S03E26 of Connection Problem: The End of Enlightenment

Sitrep: Writing this on a long-ish series of train rides, at 7:52am, about 2h into the trip, fueled by train coffee. Proceed at your own risk.

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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!

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You might have noticed that the subject line of today's newsletter is a little different: It doesn't start with "Connection Problem" anymore. Turns out, as the ever-helpful and kind Peter Rukavina pointed out to me, waking up to an email with the subject line "connection problem" can be rather worrisome. This was not what I intended, naturally, but something I overlooked. My apologies for any heartbeats skipped due to unexpected error messages!

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Personal updates

Trustmark: My concept for the trustmark for IoT is slowly shaping up. I updated the trustmark deck to represent a current snapshot of my thinking, and am very much inviting feedback and comments to the (early draft stage) checklist I'm working towards. You can find the link to the checklist following either of the two links above.

Travel: Some travel plans in case we might be crossing paths. I'll be in Dundee for a few days leading up to Dundee Design Festival (coming Tuesday/Wednesday), NYC 6-11 June, Toronto 11-15 June.

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The End of Enlightenment

Three things I saw this week that coalesced into one big, unwieldy mess:

(1) This tweet from Connie Chan about Wechat, face recognition, and fully integrated services: "Face recognition commercialization: 1. Upload a selfie to wechat official account. 2. Run Shanghai half-marathon. 3. Within hours get back photos of yourself (from 000's of pics by freelance photographers). 4. Pay $1 to buy unwatermarked images. (c/o Neil Nand)":

(2) New America write about a new Federation of Internet Societies launched by the Chinese government and offer a translation of that federation's document proposing priorities for internet associations nationwide and calling for unified action: "Heads of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, and Qihoo 360 Join CAC, Propaganda, State Media Officials". Let's say it's quite the read. A top-down, highly centralized and very much integrated effort to turn China into a cyber superpower and to, y'know, coordinate. This level of centralized, coordinated action doesn't bode well.

(3) In The Atlantic, Henry Kissinger writes about the relationship of AI and humanity: Think big picture, a really smart elder statesmen analyzing with some distance. I don't 100% agree with all he says but there are some interesting questions in there for sure. His lead points are that we might not be able to understand and interpret AI, and that lack of understanding of how the world works means we might be headed into a new dark age of sorts. Two money quotes for me:

"Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?"

and

"Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?"

This last part especially I found worth pondering: The idea of incomprehension rather than the more simple "who's in control".

I'm not entirely sure how these three puzzle pieces align quite so, but there's a shape in the fog there, and it's not a good one. We've been talking a lot about how AI might be intransparent, biased, unaccountable. All of these hold true to a degree. But we've been talking a lot less about the actors that drive the development of AI.

Consider the different lenses to look at future (or even current) AI deployment: What impact does AI have in different verticals like insurance, medical research, autonomous mobility, policing, warfare, weather forecasts? Just a few to show the broad range we're talking about. What about different types of actors, like corporates, individuals, collectives, rogue actors, militias, military, corporations, startups, charities, universities? How will different nation states (or supra states) likely use AI, like say US, Europe, UN, Brazil, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Israel, Iceland, or Sweden?

Now cross reference with Wechat facial recognition marathon photos, a fully integrated Chinese internet association, and maybe just for fun's sake throw into the mix a few other actors like Five Eyes and Facebook, stir well and let it rest for a bit.

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Things that caught my attention

The crypto bros are at it again, this time with Numerai, a "collaborative hedgefund for AI" and a masterplan that involves monopolizing intelligence, data and money (and then decentralizing the monopoly). What could possibly go wrong:
 

Smart fridges and TVs should carry security rating, says Durham Police chief Barton: “You’ve got a situation where we don’t know what the security is like in the devices we are buying in the internet of things. It’s just not reported. And yet that is the most significant component of what it is you are buying.” Trustmarks all the way down.

GDPR will pop the adtech bubble, says Doc Searls. Excellent piece on the mess that is #adtech, as opposed to advertising or marketing, and how GDPR just might pop that bubble and leave all of us in a better internet for it. Adtech be gone!

Guidelines für artificial intelligence, as drafted by Deutsche Telekom. DT's AI policy, or at least 9 rough guiding principles, touch on some good stuff, but notably missing is the bit about giving users control and access: Transparency is a good start, but if you can't act on it, it only gets you so far. This is a good reminder to always consider the stories not told, the narratives and voices not included.

Speaking of stories not told, a thing my mind is primed to do is look for how narratives are framed, which includes looking for what's not said. So when hearing a compelling story, like say, sweeping AI development guidelines, always ask yourself: Which narratives are left out? Which voices have not been considered here that should be heard? Twitter thread.

Sustainable-ish: NYC building has the air-purifying power of 500 trees. It's sprayed with a thing called Pureti which breaks down "contaminants clogging Manhattan’s air via a photocatalytic process that transforms polluting particles into oxidizing agents. They’re then released into the atmosphere as harmless minerals." Eco features, the article continues to explain, are also a fancy status symbol for luxury real estate buyers these days, because capitalism.

Let them eat sea weed: Adding certain types of seaweed to cow feed dramatically cuts down methane emissions. But it's not easy, allegedly, because "producing enough [of this type of seaweed] to feed even 10 percent of Australia’s feedlot and dairy cattle would require upwards of 15,000 acres of commercial seaweed farm (...) 'That is the number one barrier—getting enough seaweed to feed to millions of cows'". And that's a problem because...?

AI falls for the same optical illusions humans do. AI is tricked by optical illusions, find researchers working on deep neural networks (DNNs). Turns out that's good news, at least for some of us as it means deep neural networks can be used for (human) brain research. The so-called rotating snake illusion in that article is so totally worth checking out btw.

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I wish you an excellent 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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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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The picture at the top via the beautiful Public Domain Review.