Category: Institutions and Revolutions

How the Flip of the Digital Divide is Meaningful

Seth Godin’s post ‘The digital divide is being flipped‘ explains how the children of the rich are nowadays protected from the consequences of the screens, whereas the children of the poor are left to their addictive consequences.

I still remember a few years ago when digital divide was about the rich getting access to the wealth of internet while the poor (or the remote) couldn’t. It was a massive issue for governments who committed substantial resources to bridging the gap: “Privileged parents, those with time, education and money, were giving their kids access to the tools of the net while other kids were missing out on the wealth of interactions and information available online. The fear was that this gap would further magnify differences in opportunity.”

Nowadays, screens and internet access is almost ubiquitous, and the issue is rather not to get addicted to social networks, online games and other time-losing activities. Social network leaders are known to forbid screen access to their children.

The internet has moved from an incredible access to a wealth of information to a mass addiction machine. It does not need to be that way: what is important now is educating the younger generations about health rules when using screens and the internet, and how value can be extracted. This may need to be a new emergency for governments!

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How to Overcome a ‘Big Gulp’ Decision in Transformations

Following from our previous post ‘How many Transformations Fail Due to the Lack of Decision‘, in her post ‘Big Gulp Decisions‘ Charlene Li suggests when it comes to the manner of taking the decision to transform, that the right strategy is to ‘burn the boats’.

“Realize also that in the end you’re not going to have all the answers. You will never be 100% certain. […] Once you decide to make this decision be prepared to what one disruptive company calls “burning the boats”. We have to be willing to say we’re making this decision and we’re moving forward and there is no going back. Because if people think that there is an option to go back to what you normally doing before, they will hedge.”

On that perspective, I am not too convinced that it is the right strategy in all cases, because contrary to the Spaniards landing in America with Cortes, organizations nowadays live in an open world – people can decide with their feet to go somewhere else. Therefore, while it is important to ensure commitment to the transformation, the risk of people fleeing is also real.

My recommendation is to instill the transformation at a reduced scale in a specific part of the organization – maybe a specific subsidiary, or even a newly created business, and then let it spread by example and exchange of personnel to the rest of the organization. This also avoids to ‘bet the house’ on the transformation and maintains revenue from the traditional business. This approach may seem less efficient, but it takes into account that something that works will attract people in an open world.

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How Arthur C Clarke’s Three Laws Continue to Apply

Arthur C Clarke, famous science-fiction writer, produced three statements about technology development. They are quite applicable and profound, in particular with the perspective on the Fourth Revolution. I find it useful to share them here.

  1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The first statement is about the role of the change of generation in our institutions: too often, such a change is needed for our paradigms to evolve officially – experts and professors remain stuck in their worldview.

The next statements are about going beyond what we believe is possible. There are not enough visionaries doing that nowadays: in spite of the start-up trend, too many start-ups remain within the established possible.

I love the mention of magic, because the last statement tells us that irrespective of the progress of technology, there will always be magic: beyond the currently possible, and we will always be amazed. Let’s look for the next magical stuff!

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How Social Media are Perfect Tools for Autocrats

Following up from the previous post ‘How BUMMER Became a New Acronym for Social Media‘, there is some debate about the social destruction brought about by Facebook and the likes, and whether those applications do not undermine democracy – such as in this article in the New York Review of Books titled ‘The Autocracy App‘.

The article states in summary that:

  1. Facebook as a company has lot control of the consequences of the usage of its services, that are being used by pressure groups and rogue users to create instability, chaos and even ethnic cleansing
  2. There is a growing consensus that the power of such a dominating company needs checking, as the tools proves to be much more useful to autocrats while it undermines democracy. Addiction and closure of the horizon of people around their interests hurts the debate, while data can be used by autocrats against users.
  3. There are several ways to deal with the situation, from an user movement (promoted by Jaron Lanier) to anti-trust regulation. However for the moment the current frameworks seem to have difficulties to be effective.

As any tool that becomes prevalent, Facebook demonstrates shortcomings in parallel to benefits. The fact that there is no real governance of the company with Mark Zuckerberg keeping the control does not help. I really believe that regulation is the only way, and there have been positive effects of european law on social media. This needs to be reinforced, because it is true that the impact of social media changes our world, and that democracy is impacted.

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How BUMMER Became a New Acronym for Social Media

Jaron Lanier – quite an interesting individual – came up with a new acronym for social media: BUMMER, which means ‘Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent’. The concept is developed in this interesting (and critical) Medium article ‘Jaron Lanier’s Top 10 List for Quitting Social Media‘.

The concept is that social media sites change our behaviors in a way that is of interest to them, and that their interest is straight financial. The two steps of this approach can be analysed.

Social media does change our behavior, that’s clear: most people just can’t stop looking at their mobile phone, and on the social networks on their mobile phones, and everything is engineering to support that behavior (notifications etc.).

Whether the interest of social media moguls is only financial is more open to debate. It might not have been the initial intention. It may only be a means to another objective. What this objective could be, oscillates between scary (manipulation of the masses) or benevolent (connection people).

I do not believe we should leave social media, because used well, like any tool, it can bring many benefits. But we must develop behavior rules so as not to fall prey to it. And the question is still open about what is really the objective of social media companies.

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How Virtual Creatures Invade Our Connections and our World

Virtual creatures start to be everywhere in our environment: major instagram influencers are hired by leading brands that are in fact virtual, virtual news anchor presenters appear. Maybe your next connection on your preferred social network will be virtual? Tough times for starlets, like exposed in this post ‘Brands Are Creating Virtual Influencers, Which Could Make the Kardashians a Thing of the Past‘.

Lilmiquela, a famous virtual Instagram influencer

Virtual creatures may look safer and more docile: no risk of personal crisis and unprofessional behaviors outside the screen, and full control of the behavior on screen. They can be made as attractive as needed, and may be fully adapted to the audience – many of those virtual influencers are colored.

At the same time of course we’re losing a certain dose of humanity, making interactions with those influencers and brands even more… virtual and distant from our day-to-day life. Those won’t have the same day-to-day issues and challenges we face as humans. Also, their perfection will look even more unapproachable for us poor imperfect humans.

I believe this trend is here to stay and will even be enhanced further with AI bots coupled with virtual creatures. It will also be harder to distinguish those virtual connections. Another reason to stay grounded in our humanity and being less influenced by the perfect pictures we find of others on social networks!

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How the Collaborative Age Seems to Create Increasing Rural Abandonment

Rural abandonment is an increasing reality. It is also a key driver of politics in many countries, with votes being increasingly differentiated between city and countryside; and votes in the countryside being increasingly extremist. One of the latest examples is the cancellation of rural bus lines over the entirety of west Canada: ‘Decline of Greyhound service mirrors rural Canada’s plight‘.

Abandoned basic services in rural France

A few years ago, with the the rise of internet, visionaries were considering rather the contrary, with city people moving back to rural places, creating life again there, and working remotely from home. There are still regularly a few stories about such experiences, but more often, people are just moving from larger to smaller cities for an improved lifestyle.

As of now, rural abandonment seems in general to increase, and additional forces tend to reinforce the trend:

  • agricultural work seems increasingly ripe to robotisation, as work is performed in a relatively simple environment, and GPS based optimisation can increase yield significantly,
  • weaker government resources reduce subsidization of rural public services
  • the mix of ideas is much better in cities, creating additional value and an increasing value gap
  • in a negative cycle, the loss of basic businesses and services in rural areas makes life harder and increases the migration to local towns

The rural territory is an asset and should not be seen as a burden or just as a playground for city folks. Some isolated initiatives give new economic life to certain territories but they are still far apart.

This issue of rural abandonment needs to be addressed proactively by governments: otherwise the burden of maintenance will increase dramatically. I am looking forward to hear about possible initiatives.

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How AI is Being Used to Spot Lies and False Declarations

Following up on our review of the changes brought by AI in the field of justice (see for example the post ‘How Predictive Justice Software Starts Being Used‘), this interesting Quartz post ‘Police are using artificial intelligence to spot written lies‘ addresses how AI can detect fake statements for insurance or police.

Certain patterns can certainly be identified to assess the probability for a statement to be untrue, but the immediate question if of course up to what level this may be used. Is this only to prioritize those declarations that would warrant further investigation, or would that lead to a straight rejection?

One can also expect in the near future to see a whole new industry of AI statement coaches to emerge, with coaches and counter-AI programs being made available to check the veracity level and modify the initial statement to make them appear more credible… The interesting part here is that we are increasingly moving into a world of conformity, because AI will instantaneously detect anything that comes out of the ordinary.

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How AI trainer is the new trendy gig for students and young professionals

I was not aware until recently how the job of “AI trainer” is the new gig for students seeking some extra money and for young professionals. But as AI-based services and ‘deep-learning’ products increase, there is a need to help them learn faster from existing data. The job is about feeding the data to the software and manually correcting the outcome to help the algorithm learn faster.

AI teaching sweatshop in Asia

For some basic image recognition, there are even sweatshops setup in low-cost countries to teach the algorithms. For more complex matters, this is generally performed in the AI company premises by graduate students in the relevant specialty.

Of course, the intent of deep-learning algorithm is to replicate what has been taught to it in a scalable manner, therefore automatizing the job that was previously performed by junior personnel. But the irony is that it also creates the new job of teaching it on the basis of an initial set of data how to respond and what to produce.

Let’s not be astonished if the first jobs of new graduates in the years to come is ‘AI teacher’!

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How Predictive Justice Software Starts Being Used

In this Bloomberg article ‘This AI Startup Generates Legal Papers Without Lawyers, and Suggests a Ruling‘, the operation of an Argentinian start-up, Prometea is described. It uses AI to produce suggested rulings from past decisions, thus increasing dramatically the productivity and reducing the backlog of cases.

The productivity boost is significant: “The Buenos Aires office says its 15 lawyers can now clear what used to be six months’ worth of cases in just six weeks.”

At the moment it only produces drafts that are still reviewed by humans, but the results are apparently very encouraging, and many countries seem to be interested by the system, including the UN.

Predictive justice is coming, at least for simple cases. Our judicial systems will certain try to resist, but that’s the trend of history.

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How Bitcoin Mining Substantially Aggravates Climate Change

As we know, cryptocurrency mining farms are very energy intensive. But I had not idea how much until I read that paper ‘Bitcoin must die‘ by Andrew Gallagher. And in reality, Bitcoin production is really using a huge amount of electrical power worldwide! Actually it takes an enormous cost to produce.

“If Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear. This is roughly equivalent to the output of ten coal-fired power plants, emitting 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C. ”

According to the article, which is very detailed from a technical perspective, there are new algorithms that are must less energy-intensive that the ones used by Bitcoin and that allow for secure block-chain usage, so at least there should be an obligation to shift to those much less power-hungry algorithms.

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How Valuable Personal Data Is: Get Coffee for Free Against Your Data

In this post ‘No Cash Needed At This Cafe. Students Pay The Tab With Their Personal Data‘, an example is developed where a privately-run university coffee is providing free coffee in exchange for personal data and the acceptance of receiving communications and promotional material.

Free coffee against your personal data

I find this example interesting as it gives a practical value to personal data: in effect, the coffee’s business model is based on targeted advertising to its patrons.

It is unclear if the model will be a success as it seems to be only at experimental stage and not fully operational yet.

Also, the value of personal data will necessarily decrease if more and more outlets collect it: it will become public knowledge and data mining existing databases such as LinkedIn or Facebook will already provide lots of information.

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