This week, I created another little game: a perspective drawing game! You can check it out here:
The idea is to drag blue dots on the screen until the box you see is correct. And the idea behind *that* is to train your intuition for freehand drawing rotated boxes correctly.
This game may not be helpful to everyone, and I’m unsure whether we can continue using it indefinitely. It is best done with a stylus on a touch screen. I have one of these Samsung phones.
I worry that future phones may not be suited for Practice Drawing This.
I’ve read about people working on new generations of AI-based phones, and they could be voice interface only, which can be cool in a Startrek-kind of way: “Sylvia requested I pay her ten bucks; see the last email she sent. Please transfer ten dollars to her account for me and send her an email thanking her for lending it to me and apologizing for the delay in repaying it. Oh, and book me a nine-day holiday starting March 3rd. You know my preferences and budget. Ask Mark’s phone if Mark is available for a call. I need to ask him something.”
That has the potential to make phones your personal assistant. In exchange for all your data, of course. That AI is going to know everything about you, which is scary. But large swathes of the population will not care.
Not only that, but if these phones become screen-less, you can’t use most of the tools I put on my website! Then again, maybe that won’t happen. We still take photos. There will probably still be a screen.
Consider the implications of this: the environmental footprint if billions of people start using AI continuously, the enormous brother-like surveillance possibilities, and the fact that there will be an AI between every interaction between two humans, interpreting, answering, and summarizing.
But worst of all, you won’t be able to use the Practice Drawing This tools on your device! I know this keeps you up at night.
In all seriousness, what worries me most is that AI will be used as Judge, Jury, and Executioner, and this is a problem because the way AI currently works, it is essentially a way to encode prejudices. I encountered this problem on Instagram in 2018. I was too enthusiastic on that platform, and so the algorithm decided I was a bot and limited my account. No way to fight that. Imagine companies using that to filter through resumes: “Ah, your name is Anita; our data shows Anita’s have below-average management skills; we’ll have to pass on your resume.” Or the tax authorities: “Your name is Richard, and an above-average number of Richard’s commit fraud, so we are going to assume you will, too, and we will start to audit you yearly from now on.”
Idiots are going to be using AI for that.
For now, the future is not here yet, thankfully, and it is pretty cool to do this Perspective Drawing Game on my phone while out and about. It’s fun.
I call it a game, but it currently lacks all the bells and whistles of a real game: levels, end bosses, points, high scores, badges, lives, and game-overs. I don’t miss these. The game doesn’t even tell you how well you did. The feedback comes from your eyes. You can tell by sight if you did it well. This holds for the memory drawing game and the dexterity warm-ups as well; you can see if you did well or not. The points, badges, and such are just external validation.
I’ve seen what external validation rewards can do with Duolingo: I ended up doing the exercises that gave me the most points, not the ones that I learned the most from. Points and badges can turn into perverse incentives, making the system addictive for its own sake.
With the Perspective Drawing Game, there is an internal motivation: you see what’s on screen, and you see if you did well or not. That motivation is aligned with the end goal, which is to develop an instinct for drawing these boxes freehand correctly. It’s rewarding to see when you got it (almost) right. Try it!
These little games provide the mini dopamine hits of getting the boxes right by sight, which is something that might help me make drawing as addictive as programming.
Yours sincerely,