S03E31 of Connection Problem: End of Season 3

Sitrep: Greetings from sunny Spokane, Washington. More concretely, from lovely Rocket Market, my favorite hyper local coffee shop/bodega hybrid in the Comstock neighborhood where I've been spending this week.

There are some family matters that will be requiring my attention this week and next, and I'll be taking a couple of weeks off. So I'm taking this as an opportunity to officially call this the end of season 3 of this newsletter—for the first time it's not just going to sunset itself! I'll be picking up with season 4 in a few weeks time, once I'm back in Berlin. Enjoy the summer break!

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

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Deb-AI-table

IBM shows off Project Debater, artificial intelligence project designed to make coherent arguments drawing on data sets. Another frontier on the "that was comparatively, but THIS is REALLY hard" ladder of AI development, IBM's Project Debater tackles free form debate. After cracking first chess, then go, and along the way many other games and disciplines, convincingly participating in a debate is admittedly super impressive. It requires voice recognition and the extraction of the underlying meaning; looking for answers and building an argument, and then articulate both in a way that is not totally snorifying or, well, just plain weird. All the articles I found (for example MIT Tech Review) say that Debater has done a pretty good job, if not a 100% convincing one. And that alone is pretty damn impressive. Now if only I could find an actual video of the thing rather than just write-ups. Pointers, anyone?

The researchers seem convinced that this might help fight fake news and other issues. And I think it can do a great job at it. I would, however, also caution that most people who consume what these days is referred to as fake news actively choose their news channels to be full of fake news: It's a matter of ideology more than deception. If you consume Fox News or RT, you know what you're in for. If you ingest de-contextualized info snippets on Facebook without a grain of salt, again, you know you're in trouble. (Citation needed, admittedly, and I expect some of you might push back against that notion.)

So will this solve face news? Absolutely not. (It might very well contribute to more convincingly manufacture fake news instead.) However, having an AI tool one day to help fact check or prepare/support arguments, test hypothesis, and generally speaking understand and build arguments is something I very much look forward to and that I imagine will be tremendously useful.

Also, will there be a freemium, ad-supported model and a premium, high-end model if you can afford it? You bet. Welcome to the 21st century.

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Things that caught my attention

Flash crash: James Bridle writes about machines evolving beyond our control, like during the flash crash of 2010: "Something deeply weird is occurring within these massively accelerated, opaque markets. On 6 May 2010 (...) the index started to fall rapidly. In less than five minutes, more than 600 points were wiped off the market. At its lowest point, the index was nearly 1,000 points below the previous day’s average, a difference of almost 10% of its total value, and the biggest single-day fall in the market’s history. By 3.07pm, in just 25 minutes, it recovered almost all of those 600 points, in the largest and fastest swing ever. In the chaos of those 25 minutes, 2bn shares, worth $56bn, changed hands. (...) The event became known as the “flash crash”, and it is still being investigated and argued over years later." This, of course, was only a small peek at what's yet to come.

Merkelism: If you're interested in German politics generally speaking and Merkel's politics specifically, you could do worse than revisit this Economist piece on the three pillars of Merkelism, i.e. being ethical, not ideological; reactive, not programmatic; and detached, not engaged.

Snowflakes: This is kinda an old hat (like 2013 old), but oh boy these super close-ups of snowflakes are a sight to behold. How much more man-made can a natural object look?

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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 Unsplash (Kalen Emsley, rawpixel).