Category: Predictions 2016

This time will be different

… If only for the following reason(s):

  • So far, Technology has been developed by humans, willy-nilly mostly as also fitting in the Selfish Memes sort of way (including Blackmore’s Meme Machine), to alleviate and overcome the very humans’ weaknesses that set us below a great many respective animals, and Nature.
      
  • Now, I(o)T slash AI (ASI) will soon be overcoming humans’ only few strengths in Thinking. At once leaving us vulnerable to become, at best, prey for <something> but with no place to hide (sic) nor any defenses…

So, this time will be different and the Luddites (actual sense, not the loom-smashing caricatures) will be right. For the one time they ‘need’ to be and then immediately need be no more. No more ‘but past technological innovations bringing temporary unemployment have all been overcome with growth of something new’. Read Martin Ford and you see that this will simply not be true — if only for the failure, this time of the Comparative Advantage mechanism but actually quite something more pervasively.
As a simple hint: What would you advise your 8yo nephew to be good at in school, to find … what kind of job or career later …!?

Don’t be discouraged! The End Is Nigh! Until it is:
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[They look cute but will outdo you in an instant….; Het Loo]

Predicting fuzzy futures

As we approach another round of grand fuzziness in predictions of all sorts, e.g. for president’s elections in some corner of the world, it would be wise to not only take all (and I mean all) of Superforecasting to heart but also to consider helping extending the science of the trade.
By helping me out in finding pointers and content on, and subsequently developing on, the use of fuzzy logic in predictions. As ‘current’ truth values of future states of the world are all quite possible, and going forward even mutually exclusive states may, e.g. on some news, all become more likely, with combined likelihoods rising over 100%. Where FL can play a role to keep track. And we may have to revisit (practical use of) Markov chains with suitable noise-around-parameters built in… But let’s focus on FL first.
Of course, when the End Date, the horizon for some prediction timeslot nears, the choices will be driven to 100/0 — where the crazy idea of random selection (of ‘balls from a pot’) with replacement … with double replacement … [even tinkered with the idea of replacing the non-drawn colour with the drawn one every pick; was hard to think through] may come closer to the idea of starting with some hardly-educated guess and nudging either way on all news points as one goes along; doing a (much-)sort-of random walk from 50/50 to 100/0.

So, if you’d have info on the viability of either approaches, please do drop a note…! Already:
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[Free city map dispenser; Delft]

Wired / Tired / Expired, 2016 Q1 edition

Yes here’s a surprise new quarterly Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews, a mixed bag again. But much needed, it seems, as there’s much to promote or dis(mis)s.
First, for your viewing pleasure:
Photo20 (4)
[Yes the UFO one again. Still prime FLlW space…!]

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
DeepMind / AlphaGo Watson “Robots”
For, discreetly not completely, winning at Go, taking the fame flag from this edition’s Tired contender. The W of <fill in the blanks and colour the pictures>, e.g., medicine but now having extended so often into the mundane. See also many earlier posts of mine, as indication that the newness has been lost quite summarily. Anyone who still thinks ‘robots’ as humanoid machines are the future, either writes for simpletons in a way that reveals the simpleton self or hasn’t understood in the first place.
Noam Bernie Donald
Still going, maybe not very strong but exposing the ridicule of it all, ever more clearly. Hang in there, best-option of the world! If elected, the world will have a seriously bad hair day.
Artificial Empathy UX MobileFirst design
Ow yeah! The end purpose of all AI explained: To sell us even more in ever more devious ways … Not even Linux but the nonderstood follow-up of user-centered design. Sometimes in a last-ditch effort even renamed mobile only design. Will go the way of the books, sense returning to common.
Flex mesh work Start-up Culture / Creative Incubator Silicon Valley
Project-oriented and anything staffing-wise goes. No strict ‘policies’, just getting the ultimate High-Q resourcing in whatever way available. Oh yes all the petty boys and girls getting ripped off off their ideas, talent and energy. Dumped subsquently. Does hardware XOR consumerist-data. Both old.
Crypto Backdoors Security
Let’s all do it, transparently, in privacy-friendly apps, or on top of the less so. Will not work Period As if still using the container phrase means anything other than confusion.
Drones versus commercial flight safety Drone deliveries Attack drones
OMG the Need For Regulation! Yes…, why not, exactly…? Women have deliveries, men have balls but as this isn’t about cricket, drones have physical distribution potential. Some. Yes, that’s the first and very foremost commmercial deployment of the category. Now what?
Do Your Thing Disruption The Uber Of
Just read Godin’s frustrum post and you’ll get it. Of the right kind, not the ‘overthrow then what’ kind you m.r.n The shorthand for / of the Clueless.
Caring for refugees Expanding the EU EU
Get real about the numbers, the risks. Humanity can fix this. Easily. Expanding the mess exponentially, isn’t going to clean up. Pronounced ‘Eeewwww!’. Why not ditch it, have a good cry, and start over again with a glacial-speed cultural integration first …!?

OK, any suggestions for next quarter’s (!) edition ..?

Deinduction

OK. To be, think, human, two things seem to be required:
No, not the dichotomy of deduction versus induction. Not so literally (literally, I mean like owemygawd). But the top-to-ground-then-back-up-again ‘logical’ goal-directed problem-solving reasoning, versus the speculative wandering of the mind. Perspiration, and Inspiration. Taking correlation for causation, versus fuzzy-logic supported hypothesizing. OK, I admit I threw in the fuzzy logic part to confuse, and to discombobulate your comprehension.
But still, therein lies the foundation of Theories, the brickwork of thinking: Is there a priori knowledge, or is everything we know only valid within its own framework of reference..? Is the definition of definition circular or not, or in some circle..? Should, must be, to be basis for theory-building.
Expanded upward by Kuhn and Lakatos, drilled down by a great many, philosophers mostly — that haven’t delivered workable answers yet. Not workable at least, to span the gap in between neurobiology and psychology. Which is where AI-as-we-know-it will have its place, after which it will be vastly expanded to cover it all. Maybe not individually embodied, but will.
And, there’s no either/or. There’s the spectrum ..!!

And all this, relevant for the grounding (both ways, please) of ‘Big Data’. Think that one through!

Also,
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[Close, but no torte in the Sacher Stube…]

One IoTA FYI

To close off [almost, since @KPN fraud themselves away from bankruptcy by series of outright lies to customers and tort] the year with a wild shot, ahead:
There is value in the information analysis in IoT, as described in Gelernter and many since, of the two-way flow of information. One, flowing up are information in the form of answers as aggregations or pattern matched tuples(ets); the other going down, being both commands and inquiries/questions.

This fits the IoT world snugly, and should be taken into account when developing IoTAuditing frameworks:
What we’re after of course in all of auditing — and this we consider self-evident or else go back to study auditing fundamentals, from agency theory! — is the controls that keep the quality of the back/forth i.e. down/up information flows within (client-!)required margins. No more! But be aware of who the client really is, not the one doing the actual paying. So, we may focus on the integrity of the information flows first and foremost, then the continuity (availability), and then confidentiality as an afterthought.
With neat break-downs to isolation, appropriate input/output buffering (anyone still aware of the difference between an interrupt and a trap? If not, take a hike and learn, and weep), integrity controls above all. And some thing on (establishing) the quality of aggregation and of the questions being pushed down — when the wrong questions get asked e.g. by lack of understanding of the subject matter (sic), as is so very commonplace in the vast majority of organisations today, the wrong results will turn up from within the data pool (reporting ‘up’wards).

And of course there’s the divide between
the operational world where actual business is done (either administratively in offices though one could argue (i.e. proof beyond recovery) that this isn’t actually doing anything worthwhile, or producing stuff), and
the busybodies world ‘above’ (quod non) that, which thinks (wrongly) to be able to ‘control’ and ‘steer’ the productive body, sometimes rising itself into the thin air levels of absolute ridicule (by) branding itself ‘governance’.
But do re-read all of last year’s posts and weep. But do also see the implications for variance in the integrity, availability, and confidentiality needs at various (sub)levels.

And:
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[The 2016 way is up; Cala at Barça]

Predictions Wish List 2016

Now that you have drowned in predictions about … < fill in your favourite subject and colour the pictures > for 2016, it’s time to not only read through them and see whether you can agree — which you don’t need to as the truth is already here — it’s time to turn your Yes I Can See That / No I Don’t Think So into something of the more outspoken kind, not being outspoken but outwritten. As follows (mine, hence, yours if you’re smart…):

  • Blockchain (-like) methodologies and technologies delivering an app that shakes up the accountancy industry so thouroughly that the Big$/4 halve in size and influence (even further).
  • A breakthrough in the translation of Information to Value and vice versa, by means of being able to have the value of information one processes, on the books. Not necessarily in monetary terms, but somehow, comparable.
  • Some form of APT management/containment methodology.
  • A unified implementation/interoperability / API / management framework for IoT. Open, all-encompassing, like the OSI stack.
  • A breakthrough in the sobering up over the quod non of normative value of SOx/TLD/Basel-OpsRisk and all standards (ISO and others).
  • Similar, a sobering up (but deepening and intensifying for the solutions part) over cyberhere, cyberthere, cybereverywhere.

OK, going out into 2016 (not just yet!) with:
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[On a winter’s day … how many wished for unification of this city, mere decades back?]

Prediction16

Yawn. Or not. The following will get real serious in 2016. Like,

Well, for the list with everything and their dog:

  • Some Exits: Green Egg, ‘Cyber’everything, disruption/uberization, privacy, and, certainly and very much hopefully, “Like us on Facebook” … and very, very certainly hipsters let alone their ‘beards’ (quod non).
  • Entrat to replace the latter, hopefully, some actual non- or anti-bureaucratic frameworks of mind.
  • Also out, to be replaced by … [as yet unknown]: Vlogging or what have we, in socmed space, with 100k-1M+/++ followers as being he thing to aim for. As it becomes clearer and clearer in 2016 that only the 10M+/++ leaders (??) can make a dime from it, or barely a living. Who are the big winners, in all of this? User data / experience farmers?
  • Risk Management 3.0 will grow to be the Next Thing in managementspeak. If you’d need any proof, go read back the ton of posts on your perennial Truth site.
  • Also, we might get a last blip from SMAC(T) as a trend summary.
  • All of the points made by The (some) Man. Obviously. And some of this as well though this may all show to be overblown.
  • Still a wave of interest in Rise of the Robots. Combined with AI through and through, like in this. With support at an angle, from this.
  • A further blend of cloudsourcing and deperimetrisation putting your infra and all of your data naked and out there in the cold.
  • Oh almost forgot: A lot more on APTs, 3D printing (when will we finally get 4D printing …!?), MehhDrone stuff, blockchain, IoT, et al.
  • But we may hope, the latter two get much more innovative applications; one the one hand with simpler explications, on the other, truly innovating e.g., into the DAO realm.
  • Ah, DAOs; let’s first see more of this in 2016.
  • Offering a simple list copy from HBR:
    • Algorithmic personality detection: Yes
    • Bots: Yes
    • Glitches: Mwah; we indeed will see scores of them, ever bigger and more impactful (also b/c complexity explosions of the mixed e and physical worlds), but they’re somewhat of the mehhh category for the purpose of Here.
    • Backdoors: See APTs et al; much more of them yes but again, mehhh
    • Blockchain: As mentioned
    • Drone lanes: Hmmm, interesting…
    • Quantum Computing: Probably hung in there from previous (many) years’ lists; mine, too. May, might, but for the same token may not
    • Augmented knowledge: Definitely. Hopefully, in a good way. But maybe even hopefully, steered towards safe use, after a hopefully indicative but small-enough dystopian-style mishap ..?
  • CloudIAMming. IAM, renewed, for federated use in ‘the’ cloud. Yes, this will have a whole new lease of life, as a management field, and a consultancy field as well.
  • This just in: Forgot to mention VR as a thing in 2016. Definitely.
  • I may want to do an update halfway through the year…
  • Oh, and of course our motto for 2016: A CEO with you, is still a CEO.
    #gosubstitute[ _X, _Y | fool, a tool ]

After which there’s only:
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[Purposefully unsharp. Berlin, some years ago.]

One-sided mirror

Hopefully just in time for your last-minute (huh?) holiday season shopping: This masterpiece; excellent for edukaizjionel purposes and general divertissement, including Be-ing Warned…

Because, it spans so much of interest; from humble (?) ‘computer’ components all the way up till Topsight.
Read, learn and weep over humankind’s future.

Now then, for a short departure:
DSCN7994
[Unk Berlin]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord