S06E07 of Connection Problem: Degrowth, AI deserts, remote planets
Hello and welcome,
As physicists have just reminded us (and how they’ve driven home that point) we’re on a tiny planet in a remote corner of the universe, and there’s a lot going on out there. (God I love astrophysics, even though I understand barely anything.) So with a renewed sense of humility, let’s seek shelter in the more familiar, smaller matters of planetary-scale, human society. That shouldn’t be so hard, right?
Apologies for skipping last week’s episode; between a public holiday and some other stuff it simply didn’t work out. And let’s face it, rare is the person who complains about One Less Email In Their Inbox. To make up for it, this one comes a day early, so there’s that. Enjoy!
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Degrowth as an opportunity
Through Patrick (Sentiers) I stumbled upon this interview with Vaclav Smil, expert craftsman of crunching numbers. He does a stellar job arguing that degrowth doesn’t mean cut down on all things but rather that growth and degrowth are essentially tools to use depending on context. For example, some countries below a certain poverty threshold should focus on growth (towards lower mortality, and increased nutrition and education) while other, richer countries could easily cut down and not miss much at all:
“Once you reach a certain point, the benefits of GDP growth start to level off in terms of mortality, nutrition and education. (…) We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? Not much is going to happen to their lives. People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have.”
"To answer this, it’s important not to talk in global terms. There will be many approaches which have to be tailored and targeted to each different audience. There is this pernicious idea by this Thomas Friedman guy that the world is flat and everything is now the same, so what works in one place can work for everyone. But that’s totally wrong. For example, Denmark has nothing in common with Nigeria. What you do in each place will be different. What we need in Nigeria is more food, more growth. In Philippines we need a little more of it. And in Canada and Sweden, we need less of it. We have to look at it from different points of view. In some places we have to foster what economists call de-growth. In other places, we have to foster growth.
It’s a fascinating debate, and certainly going to be a defining one for our era. The other day, my hairdresser gave me an unprompted lecture on how kerosene prices were too low and need to go up to prevent us from taking short term, long distance travel too often. If that isn’t a sign of this debate entering mainstream then I don’t know what is. The times they’re a changing.
ps. I’m very tempted to pre-order this book of Smil’s that’s going to be out this October, but I can’t quite decide if it’s essential reading, or a 1.5kg stack of reading guilt on the coffee table. Maybe it’s both! How do you find the time to read big chunks of non-fiction in your lives? It’s not a rhetorical question: Do you find the time? Is there a trick/ritual/habit, anything?
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AI Deserts
The great Jen Pahlka (of Code for America fame, among others) has written a fantastic piece on the uneven distribution of AI capacity. (Insert your favorite William Gibson reference here.) The whole text is a quick and very good read, but if you’re pressed for time, the super short summary is this (I’m paraphrasing):
AI/Machine Learning capacity is driven by access to data, which only the commercial sector really has, and only the commercial sector is moving in this space really fast and building massive capacity. The public sector and civil society are falling behind more every day, and exponentially year over year. NOT GOOD.
A few quotes/highlights below.
On access to data as a condition for effective use of AI:
“What is under-discussed is how unevenly this change will happen, because we misunderstand and overestimate the preconditions for AI outside the private sector. The first precondition for AI is data — lots of it. The private sector has digitized and enabled the collection, transport, and everyday use of massive amounts of previously inaccessible information. Google, Facebook, and by extension their advertising customers and applications that use their platforms, now have enormous amounts of information about us not just because we share this data explicitly, but also because these systems monitor what else we’re doing when we’re online.”
A neat metaphor:
“If AI were a plant, data would be its air, soil, and water, and in these connected ecosystems, AI’s roots can reach far and wide to access resources.”
On legacy systems that dominate large sectors of society:
“digital transformation hasn’t happened evenly across our society, and it’s particularly the public and social sectors that have been left behind. Here, large-scale systems of systems that talk to each other are few and far between, and the low availability and connectedness of data means that these sectors may become AI/ML deserts, so to speak. [organizations with legacy information systems] likely receive significant amounts of data from the other organizations and agencies they collaborate with in unstructured formats: email, fax, and phone calls logged by humans.”
Challenges are often of a non-technological nature:
Some “will point out that computers will soon be clever enough to overcome the standards problem; they’ll simply learn to infer what different fields mean and do the normalization themselves. But they may not have that chance; gaining access to that data from each individual unit is possibly the hardest challenge, because it’s not a technical problem, but a legal, bureaucratic, and human one. When we say things like “the Department of Defense has that data,” it makes it sounds like any given human of sufficient rank could assemble it. That simply isn’t true in practice. It’s not just the Department of Defense; what digital means is closer to the fragmented spreadsheet scenario than the systems of systems scenario in most government contexts, and certainly in the majority of nonprofits.”
The key pre-condition to get started with AI is digital competence:
“All this speaks to the second precondition for AI that we often fail to account for: organizational competence at digital that’s rooted in enduring structures and cultures. This is important because it’s a key driver of data availability, but it’s also important in its own right if you care about ethics in AI”
Ignorance does not prevent harm:
“Government will try to do AI, of course, even without sufficient data or digital competence. (…) an organization without core digital competence is doomed to use AI badly, with potentially disastrous consequences.“
And finally, a call to arms to tackle a big issue head-on:
“We need an effective, capable public and social sector. Government and nonprofits play a critical role in what matters most in our lives: our health, our safety, our vulnerable kids, our friends and neighbors recovering from natural disasters, our veterans, our national infrastructure, our response to the climate crisis. Governments and advocates are also meant to serve as an important check on corporate power. We already live in a world with an enormous asymmetry between the capabilities of the private sector and the public and social sectors, and we are confronting a future in which that asymmetry will grow exponentially year over year.”
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The corpse of Universal Truth
From L.M. Sacasas' excellent newsletter, The Convivial Society, talking about AI and facial recognition, a conversation triggered by ImageNetRoulette, this struck a nerve:
"I'm sometimes inclined to think that we are doomed to repeat the worst errors of the past but in a digitally augmented fashion. Often this is connected with a characteristically modern desire or urge to achieve a God's-eye-view of things without, you know, God. Much of what we might now think of as traditional postmodernism—thirty years ago I suspect no one would have imagined speaking of traditional postmodernism, but there it is and I think it works—was basically an acknowledgement that the modern quest for certain, objective, universal Truth had exhausted itself. Digital technology has re-animated the corpse, which is why we now see zombie versions of phrenology, eugenics, and the like floating around"
I don’t see it as quite as bleak — these things do get called out quickly, normally — but it seems true that a similar technologically/engineering driven mindset tends to propose some odd ideas along those lines, often without ill intent, and under the cover of black box algorithms these ideas find a manifestation in real life. So yes, 100x what Sacasas says.
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Zuck vs Warren: Fight!
So Zuckerberg had his comments from an all-hands leaked and it was awkward. But as much as I dislike Zuck and a lot about Facebook’s practices, I find it hard to chime in with the chorus of people smashing him. A lot of what he says there appears, while maybe too smug, not that wrong in his role. (Trust me that defending Zuckerberg of all people feels even more strange for me to do than for you to read here…)
His statement of defending against a break-up of Facebook in the courts is of course what he has to do in his role: That’s what the courts are there for. He defends the rule of law in his statement (unlike at other times, where he just hints that the laws have to change for him/FB). I don’t agree with many things he’s ever said, and find a lot of it despicable, incorrect, and/or dishonest. But this just seems like the only answer he could possibly give int his context? Anyway. Too much airtime for someone who doesn’t really need it.
Fun fact: It’s pretty much a year and a half or so since I left Facebook, and for what it’s worth, it was the easiest transition. I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything at all, not even occasionally. To be honest, I’ve been a bit surprised by that. Of course, YMMV.
(For the record, I'll happily put my money on a Warren & Vestager tag team in this one.)
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Miscellanea
- Privacy Dependencies, a great paper exploring how privacy isn’t something to solve at the individual level: “What we do and what we say can reveal as much about others as it does about ourselves, even when we don’t realize it or when we think we’re sharing information about ourselves alone.“
- How countertop payment systems change tipping: It’s always fascinating to be able to watch culture change right in front of you (literally).
- Ever wondered what happens if your airline went belly-up while you’re traveling? Well, the recent Thomas Cook bankruptcy offered an opportunity to compare how that plays out differently between Europe and the US.
- Pepe the Frog Means Something Different in Hong Kong. The internet works in mysterious way.
- Ocean plastic cleanup successful in trial. Neat project, good to see if moving forward. And a stark reminder that even something as deceptively simple as collecting floating plastic is a real challenge (also but not only of scale).
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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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Currently reading: Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Abaddon's Gate (James S. A. Corey)
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What's next?
In October, I’ll be speaking at the FES event “digital capitalism” in Berlin, on smart cities. In November, Tech Care in Copenhagen, the Edgeryders Festival (Berlin) as well as at a Körber Stiftung event in Hamburg. And in December, of course the annual ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam. Overview here.
Enjoy your day!
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: Unsplash