the little lies robots tell us
ruminations on human-computer interfaces
“Battery Fully Charged!”, my bluetooth headphones chirped brightly directly into my eardrums when I accidentally bumped the power button when I was taking them off, returning from a little shopping trip. Wow, I thought, what amazing headphones. They can confidently state absolute bullshit!
Obviously the batteries weren’t fully charged. I’d been listening to music and podcasts for like, an hour and a half. I mean sure, the headphones are pretty new, and they have very good battery life, something I’m a huge fan of, of course. But they aren’t so efficient that an hour and a half of listening has no impact. And in fact, upon checking, the battery life was actually at 91%.
Now of course, I can’t (and don’t) expect my headphones to have a pre-recorded message for every single percent point. But I do know that it does have a line it reads out for every 10% increment, and with something like battery life, isn’t it better to round down rather than up, so that I don’t get a false impression of it having more usable duration left than it does? Of course, this isn’t exactly accurate either - and the line my headphones read out covers this, by saying “Battery Level: About Ninety Percent”.
But it got me thinking a little further than this; the percent readout of battery life remaining is itself only an estimation anyway. It’s usually derived from the current measured charge of the battery versus its rated peak capacity - and best practice measures the charge against the last-known peak capacity detected, as that degrades over time as the battery is charged and discharged. 100%, over time, means less and less absolute operating time for the device. The voltage of the battery also changes as the charge runs down, and the rate of change of the charge is also not a simple sliding scale.
Would it be better if battery meters instead showed you all these details? No, of course, at a glance it would be far too much information to make a judgement on right away. It’s better, and more ergonomic, for the number to be a somewhat easily-understood abstraction. But that only works if the abstraction being presented to the user is itself as accurate as it can be. Because the drift between abstraction and reality becomes so much larger if (on top of all the other things that are tricky about understanding battery life) the number I’m being shown is a good few percentage points off of where the calculation actually takes it.
And this wooliness gets applied to so much more, too. Some websites and apps seem allergic to showing a user what date and time some event happened at. Ever been on a website, and all the posts say something like, “3 months ago”? If you’re lucky, you can hover over the date display and actually discover their real dates and times, and you gain additional context - these things happened close together, over the course of only a couple of days, with a few posts every hour. You know from the gap in time that this was something hotly discussed, and briefly, in a way that simply stamping everything with “3 months ago” does not.
These get worse of course, when the year rolls over; some particularly poor examples change what should reasonably say “two weeks ago” into “one year ago”, for something that was posted in December being viewed in January.
Misinformation like this causes unnecessary mental load on people - ostensibly the exact opposite purpose of a computer, and yet people have been subjected to this so often that it has become a normal part of using these devices.
Because of this normalization, it has been easier for dark patterns to proliferate that exploit similar loopholes. Inexact, passive language like “Remind me later” has become the default for confirmation dialogues for every advertising-ridden soul-sucking “feature” of modern commercial operating systems, platforms, and applications. The erosion of consent in this way increasingly cedes ground to massive corporations with little-to-zero oversight, and impoverishes our ability to control what our devices and platforms do; instead, much of the time, it feels like these tools end up controlling us.
I’ve banged the drum many times before about the infantilisation of the user. Well-meant and necessary efforts to make computers accessible and usable by everyday people have since been warped by commercial interests. Over-simplifcation of what a computer is and does leaves people unable to reason about why the device is working the way it is. Malfunctions no longer display error messages that communicate the reason for failure; instead, a page or app simply says “Oops! Something went wrong.”, in a cloying tone of voice more suited to reassuring a toddler who has spilled some sauce on themselves than for an adult using something to complete their daily work. Rather than be told what the issue is, there is no recourse but to wait for the corporation to address the issue (or to spend money on a paid support service).
Files and filesystems are hidden, smeared into a mush of camera rolls and AI-driven searchable buckets. Are the files stored locally on your device, or not? Why should the corporation tell you, when instead, it can spring a surprise message telling you that “You have used 80% of your cloud storage; upgrade your subscription plan now to avoid us deleting everything you’ve ever made!”. Did you remember uploading them to the cloud? Were you asked, and could simply only answer, “Yes!” or “Later!”? Are those files now being used to train some generative model, the images of cherished loved ones chewed up and spat out into a paste, the familiar light of their eyes replicated a thousand times across soulless mannequins, empty fabrications devoid of even a shred of genuine human creativity?
The longer we tolerate the little lies that robots tell us, the bigger the lies become, and the more difficult it becomes to untangle them from our everyday lives. This is not an inevitability, however; we can find in ourselves and in our connections with eachother the self-confidence to learn how these things work, to unpick the threads, to see through the smoke and mirrors that they are only barely veiled behind.