weeknotes: place, conspiracy, history

-
Starting with today’s article by John Naughton about corporations, and the agency they have in our world. He notes, too, the role of founders as leaders, and the trust many people place in them to shape what they create. As well as the big tech founders (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk), there are the co-founders people look to as ethical guides (such as Mustafa Suleyman at DeepMind); I’m reminded of many conversations where I’ve been told not to worry about DeepMind because Mustafa is amazing and will hold them to do the right thing. It seems a lot of faith to have in one person, and a lot of responsibility and workload (possibly an impossible one) for these leaders to take. Then there are the charismatic founders of new tech initiatives such as RChain, Holochain and Hashgraph, where it seems like any doubts are addressed by blithe statements about the greatness of the founder — often both in terms of technical skill, and good intentions. If you don’t know these people personally that’s harder to accept…
Away from business, there’s civil society, and what happens to it as society changes and the internet changes how things work, and new challenges around the environment and inequality arise. The Civil Society Futures report is now out, as interactive site and PDF, following a two year independent inquiry. It is a call to action for civil society (and, I guess, for people and groups who wouldn’t think to describe themselves as part of civil society) to behave differently. (I particularly value pages 10–11 which outline issues, and p16 on the importance of place.) There’s also some specific commentary on the technical side of the report.
Place seems neglected in how we think about things. The big divisions around Brexit in particular seem to be shaped by whether you have a more global outlook, are mobile and cosmopolitan, or whether you are rooted in a place with a more local focus. So much about how we think about tech entrepreneurship assumes mobility — that you can just move to Silicon Valley, or to a big city like London or even Manchester; and the value of being in a place with social ties and community, family and history, is often ignored or dismissed. People who are based in a small area, and have strong reasons to stay there (such as social infrastructure) plus emotional ties, do not have the flexibility of others who feel they can freely relocate for work, education or opportunity.
On one level we know the value and power of local clusters, but we forget those who are left out of them or for whom joining them has a much greater cost. Adrian McEwen’s short twitter thread touched on this — I read this as how London organisations meet and network and connect formally and informally, and I think often forget the groups who are less present. There’s more on this in his post about Lab of Labs; how much do we reach out, and how much should ‘connector’ groups make an effort to go to places where interesting things are happening, even if they don’t get marketed? Thus we end up back at a Nesta article from last month about civil society and the fourth industrial revolution — a slightly different angle from the report above, with “4IR” being predominantly robotics, digital manufacturing, internet of things, AI and VR. This piece includes an overview of technology (not all internet-focussed — there’s some manufacturing in there too) being created for different causes and in different ways.
(A mention, alas without link, of Field Ready in that article; a year ago my paper on opportunities and challenges of distributed manufacturing for humanitarian response was published, and I spoke at the Open Hardware Summit about our work. The Humanitarian Makers newsletter arrived today. Good and important work, but as I am reminded when I bump into former Field Ready engineering team members around Makespace, sadly not viable to take to scale yet.)
Adrian also linked to an article on municipalist movements, yet another idea I’m only just learning about. “As soon as movements look to “scale up” their politics to the regional or national level, they rapidly lose the very qualities and capacities that defined them as transformational.” The focus on cities as places where change is possible is good, but I wonder what initiatives are possible in the gaps in between, the inter-urban areas, which may not be rural as such, but smaller towns and village clusters.
Snippets from conversations:
  • are we moving to a new phase of surveillance capitalism, where the raw data doesn’t matter much, because key profiling insights are already available? This would render much of current efforts around data collection and use possibly moot.
  • Are we keeping the right bits, and throwing the right bits away? Google services which no longer exist.
  • Apple’s decrease in stock valuation in the last month is more than the total money invested by DARPA in research over all time.
  • More big tech backlash in the FT:
It also is not news that the big tech companies aren’t actually a dream come true. They have had a wonderful time being the good guys in a low-interest rate, low-labour cost, low-regulation and nearly tax-free globalised world.
Another week in which I muddle around trying to understand economics. Our research network on open IP had a synthesis session to see what we’ve learned this term — we set out to look at ‘rethinking economics’ and I think we felt, overall, that we still haven’t got enough beyond traditional economics. Lots of questions remain, and we are desperately short of case studies and examples to help us learn what has worked and what hasn’t. Perhaps they are all hidden in other disciplines and we just haven’t found them yet?
Diane Coyle’s inaugural lecture was about economists, experts and measuring progress. She posed two questions: what makes one policy better than another, and therefore counts as progress? And how can those desirable outcomes be brought about? The things we might really want to consider to answer that are hard to measure with statistics — such as the changes in quality of life due to healthcare changes over 40 years, or the arrival of the ability to speak to a family member in another country, or the loss of a species. You can’t tell how much better a 2018 car is than a 1978 car by measuring the materials in them; and a breakdown by detailed features, such as electric windows or ABS, is only done for a tiny fraction of goods. Metrics unavoidably embed values. GDP is as it is because historically the economy was defined as what firms do, not what households or civic organisations do. Diane also talked about the way machine metaphors are embedded in economic policy, and the potentially dangerous misleading mental furniture this can create — the idea of levers for instance. Frustratingly, the only suggestion as to how we might move to measuring things which more closely reflect our values and activities was to do more politics.
I had the pleasure of lunch with Bill Janeway, who pointed out that efficiency is the enemy of effectiveness is likely to lead to the collapse of the machine learning bubble. So much of the machine learning conversation still misses the basic question of whether or not it actually achieves useful insights based on reasonably correct information.
Pascal Finette (who I got to work with at SU in 2016) of the Heretic (great short reads on entrepreneurship and innovation) writes that goals suck, and suggests we might use a regularly reviewed narrative instead. I like this idea :)
A real highlight of the week was Simon Schaffer’s talk on trust-building in the age of the mechanical computer; a different perspective from our usual discussions at the Trust & Technology Initiative.
Simon talked about the work to create mechanical replacements for human labour in creating almanacs, and other safety-critical information used in shipping and so on. The human systems had been carefully designed to give trustworthy results, with each month’s tables calculated and checked by 3 different individuals to ensure minimal errors. There were many people involved — including women calculators. They didn’t even use slide rules — this was hand calculation, and the people involved always had to live in different towns around the country to avoid collusion. If they came up with exactly the same numbers at the end that would be challenged, as it would suggest cheating. So advocates of the mechanical alternative had to put a lot of effort into persuading people that it was better. Henry Babbage manufactured pieces of the difference engine, which were showcased in museums, to build interest and confidence in the idea. The work had all kinds of different aspects, even including testing over a hundred different colours of inks and paper to see what made printed tables most readable, to avoid transcription errors.
Place was important here too — the machines were made by engineering firms south of the river in London, who mostly made military equipment and were well known for that; the museums were north of the river, near the power centres of government; key thinkers and advocates such as Babbage and Darwin lived in North London. The whole endeavour, then, was “cosmopolitan” and local, compared to the physical distribution of the human alternative it would replace. Good for trust-building. The engineers who made it, interestingly, were the most sceptical about the mechanical computer’s capabilities.
There were many links to modern day technology development. The project used engineering teams straight from other successful projects, which helped lend it credibility — just as engineering teams move between Silicon Valley companies today. The precision engineering equipment in the South London workshops had been funded by the state for military projects, and could now be reused for other things; just as the internet was once a defence project.
Babbage also set about creating a crisis about the tables created manually, exaggerating the error levels, to drive adoption of the automated solution. Surely this has commonalities in modern machine learning enterprises… Simon talked about the “industry entertainment complex” — the way that industry was able to showcase new machines with much glitz and celebrity interest. Technology as sublime.
Another interesting point was that there is no critical history of the role proofs of concept and demonstrators have played in the development of technology through the ages. Showing rather than explaining is a powerful tool, and demonstrators and prototypes shape how we think about, develop and adopt new technologies. I’m looking forward to discussing this more.
It was timely then to see Noel Sharkey’s critique of the robot Sophia this week. Sophia is a robot demonstrator, created from an entertainment perspective. I’ve experienced first-hand the way that folks respond to Sophia and the impressions they take away about the state of robotics and machine intelligence, and it’s quite scary, even for educated people in an environment where you might expect some scepticism around glossy presentations. Also check out the response from Hanson Robotics. Noel does great work at the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and the Campaign to stop killer robots — if you thought “ethical tech” was just about the internet, these are worth checking out.
Seeing presentations of robots using a lot of smoke and mirrors, and hosted by reputable organisations, doesn’t help people build realistic perceptions of the state of a technology we are so often told will take over our jobs.
Friday saw the launch of research following five years of study by the Conspiracy and Democracy project at CRASSH. The Guardian has a good overview of conspiracy theories in the UK:
Sixty per cent of British people believe at least one conspiracy theory about how the country is run or the veracity of information they have been given.
and:
The most widespread conspiracy belief in the UK, shared by 44% of people, was that “even though we live in what’s called a democracy, a few people will always run things in this country anyway”.
Discussing this at the Information Law and Policy Centre conference, I found quite a few people felt that wasn’t a conspiracy theory, and viewed it simply as reality.