Pink sky illustration from Bijutsu Sekai (1893-1896) by Watanabe Seitei
 

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Hello from the EuroCity 177 Berlin-Praha.

I’m headed to Rotterdam, with a brief detour via Dresden for a quick personal stop. In Rotterdam, we’ll have this year’s ThingsCon conference - the 6th year in a row. This is getting serious!

Also, I’m told there are still a handful of tickets just for the second conference day, Friday Dec 13th - if you’re around, click through the link above and come say hi! (Hit reply if you need a discount, I can bring in a few folks slightly cheaper. Again, that’s how grown up we are now: Someone sends me an allowance of codes to give away, rather than me frantically generating them on the fly. Thank you, team Rotterdam!)

ThingsCon is also the reason this email comes a couple of days early: With the conference taking over my brain there’s simply no chance for me to sit down and have a coherent thought, let alone time to write this up. But/and that’s what train rides are for! 🚅

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The recent past, (…) a world that feels real because it’s familiar, and therefore out of date

— Joshua Rothman in his excellent William Gibson profile

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

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Don’t race that AI

In commercial and policy circles alike, there’s lots of talk about winning the race for AI. This framing might be seriously flawed, though, as ALLAI (a Dutch network for ethical AI) convincingly argues:

Firstly, there is no race, and secondly, if there is, it is the wrong race to run.

There is no race because of the very definition of a race: a competition of speed, against an objective criterion, usually a clock or to a specific point. In AI developments, we don’t have a end point!

That it is the wrong race to run, is an even more important issue. The US and China are betting on machine learning developments, and in particular on deep learning, as the approaches that will achieve AI, and thus enable them to ‘win’ that so-called race.(…) However, these approaches are focussing on one aspect of intelligence, that of the ability of perceiving patterns and make predictions based on those perceptions. True intelligence is more than this, and includes the capabilities to reason, interact and and decide based on little, incomplete and contradictory information. There is an urgent need to explore alternatives for statistical approaches to learning.

See also Ines Montani’s pretty good overview of how little water the going theory is that there are clearly dominating companies in the AI space - she takes that apart and also helps categorize a little what’s going on under the banned of “AI”. But while we’re here, a ranking of countries by their AI readiness, which is at least an interesting approach.

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Fixing global governance, one step at a time

Cathleen Berger works in Mozilla’s policy team and I’m more than happy that I had the opportunity to get to know her better over the years: She has a super interesting mix of backgrounds and knows her stuff; she has a moral compass and isn’t afraid of tackling big issues. Like, y’know, global governance. In this piece she explores how to structure engagement with governance issues in order to be effective:

When I think about global governance and policy-making, I try to structure my engagement along five phases, each of which addresses a particular question, so that I can decide which one I want to contribute to. Each phase is structured along its own process and questions will be addressed by different sets of actors, along distinct formats, and generate specific outputs.

A. What are we trying to tackle? (Issue identification, agenda-setting)
B. Which solutions may be appropriate? (Problem-solving, deliberation)
C. Ready to write it down? (Drafting, policy-making)
D. How do we make it happen? (Validation, implementation)
E. What did we learn? (Evaluation)

What can I say? I like a good check list!

Governance and how it can/has to respond to tech is really a fascinating debate right now. Which systems and processes have to change? Which ones are solid and the orgs lobbying for support for their agenda just need to learn how to engage with them effectively? There’s a lot of moving parts right now, and a lot of opportunity.

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Blue Dots and New Silk Roads

A few years ago, China launched the Belt & Roads Initiative (Wikipedia), a so-called New Silk Road, or Silk Road 2.0. It’s a massive government program to build out the influence across the globe, across Asia, in the global South —especially Africa—, throughout Eurasia, and well into the Americas. The mechanisms are manifold, but mostly it focuses on integrating trade and financing: Massive investments and lending, lots of trade deals. Critics decry it as diplomacy by debt-trap; while that doesn’t seem all that far off, I’d argue that it’s probably a little more complicated than that, and/but also colonialism. Why that’s interesting for me, in the context of this newsletter, is that quite a bit of that energy is channeled into things like Smart City investments (that bring Chinese tech vendors like Huawei into the growing population centers across Africa and South Asia, but also to Europe) and data deals to train facial recognition AI systems. Long story short, it’s big and it’s Chinese and so the US, China’s Western tech superpower counterpart (and by extension, Europe) are getting nervous because frankly it seems they missed the boat on this one.

Fast forward a few years to Blue Dot (OPIC press release), a newly unveiled initiative spearheaded (apparently) by the US, Australia and Japan. (How Australia got on board there is beyond my understanding, but good for them, I guess?) Details are still surprisingly sparse but it appears to be pretty much a counter to Belt & Road as far as technical (and especially networked) infrastructure is concerned: “a multi-stakeholder initiative to bring together governments, the private sector and civil society to promote high-quality, trusted standards for global infrastructure development.”

Not having China’s centralized coordination, this one is a little more decentralized and market-driven, and seems to sit somewhere between a funding/procurement policy and a certification for trusted tech. Frankly, it’s a little hard to tell as the reports seem to mostly be hearsay. I expect a lot more to surface in the coming weeks, but for now here are a few quick overviews I found: One, two, three.

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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: Medallion Status (John Hodgman)

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What's next?

The next few days, ThingsCon conference in Rotterdam. Then back to finishing up 3 reports (smart cities & digital agenda; smart cities & labor rights; ethical AI made in Europe), all due within the next few weeks and hopefully published shortly thereafter. Clicket-y-click! ⌨︎

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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