š®Ā Self-conscious machines; attitudes to automation; trust in the platform age; urban mobility; online dating & society; roboroaches++ #135
Blockchain's real power. Building conscious machines. Wariness over automation. Why your iPhone slows down. Online datings impact on marriage. The multimodal transport revolution.
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DEPT OF THE NEAR FUTURE
š¤Ā Ā Building a self-conscious machine. Fascinating long-read by Hugh Howey on how we might build self-conscious machine. It mayĀ need a theory of mind, internal storytelling, and messy modules rather than engineered precision.
š Blockchain is a new digital substrate that makes old models of governance, development, and businessĀ obsolete, argues Angus Harvey. This good survey on the promise of distributed ledgersĀ argues that:
_Ā the combination of a shared, open database with permissionless innovation and an incentive system that prevents winner-take-all markets is a total game changer._
š¤Ā Ā Nearly 60% of Americans would support the government to provideĀ a guaranteed income to meet their basic needs, while nearly 9 in 10Ā want machines limited to performing tasks that are unhealthy or dangerous for humans,Ā findsĀ Pew Research in their recent Automation in Everyday Life survey. The data shows a polarisation in attitudes to core automation technologies underpinned by the neo-socialist/pro-labour rightsĀ indicated above. As usual, those with more education have had better experiences of the introduction of technology. There is a lot in this, and it certainly suggests the automation revolution will not beĀ accepted by the broader public as eagerly as a founder will gobble down a friendly termsheet.Ā By contrast, nearly two-thirds of Americans support human gene editing, including germline tinkering, for therapeutic use.Ā (AlsoĀ this week, aĀ pair of British academics released a report in favour of āuniversal basic servicesā to include housing, transport, and internet access to accommodate the technology-driven disruption of the workforce at a cost of 2.3% of GDP.)
š§Ā Ā Manufacturers are making devices increasingly difficult for consumers to fix, as companies guard the gateway to the most valuable asset: the data.
The global assault on repairability highlights a bigger problem: what it means to own things in the digital age... firms now limit what people can do with the stuff they buy, in particularly the digital sort. āOwnersā are often not allowed to resell it, transfer it to another devices or mash it up with other digital goods.
(And those of us with iPhones may have muttered āplanned obsolescenceā as the device seemingly slows down around the time of the launch of the next version. Recent research suggests that there isnāt a nefarious Apple plotĀ but rather a more straightforward explanation.)
āĀ Ā Korean instant messenger, KakaoTalk, launched an online bank that leapt to 45% market share within three months of launch. Counterpoint Research argues:
KakaoBankās revolution can be summarized in two words, āspeedā and āconvenienceā. Consumers had been waiting for innovation to come to the finance sector and KakaoBank has delivered this by offering speed and convenience through a smartphone. The service took advantage of its dominant messaging platform, KakaoTalk, which lowered its marketing expenses and brought a feeling of security through the familiarity of the brand.
ā¤ļøĀ Ā Online dating is starting to change society. Why? Because it has the ability to connect complete strangers, irrespective of their existing cliques. Two possible outcomes suggest researchers Ortega and Hergovich are a huge increase in inter-racial marriage and potentially even stronger marriages.
š§Ā Ā China wants to build a facial recognition database that can recognise every citizen within 3 seconds. That is 13 Terabytes of facial data, according to the documents, which works out at about 10 Kb per face. Some public lavatories in Beijing also use facial recognition so that the automatic dispensing machines will deny toilet paper to people who ask for it more than once within a given period.
DEPT OF PLATFORMS AND TRUST
As larger parts of the economy move to gig or contract work, trust ranking becomes an important feature of the economy. Trust ratings have already proved their mettle on eBay, and are a key feature of Uber and Airbnb. For better or worse, they putatively allow platforms to manage (often at scale) their pools of workers.
Gavin KellyĀ reckons that gig workers should be able to keep their reputation ratings because:
Ratings crystallise hard-won reputations; they are the passport to future earning power. Lose them and, regardless of experience or prior standing, you are pretty much starting from scratch.
Author on peer-to-peer internet trust, Rachel Botsman, argues that algorithmic approaches using extant data can help -Ā by providing reputation ratings to users new to a platform. How else will we deal with strangers āin a world in which we can find someone to fix a leak or drive us home or date with a few swipes of our phones, online trust is set to get faster, smarter and more pervasive.ā
The road to platform neutral, portable ratings haveĀ aĀ short-lived history. RapLeaf was perhaps the most well-known example. My own firm, PeerIndex, built a cross-platform reputation score before the policy decisions of those platforms to pursue closed garden networks rather than open Web 2.0 services. (I even gave a talk on the subject back in 2011.) These early firms struggled with the closed-garden and the comparatively small size of the peer-based digital economy.
But other hurdles remain. Do we trust third parties to maintain fair and redressable ratings? Neither the consumer credit nor bond ratings agencies havenāt shown themselves to be great exemplars.
That isnāt all. Many services are more than simply transactional. Rather, they are subject to Polanyiās Paradox: āwe know more than we can tellā. Translated to ratings this means as service providers, we canāt encapsulate our reputation or trustability in a single number, and as customers we probably canāt always express exactly what we want in a single number.
Laetitia Vitaud puts cleaning and janitorial services under this lens in a lovely essay:
The problem is that itās very hard to industrialise cleaning. Unlike factory work on assembly lines that can be replicated and directed for maximum efficiency, cleaning doesnāt necessarily take place in identical environments. No two homes or offices are exactly the same. Applying the exact same moves to these different environments is suboptimal. The result is that Taylorist cleaning can only produce the appearance of clean rather than actual clean. The work is botched. Nothing is ever in-depth.
Laetitiaās solution is also ratings, but echoing Gavin Kelly, ones designed around the individual service provider. And, of course, one future might be toĀ reinforce ātrustā with cryptographic proof as provided by blockchain technologies.
Elsewhere:
Socnetās āPeople You May Knowā feature has long been a creepfest, connecting psychiatristās patients or unearthing unknown family ties. Kashmir Hill explores how the PYMK feature of Facebook is unwittingly unmasking sex workers.
Airbnb brings a new definition to full-stack startup. It is now building apartments in Florida.
Domestic robots will likely look cute in order to help us feel more comfortable and trustful with them. It's a trap.
The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is another government looking at using blockchain for its land registries.
DEPT OF FUTURE MOBILITY
Weāve long argued that urban mobility is changing. The future will be increasingly heterogeneous. Trips will become increasingly multi-modal and the number of accessible modalities will increase: bike-share, buses, autonomous fixed routes, ride-sharing, trains and more.
Here is a great interview between urbanist Richard Florida and the authors of Faster, Smarter, Greeneron the mix-modalities of future urban mobility:
The idea that we need to transport a 165 lb human in a 3,300 lb car seems wasteful. We think that enabling greater heterogeneity of urban transit options is one of the keys to reducing dependence on the single person automobile. Ā When walking, biking, buses, railways, sharing services, and a wide range of lower-carbon vehicles such as micro- and mini-cars co-exist with cars, and are connected in an urban environment, mobility options and utility can be enhanced significantly.
I was fascinated to learn that 3.7% of the German population already owns aĀ āpedelecā (or battery-assisted pedal-powered) bicycle. This represents a ā¬10bn consumer market already, which analyst, Horace Dediu, reckons is poised for the āhockey stickā.
Elsewhere:
How map-making is changing under the demands of machines & machine intelligence. The future will beĀ āa prismatic collection of mappings, that invites comparison and appreciation of the ways in which our world is both known and unknownā says Shannen Mattern. (Lovely long read.)
NVidia announces the 320 Teraflops, 500WĀ self-driving GPU rig, Pegasus. While pricing isnāt announced, this is well above the 50 Tflops minimum that many in the self-driving industry believe is what is required for level five autonomy in a wide range of environments.
Horace Dediu digs deep on the Model 3ās production woes.Ā Model 3 woes notwithstanding, Tesla leads the back by volume and value in EV shipments in the US.
Shell looks to move beyond petroleum by acquiring European electrical charging outfit, NewMotion.Ā (FT paywall)
Google's Waymo is preparing to launch self-driving taxi service.
SHORT MORSELS TO APPEAR SMART AT DINNER PARTIES
𤰠For the first time, scientists show that C-section contributes to obesity in mice. If additional studies show similar results in humans, this could have a significant impact on how we treat delivery. C-sections have turned into lucrative business, and the U.S. alone has seen the number of deliveries by surgery go up by 50% in the past 15 years.
šĀ Ā ChinaāsĀ censorship apparatus is becoming a ācool place to workā.
Some websites are making money by mining for cryptocurrencies in their usersā browsers. 500m people may be affected.
How a missing smiley foiled a $70,000 email fraud.
šØĀ Ā Oxford will be the first city in the world to create zero-emissions zone.
Scientists discover the first planet beyond Neptune adorned with a ring.
āĀ Ā Journey of a cargo ship from the Red Sea to Hong Kong in 80,000 images assembled in a 10-minute timelapse.
A hole with an area of 80,000 square kilometers (30,888 square miles) in AntarcticaĀ leaves scientists puzzled.
This robot cockroachĀ doing backflipsĀ is pretty cool.
š°Ā _The New York Times'Ā Ā _Nick Kristof visited North Korea recently. In this short podcast interview, he paints a gloomy picture of Pyongyang's propaganda machine and preparations for the nuclear war.
END NOTE
I had a great, if chilly, week in Amsterdam at the World Summit AI. I'm impressed with the scale of engagement with the wide range of issues this technology is going to raise. There were also some rather interesting companies. One thing that struck me is just how many computer vision startups there are, and how many of them have large numbers of customers. It does feel a bit Winchester-driver, in some sense. But it's also clear, as I've argued many times in EV, the computers will have eyes and the ability to process what they see. Many interesting & valuable applications will abound. We'll need the usual interdisciplinary discussion about the implications of these.
I'll be in Dubai in mid-November and I'd be happy to pull together a quick Exponential View get together. Let me know if you are based there, or will be there on the 9th, let me know.
Azeem
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