Connection Problem S03E14: Silicon Valley is a four letter word
Revisiting the links I bookmarked for this week's Connection Problem, the red thread that emerges is "responsible technologists", with inputs from some unlikely parties.
Also, hello to all the new folks who joined the last week or so. I couldn't figure out where the influx came from—how did you find this? By the way, I'm tempted more and more to move the newsletter date from after the weekend to before the weekend. Any thoughts or preferences on that?
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is always appreciated!
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Big in Brazil
Good news first: I'm excited and very happy that a report I wrote last fall as part of a ThingsCon-Mozilla collaboration (A Trustmark for IoT) was just referenced fairly extensively in Brazil's National IoT Plan, (concretely in document 8B / Action Plan).
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It's up to us.
No one's coming. It's up to us: Dan Hon on the role & responsibility of humanist technologists is 💯🙌🙏
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Clean up the swamp
CNN reports that Unilever threatens to pull ads from Facebook and Google if they don't clean up the swamp: "2018 is either the year of techlash, where the world turns on the tech giants -- and we have seen some of this already -- or the year of trust," [Unilever marketing boss] Weed will say. "The year where we collectively rebuild trust back in our systems and our society."
Now that's some strong language right there.
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A new New Deal?
The European Commission is getting ready to play hardball with US tech companies, or at least that's what they're suggesting: By announcing a new New Deal for Consumers (or at least, announcing the need for one) they hint at a new initiative to get US tech companies to play by European rules where European users are concerned.
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Silicon Valley is a four letter word
In the meantime, outside of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is becoming an adjective, and a bit of a dirty word. As is: "This is a very Silicon Valley approach." It's not meant, usually, as a compliment.
In the mainstream mainstream (say, the physical newspaper clips from his conservative newspaper that my dad mails me by snail mail occasionally about some tech thing or another), Silicon Valley (SV) still has the cachet of innovation and digital revolution. Think "It's incredible what they can do with computers these days!"
But if you talk to anyone with a somewhat deeper understanding of these issues, and anyone who up to speed—the early adopters, industry insiders, and many more—the tack has been changing dramatically.
I'm not quite sure what to think of this, to be honest. Facebook and Google bashing is easy; I think it's often misdirected, too. And I hasten to add that I've done it myself more than once. But it's a cheap party trick that often misses the point and mis-assigns the blame. (Also, full disclosure, I've worked with Google on several projects in the past.)
Often, criticism of tech—and especially data-related issues—are aimed at Facebook and Google, because they're the consumer brand we all are very familiar with. Some of those criticism are undoubtedly justified, too. Others are misplaced: Google (and to a degree, Facebook) are quite possible the best stewards of data because a) they have the expertise and resources to employ very skilled security teams; and b) their business incentives are based on having exclusive access to their users' attention. Whereas the large tracking-based ad networks are a cesspit of non-consenting data collection. But I digress.
Anyway, I'll just leave this thought out here and would love to hear what you think—Silicon Valley: praise or dirty word?
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Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
It's not just Silicon Valley, though. India also is messing up badly. This report on Aadhaar failing the most vulnerable ("Aadhaar took away whatever we were getting") is as powerful as it is alarming as it highlights yet another angle of how Aadhaar fails besides data protection politics: Due to mismanagement and supposedly smaller issues like typos in names, or even "due to slight changes in the matra (vowel sign) in Hindi", financial support from the government stops coming in. Of course, as is often the case with these large scale, top-down systems, there's no reasonable way of recourse. Please hold the line. Our operators will be with you any minute now. Or maybe not.
So now we have a centralized government vault of citizens' data, which is bad. It's already been breached, which is even worse. And it doesn't increase efficiency of service delivery but leaves the most vulnerable to suffer because the system is designed without resilience in mind. What a cluster f***.
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AI learns how to transfer learning
DeepMind is mastering transfer learning: "DeepMind built a new AI system called IMPALA that simultaneously performs multiple tasks—in this case, playing 57 Atari games—and attempts to share learning between them. It showed signs of transferring what was learned from one game to another. (...) IMPALA was 10 times more data-efficient than a similar AI and achieved double the final score. That's a promising hint that transfer learning is plausible. Plus, a system like this that learns using less processing power could help speed up training of different types of AI."
This is fascinating; if effective, this might accelerate progress in machine learning enormously yet again.
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Explore the future
Shout-out to Sami Niemelä's impressions from Interaction18. As my fellow co-chair from Interaction16 in Helsinki and a leader in the field, he knows this stuff and can put it in context much better than I ever could. (And I have to say, this is an impressive, lovely, committed community if ever I've seen one.) Alas I had to miss the event.
Core themes are around responsibility, designing for resilience, and designing systems that work for all (rather than products that work for a few). It's very zeitgeisty in that sense.
Two concrete shout-outs that Sami name-checked in his post:
- Dan Lockton's New Metaphors project at Carnegie Mellon's Imaginaries Lab (including templates, cards, etc.) looks ace.
- Buddy Simone Rebaudengo and his automato.farm collective brought an installation that looked just lovely: Objective Realities, which lets you experience the world from the perspective of connected objects. Come on, let's be a roomba for the day!
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Have a great weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
PS. Please feel free to forward this to friends & colleagues, or send them to tinyletter.com/pbihr
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