A good warm-up question: who in your life do you lie to the most?

As mobile computing, big data, location services and voice recognition converge, new possibilities emerge we probably never even thought about. The Atlantic had a smart piece on one possibility: the future of fraud-busting.

They cover several potential avenues that technology could protect us, but one in particular seems like it could change a lot more than how often we have to change our credit card numbers.

Picture yourself walking down the street when a man approaches and asks for bus fare; he says he lost his wallet and needs to get home. Right away, your phone buzzes with a notification: Stay away. He’s a fraud. The same voice has been asking for money in different locations all week. Such a possibility sounds far-fetched, but your phone company already gathers information from all the phones in its network, and several tech firms are developing voice-biometrics software that can identify individuals and even catch emotional patterns that may indicate deceit. [emphasis added]

The idea of catching on to repeat offenders with data is one thing. But what if someone unlocks that next level of real-time analysis, decoding an individual’s voice patterns and emotional cues, to foil lying? Imagine a world where an effective lie-detecting machine is in everyone’s pocket. Conversation would never be the same again.

Would you want this technology to exist, understanding that you’d know when people were lying to you, and they’d know when you lied to them?

Even if that meant the polite deceptions we use to smooth things over with friends or in relationships are no longer possible?

How else would this change our lives — at work, in commerce, in dating, even in public life like politics or dealing with the law?

Turns out your answer depends a lot on whether you’re the car or the pedestrian.

Self driving cars sound awesome. Less traffic, fewer accidents, more free mental bandwidth while commuting. But nothing is perfect, and some scientists are beginning to examine how automated cars should handle accidents:

Here is the nature of the dilemma. Imagine that in the not-too-distant future, you own a self-driving car. One day, while you are driving along, an unfortunate set of events causes the car to head toward a crowd of 10 people crossing the road. It cannot stop in time but it can avoid killing 10 people by steering into a wall. However, this collision would kill you, the owner and occupant. What should it do?

One way to approach this kind of problem is to act in a way that minimizes the loss of life. By this way of thinking, killing one person is better than killing 10.

But that approach may have other consequences. If fewer people buy self-driving cars because they are programmed to sacrifice their owners, then more people are likely to die because ordinary cars are involved in so many more accidents. The result is a Catch-22 situation.

So one could abstractly argue all day about what’s right, and if you’re able to take yourself out of the equation, the math is what it is.

If it were up to you to decide how autonomous cars handle accidents, what do you program them to do?

How does your answer change if:
a) you’re the first one driving one?
b) you’re also in charge of convincing other people to buy one?
c) everyone is required to drive one (and is that worth doing)?

It’s so great when friends get together like this.

This piece from the NY Times on how phones keep us disconnected hovers around a topic we see covered a lot (and that I keep coming back to myself, here), but references several studies that make it hit harder than your average thinkpiece.

In 2010, a team at the University of Michigan led by the psychologist Sara Konrath put together the findings of 72 studies that were conducted over a 30-year period. They found a 40 percent decline in empathy among college students, with most of the decline taking place after 2000.

Across generations, technology is implicated in this assault on empathy. We’ve gotten used to being connected all the time, but we have found ways around conversation — at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, in which we play with ideas and allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. But it is in this type of conversation — where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another — that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

The studies make it seem undeniable, but the interpretation here isn’t simply about people having short attention spans or being shallow. There’s a more poignant spin that we’re just afraid to expose ourselves and be open, and the less practiced we are at that, the easier it is to retreat to the safety of the mediated conversation over the one right in front of us.

How often do you turn to the phone when you should be engaged in conversation? Why do you think you do this?

When other people do the same thing, what do you think of them?

Do you think your ability to have a meaningful conversation is improving or suffering over time? Does this have anything to do with the technology in your life?

Do you even want to change this trajectory, or is this an acceptable evolution of how we interact for you?

[Note: photo taken from artist Eric Pickersgill’s series of group photos with the phones removed for effect. Lovely project.]

Early Kindles succeeded at being both revolutionary and revolting at once.

In Aeon magazine, writer Craig Mod reflects on his initial enthusiasm for digital books, and how that enthusiasm has cooled, sending him back to the physical versions for a whole host of reasons.

It was an incredible user experience, full of perceived value, delightful in its absurdity. Most importantly, using the device in these ways felt like an investment in the future of books and reading. Each Kindle book I bought was a vote with the wallet: yes – digital books! Every note I took, every underline I made was contributing to a vast lattice collection of reader knowledge that would someday manifest in ways beautiful or interesting or otherwise yet unknowable. This I believed. And implicit in this belief was a trust – a trust that Amazon would innovate, move the experience forward unpredictably, meaningfully, and delightfully. This belief – that Amazon was going to teach the old guard new tricks – kept me buying and reading and engaging.

…

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. …It was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a room with most of the air sucked out of it, stale and exhausting, the exploration stops. And for the intersection of books and digital there’s still much exploration to be had.

In his case, it’s not the lack of willingness or enthusiasm for the idea that has turned him off. It’s the lack of momentum on exploring even newer possibilities.

What differences have you perceived in your digital reading vs digital reading, in terms of reading experience, or how you engage with the material?

What are the most meaningful strengths of each format? Do any of these make you a die-hard advocate for one or the other?

If in another 20 years they were to stop physical book printing outright, what would you miss most? What would we lose as a culture?

Do heavy Tinder users have the least, or the most, need for a site like this?

The recent Vanity Fair article on the way Tinder is changing dating — or possibly even destroying it, depending on your reading — seems to be taking the internet by storm this week.

One way to read it is that no one cares about relationships at all anymore. It’s just convenient, on-demand sex with acceptably attractive partners, and this is how young people live now. Another is that this generation is going to lose all understanding of how relationships work because of their glut of options for sexual partners.

One thing the article doesn’t seem to address is how the existence of Tinder is changing how people behave in order to do better on Tinder. Are they all obsessed with skin care in ways we weren’t before? Driven harder than ever to have gym-hardened bodies so they get swiped more often when their appearance is their only opportunity to impress? Do they spend hours faking smiles for practice selfies? Become nearly-professional photographers in their quest for the best-lit, perfectly framed headshots?

The image-first style of these apps, and the superficiality and judgment that comes with them, is barely mentioned at all in the article, but that’s what interested me (as someone who has never used Tinder). So.

What would an app with the opposite priorities of Tinder look like?

How would it work? Would you use it if you were single? If not, who would?

Would those people be having as much sex? Better dates? More relationships?