S03E30 of Connection Problem: 🍾 30!
Sitrep: Welcome to the 30th installment of this newsletter season. Writing this at Toronto airport after an intense whirlwind tour of work things in NYC and Toronto, bound for the Pacific Northwest, where I'll be spending the next few weeks.
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As always, a shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Personal updates
The Big North America Tour 2018 continues. After NYC and Toronto I'm headed for Spokane, WA. It's been a tremendously productive week with Mozilla in Toronto. Think full immersion. If you know me at all, you might know that ice breaker activities are usually not really my cup of tea, but oh boy this was good. It's a really strong, values driven, warm community that I'm very happy and lucky to be a part of. On that note, I'm also social-ed out and ready to have a few more introverted days ahead of me.
Travel: Spokane, WA for the rest of June, then Berlin, Darmstadt, Berlin in July.
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SurCap
Three things related to surveillance capitalism (SurCap).
(1) Jonathan Zittrain wrote an excellent piece on IoT, risks of (NYTimes). He breaks down overall risk assessment into two large categories: potential harm to individuals, and potential collective harm. The latter one is the more interesting:
"Second, hacking even a tiny subset of the 10 billion and counting networked things can produce threats larger than any one consumer. Individually these devices may be too small to care about; together they become too big to fail. Security systems in a city could be made to sound an alarm simultaneously. Light bulbs can be organized into bot armies, directed to harm any other internet-connected target. And worse than a single Jeep executing an unexpected sharp left turn is a whole fleet of them doing so."
And that's just is, isn't it? To look beyond the individual at collective harm, and hence collective action to take. Could be regulation, could be codes of conduct on the retailer side. (Could be a trustmark, like the one we're working on.)
(2) Finding concrete examples of how China's social credit score works is still surprisingly hard if you don't speak Chinese. WIRED has a good solid overview. This is an issue of such epic proportions, with problematic concepts all the way down, that my brain kinda just caught on one small detail, one example the author mentions here: long video game sessions are bad for social credit (time waste); buying diapers is good (responsible parenting). There's literally a way to offset your gaming habits by buying diapers. I can just imagine a gamer reaching for his phone in between rounds of Doda, and heaving a sigh, ordering a jumbo pack of Pampers.
(3) China exports facial recognition algorithms to Africa. File under digital colonialism, surveillance capitalism.
Welcome to the strange new world at the intersection of Surveillance Capitalism and hyper-capitalist Neo Communism.
We need to seriously reconsider where we're headed collectively, and how we can make sure that we'll still have a global internet in a few years time rather than a Balkanized hodge-podge of national or regional networks with minimum exchange.
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Things that caught my attention
Tackling the Ethical Challenges of Slippery Technology. When Anab writes, it's worth paying attention. Here she discusses AI and ethics. Also, her partner in crime Superflux Jon Ardern cuts to the chase: "We imbue technology with the ideals of the people who have created it, rather than those who use it."
Google-funded ‘super sensor’ project brings IoT powers to dumb appliances. Interesting approach to smart homes based on one sensor board, enhanced by machine learning, that can kinda-sorta smarten up a home—as opposed to having to install expensive smart appliances. Obviously it only does sensing and not, for example, remote activation. But how it senses, and what it infers from its sensing, is impressive. There's some interesting stuff done here with data.
"The system involves using a single custom plug-in sensor board that’s packed with multiple individual sensors — but, crucially from a privacy point of view, no camera. The custom sensor (shown in the diagram below) uses machine learning algorithms to process the data it’s picking up, so it can be trained to identify various types of domestic activity, such as (non-smart) appliances being turned on — like a faucet, cooker or blender."
The Dinner Party Flex: Cooking in the Age of Social Media. Is shared cooking the last island of earnest social interaction?
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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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This picture and the one at the top and via Public Domain Review.