S06E14 of Connection Problem: The Tragedy of Future Commons

Image: Total eclipse of the sun from the Trouvelot astronomical drawings (1881-1882) by E. L. Trouvelot (1827-1895)
 

Hi and an extra welcome to all the folks who joined this week!

Presumably a bunch of you came via Patrick’s kind shout-out — I’ll do my best to measure up to the expectations. As always, whether you’ve just joined or have been along for the ride for a long time, please feel free to hit reply anytime.

Peter

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If you'd like to work with me or bounce ideas, let's have a chat.

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Personal-ish updates

The year has entered the most hectic time of the year. Between workshops for fun things like giving feedback to newly planned research labs and analyzing ethical AI ecosystems and how to strengthen Europe’s digital commons, there’s a ton of research and writing on my metaphorical desk: Ethical AI; smart city governance, smart cities and a European digital agenda, smart city and labor rights. More to come.

So it’s all good and busy and interesting and looks like it’ll stay that level of interesting until well into 2020, which is still a weird year to type out for me, but there you go. At least we know how to refer to the next decade by name.

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The Tragedy of Future Commons

I can’t help but thinking that so many of today's debates - from climate change to smart city governance and AI ethics - are so much more connected than we give them credit for. I might be projecting, but in my mind they’re just variations of one simple theme:

Do we narrow or broaden the future options space? In others words, will we leave the next generation, the public sector, or the other people around us more options or less options? Do we give them agency or take it away? And how can it ever be ok to act in a way that takes away future generations' options? That strips governments of their chances to deliver services to their citizens?

It's essentially the Tragedy of the Commons as applied to the time axis: The Tragedy of Future Commons. And we can choose very deliberately to strengthen the commons (now and for the future), to strengthen future generations in the face of climate change (where we might have hit another tipping point), to strengthen city governments in their ability to govern and deliver services by not hollowing them out, etc. etc. etc..

What actions that requires of us depends heavily on context of course: AI to be made with more participation and civil society involved so as to mitigate risks. Smart cities to prioritize public ownership and accountability so the city doesn’t lose its influence to the private sector. Climate change to be at the top of all our priority lists in order to give our future selves and future generations more and better options to shape their world and thrive in it.

Too often we’re stuck in debates that are based, essentially, in yesterday’s world. We need to realize the situation we’re in so as to avoid false choices. It’s not “climate or business”, it’s “climate or no business”. It’s not “climate or civil rights”, but “climate or no civil rights”. Radical changes are coming our way, and I’d rather shape them with intention and some buffer to spare rather than see them imposed on us like gravity imposed on Newton’s fabled apple.

So let’s aim for the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons, whatever that might be called. The Thriving of the Commons?

And if you need a framework that’s decidedly not made for this purpose but has been holding up nicely for me, look to the Vision for a Shared Digital Europe (SDE) for inspiration. It lays out 4 pillars that I find pretty appealing: Cultivate the Commons; Decentralize Infrastructure; Enable Self-Determination; Empower Public Institutions. The authors drafted it with the EU’s digital agenda in mind (I was a very minor contributor, joining at a later stage). But I think it can apply meaningfully to smart cities just as much as it does to AI development and climate change and other areas. (Feel free to hit up the team to see how they might apply to your context, or reach out to me and I’ll be happy to put you in touch.) Those are good principles!

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Algo Accountability Failure

A while ago, NYC launched a new initiative to great fanfare: The Automated Decision Systems (ADS) task force. At the time, and mostly since, I cheered it on and pointed to it as an outstanding example of how cities should tackle the thorny issue of algorithmic decision making and its potential impacts on local communities. Alas, it looks like this effort has largely imploded.

A former member tells a tale of woe (FastCo) in which the task force was derailed by a lack of shared definitions and lack of access to data. (And I’m not going to lie: I do wonder about intent and industry connections here.)

City officials brought up the specter of unworkable regulations that would apply to every calculator and Excel document, a Kafkaesque nightmare where simply constructing a pivot table would require interagency approval. In lieu of this straw man, they offered a constricted alternative, a world of AI regulation focused on algorithms and advanced machine learning alone.

The problem is that at a moment when the world is fascinated with stories about the dire power of machine learning and other confabulations of big data known with the catchphrase “AI,” some of the most powerful forms of automation still run on Excel, or in simple scripts. You don’t need a multi-million-dollar natural-language model to make a dangerous system that makes decisions without human oversight, and that has the power to change people’s lives

And that’s just it, isn’t it. Algorithmic decision making is a mouthful, but of course it’s a much more meaningful description of what’s often discussed as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML). For a citizen impacted by such an algorithmic decision making system it matters very little what technological underpinnings power that system. If an algorithm denies an important right or access to important information, it doesn’t matter if it was as sophisticated as a cutting edge neural network or as simple as a spreadsheet running on bad input data:

while this opportunity for oversight may have disappeared, the dangers posed by government algorithmic systems have only grown. A comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the ways that governments use AI to make decisions about people’s lives is more urgent than ever before. The only question is whether other cities will have the political will to do more than perform a transparency shadow play and actually pull back the curtain on their algorithms.

And hence the important of getting the framing right when discussing AI, smart cities, or any other data driven system. Where algorithms make decisions, we need to make sure they a) good and b) there are meaningful channels to seek redress.

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Sonos & Snips? Private voice control ftw.

Sonos, the smart speaker maker, snapped up Snips, a French startup that developed a privacy-first voice assistant. (And one of the initial receivers of the Trustable Technology Mark.)

I'm pretty excited about this. They know better than most how to make voice happen with privacy in mind. I still believe in voice as an interface, but the current crop seems too problematic to me. We have Sonos speakers, and specifically those without microphones. There’s a market for privacy-first connected products, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be growing for a long time.

In related news, a shout-out to ”Privacy Included: Rethinking the Smart Home",

Mozilla Foundation's special edition of the Internet Health Report. Also, I was more than happy to find shout-outs to ThingsCon and the Trustable Technology Mark, and to find myself quoted in it 🙏

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Miscellanea

Big Tech’s Big Defector (The New Yorker). I’m never sure what to make of the narrative of insiders switching sides after a moment of personal enlightenment, especially if they benefitted greatly from their original stance and also stand to benefit again from their new one. That said, this profile on Roger McNamee (who I have to admit I wasn’t aware of at all) is quite interesting in that he seems both very outspoken and well connected. Still within the larger framework of Silicon Valley logic but on a personal vendetta to make personalized ads illegal, which is a refreshingly radical take.

Klimaschutz ist kluge Wirtschaftspolitik (ZEIT, in German). It’s good to see more voices chiming in with support for what seems such an obvious reality: That an effort to stem climate change is not a barrier to the economy but a requisite. Not only would the economy likely collapse in the face of advanced climate change, but there is tremendous economic potential in fighting climate change and in working towards a thriving future with abundant energy.

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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: The Beauty of Everyday Things (Soetsu Yanagi), Lost Japan (Alex Kerr), Tiamat’s Wrath (James S. A. Corey)

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What's next?

In two weeks, I’ll be co-hosting ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam. Come swing by! For all other presentations and talk as they come in, see the overview here. Otherwise it’s me going heads-down for research and writing, and only occasionally popping my head up for a meeting or on Twitter.

Enjoy your day!

Yours truly,
Peter

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies —  like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence — can have a positive social impact. 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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