S05E13 of Connection Problem: Haltung is All We Have

Hello friends,

This is coming to you from Valencia, where I am for the 5th edition of IFF, the Internet Freedom Festival. It's a slightly different crowd here at IFF than most other events I've been: More purely activist in a way, less design-heavy than some. The security and privacy folks are legion here, as is, for some reason, glitter.

Since I more or less just got here and spent most of yesterday at a satellite event, I'm not going to cover much of the event here in this newsletter, but there are three things I noted that I wanted to share right away:

The first is the code of conduct. I've been studying codes of conduct for some years, ever since I had to start putting them into place for the events I was involved in, and to enforce them, too. I've always found it hard, and also fascinating. Here, the code of conduct was read in full to me, by a real human being, as I picked up my badge. It's not a brief document, either, so I can barely begin to understand how that might have worked during peak badge pick up hour. I'll try to find out for sure. Also, what stood out to me in this code of conduct is how far ranging it is - it covers (apparently on eye level, somewhat strangely?) anything from drugging drinks to making fun of accents or correcting grammar without invitation to do so. Taking photos on the premises is permitted unless there is explicit consent of anyone in the pictures. Mentioning anyone on Twitter is equally not allowed unless there is consent. This is good, if maybe a little on the overbearing. Like I said: Fascinating!

The second is that it stood out to me that I didn't know a lot of folks. That's fantastic - it means I've come to the right place. It's a bit obvious that usually we can only know a fraction of the participants at any given event. But since I've not only been speaking at events for the better part of a decade but also been curating and chairing events in a range of topic areas from connected things to smart cities, from iOS development to digital economy, from maker culture to industrial IoT, it's unusual for me to show up somewhere and know very few folks, especially among the speakers. So yay IFF!

The third thing is how much the various groups struggle finding shared language between themselves and their peers and potential partners. And it's not just engineers and designers. For example, funders and community speak different languages, use different narratives. So do data management teams and humanities folks, and smart cities people & urban planners. There's literally decades of research going unused. To build coalitions, this is the first step. So while it feels like a cliché, getting more inter- and cross-disciplinary teams to work together still seems like a top priority. Why the silos exist I can only muse about. I reckon it has to do with corporate structures, educational paths, budgeting, and with who's in conversation reach, by sitting in close proximity in the office or in the same Slack channels…

Note: For the note on "Haltung", see the Miscellanea section.

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Personal(ish) updates

As mentioned last week, The Waving Cat just turned 5. For the company's monthnotes I did a quick recap of what happened. It's been a pretty productive time:

"In this time I’ve written 3 book-ish things and many reports, co-published multiple magazine-ish things and a proper academic paper. Co-chaired some amazing conferences like ThingsCon, Interaction16, UIKonf and more. Worked on strategy, policy and research across a pretty wide range of industries and clients from global tech to non-profit to governments. Was on a number of juries, and mentored a bunch of teams. Was a Mozilla Fellow. Launched a consumer trustmark. Helped kickstart a number of exciting projects including ThingsCon, Zephyr Berlin, Dearsouvenir and the Trustable Technology Mark. Spoke at about 40 events. Wrote, contributed or was quoted in about 60 articles."

That's five years of the company, by the way. The blog has been going on for much, much longer (2005 or 2006, I believe).

Also, I got a very warm Mozilla Farewell. The lovely crew at Mozilla's Berlin office organized a Fellowship of the Ring ceremony for Julia Kloiber and me. Julia shared a couple of photos on Twitter. There was a unicorn gavel, bubbly, even flower crowns and all. Thank you!

See? Flower crowns, for real!

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European Artificial Intelligence

I was kindly invited to Aspen Institute's annual AI conference. There, I learned a fair bit about the work of the European High Level Group (HLG) on AI Ethics Guidelines from one of the involved ethicists, Prof. Thomas Metzinger.

The final report will be out on April 9th. To paraphrase Metzinger, this will both the best document on AI ethics out there today, and it has glaring shortcomings. After industry pressure, all the non-negotiable "red lines" were removed, the language softened to speak of necessary trade-offs instead. The term "ethics washing* came up in the following discussion.

I'm also interested in mapping the leaders in AI ethics. Any pointers of people or orgs or projects I should be aware of? Any pointers are welcome, no worries if it seems to obvious. (There are a few names that pop up everywhere, but I think there's an undercurrent of smaller, more tangentially involved orgs and projects that could be helpful and relevant, too…)

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Deepfaking Earth

There's a fascinating piece on DefenseOne about novel uses of deep fakes: Using AI to make undetectable changes to outdoor photos and see them find their way into public data sets like maps that use open source data. Note also the geopolitical implications put forward by the article.

Some excerpts:

Worries about deep fakes — machine-manipulated videos of celebrities and world leaders purportedly saying or doing things that they really didn’t — are quaint compared to a new threat: doctored images of the Earth itself.

China is the acknowledged leader in using an emerging technique called generative adversarial networks to trick computers into seeing objects in landscapes or in satellite images that aren’t there, says Todd Myers, automation lead and Chief Information Officer in the Office of the Director of Technology at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“The Chinese are well ahead of us. This is not classified info,” Myers said Thursday at the second annual Genius Machines summit, hosted by Defense One and Nextgov. “The Chinese have already designed; they’re already doing it right now, using GANs—which are generative adversarial networks—to manipulate scenes and pixels to create things for nefarious reasons.”

For example, Myers said, an adversary might fool your computer-assisted imagery analysts into reporting that a bridge crosses an important river at a given point.
“So from a tactical perspective or mission planning, you train your forces to go a certain route, toward a bridge, but it’s not there. Then there’s a big surprise waiting for you,” he said."

So, fake images inserted into the supply pipeline for mapping. Take this side by side with recent research showing that autonomous vehicles could be tricked into changing lanes through stickers on the ground (here: Tesla's, through stickers on the ground; it's been fixed since). This gets us an interesting glimpse at the kind of conflicts we'll see a lot of the next couple of decades. Between security flaws and global competition between state actors and non-state actors and terrorists and GANs and pranksters and unintended consequences, we're in for some mayhem that should prove to be… shall we say, interesting? Welcome to the 21st century, which is finally revving up for real.

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Erasing Zuck's Past

Bizarre story of Facebook "accidentally deleting" a bunch of Zuck's blog posts (Business Insider) and can't or won't restore them because the work required would be extensive and not guaranteed to work.

This conjures up just three thoughts:

First, it's sketchy AF! Not just the deletion, but the communication of this being a hard-to-fix error. For Facebook we hardly need a daily reminder of how sketchy the company operates, but it's nice that they send one anyway.

Second, if I was a shareholder I wouldn't be happy that FB has sloppy backup practices.

Third, the excellent Zuckerberg Files project anticipated this and has all the data 👏: "The Zuckerberg Files is a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, spanning 2004-2019. Nearly 1,000 full-text transcripts and 250 video files are available for researchers to download, analyze, and scrutinize."

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Miscellanea

Haltung. One thing that's been coming up in discussions a lot lately is how important it is to stand by what in German is called haltung: To be honest I don't know if there is an exact translation - it's somewhere at the intersection of posture, mindset and convictions. One of the literal meanings is posture. So think about it in the sense of showing some spine. Something you stand for. A moral compass. This is where things get terribly fuzzy but when facing issues to complex, and debates to semantically fraught, to truly ponder all sides of an argument (or to even believe in the other parties' good faith) this is the one thing it'll all have to be built on. The baseline to measure arguments against, and the foundation to build on. Nothing especially new here. Just a reminder.

Privacy’s not dead—it’s just not evenly distributed. FastCo has a series on the Privacy Divide. I like the framing. And I like this sentence specifically: "“Privacy” isn’t just privacy, but fairness, security, freedom, justice, free speech, and free thought." That said, I'd argue (which this article doesn't) that if we continue the way we're going now, then privacy will increasingly be a luxury item. Something you'll pay dearly for, and which only the wealthy can afford, like a nanny or a big car or, y'know, a reasonably spacious owned apartment in a big city.

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Currently reading on a skip-between-books basis: Infinite Detail (Tim Maughan); A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein); Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff); The End of Trust (McSweeny's).

Just finished reading If cats disappeared from the world (Genki Kawamura).

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!

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Yours truly,
Peter

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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 2018-19, Peter was a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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