Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 105

It’s Wrong to Fear-monger on IoT Security

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Bruce Schneier on Amazon (Emphasis Mine)

In this blog post, Bruce Schneier is adding to what I’ve been complaining about for a while now in InfoSec—a massive tone of fear and panic around IoT technology and its interaction with humans.

Listen to the audio version of this essay.

“Everyone wants to control your life.”

“I fear it’s going to get a lot worse.”

Please stop.

I know it’s super cool to scream about how IoT is insecure, how it’s dumb to hook up everyday objects like houses and cars and locks to the internet, how bad things can get, and I know it’s fun to be invited to talk about how everything is doom and gloom.

I absolutely respect Bruce Schneier a lot for what he’s contributed to InfoSec, which makes me that much more disappointed with this kind of position from him.

InfoSec is full of those people, and it’s beneath people like Bruce to add their voices to theirs. Everyone paying attention already knows it’s going to be a soup sandwich—a carnival of horrors—a tragedy of mistakes and abuses of trust.

It’s obvious. Not interesting. Not novel. Obvious. But obvious or not, all these things are still going to happen.

When we brought electricity to millions of homes, houses burned down, and people died, but I’d argue it was worth it to have electricity in the home and business.

Fear-mongering about IoT is like looking at the first electricity coming to homes in the early 1900’s and warning everyone it’s a horrible idea because of the fire hazard.

You’re honestly objecting to assigning trust, at digital level, to various people in your family, friends, various organizations, etc? Digital management of trust is happening. Having digital assistants in our lives is happening. Having our homes, our workplaces, and our environments adapt to our presence is happening. These aren’t ideas, they’re inevitabilities.

Technology is integrating into human life on planet Earth, and there’s not anything anyone can do to stop that. And once we get out of the woods it’s going to be a massive improvement. Just like electrification was. We should obviously try to minimize the risks, but we don’t do that by trying to shout down the entire enterprise.

To characterize Amazon’s progress in smart homes as, “They want to control our lives.” is both incredibly shortsighted and irresponsible. Awesome people like Bruce (and everyone in InfoSec really) should be leading from the front by saying:

Yes folks—things are going to get nasty. The digitization of our lives through IoT will be a bumpy ride, and people will get hurt. We in InfoSec are on the front lines. We’re the technologists embracing this change first, as the inevitability that it is, and we’re doing our best to make the transition as safe as possible for you.

That is our role.

Not dog-piling on every new technology/life integration like it’s the harbinger of death that must be stopped by InfoSec. It’s not our job to stop the inevitable from happening; it’s our job to make it more safe when it does.

We should be shepherds, not obstructionists.

People complaining about fire hazards wouldn’t have stopped electrification, and people complaining about IoT isn’t going to stop that either.

People need us.

They’re bewildered and scared. So let’s start preparing them for what’s coming instead of adding to their fear and uncertainty.

We’re better than this.

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Bruce Schneier is Wrong to Fear-monger on IoT Security

To benefit from the work I put into my typography, read natively at: Bruce Schneier is Wrong to Fear-monger on IoT Security.

—

Bruce Schneier on Amazon (Emphasis Mine)

In this blog post, Bruce Schneier is adding to what I’ve been complaining about for a while now in InfoSec—a massive tone of fear and panic around IoT technology and its interaction with humans.

I absolutely respect Bruce Schneier a lot for what he’s contributed to InfoSec, which makes me that much more disappointed with this kind of position from him.

“Everyone wants to control your life.”

“I fear it’s going to get a lot worse.”

Really? Bruce, no. Please stop.

I know it’s super cool to scream about how IoT is insecure, how it’s dumb to hook up everyday objects like houses and cars and locks to the internet, how bad things can get, and how you get to be the one that warned everyone in your new book.

InfoSec is full of those people, and it’s beneath you to add your voice to theirs. Everyone paying attention already knows it’s going to be a soup sandwich—a carnival of horrors—a tragedy of mistakes and abuses of trust.

It’s obvious, Bruce. Not interesting. Not novel. Obvious. But obvious or not, all these things are still going to happen.

When we brought electricity to millions of homes, houses burned down, and people died, but I’d argue it was worth it to have electricity in the home and business.

Fear-mongering about IoT is like looking at the first electricity coming to homes in the early 1900’s and warning everyone it’s a horrible idea because of the fire hazard.

You’re honestly objecting to assigning trust, at digital level, to various people in your family, friends, various organizations, etc? Digital management of trust is happening. Having digital assistants in our lives is happening. Having our homes, our workplaces, and our environments adapt to our presence is happening. These aren’t ideas, they’re inevitabilities.

Technology is integrating into human life on planet Earth, and there’s not anything anyone can do to stop that. And once we get out of the woods it’s going to be a massive improvement. Just like electrification was. We should obviously try to minimize the risks, but we don’t do that by trying to shout down the entire enterprise.

To characterize Amazon’s progress in smart homes as, “They want to control our lives.” is both incredibly shortsighted and irresponsible. Awesome people like Bruce (and everyone in InfoSec really) should be leading from the front by saying:

Yes folks—things are going to get nasty. The digitization of our lives through IoT will be a bumpy ride, and people will get hurt. We in InfoSec are on the front lines. We’re the technologists embracing this change first, as the inevitability that it is, and we’re doing our best to make the transition as safe as possible for you.

That is our role.

Not dog-piling on every new technology/life integration like it’s the harbinger of death that must be stopped by InfoSec. It’s not our job to stop the inevitable from happening; it’s our job to make it more safe when it does.

We should be shepherds, not obstructionists.

People complaining about fire hazards wouldn’t have stopped electrification, and people complaining about IoT isn’t going to stop that either.

People need us.

They’re bewildered and scared. So let’s start preparing them for what’s coming instead of adding to their fear and uncertainty.

We’re better than this.

—

I spend 5-20 hours a week collecting and curating content for the site. If you're the generous type and can afford fancy coffee whenever you want, please consider becoming a member at just $10/month.

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Stay curious,

Daniel

Two Alien Space Forces That Almost Certainly Exist

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I was watching the Black Mirror the other night and remembered one idea and had another one.

These are both making the not-insignificant assumption of faster-than-light travel.

I think there is an extremely high chance that two different types of space force exist in our universe.

A force that listens for early civilizations sending out beacons, similar to Earth broadcasting out constantly say, “Hello! We’re here! Is there anyone out there?”, and then comes to save them from other aliens who come to take advantage. The Three Body Problem talks about how bad of an idea it is to send these kinds of messages, and Steven Hawking agrees.
A force that finds all civilizations capable of creating conscious creatures in virtual reality, and then goes and explores every single instance they have running to make sure nobody is trapped in a state of suffering. Imagine someone creating AIs who are like background characters in some grand plot, except they’re millions of individuals, and each one of them is conscious in some way and is actually suffering. Or like has been explored recently, imagine a few people created in the likeness of a gamer’s enemies, and who are subjected to unspeakable horrors for basically infinity (consider that you can control the passage of time to the subject).

I think that any sufficiently capable and morally advanced civilization (likely mostly AI at this point) would have these types of forces deployed throughout the universe.

Perhaps it would just be one collective, like the Borg except for good, who goes around making sure entire races don’t get exterminated by conquerors, and that someone doesn’t discover the ability to make consciousness and then use that ability to massively increase the amount of suffering in the universe.

Think of the stories that you could write about these two forces (or maybe two divisions of the same force).

And then think about the fact that, if there is such a thing as faster-than-light travel, they probably already exist.

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Unsupervised Learning’s Best Links of 2017

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This is a special, supplemental content post for site members looking back at the most popular Unsupervised Learning stories of 2017. I basically went through every newsletter and extracted the most clicked stories, and then distilled them that down to this list.

How to Email Like a CEO
The Future of AppSec Testing
A Guided Digital Security Planning Tool
Disambiguation of Net Neutrality
Marc Andreessen Keeps Coming Back to these 8 Books
Criminals Using iTunes to Launder Bitcoin
Know Which of Your AWS IPs Are Externally Facing

…

You can get the rest of this member content by becoming a member below.

Become a Member

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The Real Internet of Things: Acknowledgments

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

Thanks to Saša Zdjelar, Andrew Ringlein, and Jason Haddix for reading various versions and fragments of this text. Your input and support throughout this precarious first-book experience was deeply felt and appreciated.

Thanks especially to Saša for enthusiastically talking through many of these concepts with me, and to Jason for being the first of my friends to tell me back in 2013 that I had something worth capturing and sharing.

It’s easy to simply stop writing a book and to never go back. And without you two I very well could have.

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The Real Internet of Things: Colophon

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

San Francisco CA, London UK, Newark CA
2016
macOS Sierra
Vim
Markdown
Pandoc
Zomby, Glitch Mob, Technoboy, Ratatat, Cryptex, Behemoth, Opeth, Gojira

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The Real Internet of Things: Afterword

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

There are many who will read this book and see nothing but dystopia. In certain moods, I’m one of those people.

What’s important to understand, however, is that I’m not conjuring this reality into existence. I’m not enabling it to happen. I’m simply describing what is—without question—going to happen. As I talk about in the initial concept of Prediction, these are things that will come to pass not from conscious, planned thought, but rather because this is what humans will demand—and inevitably receive—because of what our species innately desires.

The amount of functionality these technologies will bring, and the demand for them by both consumers and industry, will be too powerful to oppose. They are an arriving train, and all we can do is get ready for it. When it gets here, it might run us down or it might take us comfortably to our destination. But it’s coming either way.

Many of the possible uses for these ideas deeply trouble me. As someone who cares about inequality, I see DAs as powerful levers for the successful to pull even further away from the masses. As someone in cybersecurity, I have compiled my own personal legion of abuse cases for so many of these capabilities, and they range from the troubling to the terrifying.

But my distaste for, and concern about, many of the potential abuses will not stop me from either alerting people of what’s coming, nor from seeking a way to transform it into something positive.

Hating the thought of this tech harming our humanity is natural, but don’t allow the unpleasantness convince you that it isn’t there, or that it isn’t inevitable. It is there. And it is coming.

So let’s use our energy to make the arrival as safe, secure, and beneficial to humanity as possible. Denial and dismissal help no one.

Extended content

There is far more to say on each individual topic presented here, as well as more topics to add. As I do I’ll be capturing them on my site at: danielmiessler.com/blog/. Please join me there as I continue to explore the concepts with related ideas, additional use cases, and conversation about how these technologies can and will be misused.

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The Real Internet of Things: What Does It All Mean

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

So we’ve talked through the various concepts. But what does this all get us? How is this the future of technology and humanity?

There have been three main themes throughout this book:

That we can predict the future of technology through our understanding of what humans ultimately want as a species.

That human-to-technology interface is about to fundamentally change by abstracting technology behind natural interfaces.

That we’re moving towards a bottom-up and evolution-based model vs. one that’s top-down and design-based.

Prediction

We cannot know what technology will be capable of in the future, but the more we understand ourselves the more we will know exactly how it’ll be used. That dynamic is the key to our predictive power.

We are the imperfect pothole, and technology is the puddle inside. Know the shape of the container and you’ll know the shape of what fills it.

Given that perspective, technology is perhaps best defined as:

An artificial layer of abstraction that converts an entity’s desire into reality.

Technology is what fills the gap between the world we have and the world we want, and in that sense it is far more predictable than most realize.

Interface

With regard to interface, the future of technology is one where technology usage becomes more natural, more invisible, and completely abstracted. Poking at applications applications with fingers or keyboards is identical to running clothes up and down a washing board—in a river.

We’re not just moving to a model where humans interact with their computers via voice, text, and gestures—that’s a small detail in the larger point.

What we’re moving toward is a model where humans don’t really interact with computers at all. Instead, humans will interact with assistants who then interact with computers on our behalf. It’s mediation. It’s abstraction. It’s humans simply wanting or needing things, naturally communicating those needs implicitly, or explicitly, and having those things simply happen.

The world becomes transparently curated and reconfigured around us according to our preferences.

Evolution

Finally, daemonization will unify a person’s identity into a single source of truth that lives where it should: with you.

Instead of being the fleshy, abstracted subject of thousands of imperfect databases, you will become the single authority for who you are, your realtime state, what you care about, and how you prefer to interface with everything else.

It will allow us to know the state of the world in realtime, to parse that information continuously, and to use technology to shape our lives according to our values.

This not a technology upgrade, it’s a humanity upgrade.

It’s knowledge of, and connection with, all other objects through our respective daemons—allowing you the ability to create and exchange value in realtime.

It will transition us from a model where institutions slowly and imprecisely interact with other institutions about us, to a model where we interact and exchange value with each other.

This is the real Internet of Things.

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The Real Internet of Things: Summary of Concepts

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

We covered a lot of ideas here, so let’s just review the main points.

There are basic trends in technology that we can see crystallizing: centralized to peer-to-peer, forced to natural, obvious to invisible, manual to automatic, periodic to continuous, scheduled to realtime, private to open, visual to multi-sensory, aggregated to curated, and designed to evolved.

Objects, including humans, will become their own authoritative sources of truth for information about them through a concept called Universal Daemonization.

Universal Daemonization will allow for realtime data gathering about objects in the world at nearly any scale.

Daemonization will be bi-directional, allowing for the updating of, pushing to, and issuing of commands to other objects.

Because humans will not be able to parse and interact with billions of daemons, Digital Assistants will perform this task for them.

Digital Assistants or Advocates (DAs) will work to optimize the life of their principals continuously, without rest, 24/7/365, and in multiple threads.

Our DAs will use AI to subtly alter their principals’ interface to the world, giving them better knowledge and providing interfaces for modification.

All requests made from your daemon will be made as a centralized identity, and third parties will validate that it was truly you that made those requests.

Our daemons will display numerous reputation scores about us which are also validated by third parties.

Our DAs will constantly customize our experiences around us by modifying what things look like, how they’re configured, and how we experience them, through transparent daemon interaction.

Constantly improving algorithms will be connected to the billions (then trillions) of sensors in the world, and they will constantly parse reality into events and data that are meaningful to humans that can then be shared with various entities.

Our DAs will use whatever resources they have (thousands of eyes and ears) to monitor us, our loved ones, and our valuables for safety and security.

Our DAs will functionally grant us superpowers through the enhancement of our sight, hearing, and many other sense types that we don’t even naturally possess.

Businesses will become daemonized forms of their core algorithms, and the primary consumers of these business daemons will not be humans themselves, but rather their DAs using the services on behalf of their principles.

People will broadcast their third-party-validated capabilities through their daemons, and this peer-to-peer infrastructure will represent the future of finding and securing work.

The four ways of gathering and using data will be: realtime data from objects, transferring that data, analyzing the data using algorithms, and then presenting it in some useful way.

The combination of machine learning and evolutionary algorithms will not only improve our ability to learn about the world, but will improve our ability to improve that ability.

This will culminate in a framework that allows humankind to systematically define its goals, study reality in realtime using AI, and then make optimizations to our behavior that best lead to our desired outcomes.

Daemonization will ultimately allow humans to reduce their reliance on large, abstracted institutions and instead look to each other for their needs.

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The Real Internet of Things: Details and Examples

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These are published chapters from my book The real Internet of Things, published on January 1st, 2017.

Each of the chapters you’ve read so far have introduced a single concept per section. I did this to make the concept crisp and simple, which isn’t possible if you start talking about how it might be implemented.

In this section I give a few additional ideas and likely/possible applications for each.

Universal Daemonization

Most objects will have an /info endpoint in their daemon that allows other objects to understand its basic attributes. This might be where the schema is stored, i.e., all the different endpoints that are available (that can be seen by the current viewer), etc.
Restaurants will have /menu and /order and /payment endpoints. Buildings will have /safety, /blueprints, and hundreds of other /infrastructure endpoints, and these will become quite standardized over time. The same will apply to millions of obvious entries for certain objects. Books will have info on the author, the length, where they were written and when, what tools were used, the list of references, and countless other pieces of information that you’d expect to see. The key is that these will become standardized for the basic info types for each object based on the object type, even though they may have many custom endpoints as well.
Consumables and construction materials will have, as part of their daemons, a series of elements related to lifespan, integrity, etc. These values are updated through numerous means: time in use, official inspections, etc. So a city can simply look at 10 city blocks and instantly evaluate what structures are most in need of upgrades. And consumers’ DAs can read a principal’s entire list of things they own, and order/recommend replacements based on it being time. Car tires, bike tires, the roof on the house, toothpaste, polo shirts, chicken soup, diapers, etc. The key point here is not just that someone (like the manufacturer) knows these things and can nag you—it’s that the object itself will know, and that your DA can manage replacement according to a combination of requirements and your preferences.
The more up-to-date an object’s information the better, so the informational endpoints will have update/validate options available for external clients that aren’t able to make changes to the daemon itself. For example, if a mobile business is marked as being at a certain street corner, but it moves without updating itself for whatever reason, it will be able to accept update requests from people who see that it’s moved in the last minute. This will depend on the authority, reputation, trustworthiness, and how many votes come in that agree. Entire economies will likely rise on paying micro-payments for providing high-quality validation of reality. The status of businesses, the location of common objects, ratings of service, etc. People could possibly make a living by simply observing and reporting in a responsible and valuable way, with updates being pushed right into the objects’ daemons themselves. – Even basic information about an object will have their own ratings based on a number of these factors—how often they’re updated (per day, per minute, per second, etc.). How many external validations have been made with what authority, etc.
Daemonization won’t be just for physical objects like vehicles and buildings and people. They will also be used for (and useful to) conceptual and virtual objects such as applications, systems, etc. Think of the use case of an IT asset database, where all applications, servers, operating systems, tests, builds, vulnerabilities, etc—all have their own daemons and their own realtime status. This makes queries and updates simple and elegant—exactly as they should be. When you run a security scan and find vulnerabilities, they each have their own daemon with their own schema, and they’re attached to an application that has its own, which sits on top of an operating system, which sits on a piece of hardware, etc. So finding out what version of software sits on what OS, what data is being used where, how that data is changing, where it’s moving—these all become daemon status updates.

Realtime Data

One of the biggest advantages of realtime data will be serving as a constant stream into scientific studies. So rather than data analysis taking days, weeks, months, or years, we’ll be able to pull that data ever day, every hour, every minute, or multiple times per second, constantly, and at scale.
Realtime data also allows us to more quickly study the effect of variables in these scientific studies. If we’re able to track mood in realtime, for an entire city, then we’re more likely to be able to say that a particular variable was the cause of change in that mood.
Realtime data will also be able to speak to, at a more granular level, the difference between causation and correlation.
Ultimately realtime data is the most important component in the information infrastructure and Desired Outcome Management concepts, since it’s the data that’s feeding the algorithms and output.
People or systems can simply ask questions about the state of the world and get answers, e.g., how many dolphins are there within one mile? is this area more star trek or star wars? How many airplanes are there over my head, which country’s currency has lost the most value in the last hour, how many single people who prefer cats to dogs are within a 10 minute drive, what’s the most popular fast food in this area? These types of queries will obviously require the other pieces of the information infrastructure as well (data transfer, algorithms, etc.), but the data is the most important piece.

Digital Assistants

DAs will basically run our lives, from wakeup time (based on your sleep cycles and the latest research), to which method works best (raising the lights and playing certain music), to starting your favorite food and beverage, preparing to read/display your preferred news sources, etc.
Your household, work environment, and any other place you spend time in will be run by your DA as the custodian of your life ecosystem (you’re the owner). When you buy new equipment it will of course be daemonized, and the enrollment process will involve it being added to your digital ecosystem. That means it’ll be automatically hardened and access controlled based on your ecosystem. So if friends and family can do certain things with certain kinds of devices, but not with others, those settings will automatically apply to this system as well.
Instead of household items like food and dish soap and paper towels ordering replacements for themselves, i.e. talking directly to businesses, every household item will register with the head-of-household’s DA, and the DA will manage the household based on its knowledge of preferences, calendars, etc.
Your DA will notify you in certain ways, which will over time produce Pavlovian responses, when certain situations arise. You’ll hear a sound when a single person of the opposite sex nears you while you’re not working, but only if they pass a few filters that are important to you.
You might let your DA use a number of commercial algorithms to find matches for you that you wouldn’t have thought to explore yourself. So you may put yourself in Cupid mode, or Spontaneity mode, where two DAs create pre-filtered but semi-chance meetings between two principals.

Tireless Advocate

If someone mentions to you casually about a particular sport, your DA (knowing you like to immerse yourself in new hobbies) will find the nearest training locations, the best local trainers, the best and nearest places to play, and some top tips for getting into shape. So when you inevitably ask about it in the next day or so, your DA will have an entire plan sorted out for you.
Any research topic you express interest in, or ask your DA to look into, will get a full parsing and summary treatment, ultimately resulting in a summary (which probably comes from its own commercial API) that gives you exactly how much information you wanted on that topic.
Summaries will have depth levels, so you’ll be able to say things like, “less depth”, or, “more depth” as desired, but that’ll only be when it doesn’t get it right in the first place.
DAs will scour the world looking for negative information about you, news that could negatively affect you, etc., and will bring it to your attention if it finds something.

Augmented Reality

When speaking to someone either in person or remotely, you will see indicators in your field of vision telling you how truthful they’re being. This will be from voice analysis, facial expressions (if it’s a visual call), etc. The visual indicators might be a Pinocchio nose, a red outline around them or your field of view, or it may be a non-visual indicator, like a subtle hissing or vibration.
As you’re talking to people you’ll have metadata about them displayed, such as humor scores, attractiveness ratings, favorite foods, favorite books, and interesting connections to you like mutual connections, that they attended the same college, etc.
Single people in public places will automatically see potential matches in different ways, e.g., displaying a cupid over their heads, showing them in color while everyone else is grayed out, etc.
The context that you’re currently in will be explicitly set by you or automatically set by your DA. If you haven’t eaten and your stomach rumbles your DA might switch you into “food finding mode”, which displays restaurants near you in particular ways based on what you’ve eaten recently, your favorite type of food, which places have the best ratings, etc.
Kind people will be able to turn on the Gloomy filter and see a gray and raining cloud over the heads of people who need cheering up.
You’ll be able to see live crime statistics for the area you’re currently in whenever it’s after a certain hour and you’re in an unfamiliar place.
Companies will specialize in providing artfully subtle yet powerful AR indicators for various contexts, e.g., hungry, lustful, angry, skeptical, curious, tired, frightened, sad, depressed, euphoric. Each of these will have different displays in your visual field, ambient and directional sounds, subtle vibrations in parts of your body, smells, etc.
Becoming frightened in a strange area could outline everyone in green or red to indicate who to avoid or seek help from based on facial imagery, gait analysis, body language, etc.—all of which is being streamed in realtime to a series of business daemons that specialize in this type of analysis and UI/UX display.
When people are sad or angry, your DA will stream the situation and the context to a company/algorithm which will display the perfect thing to say to solve the problem. It could be a de-escalation phrase, or a phrase that takes responsibility, or shows empathy, or whatever that situation needs.

Identity and Authentication

As you move throughout the environment, whether at home or overseas, doors will open or not open based on who you are and what level of authority you have according to that resource. If you’re a police officer in the United States, for example, and you are in Munich, you might be granted access to POV access to a certain street camera, while your friend who is not in law enforcement will not.
When you purchase (or lease) a new object, such as furniture or technology, you’ll simply enroll it through your DA into your ecosystem. All of your preferences will be automatically applied to it, including how it’s locked down, who can access it, under what circumstances, etc.
When you sign up for new services and experiences, your DA will transparently convey both your authentication validation (which will be signed by your Identity Verification Service) and all your preferences.

Reputation as Infrastructure

You ask your DA where to go for a weekend trip, and it calculates all the variables based on the best experience, price, and ratings by people in your network who have gone there. Your DA recommends the winner and then uses a separate daemon/business/API to build the travel plan and add it to the calendar
There will be algorithms/companies that do nothing but find special combinations of high ratings in random things. Like making people laugh, combined with being able to bake, combined with cosmology knowledge, and will use this cocktail to recommend relationships or problem-solving connections for people.
People rated extremely high in altruism and selflessness in terms of actually giving time and resources will be able to soak up micropayments from those around them. I may have a small amount of money that I transparently give to those like that around me, for example, and they might be able to just go through life giving of themselves without worry of where to eat or sleep. It’s an extreme case but it will be possible, especially with local businesses helping with free goods.
People will be more likely to treat others well since they won’t want their selfishness ratings to rise too high, which could lead to paying higher prices for things, not getting access to certain places, or people choosing not to interact with them.

Continuous Customization

Walking into a sports bar could see the content on the displays change, the music over the speakers change, etc. You could get one waiter vs. another, be asked about your day or not, have the temperature in the place raised or lowered, etc.
If you work at a physical location, your settings will instantly transfer, including your desk height and angle, your chair settings, the lighting in your cube, your communication settings, how often you are to be interrupted, etc.
When you visit a hotel your DA will have everything configured for you according to the maximum capabilities of the property. This will include bed style, products in the bathroom, what’s playing on the display, the temperature in the room, etc. These are not things that you ask for—they’re all things that your DA knows best about you, and it simply transfers that to the property as a customization package request.
As you move from place to place (say hotels or airplanes) your context will transfer with you through your DA. If you’re halfway through watching a show on a plane when you land, your DA will ask if you want to pick it up where you left off when you get in bed at the hotel.
Anything that’s customizable that you visit will be adjusted by your DA in this way. Walk into a new home dealership and you’ll hear your favorite music, or an ideal experience for that environment, you’ll get your favorite drink, and someone will interact with you in a way you’ll enjoy.
Customization will include spontaneity, since your previous likes will inevitably get old. Part of your DA’s job, as well as the job of various experiences, will be to delight you with new music, new lighting, new interactions, etc. This will be handled through thousands of competing businesses/algorithms/daemons.
At certain really important times in your life, like when you’re out riding bikes with a childhood friend in your hometown, you might both hear a perfect soundtrack of the music you used to listen to together. These are perfectly curated experiences, performed by your DA, using specialized experience companies/algorithms. The purpose of these APIs is to always have the perfect song, or the perfect view, or the perfect whatever, for that situation.

Omniscient Defender

You’ll be notified by your DA if anyone in your family is in a dangerous situation that falls above a certain threshold.
You’ll be able to switch your visual point of view instantly to any camera you have access to, whether that’s inside your house, through the eyes of someone you’re sharing access with, drones hovering over your house, etc.
You and your loved ones’ DAs will be scanning the environment for situations that seem dangerous. More specifically, they’ll be streaming live footage to their preferred company/algorithm that specializes in assigning danger ratings to environments.
Your DA will stream surrounding conversations to a company/algorithm to alert you of anything that could be dangerous to you.
Your entire ecosystem becomes eyes, ears, and noses for your DA to monitor your family and possessions 24/7.
Your DA will let you know when you are being monitored, when you should disable your daemon, take other countermeasures, etc.
Your DA will let you know when you’re doing something that could be controversial, and give you the capture points that it could be pulled from. It will be constantly monitoring ways you could be monitored and make sure that you’re not causing harm to your reputation.

Human Enhancement

As you move into new areas your DA will query and load up various views of different objects you might look at. So you could look at a building and see the people inside as heat signatures, or you might see the schematics of a building from a distance, all as AR overlays.
With a gesture or a voice command you will simply enable X-Ray vision, or heat signature, and then see the world through that perspective. Things that were pre-loaded will show quickly, others will take time, and others will not show at all because there’s no data for them. But over time, and with enough daemon access, we’ll be able to see much of the world in this way.
The same will apply to hearing, with the ability to focus on someone across a parking lot and hear what they’re saying. You’ll be able to gesture, target, or do some other aesthetically appealing way to initiate and visualize the effect. When it kicks in you’ll hear the person talking as if they’re speaking in your ear.
You’ll be able to zoom into things visually as well, and things you can do this with will be subtly indicated within your AR interface, perhaps with a tiny telescope in the top right corner. For any of those items you can make a gesture and zoom in and out using whatever nearby cameras that exist (that you have access to).

Businesses as Daemons

Play the perfect song for this moment.
Find the perfect gift for this person.
Write the perfect letter for this situation.
Create the perfect song for this situation.
Give me the best path from A to Z given this cargo and time of travel.
Display this content to me in the way that will help me make the best decisions in the least amount of time.
What should I watch right now?
When I look at the cover of a book, give me a perfect summary that fills the cover, along with the rating.
What should I listen to?
Why am I not happy?
If I redesigned my living room, what are the top best options?
What do I waste the most time on in my life?
Surprise me with an interesting music choice that I’ll love but never would have picked myself.
Remind me when there’s someone I care about that I haven’t told how much I love them.
Show me how much danger I am in at any given moment.
Show me the local crime statistics for the area I’m in.
Spend up to 5,000 to automatically deploy local defenders if anyone in my family gets in danger.
Only show me menu items that I should eat as part of my new health plan.
Build me a perfect daily routine based on my life goals.
Find the perfect girl for me.
What comic series would I like?
I’m new to Sushi, what should I try on this menu?
I just got this text, how should I respond?
I need to impress this person I just met; build me a weekend spending no more than 1,000 that they’ll love.
Who’s hurting the most within 1 mile, and what can I do for them?

The Future of Work

Jason is rated highly in many local and global skills, and he sits relaxing at his favorite coffee shop. He’s asked his DA to only bother him with incoming job requests if they pay over a certain amount. Because of his high ratings in these skills, he often gets fiction editing requests, requests to help move things, cat-sitting, legal contract review, and empathic listening. When a job passes the threshold, his DA (named Timmothy), will break in quietly in his earpiece. “Legal contract review, 37 pages, due by tomorrow morning, are we interested?” Jason nods his head and the details are worked out between DAs transparently.
Nadia sits at her favorite co-working location watching incoming job requests scroll by her AR display. She’s a coder so she’s watching the logos for various languages scroll by, with the size of the icon representing the payment for the project. She also gets lots of requests for helping people with programming, which she sometimes takes just to be nice, since they don’t pay much. She sees a big project in her favorite language scroll by and tells her DA (Vira), “I’ll take that one.”
Companies will specialize in finding better matches of job seeker and job taker based on hidden truths they extract using their proprietary algorithms.
You’ll be able to simply say, “Find me someone to help me move this pile of rocks,” or, “Find me the best person to edit this photo.” Your DA will contact multiple companies/algorithms to find the best fit for you (if it doesn’t know already) and that company will connect you with the best service or person.
You’ll be able to specify that you prefer local, that you prefer in person, that you prefer best in the world, that you prefer cheap, etc. And the algorithms your DA uses will take this into account.

The Four Components of Information Infrastructure

There will be countless companies competing to provide various parts of the sensor, daemon, transfer, algorithm, and interface infrastructure. They will be modular in nature so that one company’s sensors can interface cleanly with another company’s daemon technology.
Each piece is a bottleneck to the entire system, so realtime data for increasingly large systems (consisting of billions and trillions of nodes) will become possible as the minimum capacity component in the infrastructure is upgraded at any given time.

Getting Better at Getting Better

Machine learning and evolutionary algorithms will be used to improve each other, accelerating the pace at which both can improve.
As algorithms start replacing humans, the pace of improvement will only increase; shown by algorithms getting better at handling customer service issues, driving, obtaining knowledge, etc. The advantages of these gains can be almost instantly transferred and applied elsewhere in the industry.

Desired Outcome Management

Algorithms will be pointed to realtime datasets that are continuously updated, and the algorithms will continue to optimize themselves as they consume more data.
Philosophy will become far more interesting because once the data infrastructure is more standardized and modular, the value from data, statistics, and machine learning will increasingly hinge upon asking the right questions. The right questions, in turn, will hinge upon our goals and will unfortunately require philosophers to figure out (and articulate) what those should be.

Peer-to-peer Value Exchange

Eventually people will build communities that are functionally, emotionally, and economically tied to each other through mutual dependence and support. Value exchange, providing of services, infrastructure mechanisms, etc.—will all be handled internally to a significant degree in order to return to a sense of community.
Fewer services (but still many) will require centralized, institutionalized resources, as the peer structure will eventually be robust enough to handle most needs. Exceptions to this norm will be in the areas where it makes sense, construction and emergency vehicles for example, to have a permanent staff available at all times.

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Daniel