S05E18 of Connection Problem: Points of Leverage
Welcome. Republica came and went, and with it a flood of folks from all over who rolled through Berlin. I didn’t have quite as much time to socialize as I’d hoped to but I did manage to meet a few folks. We hosted a ThingsCon Salon (videos etc. next week). Also, to attend the official opening of Amplifier Berlin, a gorgeous new space in the former AEG turbine works near Berlin’s Voltastrasse. It’s always great to see a new addition to Berlin’s event space scene, and I’ve witnessed this one come together from the very first day some three years ago. Congratulations to the whole team!
Also, if you’re new here, why don’t you say hi — I’d genuinely love to learn how you found your way here.
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Follow-ups
A quick follow-up to last week’s piece on Understanding China. Patrick Tanguay (Sentiers) kindly pointed me to a parallel that might be even more insightful than Amazon in the way we can think about China’s tech policy - Chinese manufacturer Haier. He shared three articles that are well worth reading: workfutures.org, strategy-business.com, platformdesigntoolkit.com. Thanks, Patrick!
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Points of Leverage
These last few months I’ve spent somewhat insane amounts of time digging into smart cities and AI from angles like ethics, governance and policy. My basic approach is: Let’s not ask what we can do, but what we should do. Not what’s possible, but what makes sense. And let's think hard about all the potential impact, intended and unintended.
I’m using both Smart Cities and AI in these examples because truly I think that for most intents and purposes we can have this debate along very similar paths for both, at least where machine decision making plays any role. So!
It’s an interesting space for me personally because everybody — correction: the small subset of organizations that care deeply about the societal impact technology has in that space — is still trying to figure out what might possibly work, how to approach this complex set of issues, and how to even speak about it. It’s the fuzzy early days (on one hand) but there’s also (on the other hand) facts and realities being manifested by tech vendors really quickly. It’s almost as if the vendors are trying to finish the job before a societal debate about what we even actually want can even begin in earnest.
Some of the key themes, or rather possible points of leverage, that I’ve found resonating and promising are these:
- The definition of what we even mean by smart city and/or AI. (See my previous post on Deutungshoheit.) It should be broad & wide & juicy! It shouldn’t focus on technologies but focus on potential impacts on society! (There may not even be a one sentence definition, maybe it takes a human-in-the-loop to say yay or nay, who knows.)
- Participatory processes need to be at the core of every step along the way. Participation of all relevant stakeholders when discussing policies, when discussing possible approaches to selecting vendors and technologies, when evaluating privacy aspects, when doing scenario planning and speculative futures. Which means, again, a very broad definition of stakeholders. Who’s got a seat at the table? Yes, this means the end of primarily top-down smart city planning. And good riddance, too!
- And to make things even more concrete, core tenets besides a general priority for citizen/user/human rights need to include accountability and transparency, as well as the absolute avoidance of vendor lock-in.
Good starting points are AI Now’s publications or the Cities for Digital Rights. If you dig through the archives of this newsletter, you’ll find plenty more.
If we get some of these right, which really only means avoiding the very obvious screw-ups, by solid processes and participation, through failsafes and good governance structures, then we might just get to a point where some aspects of smart cities are actually respected and trusted rather than just something that we can’t avoid happening to us. They might, y’know, have positive impact even.
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Trustmark Reflections
As you might know I led the development for a consumer trustmark for IoT, the ThingsCon Trustable Technology Mark. So I spent a lot of time digging through the various options and models, best practices and worst failures, as well as deep in literature and meetings around how a trustmark might work in this space. Over on my blog I shared some reflections and lessons learned.
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Future Financial Privacy Rules
Unexpected (to me at least) and super interesting: Senate committee imagines future financial privacy rules. Turns out privacy and data practices are debated in this forum, and they brought a bunch of experts from a wide range of fields on including the ever-eloquent and awesome Maciej Ceglowski (of Pinboard). Here’s what he had to say (highlights mine):
“(…) what Silicon Valley seeks to do is evade the regulation and they find a way around it. We don't like banking regulations so we invent cryptocurrency and we're going to disrupt the entire financial system. We don't like limits on discrimination and lending, so we're gonna use machine learning, which is a form of money laundering for bias, a way to blame mathematical algorithms for desires to simply avoid rules that everybody else has to play by in this industry.”
The article goes on to discuss the effects of GDPR, quoting Peter Chase, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States:
“Lawmakers at the hearing wanted to know whether the GDPR had, in fact, helped to engender trust among users. Said Chase, "Trust in the internet is going down since the implementation of the GDPR, probably because people are more aware of what companies do. The question will be whether they start acting or not, and I think there's some indication they are.””
Something to chew on.
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Miscellanea
- Not like the aunties: Impressive article by Aliya Bhatia about differences between community eyes on the ground and digital mass surveillance, and how easily purely political practices (like how and where to police how intensely) can reinforce structural issues of discrimination as these practices are captured in the data sets that feed machine learning algorithms.
- A random approach to innovation: Nesta had me baffled for a moment with their (very convincing) argument that we need to introduce more randomness into research funding in order to avoid structural bias and get to more novel thinking. Absolutely worth a read — I’m sold.
- Nothing Fails Like Success. Jeffrey Zeldman on the damaging influence of VC funding: “The reason small companies created by idealists too frequently turn into consumer-defrauding forces for evil has to do with the amount of profit each new phase of investor expects to receive, and how quickly they expect to receive it, and the fact that the products and services are still free.”
- If Politicians Can’t Face Climate Change, Extinction Rebellion Will. Op-ed in the NYTimes where these two quotes stuck out (HT Sentiers!): (1) “The world’s political classes are, increasingly, rendering themselves almost completely irrelevant in the eyes of their constituents.” and (2) “(in rich countries like US & UK) more young people are questioning or rejecting capitalism itself.” 💥
- I dream of Canteens. Reflections on Hospitality, Massness & Calorie Density. Not something I usually think (let alone dream) about, so I really quite enjoyed this bit.
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Currently reading: How to Do Nothing in the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell)
Just finished: Infinite Detail (Tim Maughan)
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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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I wish you a wonderful end of the week.
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.
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!
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Pictures: my own.