I’ve been a little too busy to pay close attention, but there has been a lot of chatter in the news and pseudo-news about Pokémon Go. The first thing I heard was that it is a new surveillance plot by the government. Anyone using the app would be tracked by government and they would know where you are and what you’re up to. I can’t really think of why they would be interested, but that’s okay. Maybe they could begin to detect some Big Data patterns that could help make new discoveries about mass social behavior. Who knows?
It turned out to also be a security threat, since it has access to information on your device. Most laughable, and somewhat disturbing, is that it seems to be causing all sorts of mishaps. A news reporter drifts across the TV screen looking for little beasts, disrupting a weather report. There have been car accidents due to people playing the game.
That said, Pokémon Go seems like a pretty ingenious toy. It involves searching for imaginary beasties that are virtually positioned into GPS locations. They can be anywhere, and your job as a player is to go out and find them and to put the critters in the little balls on your screen. It has some of the qualities of games like Geocaching, which sends you out looking for various objects (real objects, not virtual) hidden by other players, but it is a Pokémon game, and anyone who has kids into Pokémon will realize the gravitas of that alone. One of the major pluses of games like Pokémon Go is that it gets kids (or any players) off the sofa, and out into the world (though a partially fabricated world imposed on the actual). Nintendo has done well, and should make out exceptionally well with this product.
I hesitate to say that Pokémon Go adds to the overall quality of life. Like all smartphone games it’s more of a distraction that anything else. One may be better off just going for a walk and looking at things that really exist in materiality. After all, if you wander around with your eyes and your mind open, you can never tell what you might see. It’s true that games like PG and Geocaching actually get people out by creating a context and agenda to their doing so, but people can make their own choices, unprompted by games and other commercial mechanizations. That’s what personal freedom is, I always thought. I would say that the game is neutral in that it sums up to about zero in regard to overall benefit to the planet, when all the pluses and minuses are added together. Sure, it will make some money, but that money will likely not be distributed efficiently.
I think about stuff like this often. I have had my own ideas about applications to develop, new ways of doing and streamlining things, but most of them didn’t really seem to be worth much in the long run, except maybe as possible methods of prospering personal gain, and the idea of benefitting without adding value has never sat with me easy.
The possibilities used to seem different. I remember when I was a child, we were told stories about how things would one day be automated to the point where we wouldn’t have to work, or we would have to work vastly fewer hours, and we would have more time to educate ourselves, move our bodies, make love, music, what have you, but what has happened instead is we have to a large degree automated ourselves out of jobs.
I worked supporting a securities finance sales desk, and we were one of the early adopters of automated borrowing and lending of securities. It was great, instead of spending 45 minutes on the phone typing requests into a computer terminal, the systems themselves could commucate and book the loans and borrows in a few seconds. I still had things to do, and eventually I got involved in the development side, since automating and streamlining processes like that seemed to be where the real value was.
But was it? Securities lending traders, even though their balances are far greater than they previously were, are making less money, and today there are fewer opportunities.
One of the selling points for our current implementations is to promise a higher return per body count, and that means by providing technology that will allow business to expand without hiring more people, or to allow for the elimination of staff. This can be a great benefit to a business on a one-by-one basis, but the trend is somewhat disturbing. In the US, especially, we have an ethic that equates personal value to hours worked (more so than value produced, it seems). If the net result of my work over the past few decades has been to eliminate jobs, then I end up being one of the people who is enabling people to go on government aid, not so much on a person-by-person basis, but systemically over time.
I would love things to be different. I would love to be eliminating jobs if that meant people could go on educating themselves, spending more valuable time with their families, or making love, art and music, but economic constraints the way they are don’t allow for that, and it may take forever for social and political values to catch up with the world that is happening around them. I don’t have a solution, beyond my typical hopeful dreaming.
But I will begin to ask myself in each case whether the automation I am working on really makes sense, and whether it benefits the whole, or is simply another one-off. I may not often have much impact, but perhaps hidden among all the minutiae of decisions and layers of detail there will be opportunities to create real value. What that might look like, I don’t know, but it seems like a good place to begin to attempt to make to difference.