S05E15 of Connection Problem: Indulgences / Teaching Trustable Tech / Lists of Lists for Tech Ethics
I’m sending this issue from the train between Frankfurt and Berlin, going some 200km/h or so, tethering via my phone. Welcome to the banal side of the 21st century. Today was a teaching day, which is rare for me: Prof. Andrea Krajewski kindly invited me to spend a day with her students at Hochschule Darmstadt to discuss trustable tech and its implications. (Full disclosure: Andrea is a founding member of ThingsCon e.V., her school is reimbursing my travel and paying me a small fee.) I brought some slides and some print outs of Artefact’s Tarot of Tech cards and some printouts of the Trustable Technology Mark application form to workshop with. (We used the slides, but sk) So I’m in a “next generation” state of mind: What little can we contribute so they’re as well equipped as possible to face the challenges their lives will throw at them? Some of these folks will be designing future connected products, or the processes to design future products, so I hope what I have to share will be useful for them — and if it's not useful right now than maybe in a flashback ten years from now.
Tomorrow M & I will go out of town for a day or two because public holidays and good weather, and I'll strap the little one in one of those toddler back packs for hiking and, well, hike with a kid on my back, through dense forests and along some lake or another, which is what most of Berlin’s environs look like. See how that goes. Puts things into perspective, it really does.
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Towards a Shared Digital Europe
Friends have just published their vision for a Shared Digital Europe which is really quite something. This initiative to reframe how we think and talk about digital Europe offers a powerful new policy framework (highlights mine):
“This document summarises the efforts undertaken by Kennisland, Centrum Cyfrowe and Commons Network to develop a new vision for digital policymaking in Europe. To this end, we have created a new policy frame, in an effort to find solutions for a number of problems that plague the Internet. Over the past five months we have worked on developing a frame that can replace the existing Digital Single Market frame of the European Commission. A new frame can guide policymakers and civil society organisations involved with digital policymaking in the direction of a more equitable and democratic digital environment, where basic liberties and rights are protected, where strong public institutions function in the public interest, and where people have a say in how their digital environment functions - a Shared Digital Europe.”
That’s right, this proposes to just do away with the whole frame of reference for all things digital in Europe (which focuses primarily on economic functions) and to replace it with a much larger, society-focused frame of reference.
I’m so happy this exists, and that I even got to contribute a tiny, tiny bit to it. All the props to Alek Tarkowski, Paul Keller and Sophie Bloemen. And I can’t tell you how much I hope this succeeds. I really think it could pave the way for a decade or two of much better policy making.
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A list of resources for ethical, responsible, and public interest tech development
For today's day of teaching I started compiling a list of resources relevant for the ethical, responsible development of tech, especially public interest tech. This list is very much incomplete, a starting point.
(For disclosure’s sake, I should add that I’ve started lists like this before: I’ll try, but cannot promise, to be maintaining this one. Just assume it’s a snapshot, useful primarily in the now and as an archive for future reference.)
I also can take only very partial credit for it since I asked Twitter for input. I love Twitter for this kind of stuff: Ask, and help shall be provided. My Twitter is a highly curated feed of smart, helpful people. (I understand that for many people Twitter feels very, very different. My experience is privileged that way.) A big thank you in particular to Sebastian Deterding, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Dr. Laura James, Iskander Smit, Arne Berger and to others I won’t name because they replied via DM and this might have been a privacy-related decision. You know who you are - thank you!
Here are a bunch of excellent starting points to dig deeper, ranging from books to academic papers to events to projects to full blown reading lists. This list covers a lot of ground. You can’t really go wrong here, but choose wisely, lest you get sucked down the rabbit hole.
Papers & projects:
- The New Practice of Public Problem Solving
- Casa Jasmina
- Inclusive Design Principles
- TU Delft Design for Values
Organizations:
Books:
- Everyware (Greenfield)
- The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (Sterling)
- Weapons of Math Destruction (O'Neil)
- Smart Cities (Townsend)
- Future Ethics (Bowles)
Libraries, reading lists & lists of lists:
- Cambridge Trust and Technology Library
- Better IoT Design & Ethics Resources
- Thingclash Critical IoT Reading List (archived)
- ThingsCon Resources
- The Engine Room Library
- Casey Fiesler’s Tech Ethics Curricula: A Collection of Syllabi
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Brix Systems by Love Hultén
A lovely art/design project (Youtube) that rebuilds the electronics of the Lego universe (the phone, the computer, the other computer, the modular wave music thingie) and build working models of them, human scale. I found this through Robin Sloan’s newsletter, which is excellent. (Of course it is! How could it be any other way!?)
I love this project because, well, first of all because it’s a lovely, playful experiment, a big “can we really make this work”, applied to a problem set where the stakes couldn’t possible be any lower: Playfulness at its best. But also, more importantly, it feels completely out of time, atemporal in the best sense of the word. It’s kind of nostalgic but not for the obvious reasons (“Oh look, LEGO! I remember these from when I was a kid!”). It feels so out of time purely because of this playfulness, this stakeless-ness. Because, in a way, who cares? It’s 2019, the world is coming apart at the seams — and someone’s replicating working models of toys that play King Kong? This is, in a way, very 2005. Very early Kottke, early BoingBoing. It’s a total indulgence. It tells of a Web from the past.
But I do believe that these small acts of playfulness and zoomed-in ingenuity are important. They somehow speak of human resilience: You can burn up the planet we stand on and you can try to tear down the peaceful (relatively speaking) global governance systems we’ve built over decades but you can’t take these little joys away from us.
Ok, maybe I’m projecting a little here. But this feels nicely atemporal: An indulgence, a few minutes well spent. (Also, can we acknowledge this amazing name? Love Hultèn? What a name! Also, Hultèn builds things for a living.)
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Total, and totally affordable, surveillance near you (NYTimes)
NYTimes has this piece on how they tried out Amazon’s commercially available facial recognition system and ran it across some publicly available video feeds. Doing this is exactly as easy and cheap as you’d expect in your worst nightmare. Or as in, y'know, any activist/critic's presentation on the matter for the last decade or so.
“To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers’ websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon’s commercial facial recognition service. Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.”
and
“Over decades, businesses and individuals have installed millions of cameras like the ones we used, inadvertently setting up the infrastructure for mass surveillance. In the past, a human would have to watch the video feed to identify people, making it impossible to comprehensively record everyone’s movements. But the accuracy and speed of modern facial recognition technology means that building a dragnet surveillance system is now feasible.”
Also, this demo of the insanely powerful zoom on new Huawei phones.
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Miscellanea
People, Power and Technology (Doteveryone)
Doteveryone’s 2018 Digital Attitudes Report has been out for quite some time, apparently. It’s a good, quick read that tries to surface how people think about tech and its complex role in their lives. That seems like a useful endeavor to me. Also, gotta love a report that includes this user research quote: “It’s not rocket science to know what sorts of things people are going to be uncomfortable about, so they should be telling you exactly those points—what they’re collecting on you.” Because it’s so obviously true, and all too often our industry reports dismiss the obvious things and hence get sidetracked too easily.
New IKEA is old IKEA but closer to your home (Inc)
So IKEA rolls out new shops in downtown areas, the first in NYC. (The Inc.com article above has the talking points in bullets below some very clickbait-y headline so I just link to it because it’s how I found this — due process, essentially — but I haven’t found a good one.) So what’s the deal here? These new show rooms offer far fewer products on display and “lots more space devoted to living space mockups. For example, the New York store has mock apartments with the same (tiny) dimensions as many nearby apartments.” There appear to be “grid rooms” to try out furniture dimensions, and I would assume lots of mockup app/VR style stuff? I just find this interesting because it plays on the old golden rule of “eventually, everything turns into a photo sharing app.”
What will policymaking be like in 2040? (apolitico)
Interesting piece on what policy making could look like in the future. Essentially, what if policy making + design thinking + user research. I found the framing still a little too "solutions based" and slightly too iterative if that makes any sense, but otherwise a good thought experiment.
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Currently reading: Infinite Detail (Tim Maughan).
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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 firm. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that explores fair, responsible, and human-centric technologies for IoT and beyond. 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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Pictures: my own