Have we poisoned the internet for good?
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•35 views
Have we poisoned the Internet for good? It is time to take a long hard look at where we have ended up, and consider whether the Internet does more harm than good, in terms of our quality of life. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=763&v=q5x7njMMugw
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Have we poisoned the internet for good?
Similar to Have we poisoned the internet for good? (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (12)
Have we poisoned the internet for good?
- 1. Have we poisoned the Internet for good? Yoav Aviram, April 2018 @yobo Abort, Retry, Fail?
- 2. Photo by Levi Morsy
- 3. Photo by Agence Producteurs Locaux
- 4. Photo by Agence Producteurs Locaux
- 6. Photo by Nicolas Mario-20
- 7. Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images “Software is eating the world” - Marc Andreessen, 2011
- 9. Photo by Bloomberg via Getty Images "Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset." - Andrew Grove, Intel Founder, 2000
- 10. Photo by Theo Thomaidis Privacy (prīˈvə-sē): Freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, unauthorized disclosure of one's personal data or information by a government, corporation or individual. - Dictionary.com
- 11. Photo by gchq.gov.uk Surveillance capitalism: “This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.” - Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School, 2015
- 12. Photo by Barton Gellman/Getty Images
- 13. Photo by SkyLuke8 “As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.” - Erin Griffith, Wired, 2017
- 14. Photo by Matic Kozinc
- 15. Photo by M. Spencer Green, AP
- 16. Photo by David Boté Estrada
- 17. Photo by deskarati.com “The workings of any machine-learning technology are inherently more opaque, even to computer scientists, than a hand-coded system. This is not to say that all future AI techniques will be equally unknowable. But by its nature, deep learning is a particularly dark black box.” - Will Knight, MIT technology review, 2017
- 19. Photo by REUTERS/Steve Marcus “The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action. And you can’t ask it: there is no obvious way to design such a system so that it could always explain why it did what it did.” - Will Knight, MIT Technology Review, 2017
- 20. Photo by Mark Beach via REUTERS
- 21. Photo by Pete Berg
- 23. Photo by Pete Berg “Interdependence within society today is centered on the Internet beyond all other dependencies except climate, and the Internet has a time constant of change five orders of magnitude smaller than that of climate.” - Dan Geer, A Rubicon, 2018
- 26. Photo by Andrea de Poda “We are all data collectors, data keepers, data analysts. Some citizens do it explicitly; some citizens have it done for them by robots. To be clear, we are not just a society of informants, we are becoming an intelligence community of a second sort.” - We are all Intelligence Officers Now, Dan Geer, 2014
- 27. Photo by Patrick Hendry
- 28. References Rubicon, Dan Geer, 2018 ude, you broke the future!, Charlie Stross, 2017 ve got nothing to hide' and other misunderstandings of Privacy, Daniel Solove, 2011 he Dark Secret at the Heart of AI, Will Knight, MIT Technology Review, 2017 he Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, 2016 sing Machine Learning to Explore Neural Network Architecture, Quoc Le & Barret Zoph, Google Brain team, 2017 We are all Intelligence Officers Now, Dan Geer, RSA Conference 2014 When Privacy Goes Poof! Why It's Gone and Never Coming Back, Richard Thieme, 2017 Who Will Command Robot Armies?, Maciej Cegłowski, 2016
- 29. QUESTIONS?
- 30. Photo by Tom Barrett
- 31. Photo by REUTERS/Steve Marcus “We are locked into a spiral in which poor human performance begets automation, which worsens human performance, which begets increasing automation [...] The effect of automation is to reduce the cockpit workload when the workload is low and to increase it when the workload is high” - William Langewiesche, analyzing the June 2009 crash of Air France flight 447
Editor's Notes
- Over the past year a trickle of voices from both inside and outside the tech industry have cautioned us about our current trajectory. I'd like to amplify some of these voices and raise a hugh flag because I believe in the cause, and because I may be able to connect some previously unconnected dots. This talk does not go into speculation about the future. It is only concerned with the what is already happening now. And I believe that where we are now is bad. Perhaps irreversibly so. We have all the tools to create a utopia right now, but in order to do so we must first recognize what has gone wrong. My name is Yoav, I’m a director of Strategy and Innovation at Energized Work, I’ve founded a couple of start up companies, and I’m an independent academic. Links in the end, please form your own opinion
- In the history of humanity we have passed several points of no return. Points which once crossed have proven too costly to turn back from. These often involve increased dependence on technology. A textbook example is the agricultural revolution. When Hunter Gatherer societies started settling down and adopting agriculture this meant an tranmedus increase food production, which could now support an increased population. But it also meant a worse quality of life the new farmers. A more restrictive diet, greater dependence on the elements, and generally a less interesting existence. However going back to Hunter Gatherer proved too costly as involves mass starvation, which is probably why no civilisation ever went back.
- The Irish population doubled in the sixty years following the introduction of the potato in the 1780s, despite neither “expansion of industry nor reform of agricultural techniques beyond the widespread cultivation of the potato.” At the onset of the famine in 1845, a majority of the Irish lived “on potatoes and milk alone.” So we do this, become too dependent on a technology to our detriment.
- In 1995 Tim Berners-Lee observed that five years' worth of change was happening on the web for every twelve months of real-world time. In the 23 years since, this ratio has increased exponentially
- Also in 1995 Microsoft introduced a free TCP/IP stack into the Windows 95 operating system, ushering in the era of the world wide web and the advent of consumer focused websites.
- The Internet has enabled global consolidation on a scale never before seen at a speed never before witnessed. The nature and extent of our dependence on the new technology grew hand in hand.
- I remember the early Internet as a place of infinite possibilities, where we have dethroned the old gatekeepers, where net neutrality meant equal access and equal opportunities, and where newly anointed geeks where set on democratizing the world’s information. Later, I founded start-up companies to ride the wave of disruption, and enjoyed the view from the sidelines as business-model demolition was taking entire industries by a storm. We celebrated as software was eating the world. That software is eating the world, seems to me today to be more of admission of guilt than a victory.
- In hindsight, 1995 proved to be an important turning point for yet another reason, when the scales tipped in favor of funding the build-out of the public web by monetizing eyeballs via advertising revenue. But flashing banner ads on their own where enough. Ads needed to be targeted to be effective, and the more the better. So the ad industry tapped into the freely available stream of data which was made available by the Internet’s open access model. Over the years it had to develop and perfect entire behavioural theory of the human mind in order to be successful. Google was the trend setter and others followed suit. This trend was accelerated by the availability of cheap storage and processing power.
- So the writing was on the wall
- Everybody knows that privacy is gone. All of that is gone. I propose that privacy is never coming back because the technology of surveillance is far too profitable to ever be taken way.
- Mandatory Snowden shot State actors have done plenty of work to leverage data for surveillance, but what we have learned from Snowden is that it's the use the ad industry make of personal data, and their ability to draw insights based on the behavioural theory they developed which is highly desirable by the NSA and the likes and thus reinforces surveillance (prism)
- The whole FB perspective demonstrates another alarming trend that is becoming more and more prevalent - it is increasingly difficult to opt-out of the digital space. Even if you don't have a FB account, FB has a You account. If you do opt-out, you are silenced, because as a society we have become increasingly dependent on the FB platforme You’ve all heard of the Cambridge Analytica story, and how they were able to use very few interactions to build a behavioral model and influence both the US elections and brexit Which makes me wonder if it’s us how are training FB algorithms by interacting with the platform, or is it FB alogos training us by selectively promoting certain types of content It's not just FB, it's everyone, and not only online, Insurance & finance, retail, and everyone else who can afford it. And it’s not about online advertising anymore, it’s about behaviour modification.
- Another thing these algorithms are designed to do is inconvenience you into spending more money. Cathy Carleton, a marketing executive noticed that while flying united, which she does quite often, some algorithm assigned increasingly worse seats, in an attempt to influence her to get the United CC which gives better seats as one of it’s perks. But we give it a nice name and call it “conversion optimization” and suddenly it’s Ok. Remember, if you ever do data analytics that the level of abstraction in which you are reasoning about people’s behaviour is far enough removed for the ends to justify this sort of means.
- More recently the hunger for data has been fueled by a new breed of algorithms. Notice that I’m using the word algorithms, and not AI. This is because that is all they are, algorithms. They may be better algorithms, but they are not intelligent in the way we would consider a human to be intelligent. I am not going to talk about superintelligence or the singularity first because these terms refer to possibilities that haven’t materialised yet, and also because I believe that they are more hype than substance, at least for the time being These “new” are different from “old” algorithms though, in one very important way, from the point of view of this talk. They are opaque - we can not integrate them to find out why a decision was made.
- The reason for the non-interrogability of these algorithms is that they are self modifying. It is their self-modification that introduces the dilemma — can we trust an algorithm that cannot be examined and verified? Q: Anybody know what’ the first use for these algorithms? A: Military
- In August 2016 The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge showed that a level of defense which until now requiring human expertise will soon be replaceable by algorithms. The strategy today in the cybersecurity is to employ algorithms to do what experts cannot do, which is to protect us from other algorithms. ? There is a strategic arms race taking place where we would invest in algorithms to protect us from other algorithms, doing so at whatever level ensures that the defense “outspends” the offense. The problem is that all all security technologies are dual use, which means whatever defensive measures you invent can be used for offence, so we’ve created a vicious cycle.
- In 2016 Nvidia introduced a self driving car: The car didn’t follow a single instruction provided by an engineer or programmer. Instead, it relied entirely on an algorithm that had taught itself to drive by watching a human do it. We expect these algorithms to raise ethical questions, such as “Why did my self-driving car kill me by veering into incoming traffic?” and we expect there to be difficult dilemmas such as “Because there were five people on the sidewalk”. But can we accept the possibility for there not to be an answer at all?
- The only logical conclusion is that algorithms derived from machine learning must never be trusted unless we can understand why certain decisions where made Once we become dependent on this sort of algorithm going back to non-self-modifying algorithms will prove to be too costly The price will be our quality of life
- Implications Governance, ethics and our very own sense identity are all legging behind the exponential growth of technology. Like the EU cookie consent directive introduced in 2011, at a time when advertisers have already moved to other, more effective tracking technologies. ICOs are being regulated by a legal framework conceived in 1946 when the selling a portion of an orange grove in Florida was deemed to be a security. This lag means regulators are less and less in the business of setting the rules, and more and more in the business of attempting to put the genie back in the bottle.
- Second implication is our increased addiction to technology Algorithms fine tune the content they show you to make it more attractive to your eyes. Humans have an evolved tendency to pay attention to threatening as well as pleasurable stimuli, and the algorithms take this bias into account. It turns out that human brain reward feedback loop is easy to game. We’re all susceptible to addiction, and so we all fall into this trap, but perhaps most alarming is the implication this trend has on young children growing up while internalizing their parent’s consumption habits. Children today are also growing without an expectation or understanding of privacy because their social world has taught them a different way of being. Their sense of identity is more akin to a node in a network rather than an individual
- Third implication is our increasing dependence on the digital space In that paper Dan Geer explains that as the scale of the Internet has grown exponentially, so did our dependence on it. The more dependent we are, the more we are exposed the risk of catastrophic failure. But because it’s hard to reason about such a complex system, we don’t mitigate against these risks in the long term, only in the short. The effect is that the meantime between failures grows but the failure become more catastrophic. The increased meantime between failures creates an illusion of safety, causing us to increase our dependence and forming a vicious feedback loop at scale.
- What can we do? More technology is the answer We will not code our way out of this mess
- We need to understand that we are part of the problem As people who work in technology, we must think ethically It is not someone else's job to see the big picture We’ve all worked in either ad tech, fintech, media, gaming, retail or any number of other of complacent industries. We’ve all implemented analytics and worked on conversion optimized of one sort or another. Don’t leave your ethics at home, take it to work with you Make a conscious choice to become part of the solution
- Cybersecurity is now a basic skill we all need to get proficient at And we need to teach it to our children At the very least we need to understand what are the threats we are personally facing, what is our attack surface area, and who to make these potential attacks more costly An easy way to decrease our attack surface area is to decrease our dependence on technology
- Finally, and most important takeaway: As a society we have to allow people to opt-out of the digitalized space, and for that not to mean 2nd class citizenship. That is the best way to prevent the algorithms from dominating every aspect of our lives, and therefore to ensure our freedom This will also serve to decrease our societal dependence on this technology, making us more immune to catastrophic failures
- That’s all I have, please read the articles and watch the videos I linked to, which I highly recommend, and please form your own opinion.
- I’ve got nothing to hide? The question is hide from who? We assume it’s from the government, so if you're not doing anything illegal you have nothing to hide. But how about other governments? Google or Facebook? Or the company that buys data from FB? Marketers? Spammers? Hackers? How about the press? Remember that information wants to be free - Stewart Brand
- This is applicable to a driver monitoring a self driving car, or a surgeon who no longer operates by hand