New Week Same Humans #5
The Large Hadron Collider solves for ethical AI. The gig economy takes on home evictions. Airbnb pull the plug on pandemic house parties.
Welcome to the Wednesday update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 12,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮
💡 This week’s Sunday essay used the Four Futures framework to investigate the impact of a post-truth world. Go here to read Four Futures for Truth and Democracy. 💡
This week, how CERN’s particle physicists are leading the fight for more ethical AI.
Also, if the gig economy isn’t yet dark enough for you, then check out the new gig work platform for landlords who want to evict their tenants.
Airbnb start sharing data on illicit house parties with US local government.
Plus, the results of the first ever survey of NWSH readers: find out what our community thinks about the future of truth and democracy.
Let’s go!
💥 Particle physicists solve for ethical AI
It turns out that an algorithm central to the work of leading particle physicists is the same as that used to generate deepfakes.
The generative adversarial network, or GAN, algorithm has a freakish ability to generate fake data that mimics the real equivalent. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider use GAN to simulate the high-energy collision of particles. And trolls use it to make celebrity deepfakes.
Now, physicists at CERN are diving deeper into the way GAN works, in an attempt to understand why AIs display racial and other biases, and ultimately to help build more ethical AI.
This all comes in the week that Twitter had to apologise for a photo-cropping app that consistently excludes the faces of black people.
Meanwhile, access to GAN is being democratised fast. A new app called Puppets.World uses the algorithm to enable users to animate any photo or portrait of a person.
⚡ NWSH Take: The quest for AIs that embody our best values is an era-defining one. When an unethical AI is discovered the crowd is quick to assume bad intentions, but the truth is often more prosaic and just as scary: no one really understands how these AIs work, or why they produce the outputs they do. // That doesn’t let anyone off the hook here, or diminish the underlying reality of the prejudices that biased AIs reflect. Every organisation will rightly be judged on the action it takes to identify and correct unethical AIs. // This will fuel broader expectations around ethics and online presence. Ask yourself: is every aspect of my organisation’s online presence as ethical and inclusive as possible? It can be as simple as changing the language you use on your site or inside your app.
👽 The post-pandemic economy is weirder than you think
Three glimpses of the strange new economy that the pandemic is helping to build.
Civvl is a new startup that claims to be ‘Uber, but for evictions’. Essentially, Civvl is a gig economy platform where US landlords can find freelance workers to evict tenants who can’t pay their rent. This VICE article is alive to the possibility that the platform is a prank (here’s hoping). But it’s tied to the genuine gig economy company OnQall, which suggests otherwise. Is this anti-capitalist performance art or a genuine horror story of a startup? I’ll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, early data suggests remote working has led to a massive spike in productivity in the US.
This is a fascinating chart. It’s not yet clear, though, whether the apparent rise in productivity is real, or an artefact produced by a big spike in unemployment.
Last, this story about a restaurant in Seoul switching to robot waiters caught my eye. Restaurants in Seoul have just reopened, and the move is intended to reassure customers who are anxious about Covid. We’ve all seen stories about robot waiters before. But will the pandemic be the spark that ignites a massive shift towards automation across the food service industry? That’s a lot of jobs. According the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.6 million people in the US alone work as waiters.
⚡ NWSH Take: Across the last six months we’ve all been rightly focused on the health impacts of the pandemic. But the knock-on economic, and eventually social and political, impacts are going to be huge, and we’re only just waking up to them. // We’ll be struggling to gather and interpret data on unemployment, productivity, rent arrears, evictions and more for months to come. // The robot waiter story is a reminder of the pandemic’s power to accelerate trends such as that towards automation. Ask yourself: what’s the single biggest trend inside your industry that has been fast-forwarded by this crisis? // The 2008 crash fuelled the Occupy Movement, Brexit, and Trump. This recession is far deeper. Turbulence is coming, on a scale few people are talking about.
🏠 Data pulls the plug on Airbnb pandemic parties
During the pandemic people have been using Airbnb rentals as popup house party venues.
Now, the platform has launched a portal to help US local governments combat the problem. The portal will share the address of Airbnb rentals, and enable regulators to request properties are blacklisted if they become party hotspots. Take that young people.
Meanwhile, US car safety regulators are launching a platform for sharing the data generated by autonomous cars. Uber, Waymo and others will participate.
And the UK government has set out plans for a National Data Strategy to boost the use of data in government, business and civil society. UK ministers say they want the kind of data sharing seen during the pandemic to become the new normal.
⚡ NWSH Take: Big Tech and sharing economy giants have woven their way through the lives of billions of people. In so doing, they’ve become a new form of socio-corporate power that we don’t yet fully understand. // Data is at the sharp end of this phenomenon. We’ve built a world that runs on data, and it’s Airbnb, Uber, Google and Big Tech players who own that data, not our national governments. US intelligence requested data on around 107,000 Google accounts in the first half of 2019. // In this environment, is it time to rethink the nature of data ownership? New frameworks that make corporate data ‘public by default’ could see more private-public partnerships of the kind Airbnb is now running with US local government.
🔮 The future as you see it
In this week’s Sunday essay I imagined four alternate futures for truth and democracy. And I asked you to vote on which you thought most likely.
The results are in, and, obligatory drumroll…
We have a draw!
12% voted for Collapse, in which democracy falls to a Big Tech dictatorship
18% voted for Transformation into utopian rule by a Philosopher King
35% voted for Growth, which sees us muddling on much as ever
35% voted for Discipline, which sees tough new regulations imposed on Big Tech
In this way, the NWSH community reveals itself to be perfectly poised between optimism and realism.
If you ask me, I think we’re most likely see some version of the Discipline scenario in the years ahead. We’ll come to look on the pre-regulation years as something of a digital wild west. But that is a weakly held opinion. It is, of course, impossible to be certain.
Thanks for voting, and more interactive instalments coming soon!
🗓️ Also this week
🌐 NWSH’s Analyst at Large, Monique Van Dusseldorp, invites you to join her at the Next Generation Internet Policy Summit, an online event on the future of the internet. Go here for a free ticket and to follow the event online on Mon 28 and Tue 29 Sept.
🎵 Spotify is filling up with search optimised spam tracks such as ‘Natural White Noise Best Nature Sounds for Sleeping’. Some spam track creators are making thousands of dollars a month with each track.
🚀 A startup founded by former SpaceX engineers wants to help people build the Elon Musk way. First Resonance provides software that supercharges manufacturing processes.
🇪🇺 Facebook says it may withdraw from Europe if regulators continue to play hardball. This move was foreseen by the Growth scenario in NWSH #35. Just sayin.
🌏 Chinese President Xi Jinping says his country will be carbon neutral before 2060. The WWF says the pledge is game-changing.
👩🚀 NASA revealed a plan to put astronauts back on the moon in 2024. The mission will cost an estimated $28 billion, and NASA say one of the astronauts will be a woman.
🎃 The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention has warned against door-to-door trick-or-treating this Halloween. They suggest a ‘grab and go’ alternative in which children take pre-packaged candy from driveways.
🧠 Twitter reminded us how the philosopher Bernard Williams foresaw the post-truth age. This is why tech companies need philosophers in their ranks.
✈️ Airbus revealed three concepts for the world’s first zero-emission commercial airliner. They say such a plane could be in service by 2035.
🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋♀️ Global population: 7,813,845,238 and counting
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.7682264888
🗓️ 2020 progress bar: 73% complete
📖 On this day: On 20 September 1889 Nintendo Company is founded by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi. Its first product is a popular card game called Hanafuda.
Fight for your right
So Airbnb are shutting down illicit house parties.
It had to be done. But in the meantime, we’re building a virtual party of our own. At New World Same Humans a community is coming together: one dedicated to the idea that it’s up to all of us to build a better shared future in the aftermath of this crisis. And now, our party is 12,000 members strong.
Right now, there’s one thing you can do to help: invite more people inside!
So if you found today’s instalment valuable, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, relative, or colleague – who’d also enjoy it? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let others know why you think it’s worth their time. The more people who join us, the stronger we become.
I’ll be back on Sunday. Until then, be well,
David.
P.S Huge thanks to Nikki Ritmeijer for the illustration at the top of this email. And to Monique van Dusseldorp for additional research and analysis.