S06E20 of Connection Problem: Hindsight is 2020
Virginia Frances Sterrett - Tanglewood Tales
Hi there,
This week’s a little delayed and on the short side of things. First the kid got some infection, then I came down with a fever myself. Nothing too bad on either side, but it derails the schedule a bit as I’m sure you can imagine. But that shall not stop us!
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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.
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Personal-ish & project updates
On Colorful Caribou we’ll take another iteration to round out some details. I pulled the plug on Daring Dandelion, which was a bit of an experiment that turned out not to be as promising as it had seemed at the outset. So that bandwidth is reallocated to where it's needed most, namely all the other projects. Autonomous Antelope is just about ready and about to go out for feedback from some trusted experts.
On a thoroughly personal note, I recently learned that Berlin has a newly opened artificial standing wave — for surfing, that is — and it’s incredibly fun and a fantastic way to learn. Just saying I’m hooked, and if you’re in the area you might enjoy it. Very accessible and well-done beginners classes, too, so besides booking a time slot there’s not much prep needed to get going. And should you prefer fast-moving air to fast-moving water, literally next door there’s an indoor skydiving park.
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Hindsight is 2020
Kicking off 2020 with a new series, 20in20: 20 blog posts in 20 (work) days. Here’s the first 3, and their key passages:
(1) Category Error: Tracking Ads Are Not a Funding Mechanism
It is a category error to think of online advertising as a means to fund the creation of content. It’s not that online advertising doesn’t fund the creation of content, but this is almost a side effect, and that function is dwarfed by the negative unintended consequences it enables. Tracking ads are not a funding method for online content. Tracking ads are the infrastructure for surveillance & manipulation, and a massive attack vector for undermining society and its institutions.
(2) Smart Cities & Human Rights
What’s the most appropriate foundation to build a “Smart City Rights” perspective on? Some robust and resilient basis to build on? I’m arguing for basing this whole debate on these three things: UN Human Rights Principles, UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the Declaration of Cities Coalition for Digital Rights.
Image: Sketching out a Smart City and Human Rights analytical framework
(3) Nuclear disarmament but for surveillance tech?
Where the immediate danger of facial recognition tech is lower than that from a nuclear bomb, the barrier to entry is just that much lower: The tooling and the knowledge is there, the training data is there, it’s near-trivial to launch this type of product now. So we have to expect this to be a constant pretty bad threat any day for the rest of our lives. So what mechanisms do we have to mitigate those risks?
Related: Just as the EU is playing with the idea of a ban on facial recognition (except for security contexts, meh!), Germany announced plans to roll out facial recognition systems across most major train stations after - wait for it - a pilot project in Berlin’s Südkreuz station drew heavy criticism for having no defined success criteria and hence couldn’t be evaluated in any scientifically sound way. So it’s unclear what worked, or if this pilot project was really ever intended to test anything. Imagine me shaking my fist.
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Macroscopes
Thanks to Ton for making me aware of the concept of macroscopes:
Macroscopes, being the opposite of microscopes, allow us to see how our personal situation fits in a wider global whole. The term comes from John Thackara in the context of social end ecological design. He says a macroscope “allows us to see what the aggregation of many small interactions looks like when added together”. It makes the processes and systems that surrounds us visible and knowable.
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A social media platform for the 21st century?
Tom Coates announced they’re launching Planetary, a social media platform that’s open and decentralized (as in Decentralized Web decentralized; it’s based on the Scuttlebug protocol), meaning any one (company, community group) could be hosting their own instances. The killer feature, though, is that it’s designed to minimize harassment.
This design against harassment has multiple aspects: The business model isn’t built around engagement and ads, which creates more cleanly aligned incentives. And the protocol is set up so that messages only reach friends and friends’ friends: 2 steps, then they stop, unless they are actively re-shared and hence propelled forward. Meaning things can go viral theoretically but it’s a lot (!) more work.
The way Tom explained it once (and I’m paraphrasing) is that the physics of the space are made so that anyone’s voice only carries so far. Where on Twitter, everyone gets a giant megaphone and is yelling to the whole world (by design), on Planetary you’re in a small-group conversation. On Twitter (Facebook, etc.), anyone can see your messages and hence gather a mob to attack you; on Planetary only your friends and their friends can see and reach you. It should make for a much, much more pleasant experience. (The site looks nice, too, of course.)
This focus on the human experience rather than the open source aspect is what really sets it apart for me from the Diasporas and Ellos and Mastodons of the world. This one I’ll be happy to try.
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Miscellanea
- Games culture: Red Cross and Fortnite collaborate on a special format where you safe lives
- National AI Strategies, the primer: 2020 and the European National Strategies for Artificial Intelligence. A Summary of Existing AI Strategies and Draft Strategies on AI Entering 2020.
- EU AI Strategy: Great thread by Stefan Heumann (Stiftung Neue Verantwortung) on the leaked EU Commission's White Paper on a European Approach towards AI.
- TailorGAN: Making User-Defined Fashion Designs: “Given a reference fashion garment and a desired design attribute, we aim to generate a new garment that seamlessly integrates the desired design attribute to the reference image.” The paper is illustrated with an example of merging two designs that way: Take a grey polo shirt and a ping crew neck t-shirt and the TailorGAN will produce a grey polo with a crew neck collar. I immediately couldn’t help but joke that this is how Amazon Basics clothes are made; but maybe it’s just the trashy images they used here for illustration.
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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat!
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Currently reading: The Smart Enough City (Ben Green), Agency (William Gibson), The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes)
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What's next?
Still wrapping up a whole bunch of writing. Maybe another couple of weeks, then I’ll have my mind free to look into other stuff again.
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, and artificial intelligence — can have a positive social impact. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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