A guy runs down a path and a robot cart follows along after him, keeping pace and matching his every twist and turn. The future is here. But something nags me. I want the runner to stop to see what will happen. I can just image 10 years from now thousands of people in airports constantly being bumped from behind by their iSuitcases because the damn things follow too close and can’t break and stop as quickly as a person can. On the dirt path the mad in running down? Forget about it. The man could come to a stop in a few steps. The cart would skid right over him. It is pretty nifty though.

Another thought.

Is lonelygirl15 an part of the new aesthetic? A fictional person living online. Lonelygirl15 was always intended to be outed I think. It was created to be entertainment. It was inevitable that people would catch on. But what about those people out there who are living secret lives on Facebook? It’s a little more difficult that it used to be to set up alternate identities on the internet but not impossible. Imagine a false identity spread across the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of them linked and sharing information on an imaginary persona. Are police posing as 13 year old girls trolling the internet for pedophiles part of the new aesthetic?

I’ve been reading about the new aesthetic for a little while now and I’m still trying to get what it is. Show me a picture of a building with a digital looking brick pattern and I get that. The visual stuff is easier. The technical, the digital moving into out physical world. That’s part of it. But what about when we move into the digital world?

I suspect part of the problem I’m having understanding the new aesthetic is that the level of dialog right now is taking place in very rarified atmosphere. It’s the Bruce Sterlings who are spilling their brains onto the internet and most of us top out at see Spot run.

It is on the internet though, which, if I get this at all, makes the discuss about the new aesthetic a very new aesthetic kind of thing. In the past this kind of discussion would have taken place at elite symposiums. Papers would have been published in fancy scientific journals with limited distribution. Letters would have flown across the country, indeed, around the world in a heated debate that would have lasted for years before the New Aesthetic was nailed down. Eventually it would work it’s way down to the see Spot run level of discourse and the rest of us would read about it in Time Magazine, nicely pre-digetsted for our tender sensibilities. Now it’s happening on the internet in damn near realtime. We are seeing it in it’s rough, embryonic, highfaluting phase and we are befuddled, but fascinated. The process also seems to be incredibly accelerated as the discourse spreads far and wide at a digital pace. How very New Aesthetic.

And as the technology tries to move up-market, they’re creating new distribution channels that will solve these problems as they arise. You mention CE certification – this could be solved in a number of ways that don’t require everyone to have ID training. Perhaps kickstarter or shapeways could have some trained people on staff to shepherd designs through the process. Perhaps there could be a generic approval for certain building blocks. Who knows? But if they can capture a lot of non-creators, then they’ll have funds and motivation to solve the up-market problems.

I’m not arguing with your main point, that ID expertise and practices are still very valuable for what they’re currently being used for today. It’s just that there’s a whole new segment with much lower expectations that’s poised to eat away the market from the bottom. Saying that the output isn’t high enough quality is true for current mass-marketed products, but that isn’t the competition for these cheap low-end technologies right now, the competition is nothing. If they can win against nothing, then they’ll reach the desired quality eventually.