New Week Same Humans #26
Has Google abandoned ethical AI? Why a blockchain company burned a $95,000 Banksy. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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💡 This week’s Sunday briefing was about the present, and future of universal basic income. Go here to read Free Money for Everyone: Why the Debate over UBI is About to Explode.💡
This week, Google staff say the company couldn’t care less about ethical AI.
A US blockchain company burned a $95,000 Banksy painting live on Twitter. And India goes to war with foreign technology companies.
The stories I write about in New Week evolve fast. To catch updates on these stories and more, follow me on Twitter.
😇 Ministry of Ethics
It’s been a big week for ethics in tech.
Google staff published an open letter this week accusing their employer of abandoning its commitment to ethical AI. The letter came soon after the tech giant announced it had fired another leading members of its AI ethics team.
Back in December Google controversially fired Timnit Gebru after she complained over the company’s refusal to publish her paper on AI and marginalised groups. And two weeks ago another accomplished researcher, Margaret Mitchell, was axed; Alphabet said Mitchell had been moving files outside the company.
The letter, from activist group Google Walkout for Real Change, said the company had proven it would always prioritise the bottom line over ethics research. Calling this, ‘a watershed moment for the tech industry’ the group called on the US Congress to protect tech workers who become whistleblowers.
Meanwhile, the hack of surveillance camera company Verkana served as a powerful reminder of just why we need research into ethical tech. Hackers accessed live feeds from over 24,000 of the company’s cameras across the globe, including inside offices, schools, and prisons. Verkana cameras are equipped with ‘Smart Edge-Based Analytics’: facial recognition technology that can identify people and detect ‘unusual motion’.
One shard of light here? Researchers at Northwestern University published a new paper outlining tactics that they say can help return data power to the people. Among them? A method they call Data Poisoning: intentionally contributing meaningless or false data to the big platforms – for example, clicking on every ad they serve you – to confuse their algorithms and make targeting less accurate.
⚡ NWSH Take: Hey, Google call their HQ a campus, so they’re just like a university, right? At least, that’s what some thought in the early 2000s. Those days are long gone, but this story is a reminder of the ways in which we’ve outsourced research on the impacts of the technology revolution to the very companies profiting from that revolution. The solution? Yes, increased funding for academic research by tenured professors who can say what they like without fear of being fired. // The war between organised tech labour and big tech corporations is just getting started. // In the 20th century, mass uprising meant taking to the streets. As we move towards a world in which Big Tech corporations have more power than national governments, it may come to mean violence against The Algorithms, in which millions seek to destabalise the big platforms by feeding them an avalanche of useless data. Internet citizens of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your recommendations!
💸 All the way to bank
NFT art continues to set the world on fire.
Read New Week Same Humans #24 for a run down of how NFTs are bringing the dynamics that prevail in real-world art to digital art, too. In short, it’s all about the status of owning an original.
Back in that instalment I highlighted Christie’s online auction of digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5,000 Days. On Twitter I boldly predicted the work would sell for more than $1 million. The auction ends tomorrow, and the bid is currently at $13,250,000.
Meanwhile, this week a blockchain company called Injective Protocol bought a Banksy for $95,000, digitised it, burned the physical work live on Twitter, and sold the digital original as an NFT for $380,000. Welcome to 2021.
🇮🇳 India is building an internet of its own
India threatened to jail Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp employees this week.
The government wants those platforms to supply data on users who are sharing information about ongoing anti-government protests. It named executives who, it said, would be arrested if the requests aren’t met.
Western Big Tech has its sights on India’s estimated 750 million internet users. But there’s a problem. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is pursuing digital sovereignty; that means pushing out foreign companies and letting domestic alternatives – which are easier to control – bloom in their place. Modi recently imposed major new restrictions on Facebook and Twitter, requiring them to block certain types of content and file monthly ‘compliance reports’. Meanwhile leading Chinese services, including TikTok and WeChat, have been banned.
Now, domestic alternatives are popping up and racing to gain users. Koo, a new social platform that styles itself an alternative to Twitter (complete with bird logo!), has been downloaded over 3.2 million times in 2021 according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. Meanwhile, the most downloaded app right now is domestic TikTok clone Josh.
⚡ NWSH Take: We once dreamed about an open and borderless web, a space outside the control of governments and other powers. The open web died years ago at the hands of the big platforms. The borderless web was eroded by increasing Chinese isolation and the rise of domestic megaplatforms such as WeChat. // But now the emergence of a multipolar, fractured internet, or splinternet, is impossible to ignore. The 90s and early 2000s primed us to expect a world in which people everywhere would come to share a global hivemind. From Boston to Beijing, we would all watch the same videos, order from the same retail platforms, and eat the same brands of fast food. Instead, expect a period of ruthless digital deglobalisation.
🗓️ Also this week
🤖 The next generation of drones will be too fast for human soldiers to cope with, according to a US general. General John Murray, head of Army Futures Command, told an audience that rules against AI soldiers may need to be relaxed in order to deal with the threat.
🇨🇳 China’s 14th Five Year Plan will declare blockchain a key technology. It will mean increased state support for blockchain research; the Five Year Plans are China’s most important strategic documents.
🌐 A scientist says the universe may be a giant neural network. Professor Vitaly Vanchurin says his theory may explain the apparent inconsistencies between classical and quantum physics.
🤓 Mark Zuckerberg says we’ll soon use augmented reality glasses to ‘teleport’ to meetings. The Zuck says this will reduce business travel and so help limit climate change.
🖊️ You can fool OpenAI’s image recognition system with just a pen and some sticky notes. The AI misidentified an Apple as an iPod when someone stuck a note that said ‘iPod’ on the Apple.
🖼️ Meanwhile, Facebook announced a new AI vision model that can train itself by looking at vast numbers of unlabelled random images. Typically, AI systems must use annotated images during training.
💸 Jeff Bezos plans to spend $10 billion on climate change in this decade. The new CEO of Bezos’s Earth Fund, Andrew Steer, made the announcement in a series of tweets.
🎤 The Simpsons used deepfake technology to bring back the voice of Edna Krabappel. Marcia Wallace, who voiced Krabappel, died in 2013; Wired magazine asks if the entire show will one day be voiced by AIs.
🍌 Sony wants gamers to use bananas as PlayStation controllers. The company has filed a new patent for a system that will allow gamers to use any ‘non-luminous passive object’, such as a banana or a coffee mug, to play games.
🪐 NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is being controlled from a one-bedroom flat above a hairdresser’s salon in southeast London. Professor Sanjeev Gupta wasn’t able to travel to mission control in California, so he’s working from home.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,851,289,196
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7797363323
💉 Global population vaccinated: 0.9%
🗓️ 2021 progress bar: 19% complete
📖 On this day: The 10th March 2000 saw the peak of the dot-com bubble, with the NASDAQ Composite reaching 5,048.62.
In the neighbourhood
So it turns out that the Perseverance rover is being controlled from a one-bedroom flat that’s about 10 minutes walk from my house.
You never can tell what’s happening behind closed doors.
I’ll keep my eye out for Professor Sanjeev Gupta in the neighbourhood. It’s my mission to turn him into a New World Same Humans reader.
In the meantime, I’d love it if you made it your mission to share this newsletter with one person this week! That means forwarding the email to one friend, colleague, or family member who likes to talk trends, technology, and our shared future. Or you could share this instalment across one of your social networks, and let people know why you find it valuable.
I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Thanks to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.