S03E07: Onwards & upwards
Tuesday, 2 Jan 2018
A happy new year! 2017, begone. You won't be missed (I hope). Although globally speaking it does feel distinctly as if it's going to get worse before it gets better. But we'll see, and there's not point in being cranky, and it's a new year, so hey ho, let's go!
Sitrep: I'm sitting in the new-ish branch of Kaffee Kirsche, a small independent roaster in Berlin Kreuzberg where I increasingly find myself for meetings. My inbox is full of vacation auto-responder notifications. Next to me, a group of three British tourists/filmmakers are taking extensive video and photo footage of the place while shooting the breeze. On my other side, a group of four young women half-knit, half play with their phones. A guy in what appears to be a Mongolian-inspired felt hat and a giant Rimowa is ordering El Salvadorean filter coffee. In other words, it's a regular Kreuzberg Tuesday afternoon.
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Fun fact: After I was quoted in SPIEGEL, nominally still one of the largest-reach publications in Germany, I noticed that exactly zero people reached out to me about it. I get quotes in news outlets on a semi-regular basis, I'd say; never ever before without some folks reaching out. I'm fairly sure this tells us something about the state of the media 2017.
In related news, it's also been a few weeks since I shut down my Facebook account, and haven't missed it. It just went away, more or less unnoticed. Interesting!
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Snitches get stitches coupons. The Chinese communist party has been pretty savvy (or at least, pretty ambitious) in using apps for any and all purposes. (Remember those dozens of apps to spread communist party news and evaluate party members?) It appears that the latest was an app that would give citizens coupons for reporting on undesirable things like potholes or misbehaving neighbors. In a pretty cool plot twists, it seems people won't use the app. WSJ has the article, which due to their paywall I could only read the first couple of sentences of: In Sign of Resistance, Chinese Balk at Using Apps to Snitch on Neighbors.
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Speaking of snitches: Anyone within earshot of me has been exposed to my rants about how surveillance capitalism (aka ad tech) is going to be our downfall. As I've also started to lament on Twitter, with the GDPR about to come into effect, newspapers wouldn't be wrong trying to investigate - and look for whistleblowers from inside the ad industry - to learn how they might try to subvert digital rights by ducking or badly implementing GDPR-related measures.
One of the (many, many, many) data points that got me to this tweet was this article by the NYT that explains how a great number of free smartphone games actually actively listen to the noises in your environment like the TV to match/serve ads:
"The apps use software from Alphonso, a start-up that collects TV-viewing data for advertisers. Using a smartphone’s microphone, Alphonso’s software can detail what people watch by identifying audio signals in TV ads and shows, sometimes even matching that information with the places people visit and the movies they see. The information can then be used to target ads more precisely and to try to analyze things like which ads prompted a person to go to a car dealership."
I mean, where even to start? WTF? How is this legal? (Hint: At least in Europe it won't be, I think, starting in May.) It certainly is—and this is the technical term of art—unethical as fuck. I'm going to stop here because I can feel an urge rise inside of me to switch to ALL CAPS, and you of all people don't deserve me shouting at you for some coked up ad executives' and startup bros' behaviors.
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Content and platform regulation: The German case and what’s to come in 2018. Cathleen Berger, policy expert with a focus on digital rights working with Mozilla, has a great overview of what the situation of the net is in Europe (esp. Germany) in 2018, especially with GDPR and other kinda/sorta related legal initiatives, like the "Act to improve the enforcement of the law in social networks".
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Shout-out: The ever-excellent & lovely Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has been writing a book, Smarter Homes: How technology has changed your home life. It's now available for pre-order, and I just placed my order, and you might want to do the same (on amazon.co.uk).
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Google's voice-generating AI is now indistinguishable from humans [Quartz]. Daisy-chaining two deep neural networks together, Google has managed to create voice-generating AI that is indistinguishable from human speech—with one caveat: So far, it's for one voice, and one voice only. That said, it's a matter of (little, presumably) time and processing power to train for other voices. So now that the output is solved, let's double down on the input: From experience, high-quality voice recognition for anything but English is still somewhat scarce on the ground. And, as I'm sure is the case for many of you, in my life I'd need an at least bilingual voice recognition system to really use voice for input.
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In an excellent, short Twitter thread, Joi Ito addresses a key question for AI (and every other major emerging technology): "for those of you who are thinking "just design AI to make the world better" - better for who at what timescale? Shareholders/quarterly? Native Americans/7 Generations? Biodiversity/Centuries? "
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Beaker | Peer-to-peer Web browser. The Beaker browser project has some interesting approaches: The browser supports/promotes a decentralized, peer-to-peer internet including versioning, private file sharing and private-by-default web pages. I'm torn on the latter especially, but it sure seems an interesting approach. Also, I love that the website teases with "no blockchain required".
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The world's largest wind farm is being planned by electric-grid firm TenneT [Quartz]. Dogger Bank, an artificial island planned by Tennet (who operate the Netherlands' electric grid) appears to be an ambitious plan indeed, aiming to support the world's largest wind farm offshore. Now I'm not an expert for energy or maritime ecosystems, but from my amateur point of view this seems like the kind of promising plan we might need more of if we want to see the end of the century without having to hide in some geodesic dome or another.
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That's it for today: An easy start into the new year. Forwarding & recommending this newsletter is always appreciated, as are your questions and your feedback (thanks for both!).
I wish you a great start for 2018 and hope to talk to you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Peter