Tag: life

Skill vs Technology: a zero-sum game?

Last week I came across two peculiar stories dedicated to the role played by technology in the evolution of the civil aviation industry. While the stories were barely related to each other at first glance – and had I come across them at different points in time I probably would have never spot that huge connection between them – but luckily I was still thinking about the first story when I bumped into the second one, and immediate realisation of the scale of the apparent trend made quite an impression on me.

That first story was about the role of technology in the crash of Air France transatlantic flight 447 back in 2009. The primary conclusion from the investigation that the article elaborates on is that the pilots were so got used to flying with assistance of the autopilot that they became completely lost when they faced the need to fly the aircraft manually. They’ve just got no understanding of the situation whatsoever, as they’ve lacked the hands-on feel for flying the aircraft at cruise altitudes – something normally handled by the autopilot. In addition to that, the autopilot, designed with intelligence and pilot-friendliness in mind, didn’t warn the pilots that the aircraft was approaching a complete stall, after interpreting the way-too-sharply plummeting speed as an indicator of a probable false alarm.

Confused and lost, the pilots applied several corrective actions to get the aircraft back on its course. Unfortunately, due to the pilots’ lack of situational awareness, those actions had become fatal. The A330 lost its airspeed and crashed into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board. Ironically, the investigation had shown that should the pilots not intervene in the situation, AF447 would have continued at its cruise altitude as it should even with its autopilot switched off.

The second story I read was on a far more positive side, depicting prospective transition of the London City airport air traffic control tower from the airfield itself to a small place called Swanwick, Hampshire, some 80 miles away. Specifically, twelve HD screens and a thick communication channel are going to be used to replace the existing watch tower, and are claimed to provide far better insight into aircraft landings and take-offs performed at the airport, as well as a number of augmented reality perks. The experience of LCY is then expected to be picked up by other airports around the country, effectively making air traffic control tower operations an outsourced business.

The fact that impressed me the most about these two articles was that they both, despite being barely related per se, are essentially telling us the same story, the story of skills typically attributed to humans being taken over by technology. It’s just that the first article tells us about the end of the story, while the second one is rather at the very beginning of it.

Just like such advances in technology as the glass cockpit and way-too-smart autopilots led to pilots losing their grip in manual flying, switching to augmented HD view of the runway will inevitably lead to air traffic control operators losing their basic skills, like tuning binoculars or assessing meteorological conditions by a dozen of nearly subconscious cues. The trained sharpness of their eyes, now supported by HD zoom, will most certainly diminish. Sooner or later, the operators will be unable to manage the runway efficiently without being assisted by the technology.

And this is the challenge we are going to face in the near future. The more human activities typically referred to as ‘acquired skills’ are going to be taken over by technology and automation, the less able we are going to be about those skills ourselves. If a muscle isn’t constantly trained, it wears off. If a musician stops playing regularly, she eventually loses her skill to improvise. If a cook doesn’t dedicate as much time to cooking, his food loses its character, despite cooked from the same quality ingredients and using the same proportions.

And that’s not necessarily bad. As the technology is inevitably making its way to our lives, taking over those of our skills which it can perform better than we do, there is no reason not to embrace it – but embrace thoughtfully, realising the consequences of us losing grip on them. Remember that we had lost a big deal of our skills to the past already. Your great-grandfather is very likely to had been particularly good in fox hunting, your grandad probably performed much better than you in fly fishing, and certainly a much wider proportion of population were capable in horse riding two centuries ago than it is today. Those skills had been taken away from us by technology and general obsolescence, but do we really need them today?

What we need though is to have a clear understanding of the consequences of sharing activities we got used to do with technology, and be prepared to observe a steep decline in the quality of our own respective hand skills as technology gradually takes them over. Understanding that problem alone and taking our imperfect human nature as it is will most certainly help us manage the risks around technological advances more efficiently.

(pictured: a prototype of the digital control room at NATS in Swanwick, credit: NATS)

Nowhere to hide. How technology is getting control over our private lives.

Last week Gizmodo published an entertaining story of a part-time sex worker Leila who found herself in distress after observing a few of her ‘secret life’ encounters among friend suggestions on her ‘public life’ Facebook account, despite doing her very best to keep the two identities apart. While Facebook is traditionally reluctant about revealing its friend candidates selection criteria (just as it is about nearly all its social algorithms), it is quite clear that the location service activated on her ‘public life’ phone played not the last role. Reports from many Facebook users suggest that random members of the public whom they met a few times on a train on their way to work often ended up on their suggested friends list. This research supports the point too.

This can hardly be referred to as something we didn’t come across before; everyone knows that services like Facebook collect our location information to ‘provide us with better user experience’, as everyone of us most certainly acknowledged after looking through the social network’s usage policy (just kiddin’ mate, of course no one in sound mind ever did that). However, Leila’s experience helped draw attention to the hidden implications of giving this powerful right to Facebook, and gave us a yet another reason to rethink the whole approach to our offline privacy. Indeed, every single connected person out there leaves an enormous trail of evidence. Twenty years ago each of us was a creeping pinhead-sized point on map. Today, we rather look like endlessly unwinding balls of yarn, with the escaping thread being our ever expanding online footprint. It is needless to say that it is very easy to get to the ball by following the thread, and it is very easy for someone to pull the whole thread up once they have caught the ball.

Clearly, the only way to stay incognito is to get rid of the thread. This can be harder than you might think at first, and switching the location service off might not be enough. A Nectar card you scanned at the petrol station in the morning, an Uber that takes you home after a night out, a YouTube video you watched through a Costa WiFi all give away your locations throughout the day without any assistance of the location service. No one can tell where this data travels further. Besides being used for sending you straightforward marketing materials or tailoring the price you pay for the service, it may easily be aggregated by third party businesses (just have another quick look through that usage policy) and then used for any imaginable purpose.

To get rid of your data trail, not only you need to disable the standard ‘senses’ of your phone (location, WiFi connectivity, camera and mic) to stop direct information collection. You should also walk through the list of your apps and assess each and every of them critically against their capabilities of distinguishing your identity from the others’. Typically this would mean that you have some form of an account with them. You never know what information about you and when an app may be collecting and accumulating in its knowledge base. Too many pieces of seemingly harmless or even anonymised details can be put together to establish identities of specific people with sufficient probability – just like it famously happened with NYC celebs’ taxi travels.

But that’s not it either, and the final aspect is a real toughie. The issue is that certain types of apps collect well enough information about us to make assumptions about our identities basing on surprisingly indirect facts. This is predominantly a capability of highly diversified collections of apps from the same vendor that offer a number of services of different kinds.

Suppose you plan to take your cat to a vet for the first time. You open Google search and look for any vets in your area. Once you are satisfied with your choice, you ring them up, arrange an appointment, and add a timed entry to your Google calendar. If Google is really lucky that day, you also use their Maps service to find out the best route to get there.

After a few days you’re off to the vet. Now, if you use one of the Google’s services anonymously or from your second phone over the vet’s WiFi network while waiting to be asked in, Google can make an assumption, basing on the knowledge they already hold about ‘known you’ (a selection of places you are likely to be at at this time and day, or even the exact place if you had used Maps), that this anonymous person is likely to be you. They may not be certain about it at first (meaning they would assign a lesser weight to this assumption and probably ignore it this time – while still keeping a note of it somewhere), but after one or two coincidences of this kind they will have evidence of sufficient weight to associate the anonymous surfer with your known identity. Neural networks are particularly good in tracing and aggregating large arrays of data to identify higher level relationships between seemingly unrelated facts.

This means that protecting your privacy is not an occasional or one-off activity, not something you can enable when you need protection and disable when you don’t. If you have reasons to split between two or more personalities – and sex workers are not the only or even the widest social group here; most of politicians and showbiz celebrities have very similar issues, – the task of keeping your privacy should become a strategy with clearly identified goals, conditions, and a well-defined process that fulfills and supports it.

And there’s definitely more to this to come. Wearables and IoT stuff, which are only making their first steps into the ‘big Internet crowd’ will add up to this world of glass heavily. The rise in data mining and neural networks will make it very simple to conduct high-quality automated research basing on indistinct and incomplete information very soon. So it’s a good moment to stop reading, go outside, look around, and breathe in the air of freedom without risking of being noticed by anyone – or anything. The chances are very high that your kids will only be dreaming of the times when privacy was achievable so easily.

(Picture credits: many thanks for the playing kittens to Stuart Rankin)