Category: Fourth Revolution

How the Foundation Principles of Internet May be Flawed

There is an increasing uneasiness on the foundations and principles of internet. In a TED talk, ‘how we need to remake the internet‘, Jason Lanier explains a fundamental mistake was made in the 1990’s: the advertising model to provide internet content for free.

“Early digital culture had a sense of a socialist mission: everything on the internet must be available for free (contrary to books, even if solutions like public libraries compensate to make them available to everyone). At the same time we loved our tech entrepreneurs that could dent the universe. The solution was the advertising model: free with ads. In the beginning it was cute. ”

The comparison with what happened before is of course not so abrupt, for example newspapers have long relied on ads to finance their activity and therefore could sometimes be opinionated, but everyone knew which side the paper was on.

And as it is proven now, the consequence of the advertisement model is quite incompatible with the principles to govern internet edited under a UN mandate that refer to universality and non-discrimination (refer to those principles here).

As Jason Lanier concludes, “Our species cannot survive in a situation where if 2 people want to communicate they need to go through a third person that wants to manipulate them“.

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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 We Need to Define Urgently Personal Behavior Rules Around Smartphones

The provoking title of this Atlantic piece ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?‘ is worth pondering. And the article worth reading too. The theme of the article is “more comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.”

Modern group social discussion?

The author is a mental health researcher that has noticed an abrupt change in teenager generational behavior around 2012 – the year 50% of the developed country population got a smartphone i.e. where smartphone penetration began to change our habits. “The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household.”

Teenagers socialize physically less and the rate of depression and suicide is going up dramatically. Research shows that more time on the screen and on social networks lead to higher rates of depression and lower happiness.

Like all new tools in our lives, we need to define social rules to live with it. The smartphone and the associated social networks are still too new to have developed and ingrained these behavioral rules. It might become a matter of urgency, still I am optimistic that a reaction will prevail.

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How Happiness May Depend a Lot on Individual Opportunity

In this Quartz post ‘The quest to measure happiness has missed a key metric—and it’s more important than money‘ the author analyzes in detail how happiness is measured and the problems with this measurement.

Satisfaction is grossly correlated with income, in particular when it comes to satisfying our basic needs (see enclosed graph from the Economist). There is still a very wide spread for the same wealth. In richer countries, however, other parameters appear to become important.

The post stresses the importance of Opportunity as a visibly good discriminator for social happiness between countries. Some very rich countries only give their citizens very limited opportunities, and this would be a cause for lower happiness and revolt.

It still puts some limits to this single parameter, recognizing that “A person’s happiness, and her perception of success or failure, ultimately depends on what measures the individual values over the course of her life—whether that’s providing for a family, fighting climate change, or writing poetry. Wealth is nothing without the opportunity provided by good health to live free of pain and worry. And opportunity itself is important, but is it—or freedom, or love—paramount?”

I do believe that individual freedom and opportunity is an essential parameter for happiness – but it must be supported by a social structure that accepts failure and supports individuals through major problems.

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How Tax Systems Evolve in the Collaborative Age

As I was looking at a EU document about VAT in all European countries, the historical tables have caught my attention (pages 18 sqq). They show invariably a substantial increase in VAT rates in the last decades. In most countries, this tax has become the main income stream of governments. In South East Asia, Singapore and Malaysia have just introduced the equivalent GST, and it will soon in introduced in India at a substantial rate.

GST or VAT is becoming increasingly important. This tax is non progressive, it applies to poor and rich at the same time; actually percentage-wise rich people will generally pay less if they consume less than their income. At the same time, income tax importance has generally stagnated or touch less people (in France, less than 40% of taxpayers pay income tax). Similarly, corporate tax shows a strong tendency to diminish in all countries nowadays. VAT/GST increasingly becomes the main income stream of governments.

I believe that this evolution reflect deep transformations related to the Fourth Revolution, without being quite sure about the cause. In a way, it is a problem because tax systems become generally less progressive (increasing tax with revenue) and this increases inequalities. At the same time it follows the fact that income might not reflect value and that final consumption might be a better indicator and taxable source nowadays.

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Why History Needs to Start Being Written by Nomads

One of the key transformations of the Fourth Revolution is that nomads will take over the sedentary in terms of economic leadership. This never happened before. And History has always been written by the sedentary.

“Never did history understand nomads” wrote Gilles Deleuze. It would be about time that History could be written by nomads.

The point of view of the nomad is different: it is not about how things get built over time, it is how we interact with our environment and how we travel to meet other people, and build something out of these interactions. It is how we interact with what mankind builds, it is not about how we own things and protect them.

I am not quite sure how History will be transformed when it will be written by nomads, for sure this will be a substantial paradigm shift for many of us!

Hat tip to Anne Laure Fréant from the site retourenfrance.fr for French expats returning to France and the inspiration from her email newsletter.

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How Excessive Inequality Will Lead to Revolutions

Cory Doctorow’s post ‘EXTREME WEALTH INEQUALITY WILL ALWAYS DEVOUR THE SOCIETIES THAT PRODUCE IT‘ and the associated longer piece ‘Shared Destinies: Why Wealth Inequality Matters‘ make an interesting point about a limit any society can accept in terms of inequality. They are worth reading.

inequalityHe argues that there has always been some threshold beyond which societies undergo a readjustment – either peacefully or through more violent revolutions. “The more unequal a society is, the more out-of-balance its policies will be.”

Of course inequality is on the rise now after a historic low in the mid-20th century. The question is whether we are getting close to that threshold (as populist successes would imply) and whether this threshold is changing with new technology. In any case this issue needs to be addressed in particular as the economy sputters and does not manage to bring along some part of the population.

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What Changed Since the Last Time I Came to Stanford

Lately I had the opportunity to travel for business to Palo Alto California close to the Stanford University campus and have a walk there. Last time I was there was… 23 years ago! And as usual when we suddenly come back to past places I realized how much things had changed over those 23 years:

  • Stanford UniversityI did not have email in those days even within the university and research community. We could only do ftp to connect to other computers, sometimes
  • To communicate overseas with my family I sent a weekly handwritten fax over, and invested in a MCI long distance calling card for one weekly call
  • Amazon did not exist of course so the reason for me to go to Stanford was to visit the well-stored Stanford University bookstore to look for specialized books in my field which I struggled to find otherwise
  • The spirit in Palo Alto is all about startups which was not yet so much the case in the early 90s. Now you can’t go anywhere without people mentioning about startups and new IT stuff

Some things also don’t change much like the main buildings of the university. But it is sometimes amazing to think how that can remain steady when there is so much change around in particular with Stanford being at the epicenter of the Fourth Revolution!

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How Industrial Revolution Comparisons Are Not Comforting

In a very interesting article ‘Industrial Revolution Comparisons Aren’t Comforting‘ economist Tyler Cowen analyses the consequences of the revolution on labor and wages. In particular it shows that real wages actually went down during the period of adjustment for the average worker.

power-loomsI am fond of historical comparisons and parallels and this recommended article is a very interesting analysis. One important and interesting quote: “By the estimates of Gregory Clark, economic historian at the University of California at Davis, it took 60 to 70 years of transition, after the onset of industrialization, for English workers to see sustained real wage gains at all.” And Tyler Cowen compares the situation to the actual stagnation of wages since the late 1990s in developed countries.

One element of worry is of course that the Industrial Revolution led to the development of certain ideologies which led to revolutions and political instability and volatility – and much suffering.

Are we watching the same evolution now? This might be an issue to watch closely. I am not as optimistic as Tyler Cowen that this time we should be less extreme and more reasonable: the inclusion of developed countries in the Fourth Revolution will create substantial new sources of instability.

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How the Soviet Union failed at developing Internet

It appears that the Soviet Union considered a full computer network to be deployed and even decided to go for it in 1970, a year later than the Arpanet. That’s what a new book ‘How not to network a nation‘ states (here is a link to excerpts).

soviet internet“The Politburo convened that day to hear Glushkov’s proposal and decide whether to build a massive nationwide computer network for citizen use — or what Glushkov called the All-State Automated System (OGAS, obshche-gosudarstvennyi avtomatizirovannaya system), the most ambitious computer network project of its kind in the world at the time. OGAS was to connect tens of thousands of computer centers and to manage and optimize in real time the communications between hundreds of thousands of workers, factory managers, and regional and national administrators. The purpose of the OGAS Project was simple to state and grandiose to imagine: Glushkov sought to network and automatically manage the nation’s struggling command economy“.

And that’s was the end of it: conceived as a way for a central power to plan and decide on the fate of the country, it missed the factor that ultimately made the success of internet: allowing two-way communication and the flourishing of local initiative.

The failure at developing internet is not due to technology. It is due to the centralized, autocratic political system. Internet is the product of democracy, local initiative and free speech.

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How the Development of Legal Tech Will Change our Lives – and the Lives of Lawyers

As many other professions, the legal profession is not immune to being transformed by the Fourth Revolution. There have been many examples lately where simple legal processes have been performed by programs or simple versions of Artificial Intelligence.

legal_techFor example, a website promises to waive a large percentage of parking ticket fines using the strict application of the law (160,000 tickets would have been successfully fought in New York and London). Or, robots also get involved in divorce proceedings too.

The general article from ParisTech review ‘Legal Tech and other smart contracts: what future for legal automation?‘ provides a more general overview. According to a 2015 study, “47% of lawyers interviewed considered that it would be possible within 10 to 15 years to replace their “paralegal” employees (the administration that works as subordinates to a lawyer, in the United States) by solutions of artificial intelligence. 35% think that junior lawyer positions could be fully eliminated over the same period“. The paper continues by explaining what the most important changes will be.

While experienced lawyers will remain required for complicated cases, the legal profession should brace for a structural change in the years to come.

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How America Becomes Sedentary When the World Becomes Nomadic

Having travelled in the US on and off in the last 20 years, I had been struck that American people seemed to have increasingly grown roots. The “hometown” is now a well established concept, and I do not remember that was so much the case in the 1990s. At the same time in the world, nomadism increases dramatically.

Where is the frontier spirit gone?
Where is the frontier spirit gone?

This feeling is confirmed by the Atlantic article ‘How America Lost Its Mojo‘: “Between the 1970s and 2010, the rate of Americans moving between states fell by more than half—from 3.5 percent per year to 1.4 percent“. Nobody knows exactly why. The article proposes the expensive price of housing to be the main cause of this sudden sedentarism. This might come together with the fact that more young people are staying in their parent’s home.

As I write this article I am in Abu Dhabi. Here less than 10% of the population is local. The rest is constituted by immigrants – Indians, Pakistani, Omanis, Yemenites, Syrians… Walking in the streets at night, one feels in a melting pot. All those people who have migrated to find better conditions and contribute to the emergence of the local economy. Maybe not with the best working conditions, but they come and seek the means to provide for their families.

With the Fourth Revolution, the nomads are again in power. At the same time the US settles down. Is that a sign that in spite of being at the source of new technology, the social setup of America does not follow suit?

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