5 Apr 2023

A.I. thinks I’ve only got one ear

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I will explain the title for this post at the end (I think that’s called click bait) but first things first. Kudos to Netflix, they have now made three impactful documentaries exposing the dangers of AI driven manipulation of data for society and our civil liberties. These malgorithms are what Cathy O’Neil, who features heavily in one of the films, calls ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’. First came ‘The Great Hack’ in 2019 which exposed the deeply disturbing scandal of Cambridge Analytica and their manipulation of voter behaviour using data facebook had provided resulting in Mark Zuckerberg having to appear in front of Congressional hearings. The following year two more films were debuted by Netflix, first ‘The Social Dilemma’ then ‘Coded Bias’.

I wrote an eBook about my reaction to ‘The Social Dilemma’. TSD focused on how social media was being driven by venal amoral algorithms designed to maximize advertising revenues. These algorithms learn that the best way to do this is to feed people, to hook them like addicts, on content that pandered to their prurience, prejudices and psychoses. The result, the unintended consequence, is an increase mental illness especially among the young, bias confirmation and, most concerningly for liberal democracies, polarization of opinion to the point where rational debate is all but extinguished. So I chose to write my eBook as a contribution to a more rational – Socratic – discussion based on some small scale research I conducted among opinion leaders and on the basis of this I attempted to offer possible solutions. I’ll come back to those.

The third Netflix documentary of 2020, following closely on the heels of TSD, was ‘Coded Bias’ directed by Shalini Kantayya and featuring Joy Buolamwini among many other experts and activists, mostly women from diverse backgrounds. This was entirely appropriate since Joy’s work which she carried out at MIT exposed how facial recognition surveillance powered by AI was reinforcing racial and gender bias. The efforts of Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O’Neil and other prominent activists like Silkie Carlo founder of ‘Big Brother Watch’ in the UK have had some notable successes in forcing governments and law enforcement agencies to curtail the use of facial recognition surveillance. However, there remains widespread commercial use of AI that affects peoples chances of gaining employment, housing, credit, insurance, healthcare based on algorithms that are unregulated and flawed, in particular AI that been shown to be negatively biased against the poor, the racial minorities and the unconventional. AI is therefore reinforcing social inequality, preventing social mobility and restricting individual self-expression. This is just as terrifying as the manipulation of social media to change not just what we think but the way we think, our most fundamental human right, and the manipulation of elections, an attack on the very foundation of democracy.

All of this has been exposed in three documentaries produced by Netflix. Amazon and Apple both make lots of documentaries but none so far on the dangers of big data and AI. One wonders why……… but as I say, kudos to Netflix. I guess in the case of Netflix they use algorithms only to commission new content for you, and to suggest available content to you, that they think you might like, more like weapons of Individual entertainment than mass destruction.

I said I would return to potential solutions to this AI challenge and we need solutions because we do want, we desperately need, the positive use of AI to help us take on the Herculean tasks of tackling climate change, food poverty, obtaining better health opportunities for all.  As an atheist I don’t believe we were created by God but many of those who do also believe we were created in his/her/their likeness. They explain away humanity’s capacity to do as much evil as good as God giving us free will. Perhaps God did create us to be just like him/her/them and perhaps having given us free will he/she/they did not fully understand the ramifications of that until it became too late to do anything about it. This seems to be the perfect metaphor for AI. We created it and we gave it lots of data about us so it could think like us, maybe be better than us, certainly a lot faster than us. AI can only learn from big data (which remember means not just lots of it but multi-source). The biases that ‘Coded Bias’ talks about happened because the data we gave the AI to learn from was skewed to, let’s call it, ‘white privilege’. So we created AI to be like us, but only some of us, and we allowed it to develop in ways that were both good and bad for the world, just like us, and it is in danger of getting out of control, just like us. So how do we do better than God? How do we get AI back under control and how do we direct it towards things that are good for a free and open society, a world of equal opportunity for all irrespective of class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, faith (personally I’m not so sure about the last of those given the religious extremists out there but maybe with AI we can sort them out too)?

China is on a very different agenda it must be said. They are 100% explicit that they do not agree with democracy and that they want to use AI and data to control their society. There is no secret to what China are doing with data and facial recognition, we saw this in Hong Kong in response to the people who dared to challenge the state. In China you get a Social Credit Score, like a financial credit score but all encompassing. If you do the wrong thing, if you say the wrong thing, even if people you know do or say something wrong you are punished and the state, the CCP will know exactly what you are doing and saying, where you go and with whom you are consorting because they have all your data. The state can control you by controlling your Social Credit Score and thereby restricting your ability to get housing, access to public transport & travel, healthcare, financial services, you name it.

That makes them terrible, right? China is much worse than the free Western democracies – but is it? Of the 9 major organizations developing big data AI, 3 are in China and 6 are in the USA. Exactly the same thing is happening in America as in China with two important differences a) you don’t know about it, it’s invisible and b) the power lies in the hands of these few huge commercial enterprises who care first and foremost about profit and shareholders. People are denied jobs, financial services, housing, information & content is pushed at us with bias and partiality, all because without us knowing we are being watched, measured and judged by AI algorithms that not even the people that created them fully understand. Governments have used AI and data in ways that undermine civil liberties but they are being called out, they are accountable, although there remains an understandable concern that an extreme left or right wing government might not be so shy in abusing the power of AI & data. As they say, just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

So, solutions. I’ll start with the two proposals I’ve made previously because I still believe they are 100% right and both doable.

Firstly, social media needs to be regulated and forced to move to a subscription model. Social media generates a huge amount of data due its pervasiveness and frequency of use. AI learns from data and Social Media is where it does most of its homework. These are powerful platforms and they should require licenses that can be revoked in the case of malfeasance, just like newspapers and TV were. If the business model is subscription based they can still be very large businesses but most importantly the algorithms would be trained to build customer loyalty not eyeball addiction. If you pay something every month to use facebook, even just $1 then you are a customer not data fodder.

Secondly, there should be government investment together with commercial incentives to develop platforms that allow people to own, control and, when they chose to, transact their own data. Data is the new oil but it has been allowed to fall into the hands of robber barons. It is your data, you should be able to harvest it, store it and use it however benefits you most. This is not a quick fix and will require secure technology infrastructure with the scale and complexity we see today in financial markets and services. In my view it could be an opportunity for the financial sector who have the resources and customer base to make this work. Even if you don’t like your bank you have to trust them because they manage your most sensitive information already. A bank could be trusted to store your personal data, allow it to be transacted on your terms to get you a return and to manage those transactions. I don’t understand why banks don’t look at data in the same way they used to look at cash – bring it to us, we’ll keep it safe and give you access to it when you want and if you’ll allow us we will lend it out to be people (encrypted to preserve privacy) and make it work for you. Instead of going to facebook, or any of the data trawlers, scrapers and scavengers, big brands would go to the banks and buy the profiles they are looking for to promote whatever they want. People would consent to see brand content, anonymously, if it was made worth their time or interest.

Put these two things together – social media on subscription and the mechanism to leverage one’s own data – and you have solved a big part of the problem with no need for regulation.

That said there is still a role for regulation to prevent data abuse at the hands of AI and hold miscreants accountable but it has to be co-ordinated internationally and that sems like quite the challenge in a world were there seems to be growing nationalism and weakening global alliances. That was my conclusion but something in ‘Coded Bias’ gave me some optimism. The point was made that algorithms need an equivalent to the FDA, the US federal agency for Food and Drug Administration. We don’t allow people to market pharmaceuticals or foods that have not been tested or lack the appropriate quality controls. And this does, more or less, work across international borders. So why can’t there be an IAA, International Algorithm Administration, backed by international law that enforces the responsible development of AI?

Finally, I want to address the issue of whether big tech companies are actually able to behave responsibly – they say they want to but always use the defense that the scale of their operation, the sheer number of users and data points, make it impossible to have foresight on all unintended consequences and oversight on every malpractice. Let’s focus on the issue raised in ‘Coded Bias’, that facial recognition technology is biased against certain social groups, generally the disadvantaged groups who are under-represented in the data the AI is learning from. In my research I came across something new to me (I never claimed to be a technology expert). It is called synthetic data and is predicted to become a huge industry. The models and processing needed to develop synthetic data are no doubt very complex but the output is very simple to explain, the clue is in the name. This is artificial data, data that’s confected, invented, made up. It is needed to fill gaps in real authentic data to help AI to learn to do whatever it is developed to do. For AI to be effective it needs lots of data and the data has to be comprehensive and statistically representative. So they run lots of simulations based on lots of different scenarios in order to produce data to plug the gaps in real data.

This is a terrifying concept but it is not conceptual, it is happening right now. Many if not most of the systems developed using machine learning and AI use synthetic data, it overcomes issues of sensitive and confidential data that is hard to get. Obviously it is open to abuse, you can create the data to feed to AI that teaches it to discriminate prejudicially. So per the previous point, there has to be regulation. However, it can also be used to eliminate bias.

As humans we are programmed to be biased, our brains work by using pattern recognition. We know not all snakes are dangerous but some are, so if it looks like a snake we run. It’s a basic survival instinct and instincts are very hard to shift. When we look at an individual we take in the visual cues and form judgements and, just like the malgorithms, our brains have been trained to make prejudicial assumptions on flawed information. Someone looks a particular way, talks a particular way, exhibits certain behaviours and we make a negative judgement, there is no point in pretending otherwise. That judgement can be unfair but as humans we have the ability to over-ride our unconscious bias and make a conscious decision to look deeper, to give someone a chance, before making a decision that affects them. Synthetic data allows us to programme that humanity into AI. Poor people are a bad credit risk, the real data will teach AI this lesson and make it hard for certain social groups to access the loans that might help lift them out of poverty. The same system will make it very easy for the well off to buy a second car. One thinks it would be better for society to make finance available to facilitate social mobility rather than more physical mobility for the well off. If so we can use synthetic data to upweight the scenarios in which poor people are not unfairly treated as bad credit risks.

‘Coded Bias’ certainly got me thinking, so well done Netflix, again. My brain works in strange ways and the focus on racial bias in facial recognition made me think about ears. A lot of images of people will be side on as they walk past the camera that’s recording them, so it will only detect one ear. The AI might conclude that lots of people, even most people in certain locations, might only have one ear. Having only one ear has a medical term, it’s called microtia and it is more common than I thought when I looked it up. It occurs in 1-5 out of every 10,000 births which I think means there are 4 million out of the global population of 8 billion that only have one ear. Not common then, but not unheard of in the real world. We could teach AI about this, using synthetic data because samples of real world data would not likely detect the prevalence of microtia. It might prevent AI drawing the wrong conclusions, either ignoring microtia or over-estimating it. On the other hand, it might help facial recognition spot a one eared crook like Mark ‘Chopper’ Reid, the Australian criminal who cut off his own ear in prison to get an early release (it’s a long story). My question is very simple – would a machine have even thought about this, would it have looked up the data on microtia, searched online for an example of a one eared crook? I doubt it. So, if you have them, listen with both ears and both eyes wide open, we need to use AI, not let AI use us.

31 Mar 2023

Is it time to be seriously worried about AI?

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They say the time to get worried on an airplane is when the crew look scared. So if 1,100 of the top technology leaders and developers publish an open letter warning of the potential risks of AI to the future of the human race and calling for a 6 month moratorium on further AI development, people like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak (but interestingly not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg), it surely has to be time to be, at the very least, concerned.

The trigger for this major red flag would appear to be the release of ‘ChatGPT’ by OpenAI, the output of their Artificial Intelligence system, ‘GPT- 4’. Let’s unpack this. OpenAI is a research laboratory funded by the likes of Elon Musk and latterly Bill Gates/Microsoft. OpenAI is a not-for-profit organisation but it has a very much for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Limited Partnership that commercialises what the lab develops. The launch of ChatGPT took the valuation of OpenAI LTD to over $29 billion. GPT-4 stands for ‘Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, 4th edition’ and it is a ‘multi-model large language model’ which in effect means something very, very intelligent that you can talk to through its chat box, ChatGPT. You can ask it questions and it will reply, like a kind of talking search engine (Google are very worried about it because their version, ‘Bard’, is by all accounts not as good). But ChatGPT can do much more, it can create stuff, letters, essays, stories, poems, it can even write code.

The Open Letter calls for GPT-4 to be the line in the sand, the signal to pause and figure out how this should all be governed, what oversight and guardrails need to be put in place to avoid AI getting out of control and to avoid unintended consequences.

I have been worried about AI for a long time and I have occasionally shared my concerns and what drives them in my blogs and eBooks. I’m not a technology expert by any stretch of the imagination but I do have a very elastic imagination (which in my defense Einstein said was important than knowledge). Imagination is fueled by, to give it the posh word, the zeitgeist. You sniff what is in the air culturally, join the dots and let your imagination do the rest. I can be more specific than that and point to three things, three realizations that joined some dots and got me worried about AI, social media and robotics.

The first realization was that if you see it in the movies (or in the pages of science fiction) it has a habit of coming true – science fiction more often than not becomes non-fiction. If you live long enough you see the widespread adoption of technologies that were wild ideas in old films, TV shows and books – digital photography (‘The Man who fell to Earth’), the iPhone (Star Trek), virtual reality (‘Brainstorm’), ChatGPT (computers like Hal in ‘2001 A space odyssey’ and just about every other deep space film or show). We can’t yet ‘beam me up Scotty’, nor do we have robots that are indistinguishable from humans, robots that can form and reform into any shape  or alien invasions intent on mining the earth so it hasn’t all become reality, yet…..

Nevertheless, it struck me that sci-fi is a kind of forward memory so when I watched movies like ‘Phenomenon’ or ‘Lucy’ it made me think about the possibility of the human brain working at 100% capacity but when I watched ‘The Matrix’, ‘Ex-machina’ or ‘Westworld’ I worried that machines would get there first because, motivated by power and greed, we would facilitate this.

The second realisation was that the internet was becoming a connected global brain (I’m not claiming to be the only person to have spotted this). On the one hand the internet was becoming the warehouse for every single thing anyone and everyone had ever written throughout history, every single human artefact, and on the other hand the world was increasingly uploading every thought, comment, experience and bit of data with the ability to search and connect all this, therefore we were/are witnessing the creation of the biggest brain imaginable. Not a human brain belonging to one person made up of soft tissues, cells, blood, nerves and neural pathways but a digital brain that combines the brains of every person past and present. The key to unlocking the power of this global digital brain would lie in the intelligence of whoever – or whatever – interrogated it. You need a powerful search engine and the most efficient intelligence using that engine – the human brain is highly efficient in some ways but it is nowhere near as fast as super computers with artificial intelligence. We may (at the moment) be able to ask smarter, more insightful and imaginative questions but at a maximum rate of 1000 per second (one synaptic transmission per millisecond) which is 10 million times slower than a computer. A computer can pose 10 billion questions in one second and process the answers just as fast.

“When someone points at the moon only the fool looks at the finger” Old Chinese Proverb.

Since I first came across this old proverb decades ago it has stuck in my mind. It resurfaced when thinking about social media and sparked my third realization. Like many people I was greatly affected by Netflix’ ‘The Social Dilemma’, so much so I wrote an eBook about it. In that eBook I touch on the idea of unfettered AI possibly being the beginning of the end of life as we know it but the main idea I put forward is that AI powered Social Media is the enemy of the kind of Socratic debate we desperately need to address the world’s challenges. The solutions I put forward are very simple a) we need to create the means for people to own and transact, on their own terms and for their own benefit, their personal data and b) there has to be regulation to force social media to be subscription based and not dependent on advertising – if you don’t pay for the product you are the product. Notwithstanding, my realisation was that if AI were used primarily for commercial purposes by organisations impervious to oversight, governance and, where necessary, regulation then the finger would not be not pointing at the moon, it would be pointing at existential jeopardy. My realisation was that the unintended negative consequences of AI driven Social Media was the canary in the cage and it just fell off its perch.

In times of trouble turn to the BBC (Radio 4 to be precise). In 2021 Stuart Russell delivered the Reith Lectures and his subject was AI and how to get it right. Russell is Professor of Computer Science at Berkeley and an expert in AI. I commend everyone to listen to his series of lectures. It reassured me somewhat but like most people, if you feel worried but powerless you gravitate to any wise person who says it will be, just might be, OK. Having read the Open Letter I have been jolted out of my fragile sense of security.

I am determined to end on something positive but I must first join some more dots that I see. The Transgender debate is toxic, it is nigh on impossible to make any kind of comment or observation without being branded a ‘transphobe’ but I will try nonetheless. Some people have commented that gender fluidity has tended to surface towards the end of a particular civilization or empire and have found examples of this (possibly with selective bias) going back thousands of years. Who knows whether transgender presages the decline and fall of empire but for sure it is not a new cultural phenomenon. I would simply make the obvious observation that if we are heading for a world where AI machines and robots increasingly replace humans then gender is irrelevant, even biological gender aka sex, because biology is irrelevant.

Right now I do not know whether to be more concerned about AI or Geo-Politics or Climate Change or another Pandemic (zoonotic or man-made) – we live in troubling times and for the most part I choose to worry more about whether Steve Borthwick can turn around the England Rugby Team in time to be competitive at the forthcoming World Cup. (If I had time I would explain that sport is honestly something that gives me faith in humanity, it shows that at our best we can embrace diversity and compete while still remaining friends).

But back to Geo-Politics, it is hard to ignore the threat of a global confrontation of ideologies. On the one hand you have China and Russia (and Iran, Saudi Arabia among a few others) who reject democracy in favour of a totalitarian and repressive form of government. Even if the more liberal democratic nations come together to respond responsibly to the challenge of AI can we assume the same will be true of totalitarian states? China has very deliberately amassed the tools to control its society through the control of all their data, they are hardly likely to hold back on the most advanced use of AI to further this aim and enable them to establish global hegemony. Anyone who doubts this just read ‘The Great China Plan’ – they pretty much spell it out. They invented the idea of ‘kow tow’ and they intend to bring it back.

If the west takes a 6 month moratorium, will China and Russia do the same or are we just handing them a lead at the most crucial time?

I said I would end on something positive, and it is this. As Social Apes we are only meant to be able to live in small groups of 100 or fewer. At the start of the first millennium the world population was about 100 million. The biggest city was Alexandria with about 1 million (similar to Rome 200 years later) but the few other cities that existed were much smaller than that, less than 100 thousand, most people lived in villages. By 1100 the world population was somewhere between 300 and 400 million and cities had not grown in size or number. In the 1940’s the world population had exploded to over 2 billion, today it is 7.9 billion, there are over 500 cities with more than a million people and 31 megacities with 10 million or so. Fewer than half of us live in rural villages, most of live in cities. How is this possible – technology.

Technology, including AI, perhaps especially AI, has the power to solve more problems than it creates. If we look at the some of the most troubling and intractable problems we face – climate change, health, food & water poverty –  it might be that only with the power of AI can we hope to address them. As the Open Letter ends:-

“Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an “AI summer” in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt.”

As for China, history shows repressive societies always fail. Forget Orwell’s ‘1984’ and its depressing ending where Winston Smith accepts his death in service of ‘The Party’ while selling everyone out. Read Karl Popper’s “Open society and its enemies’ written at the end of World War II – liberal democracies will always win (eventually) because they champion peaceful progress and that is what most of want and, ironically, will fight for.

In China there is no doubt the driving force behind AI is to control people, suppress government opposition (as we saw in Hong Kong) to support totalitarianism. In the West the driving force is commercial and in a democracy that can be controlled. It does however require international collaboration to create effective regulation and accountability.

While writing this post I had BBC Radio 4 on in the background and this very subject was being debated, the Open Letter and its ramifications. The conclusion was that it was welcome and timely and that it should and would engage democratic debate. Here’s hoping – at least some of the airplane’s crew look calm.

Edited version of the Open Letter

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth, and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources. Unfortunately, this level of planning and management is not happening, even though recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control…….

………We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.

Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks,[3] and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders. Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable……

………..Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

AI research and development should be refocused on making today’s powerful, state-of-the-art systems more accurate, safe, interpretable, transparent, robust, aligned, trustworthy, and loyal.

In parallel, AI developers must work with policymakers to dramatically accelerate development of robust AI governance systems. These should at a minimum include: new and capable regulatory authorities dedicated to AI; oversight and tracking of highly capable AI systems and large pools of computational capability; provenance and watermarking systems to help distinguish real from synthetic and to track model leaks; a robust auditing and certification ecosystem; liability for AI-caused harm; robust public funding for technical AI safety research; and well-resourced institutions for coping with the dramatic economic and political disruptions (especially to democracy) that AI will cause.

Humanity can enjoy a flourishing future with AI. Having succeeded in creating powerful AI systems, we can now enjoy an “AI summer” in which we reap the rewards, engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all, and give society a chance to adapt. Society has hit pause on other technologies with potentially catastrophic effects on society.  We can do so here. Let’s enjoy a long AI summer, not rush unprepared into a fall.

20 Apr 2022

Consumer, Data Cow or Person of Interest?

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Along with many others I rail against the persistent use of the word ‘consumer’ by business, the media and even government. We are not, none of us, merely consumers, we are sentient, we are people. Consuming things is a by-product of our existence, not our defining characteristic or our purpose. Despite the confected faux regard for ‘consumer power’ or ‘consumer rights’ there is something inherently disrespectful and patronizing about referring to people as ‘consumers’. We are, on some occasions, customers, everyone is in some ways, on some days, someone’s customer. That’s fine, it conveys the idea of a willing transaction, an adult-to-adult relationship based on mutual interest. There is no context, in my view, where the word ‘consumer’ could not be more respectfully replaced by ‘customer’ and many where ‘person’ or ‘people’ would work just as well. Labelling people as ‘consumers’ implies that our only usefulness to the state is as units of labour to produce and units of consumption to justify ever more production. We’re just like the human batteries in ‘The Matrix’, Winston in Orwell’s 1984, put on earth to support the system, ‘Big Brother’.

Consumers? You might as well call us ‘eaters’, ‘breathers’ or maybe  ‘hungry, needy oxygen-users’.

If we buy into this idea of ourselves, even if only in part, as ‘consumers’ we are also giving license to a system that encourages us to consume more and more and more. Creating demand for ever improving products and services is the bedrock of liberal capitalism, a Western system that has done far more good than harm and as the old line goes, is better than the alternatives. Creating excessive consumption is bad. People know the difference, people have come up with the idea of a more circular economic system to limit waste pollution and over-depletion of finite resources. Consumers consume, just like gamblers gamble. People know when to stop.

So can we please confine the term ‘consumer’ to Room 101? Let’s just incinerate it. We are customers and/or we are people. Now we can turn to the far more dangerous threat to our humanity. Our real purpose is to provide data. We are fast becoming ‘Data-Cows’. Justin E.H. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris. In a recent article for The New Statesman he rather depressingly concluded that one’s job is irrelevant, whether professor or production worker, our role is to generate data.

………… it is growing ever clearer that the true job of all of us, now, is to be milked for data by the provisioners of online content.

What we do now, mostly, is update our passwords, guess at security questions, click on images that look like boats to prove we’re not robots. We are trainers of AI and watchers of targeted ads. 

Justin E.H. Smith: ‘Meritocracy and the future of work’ The New Statesman, April 2021

The logical conclusion of this is that when enough data has been milked from us it will all be uploaded to machines and humanity will have served its purpose. Sounds like a Sci-Fi plot – worryingly life has a habit of imitating art. And the on-ramp to the brave new, de-humanized world has already been unveiled and not just by Zuckerberg. On this very day the technology company, Improbable, has just raised £150 million to build M2, an infrastructure for the Mata-verse bringing together work and entertainment into a virtual, fully online world where all we will do is spew out yet more data for learning machines to manipulate.

To cut a swathe through history, we evolved from a repressive feudal economy to a more open, liberal capitalist economy though the ability to earn our own money and have control over how we spent it, overthrowing the Barons in the process. The new Techno Barons (or governments as in the case of China) can return us to subservience if we do not have control over the data we generate and how it gets used and monetized. We have to fight for this, we need to support the new platforms that enable us to own and transact our own data (you can check some of them out here) and in the meantime we need to resist any and every effort to get us to share our data with people who will exploit it to their, not our, benefit. Whenever you can, don’t give your email address, don’t sign up, refuse permission, block the cookies, use VPN’s.

We need to be able to hold up our hands, when we choose to, and declare ourselves a person of interest with opinions, ideas, preferences and purchasing power unique to us. We are all interesting because despite what the data & behavioural scientists tell you, despite what the algorithms predict, we make surprising choices and act out of character. We think, we have ideas, we create.

You are not a consumer, you’re more than a data-cow, you are a person of interest. Your data has great value, own it, and use it on your own terms.

2 Oct 2020

Solving the Social Dilemma

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I’ve just finished my article on my response to the Netflix documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma’. I ran a small survey to help me in the writing of this and results are still coming in so there may be some further additions and editing to be done but I wanted to get this first version out there and see what people think. Please let me know.

15 Sep 2020

Solving the Social Dilemma

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The recent release of Jeff Orlowski’s documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix may prove to be an even bigger deal than their 2016 film ‘The Great Hack’. The latter left you feeling that the villains of the piece were the businesses like Cambridge Analytica who malevolently manipulated social media data to change the political narrative, influence elections and threaten democracy. TSD points the finger squarely at big tech who purposefully design social media to feed their commercial model and in the process fuck up society and the whole of mankind.

 “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”.

Social media is not just abusing their tech to sell us stuff, they are selling us – our attention and our behaviour – without us knowing and to our detriment. TSD paints a scary future with overtones of the human batteries in The Matrix and Skynet from Terminator – AI may have started as a technology tool we used but it might become us that are the tools serving the needs of higher artificial intelligence. You think this is fantasy? Watch the documentary.

“Only two industries call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and IT” said Yale’s Edward Tufte.

Marketers (who pay for all this with their ad budgets) are trying to wean themselves off calling customers ‘consumers’. (If you drop the ‘m’ consumer is an anagram for ‘con user’). I think ‘people’ would be the best word because it simultaneously captures diversity and common humanity – the ‘we’. But I don’t think the lexicon is the issue and in fact I don’t think marketers or even the titans of big tech are the villains. They are people. A lot of the contributors to TSD, people like Tristan Harris or Justin Rosenstein, are from big tech. They have a conscience and know that many of their former colleagues do too. Marketers are not evil svengalis. They are paid to promote their products but most recognize that this increasingly means doing so in a sustainable and socially responsible way because that is what society wants. It is what will make their customers happy and they like happy customers. So what makes good people in marketing and tech do bad stuff? Two things:-

  1. Not recognizing the unintended consequences
  2. Not having a commercially attractive alternative

On the heels of ‘The Great Hack’, TSD can address the former. As ‘Inconvenient Truth’ was for climate change, this is a tipping point in the debate about social media and the issues around the misuse of the data it generates for the ‘attention extraction’ industry. We all know that something is wrong, we all know this is seriously fucked up and heading in a bad direction – but what is the alternative? What is the antidote? TSD is incredibly powerful and disturbing, very disturbing especially as it leaves you in no doubt things need to change but not much hope they will and no real solutions other than regulation (of some sort not defined) to disrupt the business model on which big tech has thrived.

Just as I concluded in my paper ‘Naked Economics; the new laws of the jungle’ the easy conclusion is that governments need to fix this – ‘they’ need to regulate. Easy but wrong because even if ‘they’ wanted to, ‘they’ can’t. It’s too complex, there is too much vested interest and there is no ‘they’. The legislation would need to be intricately drafted to cover every issue and avoid every unintended consequence. There are $ trillions at stake so expect some resistance and every government would need to act in lock step which they won’t/can’t.

So, as with the new economics, let’s focus on ‘we’ –  what we the people can do about the social dilemma that is social media data harvesting, processing and commercial application. For the wider economic context the macro levers to pull were the attribution of cost and ascribing of value to enable us to make better choices. In the specific area of data the micro levers are platforms that allow us as individuals to own, control and transact our own data.

The solution lies not so much in regulating the current business model, although that might have a role to play, but rather in creating a new business model that empowers people.

At the heart of the current model is data about 3 things:-

  • What you think
  • What you do
  • The connection between these

The tech, the algorithms, the UI and the AI that are all designed to do this can of course then be applied to change what you think and do, to get your attention and to persuade you. The business model is then to monetize this by selling it to people who wish to promote their business. It can also be sold to people wishing to change your politics but that will only ever be a small fraction of the billions social media earns. The big bucks come from big business.

The global industry for advertising and research is roughly $1 Trillion. That is how much business will pay to find out what you think and present the best version of themselves to you at the most opportune time.

What if we just told them? What if we offered the information they want to know and stuck our hand up when they had the best chance to sell something to us? Because if we did, en masse, then the revenues for facebook et al would start to evaporate.

Who would be prepared to do that? We all would. We do it all the time for purchases that are important to us and about which we are unsure. Say we want a haircut, a new car, expensive cosmetics, a new home, a piece of home electronics, a suit for our wedding. We pitch up, tell someone we are interested and then proceed to tell them everything they need to know about our lives, quite often more than they need to know. Yes we may do some research on-line and then purchase on-line but there are still many things where we meet people face to face, people that we know are there to sell us stuff, we tell them we are interested and we answer pretty much any question they care to ask. Why? Because it is in our interest to do so and we get something in return – help in making our best choice.

As long as we feel in control of the exchange of our information, our attention, our data, and this has material benefit to us we are happy to give business what they want.

I have been thinking about this for the last 5 years and I have ideas for two potential tech based platforms that would allow people at scale to exchange their ideas and their data – on their terms – with businesses and brands. These could divert a big chunk of the revenue Social Media generates directly into the hands of us, we the people, and offer what business wants quicker, cheaper and more effectively.

It would not stop the potential of big tech to produce addictive, manipulative social  platforms with the power to affect peoples’ physical and mental health, to undermine truth with fake news, to divide society and swing elections but it would take away their incentive to do so. They would eventually be left with only one option which is to make you pay for their service – and if we pay for it then we control it. It becomes the product, not us.

Let me know if anyone is interested to know more……..