S06E03 of Connection Problem: IoT is not bananas / Concepts that I found helpful this week
Hello friends,
It’s that time of the year where conference and workshop season snuck up on me, and my upcoming travel schedule jumps out from behind the sofa to give me a mild shock. You’d think that I knew by now — and rationally, I do! — but somehow the reality of extended stretches of travel tend to surprise me every year anew. So, starting in two weeks, it’ll be so many small (and a couple larger) trips that they all blend into a big one that appears to be shaping up to a 17 day travel sprint spanning at least 5 cities in 4 countries. At this point it might be better not to think about it too hard and instead to just go with the flow. It's all for good stuff, though, so let’s clear the docket in time before that first trip starts, which is after all still two installments of this newsletter away.
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Personal-ish updates
Berlin’s newspaper Tagesspiegel published a nice portrait about me as one of the heads of digitalization in Germany, as part of their (German) newsletter Background Digitalisierung. It’s available here (no paywall, but registration required).
Screenshot: Tagesspiegel Background Digitalisierung. (Photo: Nina Zimmermann)
The interview features shout-outs to ThingsCon, to Anab Jain's work, to systemic change, strong governance and participatory processes. I was playing all the hits!
On Monday, participated in a high-profile(ish) panel by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) on digital participation / fairness / consumer rights panel: Sicherheit, Selbstbestimmung, Fairness, Teilhabe – Handlungsempfehlungen für eine Verbraucherpolitik im digitalen Wandel. If videos are ever made available I’ll give an update.
Then later today — in fact in like 3 hours — we’ll have the next ThingsCon Salon will focus on public interest technology and feature the ever-brilliant Katharina Meyer who wrote this fantastic German-language piece on public interest tech as part of her missions to bring the term to Germany (which I very much support!), and the equally brilliant and kind Kasia Odrozek. You can still sign up here, and it’d be great to see you there tonight if you’re around!
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If you’d like to work with me or have a chat to explore collaborations, let’s chat!
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Not bananas
Over on Doteveryone, the brilliant and ever-helpful Dr. Laura James wrote up Why we haven’t made a trustmark for technology. On Twitter, she kindly also gives shout-outs to long-time friend and collaborator Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino’s Better IoT initiative, which in many way is what led to ThingsCon’s Trustable Technology Mark that I led the development on. The three of us had a great many in-depth conversations around opportunities and challenges in that space. Doteveryone had a structured research process that led them to conclude not to go through with the idea of creating a trustmark:
Doteveryone is often asked why we didn’t go ahead with an early idea to create a ‘trustmark’ for technology. The short answer is that digital products and services aren’t like bananas. Digital products are complicated, change over time (with software updates, new technologies, new data, etc) – and our attitudes towards them change too. It’s hard to set useful common standards, and evaluate these, in this sort of setting.
Better IoT, a community effort led with herculean efforts by Alexandra, settled on offering hands-on device for building better connected products, especially for startups in that space. And at ThingsCon, with support from the Mozilla Foundation, we decided not to be deterred and try going through with creating a trustmark.
Which we launched, and which is ongoing, but which for all the reasons that Laura laid out so clearly in that blog post, is an uphill battle, and a long and steep one at that. I’ve drafted a brief blog post about learnings from year 1, which I’m planning to share within the next few weeks.
One interesting angle that both Doteveryone and Better IoT were drawn towards is about supporting practitioners in their day-to-day work:
we found that the most significant change for the organisations was simply helping them identify ways they could work better. This was a surprising result. These organisations were all ones who were striving to be ethical and trustworthy; many had social missions and had prioritised responsible practice throughout their operations. But still, providing a framework and some tools to support their teams in thinking about responsibility was hugely useful.
This is implicitly the Trustable Technology Mark vision as well: That the questionnaire that is used to apply could also guide the development process. We’re experimented a little with formats, like simple flow charts:
Draft flowchart for the Trustable Technology Mark
It’s also something that some research I’ve been doing around ethical AI confirms: Supporting those practitioners (researchers, developers, designers, etc.) who want to do the right thing can be hugely effective.
Anyway, this is one of those write-ups that we should see so many more of: Full of insights, not afraid of also showing what hasn’t worked and why.
Personally I still think that a trustmark in that space can have tremendous value for consumers. However, if it’s feasible is a completely different story. Maybe pursuing this at all is just bananas.
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Intellectual debt
Great piece by Jonathan Zittrain on Medium, in which he explores intellectual debt. It’s full of nuggets worth quoting, I highly recommend reading the whole article. The concept is a powerful one: Debt incurred today shapes our options space for the future.
Just like financial debt shifts control “from borrower to lender, and from future to past, as later decisions are constrained by earlier bargains”, so “answers without theory — intellectual debt — also will shift control in subtle ways.”
If we don’t understand why a black box algorithm decides for us the way it does, then “a world of knowledge without understanding becomes, to those of us living in it, a world without discernible cause and effect”. We literally lose our understanding of how the world works, and as an effect, our agency.
Zittrain proposes creating a map of intellectual debt:
To achieve a balance sheet for intellectual debt, we must look at current practices around trade secrets and other intellectual property. Just as our patent system requires public disclosure of a novel technique in exchange for protection against its copying by others, or the city building department requires the public availability of renovation plans for private buildings, we should explore academic mirroring and escrow of otherwise-hidden data sets and algorithms that achieve a certain measure of public use. That gives us a hope for building a map of debt — and a rapid way to set a research agenda to pay off debt that appears to have become particularly precarious.
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What is “IoT” even supposed to mean?
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of those terms that is widely used, but depending on your definition can mean a range of things. Other, adjacent terms are equally vague at times, like: Ubiquitous Computing, Internet of Things, Smart Objects and Environments, Ambient Environments and Artificial Intelligence…
So I was more than happy when friend and collaborator Sven Engesser and his colleague Katrin Etzrodt over at the Technical University of Dresden embarked on the very worthwhile academic endeavor to untangle these very much tangled terms, and wrote an academic paper about it:
Ubiquitous tools, connected things and intelligent agents: Disentangling the terminology and revealing underlying theoretical dimensions (First Monday, full version in HTML)
“Theoretically disentangling terminology results in four distinct analytical dimensions (connectivity, invisibility, awareness, and agency) that facilitate and address social implications. This article provides a basis for a deeper understanding, precise operationalisations, and an increased anticipation of impending developments.”
It’s reasonably quick to read, it’s clarifying, it makes it easier to refer to one concept over the other: It’s a good paper!
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Concepts that stuck in my head this week
Stock and flow: In this 2010 piece that’s made the round across my feeds, author Robin Sloan explores the idea of stock and flow of creative endeavors, and I found it really resonating: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” Needless to say, if you’re a creator of anything idea based, you need a balance of both.
Squishy education to solve squishy problems: In Training the next generation of ethical techies (Medium), Ethan Zuckerman (of still-but-not-for-long the MIT Media Lab) has a thing or two to say about the way we train people to discuss complex technologies, their societal implications, and policy. Too much disconnect in that space, with machine learning PhDs having a lack of ethics/impact training and folks with a focus on those areas often being under-equipped in the tech department:
“the problems we’re starting to face around regulating tech are complex, squishy questions. Should governments regulate dangerous speech online? Or platforms? Should communities work to develop and enforce their own speech standards? My guess is that answer looks more like an analysis of Lear’s madness than like the decomposition of a matrix.”
So what can we change to get to experts who are better equipped to solve squishy questions?
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Currently reading: Four Futures (Peter Frase), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr)
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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability starting in mid-October, so let's have a chat.11
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What's next?
After a workshop in Stockholm I’ll be heading to Hamburg to speak at NEXT, where I haven’t been in a few years, exploring better urban metrics for smart cities. This is followed by a stint in Dundee as part of the OpenDott PhD program, where I’m an industry supervisor. As an experiment we’re doing this one low-carbon, by train-boat-train. Should be good!
Then, after possibly Boston & New York (details pending), in November you can come see me speak at Tech Care in Copenhagen, a brand new event about responsible technology in the public interest. As far as I’m concerned, this might very well be one of the most exciting new events in a while. The speaker line-up so far seems ace, and a friend who knows a bit more about the background has described it to me as “extremely low BS”, which is really all anycone can ask for as far as I’m concerned.
Have a lovely 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. Peter was a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and is currently an Edgeryders fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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Header image: Elena Koycheva (Unsplash)