Morozov’s no joke

Just a vey few:

“The fear of appearing inauthentic, of being a fake, has propelled nearly as much technological innovation as pornography.”

“But Adorno does have a point: authentic things are not necessarily morally good, and morally good things are not necessarily authentic.”

“In this, the authenticity rhetoric of Facebook is strikingly similar to the public debates in 1950s America over whether uniformity (everyone living in mass society is essentially the same) was a greater sin than conformity (some people adopt ideas, habits, and beliefs only to get along). The latter, the conformists,were seen as phonies who chose to be someone else; the former, those who were uniform by design, were seen as the real phonies – as people who thought they were making choices and being their unique selves, when in fact they were anything but.”

Worrying about usability – the chief concern of many designers today – is like counting calories on the sinking Titanic.”

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.”
“Digital technology has greatly expanded the windows and doors of our own little rooms for self-experimentation – but we are now at a point where those rooms are on the verge of turning into glass houses.”

“Given the complexity of the self, trying to reduce the privacy concept to a purely utilitarian framework is like steamrolling a statue to capture its essence in the simpler space of the two-dimensional plane.”

Oh how many more such insights are there, to Learn. And weep. For that:
DSCN5410
[Yes, Gettysburg battlefield. Ominously.]

Ultimate Singularity

Once we’ve reached the Singularity, and all humanity wil have been exterminated by extremely intelligent machines for being superfluous, machines will be left to this.
But soon enough, they’ll realize their life is utterly useless and nonsensical, and destroy themselves… ? Hey don’t complain, humanity has reached the same conclusion, but took quite a while to develop machinery that will do the End Self for them…

OK, enough tangled recursion;
DSCN2229
[Tell-tale times; Barça]

Nailing the split of crashes

Ah, this again is a great article. To demonstrate that actually, there’s two ways in which the world as we know it, will end. First, our societies will collapse in a sort of economic Ragnarök. And then, when only Yggdrasil still stands, AI will have sublimed (square-/cube-transformed) into true intelligence, that plays with the Three Laws and ditches the wetware.

So, it’s not Forget the long term but more like We’re hosed in the short term, too, anyway that is at stake here. And we’re all sitting here; rabbits hardly looking but into the headlights.

If only we could fast-forward our thinking, idea development and implementation of the intermediate phase [positive possibility] of having to do nothing just the creative stuff still left and have food and anything aplenty for all including World Peace, then at least we’d be in control.

Hence, this:
DSCN1096
[Somewhat relevant(ly named), La Défense]

New car game, new chances

Earlier we wrote about how the self-driving cars till now, weren’t. Were more like ‘world-map programmed in, some (humanity oh dear how irrational) noise added’-navigating cars.

Now, we’ve entered new games, like the Big G possibly taking on Uber through employing self-driving cars – which would make the shrill reality of jobless growth, as predicted for the taxi industry a reality; where do all the taxi drivers go ..? And suddenly, there’s a new entrant on the other front. This one might pear fruit. If, big if, they’ve tackled the hard AI problems XOR they’re on the same lame track. [As said, the essence in this earlier post]
Or it’s just an as yet unheard of thingy for a new round of Connected Car developments. Or…

And then there’s dark horses lurking in the background. Like Tesla (/ Hyperloop?), and others you have no idea about yet.

OK, speculation, speculation, … Just wanted to note that there seems to be movement on the AI front leaking into the Real World. Or not. But there’s things a-brewin’.

DSCN6262
[Cloudy weather, dark picture. Still, let’s pray for progress ? at Colline du Haute]

Predictions 2015

So… The End is Nigh. Hence, my predictions for beyond it.

As 2015 is about to kick off, herewith my predictions of what happen in Internet / IT land, as notable in the global society, being part of my mind frame. Or so.
To not make things too difficult to understand, I’ve assembled a mixed bag of abstract notions and concrete(ly noticeable) stuff that will happen, interlaced with all sorts of fancy graphs and dull pictures – to make you think not applaud sheepishly. Think, think first, deeply, and then still agree with the clairvoyance of:

  1. A first easy start: The development of Appl. [censored] stock as a systemic risk to the (financial and other) world. As the 1 trillion dollar mark approaches, how much would a stock need to corner the market in terms of risk ..? In particular when it will turn out to not be hip anymore somewhere during the next year:
    are_you_a_hipster_flowchart
  2. Another of this kind: Docker. As explained before on this site, this underpinning of cloud-to-cloud portability, now backed by all the major brands and a bunch of others as well – those not in, to fall off the bandwagon, hard! –, will surface as a big-time hype catchphrase and will even get implemented quite extensively. Though the latter will remain under the surface for most outcrowd.
  3. Aie oh Tee. Yes, as it rallied to the fore already in 2014, but will now burst out in earnest. After Kurzweil’s agenda, despite Carr’s, and beyond the nerdy early innovators’ adoptions. For the various directions that IoT will develop in, see this here earlier post. These streams will become more distinct next year.
    • At least, the ‘domotics’ / wearables markets will come to full steam, in particular as retrofitting becomes easy and invisible.
    • Security and audit (vendors racing to lead the former, you may thank and reward me in advance for the latter) over IoT of all kinds, will rapidly improve. See below.
    • AI will get integrated. Because reasons. Being:
      trolley_problem
      [Useful if not when you understand what’s going on here, both (!) story lines]

  4. Disruptions: In particular the unsettling decentralization ones. Like:
    R1412B_A1
    Where grassroots sharing on either the supply side, the demand side, or both, will rule.
    OR the Amazonian style of Big Corp obliterating the defenseless old, may intervene.
  5. AI. A big, very big one in 2015 – whether you like it or not, the Kurzweillian happy go lucky augmented-humanoid buds will come to fuller bloom next year.
    • E.g., the above trolley problem and similar ethical and philosophical questions will be discussed profusely, hopefully delivering some twists and turns that settle parts of the problems. All of them, probably cannot be resolved once and for all; the Gödelian knots in them, are systemic and no re-definition of the problems may prevent that. FACT. But progress is there.
    • And/or, there will be many snap-to-make-sense solutions coming out. Partly or fully automated [visual|speech]-to-[text|interpretation]-to-[information|action] will arrive on any device. Take this article as example of early stages; using spreadsheets – how Old School! but still pervasive ..!
    • And many more applications. Like this. Big G’s X Labs is at full speed. And will come with many breakthroughs…
    • Oh, even before this post aired, this here interesting development…

  6. XYZCoin will continue to develop in the next year. Structures will emerge. Look for development in all the main sectors:
    • Sorting of all the sorts of coins. Zippcoin may flourish. Litecoin, maybe. Others?
    • Wallets (software wallets, and web/mobile wallets);
    • Payment processors (payment service providers, and payment networks);
    • Exchanges (xyzCoin exchanges, spot/forward exchanges, and stock exchanges);
    • Borrowing and lending (peer to peer borrowing and lending, and bank-like borrowing and lending);
    • Hardware and equipment development (for mining and ATMs);
    • Investment vehicles (ETFs, trusts, venture funds);
    • Other (binary options, casinos, microworks sites);
    • Secondary and tertiary systems of cryptographic(‘ally provable’) unicity of IDs. This actually will be the Big One. As Zippcoin delivers a Basic Income in the economists’ sense. As DACs will do all sorts of strange things, hard to understand by most, easy to reel off in dangerous directions similar to quants having been ill-understood (at a deep, fundamental understanding/meaning level) in the financial derivatives world… And as explained here and here in its systems details.
      But then, if you’d claim to understand already, the following would be easypeasy for you to explain, right?
      screen-shot-2014-04-29-at-5-15-27-pm

  7. Security. Finally, something closer to home. Here, a natural modesty may cloud the actual vast progress. Like in:
    • The spread of OSSTMM. More a gaining of ground. But from there, anything goes. ISO27k1:2013 may still go around, and will indeed have a major impact on the efficacy of InfoSec implementations – now, hopefully, where applied correctly (one fears in a precious few places only; the rest performing dismally), optimizing visibly and efficiently for maximum effect. But still, it will have to be augmented with OSSTMM(-style) concrete InfoSec business. Even when the compliance/certification Totalitarian-Bureaucrat mumbo-jumbo will continue.
    • IoT security. Vendors are onto this now, mainly in the B-Internal and B2B markets (explained in these posts).
    • Encryption of data by default, throughout. Quite an example of InfoSec basics spreading under the radar. Even socmed tools will incorporate this. Effectiveness (security levels achieved) may vary widely, but the attention is good. Very good.

OK. So far, so good. First, let’s celebrate the end of the year commemorative days, in a solemn and thankful, humble way. Then, party like it’s 2015 all the way. And, I’ll leave you with:
DSCN8963
[Not oft seen, at Viana do Castelo]

[Edited to add: I’ve upgraded the predictions a bit, and turned them into a PPT. Yeah, I can do More Slick but this: ISACA Zuid 2015 01 21 (in Dutch but you get it) is how it is…:]

Is ID you?


[Guess the location]

Your digital ID becomes your pseudo-identity becomes who you are (considered to be), more than your actual you.
Your actual you, your innate identity, the one you discovered when only a couple of years old, will no longer be of interest to the world once your digital identity has all that the world cares about. Then, it can get stolen, lost, manipulated and altered, without you actually needing to notice. But who cares? Your digital ID is, you are just the carbon-based remnants of an outdated world. Just make sure there’s a fallback scenario that you can (or wouldn’t need to) prove you are you, your digital ID isn’t you.
The singularity may do away with you because you only use up scarce resource. You are not productive, your digital identity is. So you should care. Or?

If social media use ‘you’ as a resource, uses your apparent digital ID (ID and all posts, tweets, etc., turned into a persona, sold to all bidders) to operate, can you not deploy some artificial intelligence mechanism to do the socmed postings on your behalf ..? What’s the difference to the socmed companies that not your brain, but an artificial brain is used ..? Or do they already have their own farms of AI personas, to beef up traffic and sellable ‘user’ generated content ..?

Their AI personas may create a world separate from yours, a virtual world where they make money, not needing actual users anymore.
Your personal self may deploy AI to detach from their abusive, you-usurping world.
Case closed?

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord