Category: Collaborative Age

How the Military Is Struggling to Position Itself on Autonomous Weapons

The issue of autonomous weapons creates a heated debate. There is a push to get them banned (see our previous post ‘Why the Terminator Conundrum Requires Active Anti-proliferation Policies‘ and ‘How Urgent It Is to Ban Autonomous AI Driven Weapons‘). However, at least in the western world, the military appears to be quite reluctant to push for full autonomy, in particular when deciding to use lethal force. This debate is reflected in an excellent interview by The Verge ‘The future of war will be fought by machines, but will humans still be in charge?‘.

The interesting part I find, and I read about it also in other places too, is that the military is reluctant to leave the robot take lethal engagement decisions on its own. Autonomy allows the weapon to use less manpower for moving around, analysing threats, reporting on the situation; but when it comes to engagement, the military want to have a stop button. In addition, it is probably also a good idea in case autonomous weapons would stop from identifying separately friend and foe!

One concern is that this approach may not be followed by Russia or China, or potentially terrorist organisations that would use some form of autonomous weapons. Some also mention that this willingness to keep humans in the loop may stem from the fear of losing one’s job. In any case, developments in this area are interesting to follow, in particular when there might be, somewhere in the world, some actual small scale engagement of weapons more autonomous than the current contraptions. This might take some time though as I guess that the military will not want its technology to fall in the hands of the opponent!

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How To Properly Regulate Facebook

Following from our previous post ‘How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change‘, people talk more and more about regulating Facebook. But, as Frederic Filloux argues in his post ‘Facebook could actually benefit from a little regulation‘, that may come exactly at the right time for Facebook as it currently has a dominating position – by making harder for competitors to be compliant. This is further developed in Techcrunch ‘Regulation could actually protect Facebook, not punish it‘

 

“Why the hell would Facebook’s lider maximo welcome the intrusion of a regulator? Two reasons: it could help his business in the long run, and by the time any regulation takes effect, Facebook will have consolidated even further its already immense power.”

All agree that Facebook have very little to fear from the regulator, except if some sort of anti-trust approach would be used that would force the conglomerate to split in various entities. That was actually what allowed capitalism to overcome the large trusts and dominating capitalist companies at the beginning of the 20th century. Is forceful split of the large internet companies the solution?

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How Facebook Model is Addiction and Growth – and Why It Can’t Change

Famous blogger Om Malik‘s post ‘The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change‘ is worth reading. It came at the beginning of Facebook’s crisis about the leakage of personal data. His point is that Facebook model is based on addiction, data gathering and sharing and it won’t change.

Om Malik describes the DNA of Facebook as “a social platform addicted to growth and engagement. At its very core, every policy, every decision, every strategy is based on growth (at any cost) and engagement (at any cost). More growth and more engagement means more data — which means the company can make more advertising dollars, which gives it a nosebleed valuation on the stock market, which in turn allows it to remain competitive and stay ahead of its rivals.”

“Facebook is about making money by keeping us addicted to Facebook. It always has been — and that’s why all of our angst and headlines are not going to change a damn thing.” So, in spite of all the discussions and show times, Facebook model is not going to change. It will try to increase its addiction and lure all the users that still resist to it.

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How to Tackle the Risk of Alternative Augmented Realities

Following up from our post ‘How Videos can now be Faked Easily And What It Means‘ and The Atlantic paper ‘The Era of Fake Video Begins‘ (or the reality ends), fake videos increasingly point towards an alternative augmented reality that will increasingly surround us – and we won’t quite need special glasses to be immersed in it.

The Atlantic paints a gloomy picture: “If the hype around VR eventually pans out, then, like the personal computer or social media, it will grow into a massive industry, intent on addicting consumers for the sake of its own profit, and possibly dominated by just one or two exceptionally powerful companies.”

“Designers of VR have described some consumers as having such strong emotional responses to a terrifying experience that they rip off those chunky goggles to escape. Studies have already shown how VR can be used to influence the behavior of users after they return to the physical world, making them either more or less inclined to altruistic behaviors.” Still, it is useful to understand this might be a possible future and respond to it.

Will be prefer to be immersed in a not so rosy reality or flee to a virtual reality that might be more perfect but make us lose sense of what’s real?

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How I Believe That Building Slowly, On the Long Term, Is the Way

Following up on our post ‘How Entrepreneurship is Not a Rich Quick Scheme‘, I do believe in entrepreneurship building slowly, on the long term, the foundations of a new business, at least until there is such an adoption of their product that scaling becomes the main issue.

Like Richard Branson says, “there are no quick wins in business, it takes years to become an overnight success“. I am always amazed at how start-ups try to develop quicker than the natural development time of their product, boosted by substantial investments from rapacious investors.

It might be that I am excessively on the safe side, favoring minimum external investment and self-development (which is also a way to remain free), and that my ventures could benefit from some injection of cash to grow quicker. At the same time, I am a firm believer that new approaches and products need some time to get adopted and understood and that there is a limit to the speed of development, at least until they reach a stage of adoption where scaling becomes an issue.

I am interesting in building stuff of quality and that will be viable for the long term. It takes time and that’s normal. So let’s assume it and avoid again those ‘get rich’ scheme delusion.

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How Entrepreneurship is Not a Rich Quick Scheme

The entrepreneurial world is full of the delusion of the ‘quick success’ scheme, and many would-be entrepreneurs and investors are addicted to the ‘rich quick’ delusion. This creates behavioral problems and disappointed expectations.

Of course there are famous and visible examples of start-ups that have had stellar trajectories, but they represent less than a fraction of a percent of all the entrepreneurial initiatives.

In reality, entrepreneurship is tough hard work, week and week-ends, to build something new. It will take years to build something strong enough to be worth being re-sold. All of this in an uncertain context where it is not sure the organisation will still be around in a few months time.

And on the investor side, there is no guarantee that a start-up investment portfolio will be a rich quick scheme either. There will be more disappointments than successes, and disappointments will also happen earlier, with sometimes disastrous psychological consequences.

Entrepreneurship is not a rich quick scheme. It is another way to look at work with an objective to change the world. And in most cases, it will end in disappointment.

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How the Internet Currently Tries to get Smaller

Following up on our post ‘How Private Communities Compete With Open Social Networks‘, the strong-worded essay from The Verge ‘The year we wanted the internet to be smaller‘ provides another interesting viewpoint.

Tiredness and disappointment from Facebook, twitter and the web giants, their limitations and drawbacks, suspicion of political manipulation etc. push people away to test new, smaller networks. “We can see this longing for community — and specifically, the sort of small, weird communities that populated and defined the early internet — everywhere.” According to the essay, community email lists also reappear with a strong appeal to create small groups of like minded people.

I am convinced this is the expression of discontent on the way some of those social networks are behaving, and that eventually there will be some rules imposed from a regulatory perspective to resolve those issues. There will always be a balancing act between large global networks and smaller closed communities. We need both to respond to our needs, and both will continue to exist one way or the other.

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How Private Communities Compete With Open Social Networks

Since the beginning of internet there has been a tension between private communities and public social networks. Of course, Facebook and the likes have for a while given the advantage to public networks, but private communities now do come back strongly.

An excellent post by Steve Pavlina ‘The Rise of Private Communities‘ describes in much detail the advantages of private networks (in addition, he is in the coaching business where this type of networks offer probably an advantage when it comes to the quality of interaction).

There are benefits and drawbacks to the rise of private communities – although they also do apply to public social networks who do offer some similar features with some restrictions:

  • The advantage is a better interaction through a barrier to entry and a strong facilitation, which should make content much more relevant with less waste
  • The drawback is that the community might tend to close upon itself, and in the extreme develop its own delusions

Therefore, private communities and open networks will always remain complementary. They are tools that need to be used in the right way for the right purpose.

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How Facebook Faces a ‘Big Tobacco’ Addiction Industry Problem

I find this post ‘Facebook has a Big Tobacco Problem‘ just excellent – and the title is great too. Facebook is clearly addictive, pervades society, has adverse effect on mental health, and.. is in denial.

“Facebook’s problems are more than a temporary bad PR issue. Its behavior contributes to a growing negative view of the entire tech industry.“. Facebook is currently working hard to change its image, but the amount of evidence of its effect on behavior also mounts.

This existential issue is a threat to the entire technological world and society will have to find a solution that will necessarily involve regulation.

Some comparisons developed in the post are even thrilling: “As in the 1990’s, when Big Tobacco felt its home market dwindling, the companies decided to stimulate smoking in the Third World. Facebook’s tactics are reminiscence of that. Today, it subsidizes connectivity in the developing world, offering attractive deals to telecoms in Asia and Africa, in exchange for making FB the main gateway to the internet”

It might well be that there will soon be some kind of existential crisis to make social networks mature in terms of model and rules.

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How Curiosity is As Important As Intelligence in a Complex World

This assertion came up in an influential HBR paper ‘Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence‘. Of course, this is already suspected for a long time, like the famous quote by Einstein on the subject.

The interesting side of the HBR paper is that it links directly curiosity with the ability to navigate in complexity. It takes the position that it is a skill that can be learned, and that it is an essential skill in today’s world. ” [Curiosity Quotient] has not been as deeply studied as EQ and IQ, but there’s some evidence to suggest it is just as important when it comes to managing complexity in two major ways. First, individuals with higher CQ are generally more tolerant of ambiguity. This nuanced, sophisticated, subtle thinking style defines the very essence of complexity. Second, CQ leads to higher levels of intellectual investment and knowledge acquisition over time, especially in formal domains of education, such as science and art”

So let’s develop our Curiosity Quotient actively!

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How We Interact With Androids and What It Teaches Us

I was fascinated by this piece on Wired about our the research on our interactions and emotions with Androids: ‘Love in the Time of Robots‘. It revolves around the research by Hiroshi Ishi­guro, a Japanese professor that uses beautiful replicas to research the human-to-robots interaction.

It is easy to emphasize with a robot: “As complex as we assume ourselves to be, our bonds with one another are often built on very ­little. Given all the time we now spend living through technology, not many of us would notice, at least at first, if the friend we were messaging were replaced by a bot. And humans do not require much to stir up feelings of empathy with another person or creature—even an object. In 2011 a University of Calgary test found that subjects were quick to assign emotions and intentions to a piece of balsa wood operated with a joystick. In other words, we are so hardwired for empathy that our brains are willing to make the leap to humanizing a piece of wood. It’s a level of animal instinct that’s slapstick-hilarious and a degree of vulnerability that’s terrifying.”

More importantly this research asks difficult questions about what makes us enter in a relationship and express our emotions. Are our feelings an illusion? Is a conversation an illusion of understanding what the other person thinks? What makes us believe we are interacting with another human? Would we be satisfied with an interaction with a robot? Fascinating questions for a not-to-far future…

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How Most Traditionally-Developed Software is Failure-Prone

Modern software is often built by layering upon layers of code development. This makes those software intrinsically unsafe and impossible to test in all possible situations. This excellent post in The Atlantic ‘The Coming Software Apocalypse‘ describes both the extent of the problem and the possible solution.

software_bugIn this first post we will concentrate on the intrinsic failure-prone characteristic of traditionally-developed software. One example is developed in this post which is striking: after a few accidents involving car speed regulation systems, an expert examined the code and they “described what they found as “spaghetti code,” programmer lingo for software that has become a tangled mess. Code turns to spaghetti when it accretes over many years, with feature after feature piling on top of, and being woven around, what’s already there; eventually the code becomes impossible to follow, let alone to test exhaustively for flaws. Using the same model as the Camry involved in the accident, Barr’s team demonstrated that there were actually more than 10 million ways for the onboard computer to cause unintended acceleration. They showed that as little as a single bit flip—a one in the computer’s memory becoming a zero or vice versa—could make a car run out of control.”

Particularly scary when we note that cars are nowadays the most sophisticated machines on the planet! And a huge challenge for regulators too!

The solution is to implement a new way to produce software: automatic generation from a systems model basis. We’ll examine this in the next post.

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