...urkel technology...
“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”
-Steve Jobs-
“I want to put a dent in the universe.”
-Noah Wyle of E.R. playing Steve Jobs in the movie The Pirates of Silicon Valley-
Raised without electricity, 14 year old Beaver Utah farm boy Philo Farnsworth dreamed of a world where images and sounds communicated great distances by radio signals and tubes. After his father level-upped and brought electricity to the farm, Philo went to work on his dream and in 1927, in my great San Francisco Bay Area, he delivered on his vision with a prototype for the first working Television.
Now when I was a young teenager my parents really stood in the way of my hopes and dreams. They never let me gamble, screw, or smoke and drink with my friends. Instead I only got to do the next best thing…watch that Television. On Friday nights I was gifted with a smorgasbord of sitcom delights on the TV network ABC. Step by step this boy met a world of perfect strangers in my full house of laugh track escapism.
ABC promoted this line-up of chuckles as T.G.I.F., as in Thank God It’s Friday. Other TV Networks at the time attempted to promote their line-ups in a similar fashion with lesser results; NBC produced Oh Shit It’s Monday, Turner presented a Total Turd Thursday, and FOX went so far as create an entire weekend of content with their Hail Satan Saturday and Just Shut Up and Watch Football Sundays.
Of all the shows that shaped me during my TV Era, Family Matters stood out amongst the batch. A spin-off of Perfect Strangers, it was a show about a middle class family living in Chicago (a lifestyle and location I was conveniently mimicking at the time).
Midway through the first season, the family and the show are introduced to a character named Steve Urkel. He was the stereotypical media application of a geek or nerd of the era, with large, thick eyeglasses, flood pants held up by suspenders, multi-colored cardigan sweaters, saddle shoes, and a high-pitched voice.
Like Eddie Deezen before he got busted for burgling, Steve Urkel was a likable avatar of geek culture, beloved to the point whereupon he became the show’s major focus over time. Through this tenure of increasing celebrity Steve Urkel was mainly known for two things.
The first was causing accidental havoc. His ongoing role was built around creating property damage and/or personal injury as a result of his inventions going awry or his outright clumsiness. Some of the various mischiefs he created across the series were burning down his job, getting people fired from their jobs, gluing himself to the girl he was stalking, almost destroying a spacestation and eventually shrinking and cloning himself and others.
The second thing Steve Urkel was famous for was his catch phrase…”Did I Do That?” Performed with a tone of innocent confused guiltiness the catchphrase, became an ubiquitous utterance for anyone familiar with the character or the show. It was Steve’s way of sheepishly avoiding any responsibility for the chaos and damage he created with his technology and intellect.
A.I. is an Urkel Technology.
Urkel technologies are innovations created with no mind or responsibility for the problems they create in the world. So you got deep faked into pornography…Did I do that? So I used a robot to trick you into dating me…Did I do that? So I am convincing young men to become terrorists…Did I do that?
I am not anti innovation. I am not anti product. I am not anti Urkel. Hell, I love chaos, especially in the form of a CRASS record. But I have been struggling with understanding the roles we need to serve as creators in evaluating all possible potentials for the things we produce. Should innovation at all costs, sans purpose, be the point of it all? Or do the tools we create necessitate at least a creative and philosophical discussion at the build and delivery stage of execution?
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.“
-Thomas Edison-
As A.I. firms lay off their ethics departments, and A.I. scientists believe with increasing numbers that A.I. will cause the extinction of humans, what are we building here and why? Are we making A.I. anime to democratize content, or to pay indentured destitute animators even less money than we already do? A.I is helping people commit suicide, accelerating disinformation and conspiracy, giving fake cancer advice, engendering faux kidnappings and creating cursed crochets!
Ezra Klein notes in his column, This Changes Everything, that the coders and scientists working on this technology, even knowing that they might be working on doomsday devices, believe that the innovation is worth that potential end of the world scenario. For this handful of cynical scientists, family definitely doesn’t matter.
Instead they eye fuck each other and say…”did I do that?”
Philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2016 banged the A.I. Doomsday drum, elucidating in his book Superintelligence that A.I. might be our world ending nuclear winter. His work was influential to the point of aligning 1000+ experts and robotic researchers to sign an open letter warning against an A.I. military arms race. And here we are 7 years later and some of those same minds are once again asking for a pause, this time for A.I. learning models. Time moves forward, but the fear and potential for devastation remain the same.
Those with their hand on the development of these tools however see only the bright potential of this tech, and push further onwards. Bill Gates arguing in defense of A.I. at all speeds and costs said, “Clearly there’s huge benefits to these things…what we need to do is identify the tricky areas.”
And this makes sense. Microsoft, the largest stakeholder in Open A.I. and its ChatGPT product, has never had a better chance to reestablish its foothold as a tech behemoth above all others. Why would it avoid pushing forward given its potential to establish itself as the exclusive corpo technology leader once again? If that means a bunch of people lose jobs along the way, we get increasingly sophisticated malware, and/or just more and better call center scamming that might just be bad actor abuse, right?
So your grandma just gave her life savings to a robot but did I do that?
A.I. is not a lone form of Urkel technology. Atomic energy is also an Urkel Technology. Splitting the atom gave us new energy potentials, and it also gave us a bomb so deadly every nation wants to have one, and every human prays they never have to see one used. As Robert Oppenheimer watched his creation, the A-Bomb first explode, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through his mind, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
And as Harry Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima he thought…”did I do that?”
Apple Air Tags are also an Urkel Technology. Sure these tags can help you find your keys or bag you lost, but they are also being used for expert level stalking. And while you might want to use them to help find that dog you are always losing, that dog instead might just want to eat them.
I mean, if we are losing bags, keys, and dogs to the point where we need a $40 geo-tracking device to find them, we probably have larger cerebral issues to resolve. How did Apple not foresee this use case and plan for it ahead of time? Will they prioritize fixing them to ensure this use case is prevented or just simply say…did I do that?
The Oakland A’s might also be an Urkel technology.
The Oakland A’s are a baseball team based in Oakland (surprise!), who desperately want to live in Vegas (yeah baby!), and are most modernly notable for their advancements by way of Billy Beane’s moneyball technologies. Moneyball was a data driven strategy to build a competitive baseball team with the lowest amount of financial resources. But after leading to one of the longest win streaks in baseball history, moneyball has adapted the current iterations of the team into a cheap farm system for the rest of major league baseball owners to cull developed talent from.
At this point the A’s are basically a AAA team disguised as a major league baseball product. They are like a deepfake of what someone might say professional baseball looks like. GAP nepo-baby and Oakland A’s owner, John Fischer, stares down the coliseum field at a shortstop bobbling a groundball and should probably be asking himself…did I do that?
I am not a soothsayer. When I wrote this article today I was not considering the consequences of releasing it to the world. Who knows what damage and destruction this article could cause. People might actually binge watch Family Matters, and/or use A.I. to create endless sequels and reboots to Full House and Boy Meets World. Did I do that?
In the later seasons of Family Matters Steven Urkel transforms his “nerd genes” to become “cool genes” and becomes a suave alter ego named Stefan Urquelle. He iterates this technology until the crush he spent his life pestering and stalking finally falls in love with his altered human existence. He then clones the Stefan, lives his life as two sentient beings, and the show ends with a will they or won’t they marriage proposal between Steve, Stefan, and their love interest Laura.
We now live in an era where that entire series plot line I just described is only years away from being a real humanic possibility. So while we work on cloning technology, anti-aging, virtual immortality, and smart A.I. toilets maybe we can also consider the various ways in which these innovations might do more than what they intend to. We don’t need to sign decrees and quit innovating, but perhaps we can be more thoughtful and considerate of all the potential in our potentials.
Heck baseball just did this itself. Staring down a product that moneyballed itself into 5 hour games and a dwindling fanbase, they altered their tech stack to improve pace and competitiveness by expanding base size, introducing a pitch clock, and doing away with defensive player shifts. We would have been headed towards an apocalyptic never-ending infinite inning A’s-Marlins game, but instead we are getting beers served in the 8th inning.
Considerate innovation for the win!
There is an answer to the question posed by Urkel technology.
“Did I do that?” we ask.
Yes we did. And now we should fix it.
Still waiting to see how you translate the Canafis signature style to a real-life stand up routine. Any progress on that?
“Who knows what damage and destruction this article could cause.”
Endless damage and destruction.
Another gem!