S06E22 of Connection Problem: Jackpot
Image: Deb Chachra
Back on a normal, productive schedule, personally. That’s against a backdrop of somewhat ghastly news around the globe, including our own backyard here in Germany, where at the state level, two of the democratic parties broke the previous understanding that you don’t collaborate with the anti-democratic far right party whose name I won’t mention here. This will have ripple effects we can’t quite be certain about, but much like what’s happening in the US and UK it looks like downsides far outweigh any potential upsides. While this sinks in, things are moving forward; Deb Chachra perfectly sums it up with her Venn diagram above.
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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 & project updates
Work on Colorful Caribou is ongoing. Meanwhile, Eerie Eraser is making big strides (we just bought a domain!) and I hope to have first things to share publicly. Two pieces of work are now officially slated to be published concretely before the end of the month, so I’m happy to pull pack the proverbial curtain on Autonomous Antelope and Bamboozling Badger:
A collaboration with Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV) in which I’ve been wearing primarily my ThingsCon hat is official. SNV have announced our upcoming report in which we look at the European capacity for AI. Concretely, we argue for an ecosystem perspective, and that civil society has a key role to play for a European “third way” for AI. Here’s the announcement in its original German:
“Auf der ganzen Welt arbeiten Staaten an einem politischen Rahmen für den Einsatz Künstlicher Intelligenz. In der Europäischen Union möchte man vor allem die Entwicklung vertrauenswürdiger, am Gemeinwohl ausgerichteter Künstlicher Intelligenz fördern, auch durch entsprechende Regulierung. In einem neuen Papier argumentieren Leonie Beining, Peter Bihr und Stefan Heumann, dass es Europa ohne Einbeziehung der Zivilgesellschaft nicht gelingen wird, einen solchen “europäischen Weg” für KI zu entwickeln. Für Maßnahmen, die auch langfristig gesamtgesellschaftliche Interessen im Blick behalten, brauchen die EU-Staaten ein zivilgesellschaftliches Ökosystem, das sie dabei unterstützt. Das Papier analysiert den Status quo des europäischen “AI & Society Ecosystem” und seine Entwicklungspotentiale. Es erscheint voraussichtlich Ende Februar.”
So that’s the teaser, the full report will likely be published by the end of February.
My work with the Foundation of European Progressive Studies (FEPS) will result in a report that’s going to go life by Feb 19th specifically, for reasons some of you might recognize and for the rest are completely irrelevant. There, no detailed announcements have been made so I’m not going to spill the beans just yet. Going to be good though.
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20in20
A few days ago I set out to write 20 blog posts in 20 work days. For boring reasons that hasn’t quite worked out but it’s a close enough call that I’ll keep going. Here’s where are stand today (this link takes you to the overview):
- Category Error: Tracking Ads Are Not a Funding Mechanism. A rant on how we frame the debate around online advertising.
- Smart Cities & Human Rights. An attempt at a more robust framework for evaluating Smart Cities.
- Nuclear disarmament but for surveillance tech? Kill it with fire.
- Cost-benefit analysis, Data-Driven Infrastructure edition. We need stricter rules for Data-Driven Infrastructure.
- Engesser’s Law. What a visit to the movie theater can teach us about productivity.
- Car-free cities. The sooner the better, eh?
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The fight for faces
As covered last week, facial recognition isn’t everything. That said, when Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That states that his company has a first amendment right to scraping all the facial photos they can get their grubby fingers on, then all I have to say is…
a) not true and
b) I don’t care, because first amendment right doesn’t apply in Europe, where GDPR rules supreme
…and so I wonder, what’s the channel to trigger an investigation there?
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How to future
Shout-out to the Changeist team around Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby who just announced their upcoming book, How to Future. I’ve seen them do their Futuring work in action and they’re very, very good at it — much better than, frankly, most others. This isn’t hand-wavy predictions BS but rather thinking about ranges of possible futures and what that means in action for you or your org, today. (Madeleine also write a mean, gritty sci-fi of the best sort, which I also recommend seeking out.) The book’s up for pre-order now, to be out in July. I’ve pre-ordered; frankly I don’t think you can go wrong with this one.
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Miscellanea
- Craig Mod reflects on the membership model he’s been pursuing, and his thoughts are always worth reading.
- Is an open-source alternative to Sonos the solution to all connected speaker problems? I’d argue that it isn’t, we just need to de-couple the speakers from the connectivity. But what do I know. Let’s face it, after sinking hundreds of bucks into a couple of connected speakers, returning them, and doing the same over for a different flavor of connected speakers, those either work for a very long time or it’ll be the last pair of connected speakers I’ll ever spend money on. Good speakers should last decades, not years, period.
- The examples don’t quite resonate with me personally but a good reminder that there are different types of personalities in working contexts, like pioneers and process people. It certainly helps to be familiar with what contexts/tasks/roles you are and aren’t comfortable with.
- Google has developed a framework for auditing AI systems “to be applied throughout the internal organization development life-cycle. Each stage of the audit yields a set of documents that together form an overall audit report, drawing on an organization's values or principles to assess the fit of decisions made throughout the process. The proposed auditing framework is intended to contribute to closing the accountability gap in the development and deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems by embedding a robust process to ensure audit integrity.”
- Good friend and excellent curator Patrick Tanguay has been guest-editing Kottke.org once again and points out how much Tintin’s dress-code aligns with the style of Monocle and the idea is just delightful.
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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: Agency (William Gibson), The Shortest History of Germany (James Hawes)
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What's next?
Another week or two of writing, and then one by one the reports I’ve been co-authoring should come online, with another one in March. In March, probably a spontaneous time-out while plotting the next steps.
Yours truly,
Peter
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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities, 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 an Edgeryders Fellow (2019). He tweets at @peterbihr and blogs at thewavingcat.com. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.
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