🔮🎂 Belonging; the Facebook threat; autonomous vehicles get serious; video games vs work; robot lawyers, digital pickpockets and the A380++ #105

Mar 19, 2017

The importance of belonging. How big a threat is Facebook to society? Technopanics and shifting social norms. Autonomous vehicles heat up. Replacing work with video games. Tackling the Silicon Valley boys club.

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Dept of the near future

👻 Simon Kuper: Forget about Trump, tech will shape our futures. YEP

🤖 Baidu goes all in on AI. “The era of mobile internet has ended.” (See also: Chinese government gives AI priority development status.)

🔥 Aral Balkan: “We didn’t lose control of our data. It was stolen by Silicon Valley.” GOOD READ

☠️ Is Facebook a structural threat to a free society? PROVOCATIVE

💡 David Goodhart: Why I left my Liberal London tribe. It is time to face “the reality of flesh-and-blood humans with group attachments and the need to be valued and to belong.” EXCELLENT essay with a UK/Brexit-angle but relevant for readers in other countries.

Dept of culture, media and technopanic

Technology affects culture. It’s all too easy to see social media and new forms of interaction as insidious threats to our social-cultural norms. The new is often the source of technopanic.

In many cases, one may want to be sanguine about how the social & cultural effects of a new technology (particularly a new medium or distribution mechanism) are going to emerge. Effects are often complex, contradictory and play out differently in different segments.

🎮 Ryan Avent has a rather wonderful essay: Are young Americans dropping out of the labour market to play video games?

📱 Matt Ritchel in NY Times: Are teenagers using drugs less in part because they are constantly stimulated and entertained by their computers and phones?

Generation X appear to be more wedded to social media than Millenials.

Germany suggests fines of up to €50m for social networks that don’t stop fake news.

Is Facebook membership a prerequisite to modern existence? Many new services can only be accessed via a Facebook ID and, increasingly, the ‘social credit’ that implies.

(Longish counterpoint: as governments & banks finally allow for programmatic access to verified identities, firms can turn to them to digitally verify a customer’s ID. Pity the finance & government sectors were so lackadaisical about offering such services for much of the past decade. Good that they have now woken up.

In the longer term, might one of the many efforts to provide decentralised, self-sovereign ID built on the cryptographically-robust distributed infrastructure of the blockchain finally take off? Natalie Smolenski’s overview of self-sovereign ID is excellent.)

As the late Douglas Adams observed:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

The BBC has a rather wonderful interactive-thingy reviewing some of the greatest technopanics in history (including the panic about writing, printed books and fluoridation of water.)

Dept of AI and autonomous vehicles

Leaked data show that Uber’s self-driving cars need human intervention every 1.3 miles and can travel about 7 miles without intervention that might have caused discomfort for a passenger.

The rate of improvement is pretty significant at between 15 to 22% per week. Assuming those rates held for even six months, that would drop the rate of interventions to once every 50 miles and once every 1,200 miles.

They rate of improvement won’t hold that steady, of course, but it does show the power of the exponential compounding effect of the fast learning-loop in well-designed AI systems. It also raises an ‘uncanny valley’ in bridging from Level 3 to Level 5 autonomy. Is a car that requires human intervention ever 500 to 1,000 miles safer than one that requires that intervention every mile? A driver who can enjoy 4-6 weeks of travel before needing to grab the steering wheel may become complacent.

📊 Fabulous graphic explaining the levels of autonomy in AVs

Baidu expects to spin-off an autonomous vehicle arm.

Intel acquires Mobileye for $15bn to boot-strap its AV efforts. (Mazda is worth about $8.7bn.)

Excellent overview on how the auto supply chain is changing as the sector moves to industrialise autonomous vehicles.

Profile of Swaayatt, an Indian-firm developing AVs for India’s reasonably tricky driving environment.

Ben Medlock: True AI will need “algorithms [with] some kind of long-term, embodied relationship with their environment.”

Lovely profile of DeepMind and its culture

AI is ripe for fascist abuse, warns Kate Crawford.

Dept of pay-it-forward

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