S03E01: New Beginnings

Hello back,

It's been a while and I trust you've been well? Welcome to the launch of Season 3 of this newsletter.

By the way, the newsletter also should get a new name I think. Have an idea? Let me know!

Enjoy!

/// I'm hearing voices

LAUREN, the human intelligent smart home is a fantastic art project by Lauren McCarthy. There's so much to explore in the dynamics of how we live with machines and algorithms, especially if we can listen to them anytime/they listen to us all the time(via Bruce Sterling).

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Speaking of voice-enabled internet: How do smart homes change how we communicate, both with each other and with our environment? How does our media consumption and info diet change based on which gatekeeper devices we use? I recently was invited by Prof. Sven Engesser, who just started as a prof for media and communications at Technical University in Dresden (and, in the spirit of full transparency, is a close friend of mine), to speak about IoT and what it might mean in the context of communication science. The smart home especially offers a huge range of things to dig into for research of these master students. I'm very happy to see that they're on it, and that the university is setting up a lab to run tests on how people communicate (differently? the same? at all?) when in a room full of sensors.

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In only vaguely related news, a journalist called for a chat about the internet of things: We're working on a series on IoT, she said, but we don't know how to frame it. It sometimes sounds just too depressing for most people. I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I knew exactly what she meant. How do you cover a complex topic with the necessary nuance while there's disasters happening in the space left and right? How do you get readers to not just shut down entirely?

/// AI: Turn it up to 11

Within just a few days, several dots around AI and government actors popped up all over my radar: The UAE appointed a minister for AI. Saudia Arabia announced plans to build a smart city 33x the size of New York City, and granted “citizenship” to a robot. Google has been pushing towards more and more AI-powered services across their products. In my work and research, AI and robotics have shot up to the top right alongside (all of a sudden seemingly much more tame-seeming) IoT. It's becoming more and more obvious that we're reaching some kind of inflection point, so this space is going to stay interesting—or become even more so.

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Kate Crawford, co-founder of the AI Now institute, Some background on the report (PDF download) in this WIRED interview: Why AI Is Still Waiting For Its Ethics Transplant

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Is it a cat or guacamole? Fascinating research on GANs and 3D models. Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects is a fascinating read. May I propose we make sure to understand this better before deploying algorithms for critical infrastructure?

TK: CAT IMAGE Cat or guacamole? (Image: Labsix)

TK: TURTLE IMAGE Turtle or rifle? (Image: Labsix)

Whisper Wait, what do you mean, too late? We're already deploying critical algo infrastructure?

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In the meantime, BBC reports that "Human trounces AI bots at StarCraft video game". File under "soon-to-be breaking news"?

/// Policy Ponderings

New tech platforms: Is it a platform? Is it a medium? Congress, much like the public and many in the tech industry, are struggling to find out what GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) are. Neutral platform for content distribution or content hub? Campaign tool or pillar of democracy? I tried a first, early stab at shaping my thoughts on the matter in a blog post on Medium, but there's so more to explore there.

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Privacy, Europe, GDPR: On Connected Rights (also see "recommended feeds" below), David Meyer reports that Europe's new privacy law is moving forward and lobbyists aren't happy. So far, so good. What's mind-boggling is the intensity of the lobbying efforts described in this report and in others linked from there. This is far from over, but also shows it's a fight worth having.

/// Recommended feeds

Patrick Tanguay's Sentiers has become an instant read-all for me. You'll enjoy it.

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David Meyer's Connected Rights gives a regular, very accessible dose of—well, what did you expect?—connected rights. It's excellent. Website, newsletter.

/// Miscellanea

Bitcoin, the party topic everybody should try to avoid, is estimated to now use as much energy as a household in a week—for every transaction.

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"Can Germany Fix Facebook?" asks The Atlantic. Nope. But it sure is another data point in the mounting pile of evidence that the times one-size-fits-all regulation are over for the web—for better or for worse.

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In entirely different news, there's a new English translation of Homer's Odyssey. It crossed my Twitter framed as First English Translation By A Woman, which I found, I mean, ok, but it's the 21st century and surely that's not its best quality? And was more than happy to find out that no, that's not all at all. Until I saw this I had never read any part of the Odyssey and was hooked before in my life. (Having studied Latin for 7 years, which strangely also covered lots of non-Latin ancient text, I read quite a lot as a student.) So please indulge me for including the opening bit:

Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered in the storms at sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools, they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus, tell the old story for our modern times. Find the beginning.

I'm not going to pretend I understand the subtleties, or could hope to ever understand them. But this translation is a piece of art, and I just pre-ordered a hard copy. Of the Odyssey. It seems that good. The Paris Review has an excerpt.

/// Featured in

Some personal shout-outs of recent mentions, interviews, etc.: 🙏

• CNN: In a great op-ed on CNN.com about the future of the internet of things, Mozilla Foundation CEO Mark Surman and Michelle Thorne gave not one, but two shout-outs to our work (ThingsCon and the Trustmark for IoT report). Thank you!
• Stories Connecting Dots: The ever wonderful Markus Andrezak interviewed me for his podcast about Shenzhen's hardware ecosystem. This is the second half of a long interview—the first one, published in July, focused on Ethics for IoT.
• VentureBeat kindly asked to re-publish an article of mine on AI and policy. VentureBeat version here, original version here.