Category: Institutions and Revolutions

How Civility Becomes an Explicit Expectation in Society

This Gapingvoid rant ‘Want to be a better human?‘ brings back the issue of civility (as in “civilized conduct (especially: courtesy or politeness) or a polite act or expression” [Wikipedia]). It is not the first time I hear about the explicit comeback of this simple concept, which before was quite an implicit assumption of social life.

“As organizations shuffle from minority to minority, demonstrating how much they care & how inclusive they are, what is completely overlooked is the unsexy conversation about being nice, respectful, and kind, treating others fairly, and a hundred other courtesies that our moms taught us, or should have.”

I can’t more agree with this statement. It is a pity that people need to be reminded of their duty about civility explicitly, still is a a foundation of life in society and preempts any debate a difference and discrimination.

Maybe it is worth reminding more broadly about civility, what it means, how it is practiced. That we need to do it, however, shows the failure of both family and school to bring a minimum of social skills to people.

Let’s thus be more explicitly require civility and explain what it means. This is a minimum for social interaction and if it needs to be explicit so be it!

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How The Unregulated Industry of Life Coaches Raises Questions

This Guardian article ‘I’m a life coach, you’re a life coach: the rise of an unregulated industry‘ explains very well the inherent contradictions of the status of life coach. It is completely unregulated and dominated by a number of well-known figures of sometimes questionable reputation (as exposed in the article). It also obviously responds to a societal need, but isn’t it dangerous to let people getting influenced by unqualified professionals?

Trainings and certifications are diverse in quality and seriousness. The number of candidates to become life coach increases dramatically with each major crisis. In my experience, many do explore this career out of a personal need first, before looking at it as a way to change others for the better. In reality, many life coaches do have a less-than-ideal personal life and happiness, although they try to project a well-balanced impression.

There are drawbacks to a too severe professional certification scheme. It creates institutions that decide what is right from wrong. It can lead to situations where innovative or radical approaches will be rejected while they can be useful. Thus it is not necessarily the best solution in all cases.

At the same time when it comes to mental health, is it reasonable to add a layer of simili-professionalism to general advice on how to feel better? Having a coach implies some seriousness in the commitments taken, but one of the most important functions of a coach is to determine when people need more professional psychological help. It is unsure that all life coach trainings include that element so clearly.

I am definitely in favor of some self-regulation of the life coach industry. The ICF (International Coach Federation) is quite a good and demanding scheme that leaves some leeway in the coaching practices. Similar certifications should be requested from your coaches.

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How Insurance Companies Can Leverage Technology to Control Behaviors

Insurance companies have always influenced behaviors through basic rules underlying their contracts, for exemple historically in terms of fire prevention. There can be a fine line between imposing some rules and actually controlling behavior. In this article ‘Draining the Risk Pool: Insurance companies are using new surveillance tech to discipline customers‘, modern practices of insurance companies are described that border on spying individual behaviors.

The trend is particularly acute in the US where health insurance is provided by private companies. It starts with some shocking statements about examples of companies prohibiting smoking or other possibly health-impacting behaviors because of insurance fees; and other companies promoting health-welness programs which appear to be quite mandatory. “Wellness programs are about exercising that leverage, reducing the risk profile of employees and thus cutting the employer’s costs for health insurance plans.”

However in the modern world, this means using apps and other devices to monitor progress and connect with colleagues, and those could ultimately be used for control purpose. Examples are give, from insurers that require wearing of personal health monitoring devices, or fitting cars with black boxes to determine driving patterns. All leaving to possible insurance access and price discrimination, leading to a much more personalized behavior influence. Boundaries to this approach and rules around fairness will have to be imposed by law.

With the development of personal devices and technology, insurance companies will certainly find a field of improved insight into client behaviors. Lawmakers will have to follow those trends closely to put the right boundaries.

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How Amazon is Becoming a Very Significant Private Employer

Amazon is expanding and hiring worldwide – and is now employing a sizeable share of the workforce, as underlined in this post ‘Amazon now employs almost 1 million people in the U.S. — or 1 in every 169 workers‘. And actually, global hiring at Amazon continues in an exponential curve.

Distribution businesses have always been very significant employers (such as for example, supermarket chains) because of the labor-intensive nature of their trade. Amazon in the US (1.3 million employees or direct contractors) is on the way to overtake Walmart the first employer (1.6 million).

Those numbers mean that we can expect in the next few years some unionization of the relationships between employees and Amazon (and potentially some struggles too), and also that any decision taken by Amazon HR regarding general policies will have far-ranging effects on local economies. Amazon also certainly is developing its political influence where unemployment is a major local issue.

Amazon will probably soon become the first employer in many countries. This will necessarily change the nature of its social relationships both inside and outside the company.

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How Browser Fact Checker Extensions are Coming

With the spread of fake news, fact checking is becoming a hot subject. In this Gartner blog ‘Fact-checker Extensions Should be Standard on Every Browser‘ a possible evolution of browsers is described where news would be automatically rated according to their truthfulness

“A pop-up warning that a news item or website contains dubious or disputed information will not save us from bad information, but it will at least get people thinking. They will need to make a conscious decision to ignore the warning. Hopefully they will instead consider the links and references provided to more reality-based sources. This is basic digital literacy.“

It happens that many of those plug-ins seem to be already available (at least in English) and some are mentioned in the post. They will provide warnings and truthfulness indexes to sites and news consulted by the user. At least this would prompt verification across sources.

Of course this will not prevent some people from believing that this would be some additional conspiracy preventing them to spread their truth, or people just igniring the warnings. Fake news are not new: what’s new is that they can spread globally and exponentially for zero cost. Identifying fake news is a first step in regaining our freedom.

I am looking forward to good quality fake news checking to become standard. Of course in this weapon race fake news will become better at evading the checks and there will be an ever continuing race to uphold real facts.

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How Engineering Processes Need to Be Upgraded with Digitalization

In engineering circles, an interview of Elon Musk a few months ago has created quite a few ripples. Elon Musk expressed himself about his engineering philosophy, mainly in the context of SpaceX. This article for example summarizes his views: ‘Elon Musk’s Design Process Starts With Making Things ‘Less Dumb’‘

The 5 principles defended by Elon Musk are the following:

  • Make the requirement less dumb
  • Try to delete part of the process and of the design
  • Simplify or optimize (and don’t optimize something that should not exist in the first place!)
  • Accelerate cycle time (but not before you have sorted out the 3 first principles)
  • Automate the design process to move more quickly through the design cycles.

Those principles seem founded quite in common sense, although of course they are very hard to implement as experience shows. In my world of large industrial projects it is a constant battle to try to simplify requirements developed over decades and comprising of layers of knowledge and experience. No surprise that a newcomer like SpaceX can do better without the institutional history.

What I find particularly interesting is the fact that Elon Musk recognizes that automation as a way to accelerate iteration today needs to be an intrinsic part of engineering approaches.

Digitalization provides new possibilities and we definitely need to re-interrogate the traditional engineering processes to take advantage of the new capabilities made available, simplify and produce more straightforward designs.

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How Space Is a New Strategic Field for Big Tech

In this interesting post ‘Big Tech, The New Space Invaders’, Frederic Filloux explains how Big Tech is invading space services with the money and brutality that will change significantly this market.

He describes all the emergence in the field of space-based services and how the GAFA are now launched on a frenzy of acquisitions. “Space has become an inescapable part of their core business of data collection, transfer and processing, with multiple layers of applications, including a growing demand for AI processing.
For the consumers of satellite images and signals — insurance companies, defense, agritech sector, financial services — working in Amazon, Microsoft or Google Cloud environments is almost the natural thing to do as the tools are de facto standards.” For example, ““Amazon played it quite well by offering to the US Geological Survey and NASA to process the huge volume of data generated by its Landsat program. They did it for free in exchange for bulk access to the data. That was meant to be mutually beneficial.”. It was particularly beneficial to Amazon Web Services which is now the standard gateway to access and process satellite data. AWS provides unparalleled storage and computing power with dozens of easy to use applications dedicated to spatial analysis, refined and trained by Landsat’s trove of data“

This of course creates questions about strategic dependence on those strategic services to American companies. According to Frederic Filloux this would also be a strategy aimed at minimizing the impact of the current antitrust drives – making the GAFA indispensable to the US national security.

In any case this is clearly a deeply preoccupying evolution to see space-generated data being increasingly captured by the GAFA and an awakening of governments on the topic would be useful.

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How Modern Offices May be a Transient Historical Phenomenon

Many things get written nowadays about the future of work. We will know in a few months how the pandemics has really changed our approach. In this post ‘The end of the office‘, Seth Godin takes a historical perspective on the modern office and how it may have been a transient phenomenon.

The modern office building has appeared with the industrial age and was conceived in fact as a data management factory. “For a century, the office was simply a small room next to the factory or the store. The office was upstairs from the bakery, or next to the stockyard or the foundry. Proximity to the worksite was its primary attribute.” Then it became sprawling office surfaces with layers of bureaucracy. For many it became one of the main centers of social life.

“As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems“. With the remote work experience and the fact that we can share data irrespective of location, the need for large offices has disappeared.

I believe in the future there will be more remote work from home or decentralized offices, accompanied by a number of get-together events. This is already how many global companies work when it comes to global project teams. Transition may be faster or slower depending on industry and tradition, but it is ongoing!

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How Modern Streaming Leads to Watching and Listening Faster

Have you noticed this possibility on streaming portals to watch movies or listen to music faster? I discovered this feature in Netflix, but there now also tools to speed up any video on Chrome or other browsers – without having an effect on sound frequency or too much distortion.

I must confess I am using this feature regularly when I need to watch movies or series in a time-constrained circumstance. But now I tend to use it quite regularly even without such constraints. It is like accelerated reading and is an interesting evolution of the way we consume video or audio.

Of course this interferes with the original intent of the creator of the video or audio track, who had probably decided on the original pace with much thought, and in a way this thus interferes with the creator intent. At the same time it is also the direction of modern usage of media that we try to cram as much in the limited time we have to consume those experiences.

I am quite convinced that the media producers will soon notice the trend and change the way they produce media to accommodate this trend of accelerated listening and viewing. Still it shows the current tension between our physically limited time and the wish to consume more media experience.

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How the Debate is Open About the Nature and Future of Cryptocurrency

In this interesting post ‘‘Black Swan’ author Nassim Taleb says bitcoin is an open Ponzi scheme and a failed currency‘, an interesting question is expressed about the true nature of cryptocurrencies and their future.

Cryptocurrency are highly volatile, which is an issue as to their actual usage: “you don’t replace the currency with something that’s so volatile that you can’t really commit to a transaction in it.” There is no doubt either that there is currently a lot of speculation on those cryptocurrencies, and as it becomes an increasingly public speculation with many people of all ways of life attracted to the scheme, it is certainly much overpriced and there will be a lot of disappointments in the near future.

The decisive aspect however I believe is the fact that cryptocurrencies are intrinsically difficult to control by law-enforcement and hence widely used by organized crime. This seems to be changing, and recent recovery of bounties paid in bitcoins after some hacking events, as well as increasingly stringent tax authority control, shows that it becomes much less safe as a way to hold money. However, such cryptocurrencies are not acceptable by governments in the long run because they are potentially economically destabilizing, therefore I don’t believe this will be sustainable particularly if independent cryptocurrencies volumes increase. In addition the ecological impact of cryptocurrency mining has become evident, as its impact on the semi-conductor market: cryptocurrencies don’t scale beyond a certain size without difficulties.

All in all, while government-backed electronic currencies will certainly emerge in the future, I am much less optimistic about the scalability and acceptability of really independent cryptocurrencies, and I believe that the current fashion may not last long. We’ll see what the future holds!

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How Human Augmentation Becomes Imperative for Defense

This interesting article ‘Space Force scientist warns it’s ‘imperative’ the US military experiment with human augmentation and AI to stay ahead of Russia and China‘ expose how military competition leads into human augmentation. And what happens in the military will undoubtedly spread later in civilian usage.

“[this Space Force scientist] announced we are entering the age of ‘human augmentation,’ which is crucial to the US’s national defense in order to not ‘fall behind our strategic competitors.‘

It proposes in particular to use self-learning algorithms to develop innovative strategies (such as AlphaGo algorithm that has self-taucht how to play go). This would lead to a battlefield combining human and IA agents (including probably drones). Therefore, human agents will need to be augmented to be able to fully work together with AI and fully participate in the battlefield.

This development was expected but we can now anticipate that it may go faster due to increased competition in the arms race between nations.

The challenge I believe will be to effectively combine the virtual battlefield with the real battlefield conditions: in effect the twin battlefield will have to reflect actual conditions on the ground and this will certainly be a major challenge in the years to come.

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How Copyright Trolls Now Spread to Modern Creative Common Licenses

This excellent article ‘Beware the Copyleft Trolls‘ explains how certain organisations are now suing systematically material used under modern Creative Common licenses.

Creative Commons licenses are a new approach to copyrights that provide lighter protection and usage rights. They have developed with the development of collaborative approaches on the internet, where images, sounds and other resources are shared widely. They are not free-for-all licenses, however they do allow a lot of non-commercial usage of material.

Still, some organisations seem to sue abusively users of material under those licenses, as soon as some conditions are not strictly followed such as attribution etc.

“Verch’s scam is a profitable one. He posts stock photography he savvily generates to meet market demand, such as images of “face coverings, test tubes and people wearing masks” that he put on his website at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Then, he waits for someone to slip up on the CC-BY-2.0 attribution. And he pounces.”

This is the behavior of trolls (other exist in the field of patent law – see for example our older post ‘Patent trolls and the end of conventional intellectual property‘ ) and judges seem to be reluctant to follow suit, however this creates a lot of disturbances.

Another proof that even when one tries to develop a benevolent and collaborative approach, some trolls do try to take advantage of the situation. Therefore one should be careful however I am certain society and law will act to make sure this remains marginal and the general intent of collaboration remains.

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