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Cities are serendipity in action. Before the rise of smartphones and Amazon, most people would venture to a library or a bookshop to grab a book. In the course of locating the volume in question, you would pass by thousands of different works on hundreds of subjects. Perhaps your eye would catch on something completely random but incredibly useful while you scanned the shelves. Life in cities is similar.
But has life in cities fallen to the same fate, as apps take over dating, transport, shopping, and the civic square,...?
As someone leaves their home for their daily commute to the office, they encounter millions of different variables. It’s as if they are scanning millions of books while looking for the right one. Strangers are the critical ingredient here:
Are USA cities at a disadvantage here? Aside from the New York subway, how many interactions are blocked because everyone drives their 4-wheel bubble from home to the office? No wonder disaffection and disillusionment are so high in many states
Consider the power of this mingling in a city like Hsinchu, home to many of the world’s leading chip experts. There is an exponential effect at play: once a city has been established as the go-to place for, say, AI research, the world’s best AI researchers flock there.
But that only works when we engineer serendipity in the shared spaces, the user groups, the school pickup, the concerts and sports events
megacities of more than 10 million people – in Asia, South America and sub-Saharan Africa. By 2030, nearly 9 per cent of the world will live in just 41 cities.33
All this can lead to a gulf between urban citizens, the great contributors to and beneficiaries of exponential technology, and the rest of a country. This tension often leads to a conflict between national and city-level governments: with each claiming the right to determine how cities are run.
Local Optima can be detrimental to the global status
For example, the Financial Times recently pointed towards a tendency for national and city executives to clash over immigration – as national governments have turned against migrants, cities in need of labour have taken a more open approach.
So when will we see areas of deregulated immigration alongside areas of deregulated tax? 🤔
Exponential technologies allow cities more autonomy and self-sufficiency in electricity, trade and food.
I've seen this movie. They built a wall around the city and everything beyond was "The Wasteland"
More recently, this dynamic has spread to liberal democracies. In many cases, their reasoning is understandable. European data protection laws, namely the General Data Protection Regulation – which imposes a strict set of rules on how companies collect and use data – is perhaps the best example:
The reasoning is always understandable. That does not imply that it is moral, productive, authoritarian, just, or any other dimension we may or may not wish it to have. All it needs is to be true to those who enforce it.
institutions like the IMF and the WTO have long been the missionaries of globalisation, establishing a template for what participation in the world economy would look like. These assumptions seem out of place in a world of national self-sufficiency in energy and commodities, localised manufacturing, and cities of ever-growing importance.
The solution may be to develop more federal models of national politics, which give more power to regions and cities to manage their own affairs. They need the ability to attract people and regulate the quality of their citizens’ lives, by increasingly governing their own energy, resources and climate agendas.
Millions of civilian-targeted cyberattacks happen every day; and 96 per cent of businesses in Britain suffered a damaging cyberattack in 2019.13 Data leaks are one of the most common consequences of cyberattacks
2012, a particularly malevolent virus, Shamoon, struck oil and gas services across Qatar, the UAE and, in particular, Saudi Arabia. The hard disks of more than 30,000 computers were rendered inoperable.21 The attack wiped out the drilling and production data of the Saudi state oil company Aramco, and hit its offices in Europe, the US and Asia. It took the company almost two weeks to restore its network.
I'll be willing to wager those targets are under persistent attack, given what we now know about what oil companies knew in the 70s
The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 gave birth to the principle that the world was divided into sovereign nations with clear borders. The Geneva Conventions of 1929 and 1949 helped determine what was and was not a legitimate target for military conflict.
But what now in an age where gangsters can attack with the sophistication and violence of governments?
Maersk, one of the shining jewels of Danish business, was crippled by Sandworm’s cyberattack. All 49,000 of the company’s laptops were destroyed in the attack, and more than 1,000 business applications were ruined – all in the seven minutes it took the virus to propagate inside the firm.
According to a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the number of English-language tweets that made false claims on Twitter rose from almost negligible levels in 2012 to become a significant threat by 2016. In that period, the number of false claims increased by a factor of 30.
Falsehoods, the study found, spread across the network six times faster than the truth.
The old adage about a lie getting half way round the world before the truth gets dressed can be quantified.
It is this characteristic that makes some misinformation not just a nuisance but a type of hostile military action. And this category of misinformation is increasingly common.
Not misinformation, but disinformation, deliberately crafted to form falsehoods in the recipient
Russia topped the league table, responsible for 72 per cent of all foreign disinformation operations between 2013 and 2019.
misinformation becomes disinformation – that is, information that is actively malicious rather than merely inaccurate.
in the US, hostile state actors – particularly Russian ones – mounted concerted campaigns seeking to weaken America’s response to the pandemic. Tactics emphasised ‘weaponising’ pre-existing divisions in the US.41 The goal? To delegitimise efforts to control the spread of the disease and the subsequent vaccination programme.
Vaccinate, or the commies win...
Meanwhile the US had, by the end of 2020, no coordinated counter-disinformation strategy steered by any branch of government.44
Why would Trump want to expose himself?
the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) targeted several Turkish government locations with drones that anyone could buy on Amazon for under $300, having packed them with explosives.50 Then, in 2019, Houthi rebels from Yemen launched drone attacks
We already have the technology for wanton destruction. Drones are smart enough without modern AI. Like the paperclip machine, it's the dumb humans we need to worry about. People are far more careless with a £300 drone than a £30m one
Such weapons arguably also make illegal forms of warfare more likely, should any nation have the appetite to break international law.
Autonomy is a continuum, not a binary.
As is AI in general, and it's a very uneven spectrum
Legal experts argue there is a lack of clarity surrounding how courts might deal with crimes arising from the use of autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons.
If everyone is culpable, does that include the one oss maintainer in nabraska who made the image compressor on which the vision system is based?
The mischievous needling of small-scale cyberattacks, the disruptive potential of long-term disinformation campaigns, and savage, coordinated cyber warfare are all part of the same ecosystem.
And what of the protesters who will stop at nothing to shut down oil refineries, jet engine repairs or factory farms. You might agree ethically but is the impact any different from the actions of a hostile state?
It takes the realisation that expensive planes – like America’s Lockheed F-35 fighter, which will cost nearly $2 trillion over its life – are no match for cyberattacks: and that cyberattacks are a real threat. And so, in many cases, investment should go elsewhere.
See also nuclear weapons. Where Floppy disks and the 99999 password are as protective as tissue paper.
‘strategic snowflakes’. ‘Our daily life is enormously fragile,’ he says.66 The solution is digital literacy: the set of skills that enables citizens to operate safely in the digital world. An important feature of this is digital hygiene
Because we all know that gun safety and gun literacy in USA have completely eliminated the threat of gun violence.
Eternal vigilance is exhausting, especially if it's a hobby.
Critical thinking skills form part of high school curricula, as well as later adult education.68 Children even take classes on how to recognise fake news.
What would a set of non-proliferation treaties fit for the digital age look like?
But there are some things that cannot be bought and sold. The issue is not whether buying and selling in these arenas would be efficient, but rather about what is ethically justifiable.
You can’t buy a human. You can’t buy my liver. You can’t buy a friend – or, if you did, people might judge you a little.
But you can buy insulin. If you can afford it.
His famous essay ‘Code is Law’, published at the dawn of the new millennium, remains an excellent, prescient text. ‘The code regulates,’ Lessig writes. ‘It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them.
#ToRead
The code had become law. To say this was an important decision is an understatement. Apple and Google helped enable tools to support contact tracing, but did so on their terms
Authoritarians everywhere sneak control under the cloak of a universal good. Contact tracking to slow COVID-19, image scanning to show CSAM. Who would ever quotation the goal? But questioning the method isn't questioning the goal, a distinction that authoritarians in government or in private organisations willingly blur.
consider consumer credit bureaux. These are an essential way of determining a consumer’s financial health.
Are they essential? Some countries, such as France, would disagree
in some countries, including Turkey and the United States, people have a growing reluctance to live near other people who support different political parties. One recent analysis of 11 highly divided polities uses the phrase ‘pernicious polarization’ to refer to the phenomenon of polarisation eroding the ability of a democracy to function.26
The bubble is real and it's suffocating
Homophily itself is nothing new. It has long been present in our lives – the first study on the process, from 1954, found that racial and religious groups tended to cluster together within housing developments.
Wasn't this also the basis of company towns? Work together, dance together, pray together?
As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci puts it: ‘Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons. It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.’ For this reason, Tufekci argues, ‘YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.’29
One Step Closer to the edge
During their study, Waters and Postings witnessed a Facebook-enabled recruitment – watching a university student in New York go from claiming he had no clear religion to becoming an ISIS supporter, all in under six months. Facebook’s own research corroborated these findings.
I'm sure the MAGA and Brexit radicalism was just as fast, judging by the swings in the opinion polls
Right-wing and racist extremism was rife in many of Facebook’s major markets. And the platform’s design was making it worse: 64 per cent of people who joined extremist groups joined ‘due to [Facebook’s] recommendation tools’.
If you liked racism, you're going to love misogyny
Homophily stratifies our community. It atomises us into smaller, more disparate, more extreme groups. It builds walls, not bridges.
And soon we became the Morlocks and the Eloi
The first enclosure largely took place between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, as lands once held in common – fields used for grazing cattle, forests used to forage for wood – were taken into the hands of private owners through a series of enclosure acts.
This is the real tragedy of the commons - that the commons were stolen from us into private hands
We can all – big companies included – agree that we need new rules. Even Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of PR, argues that the boundaries for what major technology platforms can do must be decided through democratic politics.
But democracy can be manipulated by those who own the means of communication, and this is a masterful way for Facebook and others to pass the buck just as Coca Cola and IBM did before "it's not up to us to decide if killing Jews is legal, if Hitler says it's ok then we must abide by the law"
we can identify broad principles to underpin the relationship between citizens and the market. First, transparency. The systems that determine how content flows across digital networks – what gets censored, what gets boosted by the algorithm – must be easier to scrutinise.
Agree with this, and this is where GDPR could be strengthened, not just to all for transparency in decisions about you, but also in decisions made by platforms on your behalf
The 737 MAX was not allowed to fly again until it had passed a number of safety inspections. Boeing did not decide when the revamped 737 MAX was safe to fly; the Federal Aviation Administration did. We might learn from this example when thinking about our digital infrastructure.
737 Max still has problems, but there is definitely a place for an independent 3rd party to adjudicate whether a problem was fixed
Until 2019, when Donald Trump withdrew America from the INF treaty, Russia and the United States periodically inspected one another’s nuclear weapons systems.36 In the finance industry, bankers regularly run ‘stress tests’ to identify potential problems with their balance sheets, at the behest of central banks.
Was that done at Putin's request?
It would mean that if you were using LinkedIn, you would be able to access and read your friends’ posts on Instagram or Twitter. Earlier,
😨
I like companies not knowing what I'm doing on other platforms. Make it easier for me to share and much harder for social media to gather and share data
Imagine if a gig worker could bid for jobs across dozens of relevant platforms at once and carry the track-record they have earned from one service over to another. Or in the case of healthcare, where a patient could access their medical records independent of the provider behind them. In each case, power would slowly shift to the person and away from the platform.
💯
The argument is appealing. By putting a price on our data, we could create a more efficient market for the digital labour we all undertake.
Go on, bid for my data, highest price wins, but only if you meet my ethical standards
You might also be disappointed to learn how much you would actually earn from this approach. Facebook made about $7 in profit for every user in 2019.
economies of scale
