches I've since installed are flawless.  The whole system will go down at odd hours, usually late at night, and then come back up ten minutes later, buzzing my phone both times.  Finally, there is still a cloud component that concerns me, especially as I've removed the Raspberry Pi garage door system and replaced it with a Z-Wave relay that works through SmartThings.

What's an Early-ish Adopter to do?

SmartThings remains the best all around, all "things", family friendly solution available on the market.  I just wish that was saying more.  The bar has not been set very high by any other single hub ecosystem currently available.  Many of the less inclusive products like the Philips Hue work more consistently, but they are also more limited in their applications.

So, for now, I'm sticking with SmartThings.  But I'm also keeping my eye out for something with better support, a better community and a better interface.  It may not be far off.

VR in IRL

And here I am...

This week, Sony announced their VR headset for the PS4 for $399 (sort of).  With the HTC Vive on Steam and the Oculus Rift (oh, and the Samsung Gear VR), there are now a growing number of ways for people to truly immerse themselves in alternative realities.

But... but... what's the point?  Not that this stuff isn't entertaining.  It will be.  Not that there isn't a lot of money to be made in hardware and (even more) in content.  There is.  But how will this affect how we live our lives... in non-virtual reality?

... imprinting on my couch.

There are a few obvious answers that I'll list here just to get them out of the way:

• Couch potato-ness will increase.  Duh.
• Invest in catheter futures.  Bathrooms don't work in VR.
• Invest in pizza robots.  Food doesn't nourish in VR.
• Porn.  Lots of porn.

But what else? Is there anything useful in all of this or is it just for entertainment?  To answer this, I asked my local expert: my Middle-School Daughter (MSD).

Schmoid:  Hey.

MSD:  What?

Schmoid:  How do you see VR helmets being actually useful?

MSD:  Huhn?  Why are you asking me?  You're the one that's supposed to be the tech expert.

Schmoid:  Because I want to see what the next generation thinks they will be doing with this stuff.

MSD:  What evs. [pause while she gets over how weird her dad is]  I guess they would be entertaining.  I could feel like I'm actually in Minecraft.

Schmoid:  Fine, but how is that useful?

MSD:  Because it's awesome.

Schmoid: [giving up on an unwinnable argument] What about school, then?  What if you went to school online and it felt like a classroom?  Would that be useful?  All you'd need to do was get out of bed in the morning and throw a helmet on.

MSD:  Maybe, I guess.  But what about lunch?

Schmoid:  You'd take the helmet off and eat.

MSD:  Dad!  That's not what I meant.  What about talking with my friends?

Schmoid:  You guys would just open another chat and meet for lunch.  Still virtually.

MSD:  And PE?  It would be really awesome if I didn't have to go to PE.

Schmoid:  I'm sure that there would be some form of exercise that you would still have to do.

MSD:  Then... meh.  It would still be school.  But it would be cool if I got an extra hour of sleep.

The One Percent Life

It was from that conversation that I figured out what VR will ultimately do to our actual reality lives.  Those that can afford it will be able to work and collaborate more easily with others that are also VR enabled.

Virtual schools will be able to automate attendance and have all students in a class answer every question asked without having to put one student on the spot.  Grading will be managed by expert systems, asking help from the teacher only on ambiguous input.

For the workplace, cubical farms will become a thing of the past.  Or not as they will be virtual cubical farms where a supervisor will still be able to look out over their floor and know who is doing what.  Meetings can meaningfully involve people from around the globe, unlike the teleconferencing of today.

Trade shows.  My god, trade shows.  No more tired feet and scrambling to hit all of the booths and wait in line to see the latest thing or meet the 'it' person.  And the booths would no longer be bound by the laws of physics.

The worlds of Gibson and Stephenson and The Wachowski siblings (and Ernest Cline because it's hard not to love Ready Player One... oh, and Tad Williams' Otherland books) would all be ours to have.

They why would we ever need to leave the comfort of our homes?  Because there are jobs that support the infrastructure of the suburban VR warrior clan that need to be done in reality: garbage collection, electrical grid maintenance, food preparation, cleaning services, construction, assembly, etc.  Basically, all of the service and support level jobs that are considered blue collar.

Education will be separated into those that can attend the virtual classrooms with their richer experience and those that will still attend an IRL school with their fellow lower income bracketeers.  Work will be segregated into the stay-at-home white collar VR manager and the service workers ensuring that an all-beef patty is available at a moments notice.

The Cake is a Lie

Will this actually happen?  Some of it.  I'm guessing that cubical farms and trade shows will continue to exist in real life, though there may be virtual components to them.  Some schools and meetings will go full VR, but there will always be something lost in the uncanny valley of facial nuance translation that will continue to give face-to-face a premium.

Instead, what VR will do is what all new technology does: emphasize and accelerate many of the details of our existing lives.  Think social media: Facebook did not change the world, but it did allow us to share our worlds with a wider audience.  Smart phones did not change the world, they just let us say the same things we've always been saying to more people in more ways.  VR will do the same.

What will be interesting is which details it ends up emphasizing.