S03E02: File Not Found
Tuesday, 14 November 2017
Apologies for some hiccups in the last episode. Not one but two pictures were missing, including one of a cute cat that an algorithm mistook for guacamole. Such is life!
Sitrep: Typing this from my desk at the office in chilly, sunny Berlin. I've been cutting down on travel these last few weeks, and for the next few weeks. We're expecting a baby very, very soon, so I'm more or less on stand-by, waiting for the phone to buzz. Just one more talk coming up this week that requires me to hop on over to Hamburg. But it'll be a round trip of just about 7 hours, so I guess that's ok. Tying up loose ends of client work and other projects to make sure the machine keeps humming along nicely during the short while that my email response times will be significantly slower.
/// The importance of tools for pros
At Underexposed, a lovely and very intimate conference by Simply Secure, about privacy, security and design that I was kindly invited to speak at, along with some good friends and some great researchers, a discussion came up about toolkits for professionals: Pros may be pros, but they might not be pros at security/privacy/ethics/any other aspect. Good tools (including great documentation) are super important to make sure everything is as good as it can be, not just for these pros themselves but also for all users of their products.
For example, a researcher there (not mentioning names as it's all Chatham House Rules) shared findings about the role of StackOverflow versus official software documentation and found—guess what!—that developers tend to just head to StackOverflow and copy & paste the code there. Books and official documentation are too cumbersome, so copy & paste it is. With all the security-related implications and issues you'd expect.
It's one of those obvious things but one I certainly haven't thought about enough. So I asked the group for recommended toolkits touching on ethics, privacy, security, etc., and collected them here.
(Slides for my presentation, titled The Internet of Sneaky Things, are available online.)
/// Bits & Coins
So. Crypto currencies. I can't help but being more than a little snarky. It's not so much that I don't think the blockchain has interesting use cases—I'm convinced it does! It's that just about everything else about crypto currencies rubs me the wrong way. Especially the way that fans talk about them raises all kinds of alarms. Spidey senses on full alert!
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Quartz: One metric is far more important to bitcoin users than its price
Two quotes stand out to me here:
A “drop in bitcoin’s hash rate could set off a much-feared “chain death spiral” that could render the bitcoin network useless. Bitcoin showed signs of its potential for triggering this dynamic over the weekend”
Which seems to be the usual with this currency of the future.
"Bitcoin’s hash rate fell by 50% over two days as miners switched their machines from bitcoin to bitcoin cash, because it was more profitable to do so."
Right. And this probably shouldn't worry anyone. Because, as crypto fans like to point out, it's "not a fiat currency". Hmmm.
Let's file this as Exhibit A.
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Exhibit B: As Motherboard reports, estimations for the energy consumptions of one bitcoin transaction is now about a household's week's worth of energy. Not these numbers are prone to be inaccurate, but I think it's save to assume lots of energy is being expended on building that ledger.
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Taken together, I have a nagging feeling that at this point in time we have a serious problem. In the best case, we're just in a temporary, very awkward phase on figuring out how to deal with crypto currencies and the blockchain: How to make it work, and what for. In the worst case, we've created yet another layer of unrestrained and unsupervised global financial speculation infrastructure that is purely and aggressively exploitative.
Exploitative not just of amateur investors (proceed at your own risk) but also, and more importantly, exploitative of the planet itself. Unless these mining rigs are run on regenerative energy the miners literally burn up our planet for short term speculation with zero intrinsic value. You don't get to heat a house with this or move goods, you don't get to feed people. You just get a chance of short term financial gain without paying your taxes. It's like the worst bits of global financial speculation combined with shitty, dirty old factory chimneys.
In other words, I'm seriously grappling with the idea that globally and systemically speaking, we might be better off simply by not having bitcoin. We might be at a net loss situation. And that's one damn low bar not to clear.
/// The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Two more dark-ish things to consider that tie vaguely into the unrestrained-bitcoin-speculation bit:
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Gizmodo has a fascinating piece on how Facebook builds user profiles, specifically the so-called Shadow Profile that's built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users (and external sources FB buys data from, presumably). Not cool.
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As mentioned on Twitter the other day, in recent conversations with my peer group I've been noticing an atmospheric shift of sorts. The optimistic tech-might-solve-stuff approach has of course long since all-but-disappeared. But now there seems to be a genuine uncertainty if we're either a) actively hurtling towards a full-on dystopia or b) at the bottom of a bell curve, after a long fall, and about to enter some kind of new renaissance of sorts. It's full on 21st century confusion.
Being personally a little snarky but not the gloomy type I'm leaning towards the latter, buoyed especially by the fantastic conversations I see through the ThingsCon network: Super busy pros taking their time to fight a sort of activist-pro battle inside and outside their organizations to make tech work for humans rather than the other way round. And lots and lots of people from (for me sometimes unexpected) various backgrounds getting in touch for a coffee or two to inquire about potential ways to do something useful. I'll file this under "promising signs".
/// Governments & New Tech
NYTimes has a very good piece on how a bunch of smart technologists do super relevant research on the spread of misinformation on the GAFAM platforms, and who thus were able to support congressional staffers for the recent tech hearings. The piece is anchored on Renee DiResta (of Haven, and formerly O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures), who's tremendously smart and capable for these kind of things. (I met her just a few times at O'Reilly conferences like Solid and Foo Camp.)
Here's the money quote:
How a small group of self-made experts came to advise Congress on disinformation campaigns is a testament to just how long tech companies have failed to find a solution to the problem.
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In vaguely related news, after I spoke at Netzpolitik conference in September they also recorded an interview with me. Here's me waffling on in German about regulation and data protection for the Internet of Things.
/// China & AI
I'm preparing a fun little talk about China and its hardware ecosystem, and the organizers had the genuinely fun idea (I think) to tell it through a photo story. So I got to dig through hundreds of photos from recent trips to Shanghai and Shenzhen, which I enjoyed tremendously, like these:
This app tried to recognize our emotional state. It recognized Anh: "OK!" My face didn't register.
In an immersive-VR showroom in Shenzhen I walked over a suspension bridge. Until I fell right through a hole in the bridge and emerged with a bloody shin. Fun times.
But the occasion of writing that talk also got me digging about China and AI, and I stumbled upon this translation of China's Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (dated July 2017). It's a super interesting read, and an ambitious statement of intent if ever there was one. Here are 3 key milestones (I'm paraphrasing):
- 2020: Catch up to globally "advanced levels" of AI industry
- 2025: AI becomes the main driving force for China's economic transformation
- 2030: China becomes a/the world leader in AI
And this being China, the government co-invests heavily. Combine this with lax data protection and a large, tech-positive user base to train those data sets, I'd say it's a strong bid they're making. Not that currently we see strong data protection anywhere when it comes to AI training sets. Sigh.
/// To the stars
Over on Boingboing, a lovely collection of images of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe. (More and higher res on Flickr.) I couldn't help but think: omg beautiful. And why does Jupiter look so much like puppylugs?
Image: Sean Doran / NASA (Creative Commons by-nc-sa)
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Note: I'll sign off here in case you're not interested in space nations, and this last section might take a bit. There's nothing afterwards, so feel free to sign off. As always, I love to hear from you. Let me know what's most useful.
Talk to you soon. P.
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So! The self-declared space nation Asgardia has launched their first satellite.
I enjoy a solid bit of space design fiction. There's something about Asgardia that strikes me as a little off, though. For one, it seems as if they are actually serious, which would have never occurred to me. Maybe it's just an elaborate campaign to raise public awareness for the necessity to fund space research, but it doesn't seem to be.
There's a rich funder and head of nation involved, talk about governance, talk about the philosophy and the need of access for all to new scientific knowledge, and even an Asgardian-Gregorian conversion chart. (And, maybe a tad nit-picky given the context, a pretty restrictive copyright regime governing their media materials.)
A few things stood out to me as I quickly poked around the site a bit.
There's a lovely, fuzzy feel-good bit on Asgardia as a space-centered peace project:
The essence of Asgardia is Peace in Space, and the prevention of Earth’s conflicts being transferred into space. (...) to serve entire humanity and each and everyone, regardless of his or her personal welfare and the prosperity of the country where they happened to be born. Asgardia's philosophical envelope is to ‘digitalise’ the Noosphere, creating a mirror of humanity in space but without Earthly division into states, religions and nations. In Asgardia we are all just Earthlings!
Which sounds lovely, even though currently the citizenship privileges seem to focus on receiving Asgardia dispatches and being allowed to upload documents onto Asgardia-1, their cubesat.
There there's what their head of nation Dr. Ashurbeyli has to say about what makes a nation:
Asgardia is a fully-fledged and independent nation, and a future member of the United Nations - with all the attributes this status entails: a government and embassies, a flag, a national anthem and insignia, and so on.
I'm not a astro physicist. I am, however, a political scientist, and I can tell you that these are not things that have anything to do with the status of being a nation. Nationhood is widely considered to depend on the following qualifications: "(a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states". A flag and an anthem are fun to draw up, but really quite meaningless.
Then there's this bit on citizenship (emphasis mine):
The question of Asgardia citizenship is also essential. After Asgardia is recognised as a member of the UN, the question of reasons for granting citizenship will inevitably arise. One opinion is that the first Asgardians will be those who work in the fields of space research and exploration, and space technology, as well as investors in these fields, including small investors.
Why even consider giving preference to investors? This doesn't bode well.
And finally, buried deep in the FAQ, there's this nugget:
Asgardia also has a long-term objective of setting up habitable platforms in space and building settlements on the Moon (...) and possibly on other celestial bodies.
That's right. Not even a nation yet, but already they have imperial expansion plans. So what to think of a flying server rack that hosts your documents but has a fully drafted, lengthy constitution, governance rules, a single person at the top of the hierarchy, and other processes that seem to be at odds with the purpose of creating a democratic off-planet base? Frankly I don't know. But it seems so much more elaborate than your usual run-off-the-mill space design fiction.