S05E21 of Connection Problem: Wrong/interesting/excellent futures
"In my opinion, it’s a task in life to train oneself to speak as clearly as possible. This isn’t achieved by paying special attention to words, but by clearly formulating theses, so formulated as to be criticizable. People who speak too much about words or terminologies or definitions don’t actually bring anything forward that makes a claim to truth. So you can’t do anything against it. A definition is a pure conventional matter."
— Karl Popper
×
👋
After a week of fresh sea air and some family time, I’m writing this as I’m headed from Berlin to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada. While flying for non-essential business travel is in gross violation of my self-imposed let’s-fly-less policy, I’m very much looking forward to this particular event, a small invite-only affair by one of the kindest and most humble and most interesting people I know. This trip also kicks off a small flurry of travel as I’m headed on to another trip right after, first to Brussels to contribute to a conference, then Cologne for a small ThingsCon work retreat. (This last circle trip I managed completely by train: a small win-win, as I both cut down on flying and will have plenty of uninterrupted time to write!)
This week is a long-ish newsletter, clocking in with almost 2K words, but it's also an easy read. I made sure that the second half of this email goes from the problematic to the positive. You have nothing to fear! So: Enjoy.
×
Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? I really appreciate any forward or shout-out to tinyletter.com/pbihr. If you'd like to support my independent writing, your contributions are much appreciated. The easiest way is to join the Brain Trust membership.
×
Personal-ish stuff
Edgeryders fellowship for the Internet of Humans
The Edgeryders community (an EU-adjacent project that cultivates a network of change makers) kindly invited me to become a fellow for the next 6 months in their Internet of Humans program to explore better metrics for smart cities. I'm humbled and grateful for the opportunity and the mandate, and excited to dig deeper! 🙏
From horse-drawn carriage to autonomous bus
We spent some time in a small town in Northern Germany the other week, a town of 900. There, to my big surprise, during a walk we spotted a sign announcing autonomous vehicles. Turns out this is a test bed for an autonomous bus, by and for the local public transportation company. The location, Keitum/Sylt, was picked because the old streets and alleys are tiny and narrow, and hence present a good context for learning and data collection. We jumped at the chance to give it a test ride.
Some things we learned along the way: A single bus costs to the tune of several hundred thousand Euros, the software subscription alone around 10K a month. Local drivers adapt to the autonomous vehicle as much as it to them: They swing widely around it, giving it ample space so that its cautious autopilot won’t have to break unnecessarily. In this model of a pre-programmed route, special attention is required to adapt the bus’s confidence levels and overrides depending on the terrain: Normally, the bus only moves when it’s over 85% or so confident it recognizes the terrain it’s in, but in certain spots that lack distinct features, like a roundabout, it might never get beyond 40% confidence or so. (I might misremember the exact numbers.) It’s quite fascinating. Also, the kids on the bus were not excited one bit, unlike their parents.
It was clearly a futuristic future, and the perfect use case for autonomous vehicles: unlocking the damned last mile, extending public transport beyond the main arteries and hubs. And yet, within the confines of good, futuristic futures, somehow it was also the least futuristic: At this stage the bus can only navigate a pre-programmed route and not improvise. It can't leave this route at all. The Finnish competition that rolled out a few months back is, I believe, quite a bit more mature and can re-route on the fly. That said, it was really cool to see this in public space, even if it required a train bus driver to override the cautious autopilot on many occasions, and to steer the bus with a modified Xbox controller on a few others.
But my favorite bit was that when we got out, the autonomous bus parked right behind a horse-drawn carriage. Perfect.
×
Indie things that have made my day
Here are a few lovely indie experiments that have me excited in a positively giddy way I hadn't felt about things falling out of the web in quite some time:
Panic's handheld console experiment Playdate just looks perfect. Anil Dash is spot on when he describes just how and why this is so beautiful.
Robin Sloan's print experiments, especially the recent AI-writes-your-adventure-story thingie Mageframe. Robin Sloan just does these things so right:
“So, when your quest reaches you, it's likely you will be the first human to lay eyes on it. This might be... exciting? It might be depressing? I can't decide. But what I really want to say is this: if by chance the story you read DOES contain something upsetting -- it's unlikely to be a word; I'm thinking more of a kind of scene, an implication -- please let me know. I take seriously the responsibility to publish work that's nourishing, not corrosive, even when the "writing" process is, er, unconventional. Don't worry; it's much more likely you're going to encounter things that are delightful! I have read many of these quests, and this splintered, probabilistic universe is littered with gems -- names, phrases, whole weird situations"
×
Department of wrong futures
1)
Surveillance capitalism comes to your toothbrush:
“At Beam, we believe that we offer the best experience for employers and their dental care needs."
Note that the company speaks of employer needs, not the tooth-carriers' needs. Talk about unhealthily aligned incentives.
2)
Q: How intrusive are TfL’s plans to track passengers’ movements?
3)
Never one to be slowed down by nuance, respect for citizen rights, or common sense, Germany's minister of the interior Horst Seehofer would like to force messaging services to give the government access to encrypted chats. (Article in German.)
4)
Facebook has learned from past mistakes around misinformation campaigns and now runs a tight ship. Kidding, of course. Facebook decides to leave a doctored video of Nancy Pelosy up. In the words of Facebook's product policy and counterterrorism executive Monika Bickert: "We think it’s important for people to make their own informed choice for what to believe." In other words, they leave up political disinformation because, well, because they're Facebook, and being a crap company is what they do. It's almost like they aren't acting in good faith whenever they claim to take their responsibility seriously.
5)
Uber’s Path of Destruction, by one Hubert Horan in American Affairs, struck me as a bit of a misnomer but I found it a solid, even enjoyable autopsy of Uber’s inherent inability — or really, impossibility — to ever exist as a profitable business. It’s a solid take down of all the economic fundamentals: They just don’t add up, and most likely never could add up. The only downside of the article is that the author trash talks all other criticisms of Uber but his own (Too narrow! I’m smarter! Me me me!), which is a kind of writerly arrogance that easily spoils an otherwise good text. That said, it’s still an insightful read if you can get over those bits, and are interested in economics. Also, it just occurs to me that unlike Facebook, Uber never even pretended to act in good faith on anything, did they? Either way, there are some very obvious and ugly truths here.
6)
Finally, to truly end this section about wrong futures with rock bottom, Mehdi Hasan offers a reminder, and something like a best of of the literature on how the strategic use of obvious lies isn’t ignorance or an I don’t care attitude but part of the standard tool kit of totalitarian leaders (The Intercept). To see it used today in a powerful democratic country is more than a little distressing. It’s depressing, and important, and even three years later I’m still wondering how did this happen?
×
Department of interesting futures
1)
This isn't super new (end of 2018, I believe) but fascinating: A website that shows GAN-generated faces of people that don't exist. It's fascinating, and only when you look very, very closely will you find some artifacts. It's fascinating, and als great how they include an educational part there in the page (“how it works”).
2)
Shenzhen-based phone maker Transsion focuses on "micro innovation" like better camera software for darker skin tones, or oil-resistant fingerprint scanners. This is fascinating, and long overdue. The micro innovation angle is such a perfect example of the Shenzhen approach!
3)
China gets in on the ethical AI game.
4)
Meanwhile in Mountain View, a lot if Duplex calls are made with/by humans not AI. Filing this under the ever-amusing hashtag #artificialartificialintelligence.
×
Department of excellent futures (& one past)
1)
Let's start with the past, or rather, an acknowledgment of past events. This is lovely. "Many hip-hop authorities trace the advent of the cultural movement to the first-floor community room at 1520 Segwick Avenue. It was there, in 1973, that Clive Campbell, known as D. J. Kool Herc, began turning the tables at community parties, producing a sound, a rhythm and a style that spilled out into the nearby parks and streets and, later, out into the world. Mr. Campbell was living in the building at the time with his sister, Cindy Campbell." The building is now officially recognized on the state and national registers of historic places as the birthplace of hip-hop.
It makes me so incredibly happy that a thing that started quite literally with the party invitation flyer up at the top of this email could be the spark that would lead to the cultural juggernaut it has since become. To humble, playful beginnings.
2)
Amsterdam to remove 10.000 parking spaces. ❤️🌳🙌
Amsterdam streets, before and after (so far, this has been implemented in one neighborhood as a pilot project.
3)
New Zealand introduces "well-being" as a budgetary guideline/goal. Mostly it's also a process that seems to best be described as participatory budgeting between ministries and departments rather than fighting for larger stakes.
4)
A groundbreaking new policy has made Finland the only EU country where homelessness is falling: They give people homes.
“We decided to make the housing unconditional,” says Kaakinen. “To say, look, you don’t need to solve your problems before you get a home. Instead, a home should be the secure foundation that makes it easier to solve your problems.”
×
Currently reading: How to Do Nothing in the Attention Economy (Jenny Odell), Exhalation (Ted Chiang), Breach (Eliot Peper)
×
If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!
×
What's next?
- PEI for what's going to be a most lovely invite-only unconference with a lot of great people I haven't seen in a long time
- Brussels next week, for a seat at the civil society table at Call to Europe, the annual conference put on by FEPS, the Foundation of European Progressive Studies. (Full disclosure: FEPS is currently a client, but not for this conference.)
- Cologne for a ThingsCon work & plan retreat with the core team; the team is growing, and it's going to be good to spend some time together and align our ideas, plans, workflows. And of course to plan ThingsCon 19!
Have a lovely weekend.
Yours truly,
Peter
×
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!
×
Pictures: 1) via New York Times. 2) my own. 3) Vimeo screenshot from the linked video.