S07E05 of Connection Problem: Ripples of the Unknown
Good morning/day/evening to you,
wherever you’re reading this.
As a regular reminder of why you find this in your inbox, this is the personal-ish newsletter by me, Peter Bihr. As the quickest of summaries, you might have found this through my Twitter (@peterbihr), my work around responsible connected tech at The Waving Cat and ThingsCon, a recently-wrapped up project involving trousers, or through some conference-related shenanigans. If none of this triggers a memory, you're more than welcome to stick around anyway, but also you can of course unsubscribe anytime here or in the footer of this email.
That said, one of the joys of writing this newsletter is the many responses from friends old and new that respond from time zones that suddenly just seem that much farther away. Hope you’re all doing ok!
Fun fact that I file under “new normal”: When I ordered a new router, it came packaged together with a flyer offering face masks from the same vendor. It wasn’t the first time this happened.
On that note: Talk soon,
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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Project updates
The official launch of our new series of remote fireside chats with cities about their coronavirus strategies, and the roles of digital tools and civil societies within those strategies, is just around the corner. This is together with Körber Stiftung, and the first two episodes with NYC and Hamburg are already recorded, with more in the pipeline; I’m truly enjoying these conversations, and I hope you will, too. I’ll keep you posted.
All other projects are humming along nicely but there won’t be much to see publicly for a bit as it’s all behind the scenes stuff: Research, evaluations, PhD supervision, planning and coordinating discussion rounds, etc. More once there’s more to publicly share.
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Better public interest AI
The European Commission had been looking for feedback on their AI strategy white paper for a few months. This (in EU parlance) consultation ended very recently, and it was possible to submit either answers to a questionnaire or to submit a position paper.
I was glad to see that Mozilla, AI Now and NGI submitted a paper that focuses on Using Procurement Instruments to Ensure Trustworthy AI, which is very solid.
Over at ThingsCon we also submitted a paper that I co-authored together with the fine folks at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung where we focused on the importance of strengthening the role of civil society in all things to do with public interest aI.
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Carbon-neutral internet
I think I might have linked to this before, but… Mozilla also is revamping their organizational practices around sustainability, which I really like. I really hope a bunch of the bigger players will do the same. See also the Museum of Fossilized Internet that M has been working on (and that I most certainly included in a past issue). The MoFI highlights how absurd some of our fossil-powered digital consumption habits are likely to look like in the future. It’s a neat, fun project to help shift our perception.
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Beautiful physics
Look, I’m not going to pretend I actually understand these experiments around Dark Matter but oh boy do I love the way this author describes what’s going on:
“A sensor-lined tank of 3.2 metric tons of pure xenon, the detector is located thousands of feet beneath Gran Sasso, a mountain in Italy. As a chemically inert, “noble” element, xenon makes for a quiet gazing pool in which to look for the ripples of unknown particles, should any flit through.”
A quiet gazing pool full of noble element in which to look for ripples of the unknown. Amen to that.
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“Enforcement continues to be the weak link”
…for data protection in Europe. Since the (previously) laxer small countries are where the US tech industry primarily put down roots in Europe, their lead authorities for all things GDPR need to be beefed up (Reuters):
“Given that the largest big tech multinationals are established in Ireland and Luxembourg, the data protection authorities of these countries act as lead authorities in many important cross-border cases and may need larger resources than their population would otherwise suggest,” the report said.
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My face won’t tell you my intentions
Crime prediction technology reproduces injustices and causes real harm by the Coalition for Critical Technology is an excellent debunking and contextualizing of the trend toward pre-crime style policing or predictive policing. Predictive policing here meaning facial recognition and AI being used to “identify or predict ‘criminality’ using biometric and/or criminal legal data”.
Let’s be real for a second: You cannot predict anyone’s behavior by looking at their face. At best, it’s pre-judgment and removes the possibility of free will; at worst it’s a rehashing of phrenology. Either way, the way it’s implemented now is heavily racially biased; any attempt to do this through “neutral algorithms” is misleading and ill-informed.
In the summarizing conclusion of this piece: Crime-prediction technology reproduces injustices and causes real harm.
Again, I highly recommend reading the full article. It’s eloquent, well argued, and calls out a lot of the misleading arguments that are often brought forward in these contexts.
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Miscellanea
- Important: Mom, Dad, Uncle, Auntie, Grandfather, Grandmother, Family: How to talk with your family about racial equality. This is more tailored to the US discourse than, say, Germany. But it applies well enough.
- The Roots And Perception of Police Uniforms: Put This On explores the trend towards paramilitary presentation of police forces. “It may cliche to say dress for the job you want, but as we consider the limits of the jobs we really want police to do, we should consider how we dress them for it.”
- Anil Dash joins the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I rarely get excited about anyone joining anyone’s board, but this is great news. Anil has been a super important community voice in this space for a long time.
- Germany bans single-use plastic products (Deutsche Welle) starting July 3rd, 2021 🙌 What a nice birthday present.
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Currently reading: Ametora, W. David Marx. Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart.
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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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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores how emerging technologies can have a positive social impact. At the core of his work is the mission to align emerging technologies and citizen empowerment. To do this, he works at the intersection of technology, governance, policy and social impact — with foundations, public and private sector. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research and strategic advisory 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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