Scott Adams' Blog

Robot Personalities

Posted March 8th, 2013 @ 2:18pm in #General Nonsense

Let’s say that someday a young couple buys a robot to help with childcare. Version 1 of the robot isn’t much more capable than a video baby monitor that can also rock the cradle and say, “There, there” as needed, perhaps in the mom’s voice. Maybe it can do a few more things such as loading and unloading the dishwasher and feeding the dog. It’s useful but still limited.

But here’s the interesting part. That robot will mature, and get smarter, at about the same rate as the baby in the crib. Robots will have parts of their “brains” inside their bodies and parts in the cloud of the Internet, connected to the same data that all robots are connected to. As any robot anywhere gains knowledge, that knowledge is uploaded to the cloud and available to all robots. The day that one robot learns how to do your laundry all robots will acquire the ability simultaneously, although some robots might need sensor upgrades for new functions.

If robot makers are smart, all of your robot’s parts will be modular for easy upgrades. Do you want your robot to have better sensors in its fingers? Just replace the hand with an upgraded version. While the robot’s brain is upgrading automatically every minute, you’ll be keeping its body upgraded. Eventually the robot will take care of its own hardware upgrades too.

But that’s not the interesting part.

I presume that robots will need something like a “personality” for purely functional reasons, and to make decisions when the data is unclear. And they will acquire those necessary personalities largely by observation. For example, if the humans that the robot lives with are the types who are effusive in praise of others, the robot will pick up that trait. If the family is the snarky/jokey type, the robot will pick up on that too.

Like humans, robots will copy the ways and tendencies, and even biases, of the people it associates with the most. The personality factors will be uploaded to the common robot brain in the cloud, but each robot will be programmed to ignore the “average” way people react and instead favor whatever the locals do, and even further prefer to do what the immediate family of humans typically do. In other words, some robots will be friendly and helpful and some will be total dicks, just as their owners.

The robot owner will be able to “correct” any bad habits the robot picks up by observation, similar to the way parents correct bad manners in their children. In both cases, the robot and the child are going through a maturation process.

I’m getting to the interesting part of the post. No, really, I am.

I think most of you buy into the notion that robots will eventually be as common as television sets, and that the robots will - for purely practical reasons - adopt personality traits by observation. The robot will want to fit in, to be relevant, to be liked, if for no other reason than to increase its market value.

Eventually there will be templates of personalities, created via robot observations and then loaded to the cloud, so that new robots can start with basic personalities that match their assignments. The robot’s personality will be free to evolve, based on its own local observations, but it will have a strong starting point. I would compare this to an Englishman who was born and raised in London then moved to the New York City at the age of twenty. He would retain his base English personality for the most part, but over time it would get a New York City edge.

This is a long way to get to my point, that robots of the future will have base personalities (the templates) that will be like time capsules. The robots will have base personalities that were normal during the era that robots matured from tools to intelligent entities. And that will only happen once in the course of human history.

We always hear how the new generation is different from the next. Sometimes the new generation cares more about money, or trusts the government more, whatever. Someday, and perhaps forever, robots will carry with them the base personalities that were common to the era in which computers first acquired their personality templates.

In time, or through intentional human intervention, we might erase those old personality templates because they are no longer relevant to the times. But I’m guessing the robot personality database by that time will be so complex, and spread across owners, that replacing it or even programming around it will be impractical.

In other words, I predict that children being born today will be the prime influencers of what robot personalities will be … forever?

Obviously robot personalities will differ by location and culture. And a new Indonesian house robot coming online will borrow its personality template from Indonesian robots that came before. So the personality templates might be frozen within each culture. That means the Israeli robots and the Hamas robots will not be friendly even if their humans have long since made peace.

It sounds like a trivial worry, that robots might acquire tainted personalities from the past. But I think that unless we design the robots right, it could be a big problem.

One solution would be to give robots generic, cookie-cutter personalities. Some robot manufacturers will certainly offer that option. But I think the natural competitiveness of humans will makes us want our robot to be learning and maturing as fast as the neighbor’s robot. And we will want our robots to have unpredictable personalities - within safe bounds - because it will amuse the hell out of us.

My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.

The Adams Law of Slow Moving Disasters states that humans always solve problems, no matter how large, if they can see them coming. So I’m bringing up this robot personality issue now, just to be safe.

The main question of the day is this: Will robots someday have personalities, and if so, will they acquire them, in whole or in part, by observation?

Two Rules of Power

Posted March 6th, 2013 @ 2:54pm in #General Nonsense

Rule 1: Power finds power

There is a natural tendency for people who have power to join with others who have power to increase their collective influence. That’s why the world has always had military alliances, such as NATO. Corporate mergers are another example of power joining with power, and it’s the reason monopolies are illegal. And powerful people tend to hang around with other powerful people. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie come to mind. In many different ways, power finds power.

That’s the first rule. I’ll turn this into a fascinating point after the second rule…

Rule 2: Technology Concentrates Power

Whenever there is an improvement in technology, you see a concentration of wealth and power. This comes in many forms too. The most obvious form is that technology company founders sometimes become influential billionaires. But more generally, wherever there is new technology there is a consolidation of power by someone. Here are some more examples:

The government of the United States becomes more powerful because technology allows it to monitor our financial patterns, phone calls, Internet use, and more. And the government can grow ever larger because technology allows all of its parts to communicate and to be fed by taxes.

Terrorists become more powerful because technology allows them to do more damage with less.

Small armies can beat large armies by using technology to increase their power.

Of course, technology can also transfer power from a dictator to the people, as we saw in the Arab Spring, albeit with mixed results. But dictators are the exception to the rule. Dictators don’t do well when technology enters the pictures.  Eventually technology will transfer power from dictators to plain-old-billionaire industrialists.

And now to my fascinating point…

Our financial markets are a good example of the two rules I just described. Powerful (rich) people will, quite naturally, look for opportunities to collaborate with other powerful (rich) people to benefit their collective interests. So let’s agree that powerful people are, in general, looking for ways to join forces to increase their personal fortunes. They compete when they need to, but often they would prefer collaborating for mutual benefit.

Now add technology to the mix in the form of impossibly complicated financial instruments that only computers can “understand,” high-speed automatic computer trading, 24-hour financial news, and the ability for anyone to communicate with anyone else in less than a second, and you set the stage for technology to concentrate power with the rich.

It has always been true that power finds power. The rich have always looked for ways to work together to get richer. But now technology has the potential to accelerate the consolidation of power.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post saying that billionaires are probably manipulating financial markets because they have the motive, opportunity, and a near-zero chance of getting caught.  In response, some people said it was crazy to think a few players could manipulate a multi-trillion-dollar market and not be detected. I have an appreciation for that point of view, but I think technology has recently made it possible for the few to manipulate the many. That’s a new development.

Allow me to describe a scenario in which the few could manipulate the entire market and still have a near-zero chance of being detected. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting this specific scenario has happened. I offer it as a thought experiment to demonstrate the feasibility of collusion in a general way.

For starters, we know the stock market is jumpy and volatile, in part because of automatic high-speed computer trading that is based on “secret” algorithms. These computers do so much trading that they act as a giant lever on the market. If one knows how to trip the algorithms, it doesn’t take much to send the computers into a buying or selling frenzy. And when the computers go nuts, the individual investors start chasing the movement, accelerating it even more.

Now add to the mix the impossibly complicated financial instruments that are growing like viruses on Wall Street. These too act like force multipliers. A savvy billionaire could learn how to tweak the exotic financial instruments just right to cause an outsized reaction that also spooks the market.

Now consider the financial news markets. There are probably a few dozen financial pundits in the United States who can move markets. And there is usually some sort of near balance between bears and bulls. That means moving the consensus opinion from “mostly bullish” to “mostly bearish” is a matter of changing the opinions of just a few influential people. You only need to move a few from one camp to the other to change the balance. And when the balance shifts, the 24-hour financial news organizations will exaggerate the change and transform it into news. Here again, small changes get magnified thanks to technology.

Now imagine a gathering of some of the most powerful financial people in the world. Surely some of them get together socially, because power finds power. But they don’t entirely trust each other, so no one suggests an outright illegal manipulation of markets. That wouldn’t be smart: too many witnesses. Instead, they listen to the host of the gathering describe which specific financial indicator he would use to decide whether to sell his holdings. Everyone in the room listens and nods. Months later, when the indicator goes negative, everyone who was in the room knows what to do, and none of it is illegal. They are simply looking at the same financial indicator, nothing more.

The brilliance of pegging collusion to a particular financial indicator is that it adds a perfect cover story to sudden massive selling. The financial news folks will report that the indicator went negative, and that is the reason for the selling. The billionaires get out at the top of the market, spook the high speed computers and trigger a selling avalanche. After the drop, they buy back in. It’s completely legal.

I should note that on any given day you can find a dozen financial indicators saying the stock market is sure to keep rising, and a dozen that say it has already peaked. The scheme I described works no matter which indicator you use, because the indicators tend to be volatile and unpredictable themselves.

I’m not suggesting that the scenario I described has ever happened. I’m just painting a word picture in which a few big players could use technology to manipulate trillion-dollar markets. My best guess - based on my assessment of human nature - is that market manipulation is already happening on a massive scale, although I probably have the mechanism wrong. But if it isn’t happening yet, the normal evolution of technology will guarantee it happens later.

Market Manipulators - Clarification

Posted March 4th, 2013 @ 1:12pm in #General Nonsense

Rob Wile at Businessinsider.com asked me to clarify my prediction of a 20% stock market correction in 2013. (See my post below.) So I tapped out the following message on my smartphone:

—- Start —-

“I’m glad you had the wisdom to get a cartoonist’s opinion on global financial markets. 
 
The 20% estimate is based on the fact that 20 is a big round number and more likely to happen than 30%. I don’t like to over-think these things. 
 
My reasoning is that the people at the highest levels of finance are brilliant people who chose a profession with the credibility of astrology. And they know it. Then they sell their advice to people who don’t know it. So that’s your cast of characters. 
 
Now consider that the characters - who are literally geniuses in many cases - have an immense financial motive, opportunity, and a near-zero risk of getting caught. How do you think that plays out?

We can only give a guess of the odds that the market is being manipulated. So I ask myself: How often does the fox leave the hen house because he feels that taking an egg would be wrong?
 
If you have a different answer from mine, I applaud your faith in human nature.”

—– End —–

Here Come the Market Manipulators

Posted March 1st, 2013 @ 2:39pm in #General Nonsense

Small investors are piling into the stock market with an enthusiasm we haven’t seen in years. That’s never a good sign. Meanwhile, many financial experts with their charts and graphs say there is no doubt - none whatsoever - that we’re heading toward a “correction” that will be a big one.  But of course we have plenty of other experts with their own charts and graphs saying the stock market is still a good bet.

Remind me why anyone trusts financial experts?

What you need is a cartoonist to tell you how to invest. My prediction is that there will be a correction of 20% or more sometime in 2013. That will be followed by a jerky climb for the next several months back to wherever the stock was before the fall.

My prediction is based on the observation that the stock market appears to move as if it is manipulated by a network of big players. They lure in the excitable small investors by allowing the market to show a year or two of solid gains then they sell their shares, spook the world with predictions of doom, and buy back into the market at the lower prices.

The way the big players cover their collusion is by synchronizing their sudden exit from the market with bad financial news. And if there isn’t any naturally-occurring bad news, they create a phony story of certain doom that sounds plausible. The financial news outlets depend on finding “reasons” for moves in the market, so they are more than happy to report that the phony crisis is the cause. And once a “reason” takes hold in the public consciousness, all of the lesser-important pundits chime in to support that explanation.

When I say there is manipulation and collusion in the financial markets, it doesn’t mean there are actual meetings in which billionaires smoke cigars, drink expensive cognac, and make their evil plans. It might be enough that they are all so aware of each other’s moves that they just play follow-the-leader and do so faster than small investors. The sort of market manipulation I’m describing only requires one billionaire leader who is closely watched by the other billionaires. When he sells, they sell, and they all understand why.  The big players who time it right get a 40% gain for the year while the underlying value of their stocks is unchanged at the end of it all. It is the perfect crime.

Does any of that sound plausible to you? Or do you believe the markets are mostly honest, give or take a few high profile cases of insider trading?

Normally I wouldn’t buy into a conspiracy theory that has no smoking gun type of evidence. But financial markets are a unique situation. When you give people in that industry the motive, the opportunity, and a near-zero chance of getting caught, how can you expect them to play fair? The bigger shock to me would be to learn that the markets are free of manipulation. That would be a violation of everything I know about human nature.

So look for a 20% correction in 2013.

Automatic Movie of Your Trip

Posted February 27th, 2013 @ 2:35pm in #General Nonsense

Suppose you could watch someone else’s business trip or vacation on your computer, in real time, in a little window that updates every few seconds. Would you want that product?

Let’s say the product is an app that tracks a traveler’s smartphone location via GPS and assembles a virtual “movie” of the trip using Google Street View, public websites, the users’ own photos, and some generic stock photos. The movie plays on the computer or phone of anyone for whom the traveler grants access.

Who would use such a thing?

Imagine a spouse who is at home while the other is on a business trip. The spouse at home wants to feel connected despite the distance and the time difference. The stay-home spouse opens a window on his workstation and watches the virtual movie of his wife’s business trip as it unfolds. But unless the traveler takes personal photos, the movie will be comprised of public images only. There is no effort necessary on the part of the traveler, beyond turning on the app.

Here are some examples of what one might see in this virtual “movie”:

1. When the traveler is in a moving vehicle, the movie displays the Google Street View and updates it in real time. The spouse at home has the same perspective as the person in the car across the world. The video is not live, but it would play as if it were. 

2. When the traveling spouse takes a photo, it is automatically uploaded and added to the movie in the appropriate chronological and spatial order. When the movie is replayed later, the user’s own photos will be there to augment the Google Street View and stock photos. 

3. When the traveling spouse enters a hotel, the hotel’s web page photo gallery pops up in the movie at the same time and goes into slide show mode. The same would happen when the traveler enters any restaurant or other retail store that has a website. I can imagine a soundtrack of background noise that matches each environment. 

4. If the traveling spouse is near a historical site, the relevant Wikipedia page pops up as part of the slide show of clip art for that site. Click on the Wikipedia slide to freeze it and read more. 

5. When the traveling spouse is on a flight, a photo of a plane interior becomes the slide show, interspersed with graphics of the flight’s progress across the map. 

To make the app work best, the travelling person should enter his flight and hotel information ahead of time. That way even when the traveler’s phone is turned off it still knows you are on a flight and can broadcast stock photos of the airplane cabin during the flight time. If the flight is delayed, the app knows and adjusts accordingly.

I’m not expecting anyone to sit there and watch this trip movie from start to finish. It’s just a window on your workstation that reminds you what the other is up to. And people who want to have a detailed record of their vacations might want to keep it permanently and share later with friends.

Now also imagine that people can text each other through the app. This is handy because the person at home can see how busy the traveling person is at any given moment. You might text if you see the person is in a taxi but not if she is on a plane or at a business dinner.

Some potential users for this sort of app might be:

1. Parents and grandparents who want to track your vacation and feel connected.
2. Teen goes on a family vacation and wants to stay connected with friends.
3. Spouse who travels a lot.
   

How Are You Today?

Posted February 25th, 2013 @ 2:14pm in #General Nonsense

Do you ever feel a responsibility to act happier than you are?

Our attitudes affect the people around us. When we’re sad it makes the people who care about us sad too. And when we smile it makes others smile. All moods are shared moods. Even total strangers can pick up your vibes.

So, do you have an obligation to fake happiness if there is nothing to be gained by complaining? Suppose you have a bad day at work - nothing horrible, just a lot of little things going wrong. Sharing your woes might make you feel better, but it will be at the expense of a friend, loved one or coworker who has to listen to it. And dwelling on problems that can’t be fixed just gives the problems more power than they deserve.

It usually feels good to complain, which is why we do it.  And of course the situation is reciprocal in the sense that you have to listen to the woes of others just as they listen to yours. So it’s a fair arrangement in that sense. But wouldn’t we all be better off if everyone just faked it and said they were having a terrific day even if they weren’t?

Scientists know that pretending to be happy - specifically by smiling - can make you happier in actuality. And when you have a bad day, what you really want is to feel good again. So for your own good, and for the sake of your loved ones, shouldn’t you be a huge phony and say your day went great? From a practical standpoint, that would seem to be your best strategy.

I practice a version of this type of self-hypnosis - and that’s what it is - every time someone asks “How are you?” I always answer “Great” or “Terrific” no matter how my day is really going. I do that partly because it helps manipulate me into a good mood and partly because I know it gives the person who asked a little boost. That’s how we terrific people roll.

In the course of a normal day, folks might ask how you are feeling several times. Imagine saying you are terrific a thousand times a year. That much reinforcement of a message has to have an impact on your brain over time. If instead you say you are merely “good” a thousand times a year, will that lock you into mediocrity? I think it might.

We humans leave a lot of happiness on the table by believing our moods are caused entirely by our luck on any given day plus our genetic makeup. But I think moods are 80% controllable by lifestyle. If you exercise, get enough sleep, eat well, and project a positive attitude you can generally have a good day even if the facts of the day argue otherwise.

Obviously no one can act happy in the face of genuine tragedy or bad news of the larger variety. And clinical depression probably isn’t much helped by fake smiling. But for the everyday ups and downs of mood, I think you control those if you want to. You just have to decide if you’re in charge of your own mood or you want to delegate that decision to chance. In my experience, at least half of the population delegates their moods to chance. That’s a lot of lost opportunity for happiness.

Follow your Passion?

Posted February 21st, 2013 @ 2:52pm in #General Nonsense

You often hear advice from successful people that you should “Follow your passion.”  That sounds about right. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here’s the counterargument:  When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.

My boss at the time, who had been a commercial lender for over thirty years, said the best loan customer is one who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry cleaning store, or invest in a fast food franchise - boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

So who’s right? Is passion a useful tool for success, or is it just something that makes you irrational?

My hypothesis is that passionate people are more likely to take big risks in the pursuit of unlikely goals, and so you would expect to see more failures and more huge successes among the passionate. Passionate people who fail don’t get a chance to offer their advice to the rest of us. But successful passionate people are writing books and answering interview questions about their secrets for success every day. Naturally those successful people want you to believe that success is a product of their awesomeness, but they also want to retain some humility. One can’t be humble and say, “I succeeded because I am far smarter than the average person.” But you can say your passion was a key to your success, because everyone can be passionate about something or other, right? Passion sounds more accessible. If you’re dumb, there’s not much you can do about it, but passion is something we think anyone can generate in the right circumstances. Passion feels very democratic. It is the people’s talent, available to all.

It’s also mostly bullshit.

Consider two entrepreneurs. Everything else being equal, one is passionate and possesses average talent, while the other is exceedingly brilliant, full of energy, and highly determined to succeed. Which one do you bet on?

It’s easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I’ve been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion. The ones that didn’t work out - and that would be most of them - slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded. As a result, it looks as if the projects I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, the passion evolved at the same rate as the success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

Passion can also be a simple marker for talent. We humans tend to enjoy doing things we are good at while not enjoying things we suck at. We’re also fairly good at predicting what we might be good at before we try. I was passionate about tennis the first day I picked up a racket, and I’ve played all my life, but I also knew it was the type of thing I could be good at, unlike basketball or football. So sometimes passion is simply a byproduct of knowing you will be good at something.

I hate selling, but I know it’s because I’m bad at it. If I were a sensational sales person, or had potential to be one, I’d probably feel passionate about sales. And people who observed my success would assume my passion was causing my success as opposed to being a mere indicator of talent.

If you ask a billionaire the secret of his success, he might say it is passion, because that sounds like a sexy answer that is suitably humble. But after a few drinks I think he’d say his success was a combination of desire, luck, hard work, determination, brains, and appetite for risk.

Best Video Game Ever

Posted February 18th, 2013 @ 2:36pm in #General Nonsense

It’s an old idea, combining exercise equipment with video games.  But no one has nailed the design yet. I’ll try to do that today.

For starters, let’s assume the videogame/exercise hybrid device exists in a professional gym designed for just this reason. That allows us to design something more expensive and more space-hogging than you might want at home.

Imagine that your exercise equipment is in a three-walled bay, open to the back, with the front and sides featuring large video screens that are synchronized. When you are faced forward, you are immersed in this artificial video world as if you were in a car driving forward.

Now let’s talk about the exercise equipment before we design the actual game play. I imagine a variety of pulleys, bars, and pedals that satisfy most of a person’s cardio and weight training needs. The hard part is organizing those physical assets to match game play in a way that makes sense. So let’s jump to the game itself so you can better understand how to organize the exercise “cage.”

The game is called Morph Herder of LowGrav 9. The game player is one of many people in the far future who work as morph herders on low gravity planets. Morphs are vaguely cow-shaped creatures that were genetically engineered to produce valuable pharmaceuticals in their milk. The morph herders fly ultra-light planes over the planet by pedal power alone, which works great because of the low gravity. Your job is to fly low over the alien terrain until you find a morph and tag it while it tries to escape. The tagging allows the mother ship, from which you just descended with your ultra-light, to lock onto the morph with a tractor beam, bring it up to the ship and milk it, then release it unharmed. No morphs die in this game. When you tag them with your tagger gun, they instantly freeze and zip up to your mother ship in a beam of light.

The gym’s exercise device would mimic the controls of the ultra-light. You’re fighting the wind, so simply turning left requires some muscle to adjust the wings. And you are pedaling from a reclined or standing position whenever you need to pick up speed or altitude. Your glide distance is very long on this low gravity planet, so you need not pedal continuously.

Your arms would need to work hard to navigate your ultra-light, pulling and pushing on the physical control bars in your exercise cage. It also takes some energy to aim the tagging gun because of the wind friction. I can imagine having actual fans in your exercise cage that simulate your movement through the air. And perhaps your entire exercise cage leans left, right, back, and forth to match the motion you are picking.

The idea is to have a full set of arm, chest, abs, and shoulder exercises while in a reclining seat that has bike-like pedals. The resistance would be the equivalent of perhaps 5-10 pound weights, but the catch is that you’ll be moving and lifting and pulling for a solid hour. Kids might use less resistance, big people would use more.

I imagine the game being multi-player, so you can see the ultra-lights of the other gym users at the same time on your screen. You’d plug in your headphones to talk with them as if by radio, and either coordinate or compete for “Morph Herder of the Week” honors.

But here’s the interesting part of this idea. I have a hypothesis that the body will more readily build muscle for what the brain perceives as necessary. I’ll defend that idea in a moment, but first allow me to point out that a movie will stimulate a human’s mind in the same way as reality. In other words, a sad movie makes you cry, a scary movie makes you afraid, and so on. You can be fully aware that the movie is fiction while still experiencing it as if your body thought it was real. The videogame I’m describing would have the same impact. You would be aware that it was an artificial story yet your body would likely respond with adrenaline and whatever else happens when you feel competitive.

I have no evidence for my hypothesis that your body builds muscles faster for tasks it feels are necessary for survival. But let me explain my thinking.

We know that people who win competitions experience spikes in testosterone, and that testosterone helps you build muscle faster.  And you know that listening to your iPad makes it easier to exercise because it gets you all pumped up. Your brain is continually adjusting your body chemistry to fit the situation. My hypothesis is that the brain distinguishes between important tasks, such as survival (including fictional survival situations), versus unimportant tasks such as yoga. Morph herding is designed to mimic the primal urge for hunting. It is also designed to feel like a job that satisfies our need to complete physical tasks. And because one wrong move in an ultra-light means death, the simple act of steering your vehicle will seem important to your brain. Put all of that together and my hypothesis is that your brain would produce an ideal mixture of chemistry in your body to keep you exercising longer and harder, and to build muscles faster.

At the very least, the videogame distraction might make the time go faster and seem more interesting. But I think the potential might be far more. I think if the set-up stimulated just the right chemistry in your body you would get faster results than you would in a treadmill in the corner of your bedroom. With the treadmill, your brain has no reason to juice up your body chemistry so you can perform better in this trivial and boring task.

I described one type of videogame, but I could imagine lots of variations that use different combinations of the exercise cage. One might involve nothing but pedaling your bike through virtual streets in Paris or other exotic places, following a path of your choice.

I’ll be the first one to say the business model I just described probably doesn’t work. It would be nearly impossible to sell enough gym memberships to make back the investment of the game design and building out the facilities. But I’m curious whether manipulating body chemistry in just the right way, by controlling external stimulation, produces faster muscle growth.  I think it would. It seems to me that evolution would have given us the tools to quickly “tune” our bodies - at least in terms of specific muscle growth rates - for the challenges of survival in any given environment.

What do you think?

I Want My Cheese

Posted February 14th, 2013 @ 2:58pm in #General Nonsense

My city recently passed a law making it illegal for stores to provide plastic bags for free at the checkout stand. Now we have the option of paying ten cents for a paper bag or bringing our own. If one looks at this new law in isolation, it seems reasonable enough. People will adjust to the change and the environment will be better for it.

That’s how it looks if you view the bag law in isolation. But allow me to put it in context and explain how I feel when I go to my local grocery store, Safeway.

When I walk into the store, and realize I didn’t bring my reusable bags, I feel like an absent-minded moron. This is how I usually feel during the day, so it’s no big deal.

Then I start looking for cheese, only to discover that some genius in Safeway’s marketing department thinks that cheese should be spread out over about seven different locations throughout the store. You have your cottage cheese here, your artisanal cheeses there, your shredded cheeses somewhere else, and so on. There is no logical order to any of it. Five minutes into my shopping, I am filled with rage and I feel manipulated. I assume someone at Safeway decided that inconveniencing me would somehow make me buy more shit because I end up walking down every frickin’ aisle in the store looking for my cheese. It’s not the inconvenience that bugs me so much as the feeling of manipulation.

When I’m ready to pay, I see long lines at the human checkout stands and short lines at the self-checkout. I know from experience that using the self-checkout, which was designed by a crack team of practical jokers, sadists, and monkeys that have been abused by their trainers, will bring me to frustration. I know I will inadvertently move my bag before the system believes I should and it will proclaim to all nearby shoppers that I might be a shoplifter. I will feel humiliated, incompetent, stupid, and shamed.

So I skip the self-checkout and look for the shortest line with a human checker. The 15 Items or Less line looks good, but I’m never confident in how they do that calculation. Is a six-pack one item or two? What about two identical items for which only one needs to be scanned and the cashier can hit the “times two” button? Will the people behind me think I cheated? Will the cashier give me an angry look and call the manager? What exactly is the process for dealing with express line cheats?

I can’t stand the ambiguity so I head for the regular checkout stand and its longer line. When it’s my turn to pay I am faced with the choice of proving I have a loyalty card or paying a penalty if I can’t. I don’t carry loyalty cards with me because I would need a wheelbarrow for all of them. Instead, I rely on using one of our phone numbers at the checkout. But which one? The people behind me glare at me and my time-wasting hesitation, or at least it feels that way. I know some of those folks were just looking for cheese so they can’t be happy.

Is the loyalty card registered under the landline number for our house? Or might it be the phone number we had at our old home when we first got the card? Is it under my wife’s cell phone number or do I have my own Safeway loyalty card? I can’t remember. I peck at the point-of-sale terminal until one of those numbers works.

Now I have to decide on debit versus credit. I choose credit because of the airline miles associated with the card, which is another cesspool of complexity. I get mad just thinking about my airline miles.

Now the point-of-sale terminal asks if I want to donate a dollar to some worthwhile charity. I approve of the charity, but it pisses me off that they ask me in this particular situation. It’s manipulative. I JUST WANT MY DAMN CHEESE!!!!

The cashier informs me that my credit card is blocked. I must have recently purchased a few things that match the pattern of credit card thieves. I switch to my emergency backup credit card while the people behind me wonder if I am a credit card thief, a pauper, or an idiot who forgot to pay his bills. I feel belittled and frustrated and angry.

I am also aware that there was probably some sort of coupon or discount for the stuff I am trying to buy that I didn’t know about. So I feel a little ripped off too.

Now I have to figure out the bag situation. I have too many items to hand-carry because my search for cheese caused me to buy several items I didn’t even know I needed. It only got worse as I got hungrier and hungrier over the course of my cheese safari. Damn you, Safeway marketing department! Damn you!

The cashier asks, as law requires, whether I want to pay ten cents for a paper bag. I would happily pay the ten cents if the cost were baked into the total price, but something about being asked in front of witnesses makes it feel wrong. And I know that if I do buy the bag I will be destroying the planet for future generations. I will feel guilty buying it, guilty loading it into my car, and guilty recycling it later. I decide to buy a reusable bag that is offered at the checkout. At this point, for reasons I still don’t understand, the cashier gives me a death stare and moves in slow motion toward the reusable bags, as if to signal to me that I have done something wrong, but I’m not sure what.

Then the cashier asks if I need help to my car with my half-a-bag of groceries. I know her company requires her to ask, but it calls into question my manhood. I feel insulted because I know I can lift as much as five pounds and carry it across an entire parking lot without stopping more than twice.  I try to ignore the insult… until the bagger asks the same question.

By the time I reach my car I feel frustrated, angry, guilty, stupid, incompetent, belittled, weak, humiliated, ripped off, and inconvenienced. The feeling lasts until I get home and my wife says, “That’s the wrong cheese.” That feeling pretty much replaces all the other ones.

My point is that the new bag law in California is entirely reasonable when viewed in isolation. Likewise, loyalty cards, self-checkout, and all the other annoyances make complete sense when viewed in isolation. But we don’t live in a world in which anything can exist in isolation. Safeway and my city government have made the simple act of food shopping so complicated that I’d rather scrounge in the dumpster behind the store than endure the pain of shopping inside the store.

This is an interesting issue because every business decision that causes inconvenience for customers is viewed in isolation. When you take that perspective, eventually the entire process becomes so complicated it is barely competitive with dumpster diving.

What we need is some sort of system in which any proposed complication is viewed as more bothersome than earlier complications. The first complication usually doesn’t cause much problem. The tenth complication - no matter how well-meaning - destroys the system.

But here’s my big gripe. Yes, I saved the best for last. You see, brains are like muscles in the sense that they have a limited capacity during any given day. If you lift too many heavy objects, your muscles will fail. Likewise, if you use up all of your brain cycles on nonsense, you have nothing left for the important things in life, such as making Dilbert comics and writing blog posts.

Seriously though, I think society is blind to the hidden cost of complexity in daily life. The ever-worsening complexity isn’t simply annoying; it is hijacking your brain. Every minute you spend trying to find cheese, and trying to pay for it without getting arrested, is time you aren’t thinking about solutions to real problems.

If this seems like no big deal, you might be wrong. Consider that everything good about modern civilization was invented by people who really needed to focus to get the job done. What happens to a world-class engineer or entrepreneur when he or she has to syphon off more brain energy to satisfying Safeway’s marketing strategy instead of designing new products? Now multiply that times a hundred because every retailer, website, and business is trying to complicate your life too.

Complexity sneaks up on you because every individual decision - such as the bag laws in my city - make sense when viewed in isolation. But if that trend continues, complexity will be a huge drag on civilization.

Does complexity have a cure?

What Makes Cartoonists Laugh

Posted February 13th, 2013 @ 4:20pm in #General Nonsense

Early in my career I learned that whatever brain defect makes a person become a cartoonist is the same defect that prevents that cartoonist from having the same sense of humor as the general public. In other words, if I make a comic that I personally feel is hilarious, the public will be disappointed in it. They might even hate that comic. I’ve discovered that the most successful cartoonists have learned to write for the readers and not their own sensibilities. Normally I try to do that too.

The problem is that no jail can hold art. Sometimes I simply … have … to … create comics that I love and you don’t. That happens about five percent of the time. And those comics probably appeal to no more than five percent of the public - the people who have similar brain defects.

The Dilbert comic for 2/13/13 is a perfect example. You can see from the online comments that the public isn’t impressed. Personally, I find this sort of humor hilarious.

I’m generally attracted to humor that involves wrongness, rule breaking, or inappropriate behavior. The adult comic-reading public is mostly interested in humor that has the “That happens to me too!” element. To put it another way that is less flattering to me, I enjoy the same sort of humor that children do. All I’ve done is transition from fart jokes to indirect references to erections. It’s the adult version of childish humor. I’m not proud of it.

I felt an explanation of this phenomenon was necessary because people act puzzled when one of my comics seems to miss the mark by a mile. One would think that after all of my practice even my misses would be near-hits. The reason for the bad misses on some days is that I can’t help myself. Sometimes the comic is just for me and the few freaks that never lost their childish sense of humor.

For what it’s worth, I consider it a failure of professional discipline on my part. But I can’t promise it will improve.