EN 71: Raising the bar or raising the floor? (spin-off)

An ethereal screen pops up before your very eyes. This is odd, you mutter, but there’s not even a trace of surprise in your body, it feels natural, welcoming even. Your eyes move to the top of the screen: “Time to reincarnate!”. The “oh” that comes out of your mouth conveys a profound realisation. A small tooltip to the right of the header floats, and opening it reveals that you have to choose a new life, selecting body characteristics and initial context, and warns that all fields are required. Clearly, good design hasn’t yet reached the celestial planes.

You press the start button, faced with a wizard like interface. You go back and forth, changing settings and seeing their impact in a summary that updates in real time. Melanin level, country of origin, wealth, education and overall health of your parents, era of birth… these are a few of the options out of many others. As each element changes, the modifiers in the summary change as well, influencing probabilities in complex ways with too many combinations to grasp. Lowering one element might increase the probabilities of bad outcomes, but increasing other elements balance them out or diminish their importance, or vice versa.

Nothing is certain, the interface guarantees, there’s randomness in the system, these are only initial conditions. Once you reincarnate, your memories will disappear. With the knowledge of your past life, you set out to choose the best possible conditions to live long and prosper.

After what seems to be an eternity, the wizard is completed. A new, better life awaits. Your finger presses the Start a new life button, and a prompt stops you, “are you sure you want to continue?”, how would you not be sure? Yes! A progress bar replaces the wizard, slowly filling up, pixel by pixel. This is taking a bit much, you think, is the bar even moving? There’s no escape or cancel buttons to press, just the progress bar turning transmutating excitement into anxiety.

“Something went wrong”.

"Randomising initial conditions".

Panic grows as an erupting volcano. A nanosecond after, there’s nothing.

On a quiet night and date that no one remembers, a baby cries.

Interesting links

• Why do Humans do Bad Things? (Anne Currie). This is part 5 of a series of 9 posts about tech ethics, highly recommended.

• How a Digital Transformation Can Bankrupt Your Company (Maarten Dalmijn). Lessons about an agile transformation gone wrong in a water company for Amsterdam.

• Processed World. From Wikipedia, “Processed World was an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian magazine focused on the oppressions and absurdities of office work, which, at the time the magazine began, was becoming automated”. You can find all the issues in the link to Internet Archive.