I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember.

It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.)

This seems absurd.

I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey.

Like:

• Frozen 2 in which the entire city is almost destroyed by a tidal wave
• the recent Superman movie in which the city actually is destroyed, and although it is reconstructed we never hear about the people crushed by debris etc.

Superman is rated PG-13 in the US, 12A in the UK. There’s off-screen loss of life but on-screen is widespread in movies: death with barely any emotional weight.

(a) I’m sure this lack of emotional weight in existential jeopardy is harmful to us.

(b) I’m sure that existential jeopardy in movies is getting more frequent; jeopardy inflation if you like.

(c) It is SO LAZY.

Look at Ferris Bueller: the jeopardy is a car with too many miles on the clock, and Ferris running to get home in time. My kid was on the edge of her seat.

But it takes effort and careful storytelling to set up jeopardy like this. We have to understand Cameron and his relationships and the car’s place in those, and we have to care about Cameron, and we have to feel the stakes, and the ominous arrival of the knowledge… If you were dropped into the movie 20 minutes from the end, you wouldn’t have that setup, it wouldn’t matter.

WHEREAS: death is death, its weight is universal.

So I can see how it flies through production meetings of hurried people. It’s an easy yes.

I am aware this smacks a bit of “oh films were different in my day, you didn’t need all this cursing and violence”…

So I checked.

(This is the joy of AI, you can cross-check your whims.)

I got ChatGPT to develop a jeopardy scoring methodology and here’s what it came up with, from low to high:

1 – Personal or social: embarrassment, exposure, rejection, career failure, losing a competition

2 – Family or bounded community: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

3 – Mortal but local: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

4 – Collective catastrophe: mass death; destruction or subjugation of a city, nation, population or people

5 – Existential catastrophe: extinction, civilisation, planet, universe, timeline or reality

So Ferris Bueller would be a “1” whereas Frozen 2 would be a “4.”

Then I got it to look up the top 10 films at the box office in north American each year for the last 50 years.

Then score all 500 films according to the main narrative jeopardy. (I assumed that knowledge would be in the training data seeing as these are popular movies.)

If you’re interested, download the movie jeopardy spreadsheet here (xlsx).

Finally I got ChatGPT to calculate the average per decade.

Here’s the results in the format:

Period: average jeopardy score (% low jeopardy movies – % high jeopardy movies)

• 1976-79: 2.77 (43% low – 35% high)
• 1980s: 2.83 (43% low – 31% high)
• 1990s: 3.21 (28% – 46% high)
• 2000s: 3.61 (24% low – 60% high)
• 2010s: 3.96 (10% low – 72% high)
• 2020-2025: 4.08 (7% low – 73% high)

i.e. I am not imagining this.

There has been considerable jeopardy inflation in movies between the 1980s and today.

So I think this is harmful to us all.

Death, as it is used in these movies, is not jeopardy but a symbol of jeopardy. That’s part of it being used lazily.

But we should put MASSIVE weight on death and calamity!

Because it’s a big deal! Especially violent death and collective danger.

And when we don’t give it weight, it gets assumed as part of the normal order of things. Which it is not.

One argument is: look Matt, these are cartoon deaths. It’s a superhero movie, it’s fantasy, it doesn’t matter, we know how to look past the lack of weight.

But all video are merely patterns of light on the screen; I don’t think we get to say that one matters more than another; they all occupy the exact same level of “remove” in our minds, and it all matters the same.

If something deserves weight when we see it on the TV news, it deserves weight when we see it in a movie.

Or else we carry the lack of weight when we see it in movies over to the TV news, and then it carries over to the real people depicted.

I always wonder what creates the consensus cosmogony for an era – our collective understanding of how the world works and in particular where we are going.

It was sci-fi in the 1950s (that’s the argument in the link above).

Now I would argue that we have identified at least a tributary of the 2020s consensus:

When we are all exposed to media that normalises death and mass threat, there is something in the psyche that kicks in: when something built into your sense of reality isn’t happening, you work to make it happen.

Am I saying that we are deliberately, collectively creating situations of mass threat and emotionless jeopardy, because we see it in the movies and it isn’t happening as much in real life?

Yes. Unconsciously but yes.

So we need to find new collective futures, I’ve talked about that before. That’s a big lift, it takes a long time to figure out.

But I would start by giving the events in movies the weight they deserve, so they don’t get normalised. We’d all be happier for it.

And that means I would start with the ratings systems.

Ferris Bueller, for all the cursing and kissing, is a movie for kids, give it a G.

Frozen 2 should be rated R.

More posts tagged: inner-and-outer-realities (7).

I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI?

Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI.

But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.

And while a voice UI is great within a domain, do you really want to be gossiping about movies or having a psychotherapy session with your fridge? I mean, at that point what even is a product?

i.e. how would you have a single purpose Alexa?

So I’ve been spelunking Technovelgy for things that speak but only in a limited domain.

(Technovelgy is a database of over 4,000 inventions from sci-fi.)

Like this ATM that discourages long convos:

He headed for the ATM in the back… he knew it was watching him as he walked up to it.

“Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice … probably kept people from standing around, [talking] with it…

– All Tomorrow’s Parties, William Gibson, Lucky Dragon ATM

You can’t imagine this smug door talking about anything else except its fee. It would accuse you of changing the subject.

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

…he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

– Ubik, Philip K. Dick, Toll Door

Doors are often single-minded.

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams, Self-Satisfied Door

For obvious reasons I like this singing clock, although the user doesn’t appear to speak back to it.

In the living room the voice-clock, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would.

Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one!

– The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, Voice-Clock

As it happens I did once build a speaking clock based on Poem/1.

It was made from a Yoto player, and when you stuck a special card in then it would tell the time by speaking a poem out loud every 15 minutes. (I was given earlier access to the expanded developer API.)

It was enormously distracting haha

UNTIL:

I switched the speaking clock voice to an ASMR voice from ElevenLabs (which it turns out they go).

It turned out that, if you’re in the zone, a whispered poem doesn’t intrude on your focus. It’s like the traffic outside or the soft wind in the trees. You don’t notice.

But if you’re not focusing, you hear the ASMR whisper as a kind of chime.

It was weird in a short demo, but the attentional impedance matching was absolutely perfect as a device in your room.

I should share a video at some point.

My absolute favourite is this hotel that wants to exist.

This Texan hotel, for instance, was an entirely virtual construction, ones and zeros embedded in a set of chips. And yet, the hotel direly wanted to exist. It would become very beautiful, and it was already very smart. It could sweet-talk itself into physical existence from random piles of raw materials.

Oscar lugged the self-declared cornerstone to the corner of the southern wall. “I belong here,” the cornerstone declared. “Put mortar on me.”

Oscar picked up a trowel. “I’m the tool for the mortar,” the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.

– Distraction, Bruce Sterling, Bambakias Hotel

I love this idea: a pile of bricks and tools, and a speaker that calls out to passers-by and asks for favours.

We’ve spent decades using technology to commoditise labour. Why not use it to commoditise management?

There’s more detail:

Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape…

“I’m a cornerstone,” the cinder block announced.

“Good for you,” Oscar grunted.

“I’m a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left.” The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn’t hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape’s thumbnail-sized speakers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.

– Distraction, Bruce Sterling, Talking Tape

It’s not just the “telling you what to do” which is clever here (you could do it today by playing the appropriate YouTube while you assemble an IKEA wardrobe). It’s the wiki-like crowdsourcing and automatic coordination.

This isn’t to do with voice, but I like this single-minded toaster that takes its destiny into its own hands:

As a connected toaster, he’s in constant contact with other connected toasters like him – and thus keenly aware of how much action they’re getting. If he’s not being used as much as his friends, Brad gets upset. He’ll wiggle his little handle to get your attention, begging you to make some toast or at least to give him a reassuring pat on the side. Ignore him long enough, and he’ll take a more drastic measure: pinging a network of potential owners to find a new home.

From 2014! By Simone Rebaudengo of the brilliant oio.studio.

BONUS REFERENCE:

Golden Gate Claude (2024), a research project by Anthropic that was online for 24 hours only and connects all conversation back to the Golden Gate Bridge.

If you ask this “Golden Gate Claude” how to spend $10, it will recommend using it to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge and pay the toll. If you ask it to write a love story, it’ll tell you a tale of a car who can’t wait to cross its beloved bridge on a foggy day.

Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.

Zork (1977) was the first well-known one.

Here’s a list of the what the language parser says in response to various errors, straight from the source code of the final PDP-10 version of Zork from 1981:

• "I don’t know the word [word]"
• "I can’t make sense out of that."
• "Huh?"
• "Two verbs in command?"
• "Double preposition?"
• "Multiple inputs cannot be used with [verb]"
• "Too many objects specified?"
• "Beg pardon?"

I like the straightforwardness of this: some errors are plain old “syntax error” complaints but others are educating the user about the way the system works.

No conclusions, just thinking.

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I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing.

Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year.

It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mostly pics that I have only shared with Kickstarter backers).

I talked about where ideas come from and the value of playing around, and how it’s neat to learn new techniques that you can combine together.

I talked about prototyping and design – and was sure to use the words “prototyping” and “design”. I showed exploratory sketches and what CAD looks like.

I handed round various iterations of e-paper screens, and electronics from breadboard to PCB, and various iterations of plastic parts.

It’s interesting to see how a plastic enclosure comes apart, and to connect that to what an injection moulding machine is doing.

(A lot of the kids are familiar with 3D printers, so I showed a timelapse of a 3D print – it would take a year to print all my clocks! And then a real-time video of injection moulding, and how that would only take a day.)

And then photos of factory floors, and here’s the team, and assembly lines and what a page from an assembly procedure looks like, and packaging too.

7-year-olds have great questions.

Like: how does it not break in the post?

Well here’s a vibration machine in action and that’s how we test it.

And, look, in this cardboard packaging, here’s a cradle, and this was made by a packaging designer – you could be a packaging designer too if you want.

Like: how does the button work?

Well you’re right I didn’t pass round the separate button piece, good spot, it’s small and I didn’t want to lose it. So now let’s talk about assembly and about industrial designers…

I don’t like those videos of factories that are supposed to inspire awe.

You know the ones I mean: you see a thousand products a second whizzing by on 20 parallel belts. You come away saying wow. When they showed manufacturing on kids’ TV when I was growing up, that was what they showed.

“Awe” is the opposite of what I want to convey.

Except for a very specific type of person, when you show something with the expectation that “awe” is the appropriate response, you are implicitly saying to your audience: you should step back here and appreciate this from a distance. Like looking at a great work of art. Gasp but do not place yourself in the picture.

Whereas!

I want to re-home manufacturing. I want these kids to become designers, engineers, inventors, factory owners, and all the rest. Makers of any kind; participants in the ongoing making of our world.

So my message is: sure this is complicated but it’s fine, we can do complicated.

Factories are just rooms.

The stuff around us isn’t divine - these chairs we’re sitting on, the TV at the front of the classroom, the pots for the plants - all this stuff was invented and figured out and made by people.

p.s. you can be one of those people.

So when I heard the class was learning about inventing, I offered to go in and show that scrappy dead ends are cool actually (it was amazing to speak with a class that already knows the word “prototyping”) and this is electronics and this is going from sketching to plastic and this is what it means to make a product and to sell it.

I deeply feel this mission to normalise getting our hands dirty with the world – when they’re 7 years old, while their brains are still establishing what’s normal.

(This is connected with what I was saying about training for collective efficacy.)

And I’m just someone’s dad, you know? So if this guy can do it…

If you have the opportunity to go into your local school and talk about making things too, please do. You will be rewarded with wonderful curiosity, engagement and questions from the kids.

Hopefully one of them one day will look around them, think “someone should do something about that”, remember back, and say - oh that someone can be ME.

More posts tagged: that-ai-clock-and-so-on (15).

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1.

It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck.

My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensation. It’s the Peltier effect (the plate is really hot on the back) and the first time I’ve seen a thermoelectric cooler in the wild.

Here’s a thermoelectric handheld fan on Alibaba. Three quid each if you’re buying over a million.

A fan looks like a fan because of the mechanism used for the movement of air.

I’ve been meditating this week on what motivates form in product design.

Hey free concept: AirPods with built-in Peltier thermoelectric coolers so the buds are ice-cold in your ear holes.

2.

A fan moves air; electronic products move data. That can motivate the form just the same.

Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answer Machine (watch the video):

marbles dropping out of an answering machine could form an intuitive physical interface. This work later became the seed for a new movement called Tangible User Interfaces.

Each marble is a message that you can place in the player dish, put aside to keep for later, and so on. So sophisticated and so immediately understandable. (“Legible” as Durrell say.)

But what about when a product can do anything? Like a phone?

We end up with anonymous slabs of black glass.

3.

Before movie theatres there was the Kinetoscope (Wikipedia) "an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window."

The Kinetoscope came out of Thomas Edison’s lab and established the idea of reels of film, and also film as “content” to be manufactured and distributed.

But it was a single-viewer device: you leant down and put your eyes to the viewer.

The act of peeping – the form is motivated by the human interaction.

Or for the necessity of the affordance: a possible interaction that must been seen as a possible interaction. (Affordances as previously discussed.)

BTW:

I recently discovered via the sf journal [Foundation] (issue 152) that:

Thomas Edison, using his Kinetoscope, is credited with producing (though not directing) … the first filmed sneeze (1894), the first filmed kiss (1896).

4.

The egg timer that looks like an egg is the best product design of all time.

Here’s one on Amazon.

The traditional kind of hourglass timer that uses sand, on the other hand, is rubbish:

• It is traditional
• Its form is motivated by the mechanism
• And it is legible because you can see the passing of time.

But what to do you use it for?

Measuring time, sure. A lot of stuff. It can do anything (related to waiting for a period of time).

But does an initial use come to mind?

You have to think about it – aha eggs! Or you have to learn it. Ultimate the sand timer is abstract.

Like an empty ChatGPT window?

AI can do anything too.

But I opened my ChatGPT just now, and look how hard they work to give you ideas of what to do. Mine suggests: Write an email, create a painting, give me ideas…

If the hourglass timer were designed like that, they would print on the side:

• For eggs
• For rice
• For pasta
• For reminding me how long I have till my program is on.

So cumbersome.

Whereas!

The egg timer that is shaped like an egg.

Form follows function – but also where and when and how.

And then once you have timed your eggs, you have in your mind this new hammer of “timing” and you see immediately everything else you can time.

So another motivation for form is to imply the first context of use, even if - and especially if - the product can be re-purposed or adapted for other contexts by the end user, once they have internalised the function of it.

It is genius. I aspire to design a product this perfect.

The egg timer shaped like an egg was invented and patented by Lucio Oliveri in 1982. U.S. Design Patent No. D276,705 (expired).

More posts tagged: filtered-for (124).

I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux.

Because there’s a lot going on.

1. The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed
2. But the schematic flesh is commercial! The logo on the forehead!
3. Yet she has glossy hair and a spa outfit
4. And is drinking a glass of white wine??
5. Let’s not get into the red glow through the holes in the face
6. The ad copy is tight af, no messing around: retail, popularity, timely, professional, boom boom boom.

"Your best skin awaits"

I have questions about the very concept of an LED mask (can’t you go outside? but now we’ve internalised a fear of the sky because of UV?) but that’s not my point.

These components don’t work together. Health and beauty vs the evil red glow. You can’t sip the wine through that mask.

So there’s no singular integrated vibe here. It’s the opposite of vibe. It’s a set of hieroglyphs. Six symbols collaged together into the same image.

Similarly the vacuum guy James Dyson is now growing strawberries and the copy is wild.

"AI-powered British strawberries"

I mean let’s unpack that just for a second…

• “AI” is high tech future-y but also people are trained into not asking questions about it, just that it must be great because trillion dollar companies are here
• “British” has a surface of local product but in a Dyson context is elbows-out national pride, pro-Brexit style (as he is, even though he moved production to Singapore)
• “Strawberries” as in strawberries and cream and Wimbledon.

Let’s not get into the photo in which we are reassured about the quality of the strawberries not because they are being nurtured by a friendly farmhand – but because they are being CCTV monitored? Like: AI-powered panoptic strawberry surveillance will scare the strawbs into being plump and red, Jeremy Bentham’s paranoia-based fruit production?

The very next section is titled "British strawberries: 100% of your daily vitamin C" which is a whiplash into health.

At this point I don’t feel like I’m reading. I feel like these ads are laser-targeted streams of signifiers treating my psyche as a combination lock to be picked.

The fact that the grab-bag of symbols appears to have meaning on a human level (a photo of a woman; strawberries growing) is almost an accident. But there’s no content there beyond that.

Umberto Eco, semiotician, would have been able to write 2,000 words unfolding that Omnilux advert into its constituent symbols and deducing the shape of society from its very existence.

Peak semiotics was probably, what, the 1970s? We need that expertise to dismantle communication once again.

Anyway this is what it must feel like to computers when they get hacked. Like by a text message with a weird collection of characters that buffer overflows and takes over the app executable.

When AI gets really good - probably not much better than today - it will be able to automate the process of discovering the four or five symbols that unlock the “I must buy that” response, and then it’ll wrap it in a jpeg and put it on a billboard.

And next thing you know you walk by a photo of a woman drinking wine and it’s a jumble of symbols and you’ve been jailbroken and the compulsion to try an LED mask is so potent because well, I wonder what near-infrared feels like on the skin and what was that Omnilux you say? and without really thinking your phone is in your hand and

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Wet lab.

“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes away.

Don’t do this: if you put your open hand into a dewar of liquid nitrogen, you can hold it under the liquid at -196C/-320F because the boiling on the surface of your hand makes an insulating quilt. It’s a fun game. Closing your hand will create traps and you’ll get horrible burns.

Wet market.

The Wuhan wet markets entered the vernacular during Covid right? There are new things you need to refer to in a new context.

Wet-bulb temperature.

"The lowest temperature that can be reached by the evaporation of water" (Wikipedia).

It’s a function of air temperature and humidity and humans can’t survive about a wet-bulb temperature of 35C, equivalent to 40C with a relative humidity of 75%. i.e. sweating is no longer effective so you heat up and your proteins denature.

I first encountered this term in The Ministry for the Future (2020) by Kim Stanley Robinson which traces the worsening climate crisis, and wow, there’s a new term for a new context that it feels like we will be seeing in the news more in the coming years.

Wet pub.

A pub that does not serve food.

Wet signature.

It’s like “landline:” we never needed a word for a phone that was tied to the wall before there were phones that weren’t tied to the wall.

We never needed a term to say that this signature was made by an actual present human before we had photocopies and then computers.

Although somehow a robotic, automated autopen is granted “wet signature” status?

Autopens as previously discussed, which also mentions Margaret Atwood’s Longpen which is not automated and requires her to be syncronously present – but perhaps a 1,000 miles away from where the signature happens.

Wet hire, wet lease.

Equipment hire that includes human operators is wet hire.

As an aircraft operator, leasing a plane that includes staff is a wet lease.

Wet implies humans in both cases.

Wetware.

Hardware, software, wetware.

Back in the 80s, wetware - used somewhat ironically - meant your brain: “thinking” is running a task on the 3lb of wet meat in your skull.

I get the feeling that wetware today means lab-grown neurons? Wetware computers that run on cerebral organoids.

We didn’t really have words that weren’t made by humans until recently. Except for divine words and random words, both exalted.

I suppose we had widely reproduced words, and we call that “copy.”

But from now on, I guess, most words will be words not by humans, and that’s the new default. So we’ll need a name to specifically mean human words.

Wet words?

These are wet words!

One day we’ll have cyborg sleeves that move our arms for us and we’ll need a word for our own movements, and brain-computer interfaces that inject ideas and unearth memories and do reasoning for us, and we’ll need to call out plain old human brain-work: look ma I thunk it all myself.

Wet thoughts.

When we end up voluntarily ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like.

The underlying tech is currently in research phase.

What I mean is that humanoid robots are coming (as previously discussed).

And while robots are a mechanical challenge and a software challenge, some people are asking: what if you took that software part and pointed it at something else? Like, not a robot shaped like the human body but the human body itself.

For example: you can directly drive the muscles using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS).

Here’s a new wearable called Human Operator which won MIT Hard Mode 2026.

Human Operator is a human augmentation tool that allows AI to briefly take control of your body to help you learn and do things you normally cannot do. To do this, it uses a Vision-Language Model for human motor control through Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS). Vision-based commands are generated via open-ended speech input through the Claude API to control finger and wrist stimulation for intuitive on-body interaction.

So you wear this augmentation over your arm. It looks like white fish scales.

Then you talk to it. And it zaps your muscles to play the piano: "AI stimulates fingers in sequence to play melody."

That’s the link to the GitHub page in case you want to build it yourself.

Cognitively, zapping your muscles to perform a task frees up your brain to do other stuff!

Here’s a paper that studies this:

Nith, R., Ho, Y., & Lopes, P. (2024). SplitBody: Reducing mental workload while multitasking via muscle stimulation. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘24) Article 81, 1-11. Association for Computing Machinery.

The authors point out that mostly EMS is used for tasks the subject is already focused on, e.g. "playing a musical instrument."

And also EMS is distracting, either because it "causes a tingling" or generally it will "decrease the user’s sense of agency".

But despite that, would it be possible to perform two sub-tasks, such as:

continuously stirring the pot to make caramel (a repetitive muscle movement) and writing an essay (a cognitively-demanding task).

The researchers called their EMS implementation SplitBody. It looks like a cigarette packet strapped to your upper arm.

Results:

We found that with SplitBody, participants reported less physical-demand (decrease of 31%) and less mental-demand (decrease of 26%) than when performing the task by themselves. Moreover, the performance increased by 35% (averaged over both tasks), including the task that was not automated by EMS, which increased by 18%.

i.e. if you’re on a work call and cooking at the same time, you should let yourself get electrocuted to do the cooking because, although it tingles, you’ll end up doing better at the work call and the cooking too.

Multi-tasking!

Electrical Muscle Stimulation is step one.

You could go direct to the brain?

Like, you can have robot cockroaches:

There’s a backpack that you can install on cockroaches that drives them around by zapping the neurons in their antennas with electrical pulses.

It was a Kickstarter in 2013: The RoboRoach: Control a living insect from your smartphone!

There’s also a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation that you can use with humans: you zap your brain with a whopping great big magnet, and if you point it at your motor cortex then it can move your arms and legs.

Apparently it feels like free will.

Every so often I dream of a transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet that can walk me to the shops (2015):

That way your can check your email and Skype your mum, while the Walking-Down-The-Street Hat takes care of the tedious job of moving your legs, and collision-detecting your way around obstacles like buses and humans.

Whenever I meet someone who I reckon could genuinely build me a TMS helmet (I met such a person the other month at a lab in New York) I pitch the idea so it lives in their head.

And it turns out that, when you propose a special hat that automates your legs so you can walk to work while you’re also doomscrolling or whatever, they look at you like you’re loopy. Especially if you also act it out.

We have this image of ourselves as being singular, right? We do one thing st a time.

Yet I don’t consciously think about my legs when I stand up and walk, and I’m clearly multi-threaded in my thinking otherwise ideas wouldn’t develop in the background and pop up in the shower later, and I delegate my way-finding cognition to Google Maps and my memory to my notes.

It’s just an extension of that.

But I wonder whether it will feel alarmingly alienating, like voluntary disassociation as soon as you hit that button of the app that walks your legs to the office (it will inevitably use an app); or will it feel like being in the back of a cab where you can chat with your friends instead of thinking about driving?

And, as we get accustomed to running multiple embodied tasks in parallel, will we start feeling comfortable with renting our parts of ourselves on demand, just casual you know, and somehow it won’t undermine our sense of self?

It’s not so much that I think that a bodily-automation helmet is a good idea, it’s that it feels like an economic inevitability – once possible.

For example:

• Would you spend the price of a car on a home robot that can do the washing up and fold the laundry and tidy the kids room? Instead you could spend 10% of the money on an AI sleeve that takes over your arms to be the robot, and you can delegate your zombie limbs to do the chores while also attending your work zoom or winding down by doing your puzzles.
• Would you accept wearing AI gauntlets to drive your car if it meant lower insurance?
• If I’m sitting around just watching TV, why not wear an Apple Vision Pro so I can carry on watching my programmes on the inside, and meanwhile people on the other side of the world can dial into my body and go touristing around my neighbourhood, experiencing it from their headsets? I wouldn’t even have to know.
• Will a factory really bother investing in precision robotics to assemble their parts, or even time in training people to do the same, when they can strap workers with dextrous fingers into pre-trained software to do the job immediately – and the workers accept less pay because they are doing double-duty by working second tier call centre support jobs at the very same time.

Ok horrific.

But what extra could you do too?

Like, I wouldn’t trust myself to free-climb up El Capitan.

But maybe Electrical Muscle Stimulation could drive me up there safely, and I’d just be along for the ride as I (or whatever split body “I” am at this point) ropelessly ascend 3,000ft of sheer rock face, AI controlled hands and feet, high up in the fresh air of Yosemite, body tingling as a thousand tiny electric pulses zap me hour after hour through my fish-scaled cyborg bodysuit.

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Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever.

Confession time: I don’t.

I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or sending emails for me.

But really because of two fears:

• Data security. I’m cautious of something that can non-deterministically execute and get tricked into emailing confidential info or accidentally delete old photos without me noticing.
• Psychic integrity – I’ll say more about this in a bit.

So I’m a scaredy cat, whatever. Those concerns have kept me away.

Well, you know, concerns go out the window when you have your back against the wall? Last weekend, that’s what happened.

I’m shipping clocks.

Yes, finally, I know. It’s been a journey. I’m really grateful for the support and the patience of all my backers.

But, you know, 700 have left the warehouse in Hong Kong, and 640 or so have been delivered. The rest are in transit.

And last weekend…

Well, I’d shipped out 120 or so mainly to the UK and the US and everything had gone fine, very smooth.

I think I had two or three queries from US customs about import clearance and they just wanted a bit more information about the package. I filled in an online web form with a longer description than on the commercial invoice.

Shipping paused because the warehouse ran out of bubblewrap or something. That’s on me.

Then the next 500+ went out and I woke up on Saturday morning to 15 requests from FedEx for extra docs for customs clearance.

Ok that’s fine, I thought, percentage-wise this is approx the same.

So I started going through the requests. It wasn’t the simple text fields on the web this time. FedEx needed a worksheet. A worksheet is a detailed PDF that you have to complete, and they decide whether import is allowed based on that information.

The clock worksheet is not so bad. But it needs to have the tracking number at the top of the PDF, so it’s a different file for every package.

You go to the FedEx website which is arcane. Then you click around, upload the PDF, and you wait a few days and then the package clears customs and is on its way.

While I’m doing these 15 worksheets, which was the expected number, another 15 emails arrived.

I always do my best to embody the three virtues of a great programmer which are, according to Larry Wall

• Laziness
• Impatience
• Hubris.

So I figured that although it wasn’t taking too long to edit these forms, adding the tracking number to each, it would be appropriately lazy to spend essentially the same amount of time (a little more actually) to make a Claude Code skill where I type /toolbox:make-clock-worksheet <tracking> and the PDF is created and opened on my desktop so I can drag and drop it into the website.

SIDE NOTE: I have a private repo on GitHub which is my personal Claude Code plug-in called toolbox. It has all my custom skills and I can sync them between my machines and I improve them over time. Everyone should do this.

I woke up the next morning and another hundred queries had arrived.

I don’t know what kind of flag had gone off in FedEx internal systems but I think they believe I am smuggling watches or something. Because all the questions about my clock are like, ok so what kind of movement does your so-called “clock” have and how big is the movement (btw it’s not a clock unless it’s bigger than X by Y) and yeah so this “clock” how many jewels does it have.

Jewels? My clock has no jewels. Watches often have jewels, right? Watches are a great way to plausibly move value across borders. No kidding the Swiss have private banks and premium watches, a coincidence I’m sure.

(I have since been informed that jewels in watches are actually tiny and used mechanically as bearings so (a) TIL and (b) apologies for unnecessarily disparaging Switzerland.)

Anyway so I have to officially declare that these packages are not watches, they’re clocks, but I have a hundred of these things to fill in.

It is at this point that I realise what a freight forwarder is for.

But it’s just me, and I’ve got to get through these forms, and it’s a long holiday weekend, and I am seriously not going to be grinding through FedEx’s website for the next two days.

I gave in, I had to:

Claude Code, here you go, have my Gmail.

Claude Code, here you go, drive a web browser without me even looking.

Then I built an agent to process my email, navigating the FedEx website and uploading worksheets for me when that was the request (all the requests are subtly different), replying to emails from humans and attaching the worksheet when that was what had to happen.

I started conservatively, human-in-the-loop as you’re supposed to do, centaur-style, checking the drafts, but there isn’t the time. I admit it. I surrendered.

And then Monday, the holiday day itself, was pleasant in the end.

My family left for a few days. I sat in the garden in the sun washing down the bbq keeping half an eye on my agent as it worked its way through my inbox autonomously. What a life! Idyllic.

What I hadn’t quite internalised about personal agents is that they’re slow.

So time-elapsed is more but time-attended is lower.

It’s an odd kind of efficiency and doubly relaxing.

So it turns out I have a personal AI agent now.

Or at least the beginnings of the kind I am ok with.

Although it can send email on my behalf, which risks my data, I haven’t crossed the Rubicon to that psychic risk I mentioned before which would be allowing it to read and write into my notes.

My notes.

Let me tell you my theory about AI psychosis.

A lot of people keep a lot of notes.

I keep a lot of notes too, that’s how I write this blog, and in particular I like the serendipity of running across old ideas in my own notes – that’s common for other people too (2021).

We used to call it having an outboard brain and it’s true, I think for a certain kind of person, your notes become part of your extended cognition, and you “know something” whether that knowledge is within your skull or within your notes, same same, it’s just a matter of look-up latency.

My theory is that allowing something else to write into your notes does something bad to your psyche.

I had a glimpse of this: a few years ago I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in my style. (This was before chat could browse the web; my blog is well represented in the training data.)

It was pretty good so I pasted it into my notes as a record (but never posted it of course). I got scared off using ChatGPT to help with my blog pretty early when I was talking through an editing decision and it came up with a turn of phrase that was so perfect and so unique that I couldn’t resist it. But it didn’t represent any thinking that I had done to arrive at it, this perfect metaphor, so it wouldn’t bear my weight when I leant on it. Those two experiences terrified me.

Anyway so recently I was browsing my drafts folder and I ran across the bottom half of this fake blog post without noticing the context at the top, and it was like when the elevator drops faster than you’re expecting because I read these words but they didn’t feel buttressed with even a glimmer of memory in my head, so I was gaslighting myself – had I really written that note? I mean there it is, it sounds like me, but I can’t think around those words.

The feeling of not being able to trust the permanence and integrity of the physical world around you is one thing.

Not being able to trust what’s going on in your own mind is another.

Am I the same person as I was yesterday?

So unnerving.

All of which to say is that, for me, my personal theory is that AI psychosis comes from undermining your intrinsic faith in the workings of your own self.

And that comes from allowing an LLM that speaks in your voice to potentially write into your notes which, for a certain kind of person, is part of cognition itself. The AI doesn’t need to actually change your notes, the potential is enough.

Which eventually makes you go loopy.

So I have this fear of risking my own psychic integrity, which has so far kept me away from allowing a personal agent to run on my own machine – I love automation but at a healthy arm’s length…

Yet needs must. And here we are. All it took was 100 emails requesting 100 custom PDFs.

I’ve opened the door and now it’s the slippery slope. The slope ends with outsourcing consciousness itself, and the prospect of humanity becoming a population of voluntary p-zombies is a high-probability eschaton that I’ve talked about before.

I’m making a note here to

• record my feelings at this moment: how naive will this look in a year or two?
• celebrate 640 or so clocks in people’s homes, more in transit, and 300 online right this second.

For both: thank you FedEx.

More posts tagged: eschatology (10), that-ai-clock-and-so-on (15).

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