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stoweboyd

Yes, come back in 9999 to pay your taxes.

boabjohn

The extra funny bit is the date range...

mostlysignssomeportents

The AI Now Report: social/economic implications of near-future AI

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council convened a symposium at NYU’s Information Law Institute in July, and they’ve released their report: 25 crisp (if slightly wonky) pages on how AI could increase inequality, erode accountability, and lead us into temptation – along with recommendations for how to prevent this, from involving marginalized and displaced people in AI oversight; to increasing the diversity of AI researchers; to modifying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act to clarify that neither stands in the way of independent auditing of AI systems.

As many noted during the AI Now Experts’ Workshop, the means to create and train AI systems are expensive and limited to a handful of large actors. Or, put simply, it’s not possible to DIY AI without significant resources. Training AI models requires a huge amount of data – the more the better. It also requires significant computing power, which is expensive. This limits fundamental research to those who can afford such access, and thus limits the possibility of democratically creating AI systems that serve the goals of diverse populations. Investing in foundational infrastructure and access to appropriate training data could help even the playing field. Similarly, opening up the development and design process within existing industry and institutional settings to diverse disciplines and external comment could help create AI systems that better serve and reflect diverse contexts and needs.

…AI systems also have manifold impacts within labor markets, beyond “replacing workers.” They shift power relationships, employee expectations, and the role of work itself. These shifts are already having profound impacts on workers, and as such it’s important that an understanding of these impacts take into account the way in which fair and unfair practices are constituted as AI systems are introduced. For example, if companies that develop AI systems that effectively act as management are seen to be technology service companies, as opposed to employers, employees may be left without existing legal protections.

…AI and predictive systems increasingly determine whether people are granted or denied opportunities. In many cases, people are unaware that a machine, and not a human process, is making lifedefining decisions. Even when they are aware, there is no standard processes to contest an incorrect characterization, or to push back against an adverse decision. We need to invest in research and technical prototyping that will ensure that basic rights and liberties are respected in contexts where AI systems are increasingly used to make important decisions.

…In order to conduct the research necessary for examining, measuring, and evaluating the impact of AI systems on public and private institutional decisionmaking, especially in terms of key social concerns such as fairness and bias, researchers must be clearly allowed to test systems across numerous domains and via numerous methodologies. However, certain U.S. laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), threaten to limit or prohibit this research by outlawing “unauthorized” interactions with computing systems, even publicly accessible ones on the internet. These laws should be clarified or amended to explicitly allow for interactions that promote such critical research.

…In many cases, those living with the impact of AI systems will be the most expert on the context and outcome of AI systems. Especially given the current lack of diversity within the AI field, it is imperative that those impacted by AI systems’ deployment be substantively engaged in providing feedback and design direction, and that these suggestions form a feedback loop that can directly influence AI systems’ development and broader policy frameworks.

…As a field, computer science suffers from a lack of diversity. Women, in particular, are heavily underrepresented. The situation is even more severe in AI. For example, while a handful of AI academic labs are being run by women, only 13.7 percent of attendees were women at the most recent Neural Information Processing Systems conference, one of the field’s most important annual gatherings. A community that lacks 80 diversity is less likely to consider the needs and concerns of those not among its membership. When these needs and concerns are central to the social and economic institutions in which AI is being deployed, it is essential that they be understood, and that AI development reflects these critical perspectives. Focusing on diversity among those creating AI is key. Beyond gender and representation of protected classes of people, it is also important that diversity include various disciplines beyond computer science (CS), creating development practices that rely on expertise from those trained in the study of applicable social and economic domains.

http://boingboing.net/2016/09/24/the-ai-now-report-socialecon.html

boabjohn

This grabs the core inflection points where we become folded into our own toolset (yet again!)

Dates back to 2010 but the passion and insight are the key here. The tools he shows are even more robust and innovative now.

#dataviz

robertreich

Aetna Shows Why We Need a Single Payer

The best argument for a single-payer health plan is the recent decision by giant health insurer Aetna to bail out next year from 11 of the 15 states where it sells Obamacare plans.

Aetna’s decision follows similar moves by UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, and Humana, one of the other giants.

All claim they’re not making enough money because too many people with serious health problems are using the Obamacare exchanges, and not enough healthy people are signing up.

The problem isn’t Obamacare per se. It’s in the structure of private markets for health insurance – which creates powerful incentives to avoid sick people and attract healthy ones. Obamacare is just making the structural problem more obvious.

In a nutshell, the more sick people and the fewer healthy people a private for-profit insurer attracts, the less competitive that insurer becomes relative to other insurers that don’t attract as high a percentage of the sick but a higher percentage of the healthy. Eventually, insurers that take in too many sick and too few healthy people are driven out of business.

If insurers had no idea who’d be sick and who’d be healthy when they sign up for insurance (and keep them insured at the same price even after they become sick), this wouldn’t be a problem. But they do know – and they’re developing more and more sophisticated ways of finding out.

It’s not just people with pre-existing conditions who have caused insurers to run for the happy hills of healthy customers. It’s also people with genetic predispositions toward certain illnesses that are expensive to treat, like heart disease and cancer. And people who don’t exercise enough, or have unhealthy habits, or live in unhealthy places.

So health insurers spend lots of time, effort, and money trying to attract people who have high odds of staying healthy (the young and the fit) while doing whatever they can to fend off those who have high odds of getting sick (the older, infirm, and the unfit).

As a result we end up with the most bizarre health-insurance system imaginable: One ever more carefully designed to avoid sick people.

If this weren’t enough to convince rational people to do what most other advanced nations have done and create a single-payer system, consider that America’s giant health insurers are now busily consolidating into ever-larger behemoths. UnitedHealth is already humongous. Aetna, meanwhile, is trying to buy Humana.

Insurers say they’re doing this in order to reap economies of scale, but there’s little evidence that large size generates cost savings.

In reality, they’re becoming very big to get more bargaining leverage over everyone they do business with – hospitals, doctors, employers, the government, and consumers. That way they make even bigger profits.

But these bigger profits come at the expense of hospitals, doctors, employers, the government, and, ultimately, taxpayers and consumers.

So the real choice in the future is becoming clear. Obamacare is only smoking it out. One alternative is a public single-payer system. The other is a hugely-expensive for-profit oligopoly with the market power to charge high prices even to healthy people – and to charge sick people (or those likely to be sick) an arm and a leg.

boabjohn

Stark realities...we've got the best system money can buy.

gothic-punk

A new Wyoming law expands on the “ag-gag” trend of criminalizing whistleblowers in a new way: making it illegal for citizens to gather data about environmental pollution.

Wyoming’s Senate Bill 12, or the “Data Trespassing Bill” as it’s being called, criminalizes the collection of “resource data.”

It defines collection as “to take a sample of material, acquire, gather, photograph or otherwise preserve information in any form from open land which is submitted or intended to be submitted to any agency of the state or federal government.”

gothic-punk

Data Trespassing

stoweboyd

We’re in Kafka territory, here.

boabjohn

Wow...off the scale. Information is power / power is money / data is trespass.

stoweboyd

James Bullard of the St Louis Fed has embraced the postnormal economics of our time

James Bullard of the St Louis Fed has embraced the postnormal economics of our time:

FOUR times a year the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve board that sets monetary policy, concludes with a special flourish: a press conference, and the publication of the members’ economic projections. The latter includes a “dot plot” which shows how members think rates will unfold over the next few years. When the new dots were released at the end of the June meeting, on the 15th, it quickly became clear that one was not like the others. FOMC members overwhelmingly see the Fed’s main interest rate rising to between 1% and 2% in 2017, then on to between 2% and 3% in 2018: all of them, that is, except one. That oddball member projected the interest rate would stay right about where it is now over the next two years. When the projections dropped, Fed watchers immediately speculated about just which member had turned super-dovish (or super pessimistic).

Two days later, all was revealed. The anomalous dots belonged to James Bullard, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, and traditionally a bit of a hawk. But Mr Bullard’s dots represent something more interesting than a simple shift in the outlook for the economy. As he made clear in two statements published on June 17th, his whole way of thinking about monetary policy in the economy has changed.

Mr Bullard begins by noting that the Fed seems to have more or less succeeded in achieving its mandates. The unemployment rate, at 4.7%, is about as low as it ever gets. Meanwhile, inflation is close to returning to the Fed’s 2% target. Growth is plodding along in steady fashion. And yet this is all occurring against a policy backdrop that remains wildly out of the ordinary, at least by pre-crisis standards. The Fed’s main interest rate is barely above zero (and has plumbed such depths for the last eight years). The Fed’s balance sheet remains at the enormous size to which it grew during multiple quantitative-easing operations. And the Fed is promising to raise rates only very, very gradually. Monetary policy, as the central bank constantly insists, is highly accommodative. And yet the economy is behaving like it is coasting along the gentlest of downward slopes.

One could interpret this puzzling outcome in a few ways. Mr Bullard sees it as evidence that the economy does not converge toward some steady state, “normal” condition, in which interest rates sit at a comfortable 4% or so. The idea that eventually the natural processes of the economy will support “lift off” and “normalisation” is wrong, he thinks.

Instead, there are many stable regimes in which an economy can land, he reckons, and which can be stable until some shock comes along to push it out. Right now, the American economy is in a low growth, low inflation, low interest-rate regime. It has been stuck there for years, even as the Fed’s published projections suggest that a rise back to “normal” rates is just over the horizon. Mr Bullard is effectively saying: let’s dispense with that fantasy.

Dispensing with the fantasy of normality: embrace the postnormal.

The first, described as the St Louis Fed’s new characterisation of the economy, is here. In it, Mr Bullard says that there can be multiple productivity regimes—low and high, for instance, corresponding to slower or faster trend growth—but that the Fed has no way to predict when a move from one to another will occur (and should not try to in making its projections). There can also be multiple real interest rate regimes, based on things like the supply and demand for capital and the liquidity premium on safe assets. The interest-rate regime also seems to be persistent, with switches that can’t easily be predicted. For the economy to look wildly different from its current state, one of those two factors, productivity and real interest rates, would need to flip to some new regime. But they probably won’t, Mr Bullard says, and so the economy probably won’t look wildly different.

Sounds like a strange attractor in complexity theory, something many financial analysts have zero grounding in. I’ll be digging into his report for more meat.

boabjohn

It's about time we got serious with the complexity theories in the heart of the bea$st.

peterdiamandis

Data… World Getting Better

When I published Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think in February 2012, I included about 80 charts in the back of the book showing very strong evidence that the world is getting better.

Over the last five years, this trend has continued and accelerated.

This blog includes additional “Evidence for Abundance” that you can share with friends and family to change their mindset.

We truly are living in the most exciting time to be alive.

By the way, if you have additional ‘Evidence for Abundance’ (Charts, Data, etc.) that you’ve encountered, please email them to me at [email protected].

Why This is Important

Before I share the new “data” with you, it’s essential that you understand why this matters.

We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded by negative news from every angle. If you turn on CNN (what I call the Crisis News Network), you’ll predominantly hear about death, terrorism, airplane crashes, bombings, financial crisis and political scandal.

I think of the news as a drug pusher, and negative news as their drug.

There’s a reason for this.

We humans are wired to pay 10x more attention to negative news than positive news.

Being able to rapidly notice and pay attention to negative news (like a predator or a dangerous fire) was an evolutionary advantage to keep you alive on the savannahs of Africa millions of years ago.

Today, we still pay more attention to negative news, and the news media knows this. They take advantage of it to drive our eyeballs to their advertisers. Typically, good news networks fail as businesses.

It’s not that the news media is lying – it’s just not a balanced view of what’s going on in the world.

AND because your mindset matters A LOT, my purpose with my work and with this blog is to share with you the data supporting the positive side of the equation and to give you insight to some fundamental truths about where humanity really is going…

The truth is, driven by advances in exponential technologies, things are getting much better around the world at an accelerating rate.

NOTE: This is not to say that there aren’t major issues we still face, like climate crisis, religious radicalism, terrorism, and so on. It’s just that we forget and romanticize the world in centuries past – and life back then was short and brutal.

My personal mission, and that of XPRIZE and Singularity University, is to help build a “bridge to abundance”: a world in which we are able to meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child.

So, now, let’s look at 10 new charts.

For more, I encourage you to read my book Abundance: the Future is Better than you Think, or apply to join me at Abundance 360 here.

More Evidence for Abundance

Below are 10 powerful charts illustrating the positive developments we’ve made in recent years.

1. Living in Absolute Poverty (1981-2011)

Declining rates of absolute poverty (Source: Our World in Data, Max Roser)

Absolute poverty is defined as living on less than $1.25/day. Over the last 30 years, the share of the global population living in absolute poverty has declined from 53% to under 17%.

While there is still room for improvement (especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia), the quality of life in every region above has been steadily improving and will continue to do so. Over the next 20 years, we have the ability to extinguish absolute poverty on Earth.

2. Child Labor is on the Decline (2000-2020)

Child Labor on the decline (Source: International Labor Organization)

This chart depicts the actual and projected changes in the number of children (in millions) in hazardous work conditions and performing child labor between 2000 and 2020.

As you can see, in the last 16 years, the number of children in these conditions has been reduced by more than 50%. As we head to a world of low-cost robotics, where such machines can operate far faster, far cheaper and around the clock, the basic rationale for child labor will completely disappear, and it will drop to zero.

3. Income Spent on Food

Income spent on food (Source: USDA, Economic Research Service, Food Expenditure Series)

This chart shows the percent per capita of disposable income spent on food in the U.S. from 1960 to 2012.

If you focus on the blue line, 'Food at home,’ you can see that over the last 50 years, the percent of our disposable income spent on food has dropped by more than 50 percent, from 14% to less than 6%.

This is largely a function of better food production technology, distribution processes and policies that have reduced the cost of food. We’re demonetizing food rapidly.

4. Infant Mortality Rates

Infant Mortality Rate (Source: Devpolicy, UN Interagency Group for Child Mortality Est. 2013)

This chart depicts global under-five-years-old mortality rates between 1990 and 2012 based on the number of deaths per 1,000 live births.

In the last 25 years, under-five mortality rates have dropped by 50%. Infant mortality rates and neonatal mortality rates have also dropped significantly.

And this is just in the last 25 years. If you looked at the last 100 years, which I talk about in Abundance, the improvements have been staggering.

5. Annual Cases of Guinea Worm

Guinea worm cases (Source: GiveWell, Carter Center)

Guinea worm is a nasty parasite that used to affect over 3.5 million people only 30 years ago. Today, thanks to advances in medical technologies, research and therapeutics, the parasite has almost been eradicated. In 2008, there were just 4,647 cases.

I’m sharing the chart above because it represents humanity’s growing ability to address and cure diseases that have plagued us for ages. Expect that through technologies such as gene drive/CRISPR-Cas9 and other genomic technologies, we will rapidly begin to eliminate dozens or hundreds of similar plagues.

6. Teen Birth Rates in the United States

Teen birth rates (Source: Vox, Centers for Disease Control)

The chart above shows the dramatic decline in the number of teen (15 to 19 years old) birth rates in the United States since 1950. At its peak, 89.1 out of 1,000 teenage women were giving birth. Today, it’s dropped under 29 out of 1,000.

This is largely a function of the population becoming better educated, the cost of birth control being reduced and becoming more widely available, and cultural shifts in the United States.

7. Homicide Rates in Western Europe

Homicide rates in Europe (Source: Our World in Data, Max Roser & Manuel Eisner)

The chart above shows the number of homicides per 100,000 people per year in five Western European regions from 1300 to 2010.

As you can see, Western Europe used to be a very dangerous place to live. Over the last 700+ years, the number of homicides per 100,000 people has decreased to almost zero.

It is important to look back this far (700 years) because we humans lose perspective and tend to romanticize the past, but forget how violent life truly was in, say, the Middle Ages, or even just a couple of hundred years ago.

We have made dramatic and positive changes. On an evolutionary time scale, 700 years is NOTHING, and our progress as a species is impressive.

8. U.S. Violent Crime Rates, 1973 - 2010

U.S. violent crime rates (Source: Gallup, Bureau of Justice Statistics)

In light of the recent terrorist shooting in Orlando, and the school shootings in years past, it is sometimes easy to lose perspective.

The truth is, in aggregate, we’ve made significant progress in reducing violent crimes in the United States in the last 50 years.

As recent as the early 80s and mid-90s, there were over 50 violent crime victims per 1,000 individuals. Recently, this number has dropped threefold to 15 victims per 1,000 people.

We continue to make our country (and the world) a safer place to live.

9. Average Years of Education, 1820-2003

Average years of education (Source: Our World in Data, Max Roser)

I love this chart. In the last 200 years, the average number of 'years of education’ received by people worldwide has increased dramatically.

In the U.S. in 1820, the average person received less than 2 years of education. These days, it’s closer to 21 years of education, a 10X improvement.

We are rapidly continuing the demonetization, dematerialization and democratization of education. Today, I’m very proud of the $15 million Global Learning XPRIZE as a major step in that direction.

Within the next 20 years, the best possible education on Earth will be delivered by an AI, for free – and the quality will be the same for the son or daughter of a billionaire as it is for the son or daughter of the poorest parents on the planet.

10. Global Literacy Rates

Global literacy rates (Source: Our World in Data, Max Roser)

Along those same lines, the extraordinary chart above shows how global literacy rates have increased from around 10% to close to 100% in the last 500 years.

This is both a function of technology democratizing access to education, as well as abundance giving us the freedom of time to learn.

Education and literacy is a core to my Abundance thesis – a better-educated world raises all tides.

Again, if you have other great examples of abundance (charts and data), please send them to me at [email protected].

We live in the most exciting time to be alive! Enjoy it.

Join Me

This is the sort of conversation we explore at my 250-person executive mastermind group called Abundance 360.

The program is highly selective. If you’d like to be considered, apply here. Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

P.S. Every week I send out a “Tech Blog” like this one. If you want to sign up, go to Diamandis.com and sign up for this and Abundance Insider.

P.P.S. My dear friend Dan Sullivan and I have a podcast called Exponential Wisdom. Our conversations focus on the exponential technologies creating abundance, the human-technology collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Head here to listen and subscribe: a360.com/podcast

boabjohn

Get your grin on and ride this good-news data wave...

stoweboyd

America’s economic problems go far beyond rich bankers, too-big-to-fail financial institutions, hedge-fund billionaires, offshore tax avoidance or any particular outrage of the moment. In fact, each of these is symptomatic of a more nefarious condition that threatens, in equal measure, the very well-off and the very poor, the red and the blue. The U.S. system of market capitalism itself is broken. […] America’s economic illness has a name: financialization. It’s an academic term for the trend by which Wall Street and its methods have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just the financial industry but also much of American business. It includes everything from the growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in the economy; to the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending; to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance; to the proliferation of risky, selfish thinking in both the private and public sectors; to the increasing political power of financiers and the CEOs they enrich; to the way in which a “markets know best” ideology remains the status quo. Financialization is a big, unfriendly word with broad, disconcerting implications. […] The changes were driven by the fact that in the 1970s, the growth that America had enjoyed following World War II began to slow. Rather than make tough decisions about how to bolster it (which would inevitably mean choosing among various interest groups), politicians decided to pass that responsibility to the financial markets. Little by little, the Depression-era regulation that had served America so well was rolled back, and finance grew to become the dominant force that it is today. The shifts were bipartisan, and to be fair they often seemed like good ideas at the time; but they also came with unintended consequences. […] This sickness, not so much the product of venal interests as of a complex and long-term web of changes in government and private industry, now manifests itself in myriad ways: a housing market that is bifurcated and dependent on government life support, a retirement system that has left millions insecure in their old age, a tax code that favors debt over equity. Debt is the lifeblood of finance; with the rise of the securities-and-trading portion of the industry came a rise in debt of all kinds, public and private. That’s bad news, since a wide range of academic research shows that rising debt and credit levels stoke financial instability. And yet, as finance has captured a greater and greater piece of the national pie, it has, perversely, all but ensured that debt is indispensable to maintaining any growth at all in an advanced economy like the U.S., where 70% of output is consumer spending. Debt-fueled finance has become a saccharine substitute for the real thing, an addiction that just gets worse. (The amount of credit offered to American consumers has doubled in real dollars since the 1980s, as have the fees they pay to their banks.) […] Remooring finance in the real economy isn’t as simple as splitting up the biggest banks (although that would be a good start). It’s about dismantling the hold of financial-oriented thinking in every corner of corporate America. It’s about reforming business education, which is still permeated with academics who resist challenges to the gospel of efficient markets in the same way that medieval clergy dismissed scientific evidence that might challenge the existence of God. It’s about changing a tax system that treats one-year investment gains the same as longer-term ones, and induces financial institutions to push overconsumption and speculation rather than healthy lending to small businesses and job creators. It’s about rethinking retirement, crafting smarter housing policy and restraining a money culture filled with lobbyists who violate America’s essential economic principles. It’s also about starting a bigger conversation about all this, with a broader group of stakeholders. The structure of American capital markets and whether or not they are serving business is a topic that has traditionally been the sole domain of “experts”—the financiers and policymakers who often have a self-interested perspective to push, and who do so in complicated language that keeps outsiders out of the debate. When it comes to finance, as with so many issues in a democratic society, complexity breeds exclusion.

Rana Foroohar, American Capitalism’s Great Crisis

It will take an actual revolution – the Human Spring – to straighten out the financialization of the world.

(via stoweboyd)

Bang. This is what will crack the screen, and we will wonder why we were so blinded for so long.

#post-capitalism

mostlysignssomeportents

John Oliver buys and forgives $15M in medical debt, illustrates horrors of America's debt-collectors

John Oliver now holds the American record for largest single giveaway in history, doubling Oprah’s “you get a car!” record – but Oliver did it by forming a debt-collection agency and buying up the debt of Americans who’d defaulted on the sky-high expenses from life-threatening illnesses, then forgiving the debts.

The sums themselves are “zombie debts” – debts that have been long written off and generally don’t have to be paid, which are bought up by collection firms that terrorize their victims and embroil them in difficult-to-navigate litigation that they must execute perfectly, or the debts are resurrected and collected through paycheck confiscation.

Oliver’s segment reveals that while some state houses have made it easier for medical debts to be written off, others have passed laws giving more power to the debt-collection industry, while taking away penalties for abuse and creating the assumption that debt-collectors are in the right (and removing the assumption of innocence for people in debt). He also goes to a debt-collectors’ conference and captures candid footage of industry professionals joking about bullying their victims and ruining their lives.

Oliver’s fake-real debt collection firm, Central Asset Recovery Professionals(CARP, named for the bottom-feeders), cost $50 to incorporate. He was able to buy $15M in debt for less than $60K.

https://boingboing.net/2016/06/06/john-oliver-buys-and-forgives.html

boabjohn

This is very disturbing. $15M of misery bought and disappeared for $60K. That's an incredible ROI, impossibly humane, and completely contrary to the prevailing rules of "smart money." Good onya John Oliver!

Finally: a really good way to invest in direct benefits to the health of the Reef! (via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3h6BqfA1fU)

#landscape investment

stoweboyd

The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all. The connections and intersections between them are glaring, and yet so often resistance to them is highly compartmentalised. The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupation. We rarely make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. Overcoming these disconnections – strengthening the threads tying together our various issues and movements – is, I would argue, the most pressing task of anyone concerned with social and economic justice. It is the only way to build a counterpower sufficiently robust to win against the forces protecting the highly profitable but increasingly untenable status quo. Climate change acts as an accelerant to many of our social ills – inequality, wars, racism – but it can also be an accelerant for the opposite, for the forces working for economic and social justice and against militarism. Indeed the climate crisis – by presenting our species with an existential threat and putting us on a firm and unyielding science-based deadline – might just be the catalyst we need to knit together a great many powerful movements, bound together by a belief in the inherent worth and value of all people and united by a rejection of the sacrifice zone mentality, whether it applies to peoples or places. We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time.

Naomi Klein, Let Them Drown (via stoweboyd)

Go girl! Wise insight and optimism from MS Klein.

#post capitalism

Interesting critique published through the IMF. There will be a point at which the intellectual scaffolding around the inevitability of markets will crumble as completely as the notion that monarchs were annointed by God. Today there are many societies in which a monarch still serves a useful role. And many people have a relationship with God. But no one bows down to a monarch as if they were the manifestation of god on earth. How did that thinking change? Now imagine a similar progression as we evolve (stagger?) out of an era in which bowing down to a consensually imagined physics of digits claims absolute dominion over every option in our lived realities. How will that thinking change?

#beyond capitalism

mostlysignssomeportents

Algorithmic risk-assessment: hiding racism behind "empirical" black boxes

Courts around America and the world increasingly rely on software based risk-assessment software in determining bail and sentencing; the systems require the accused to answer more than a hundred questions which are fed into a secret model that spits out a single-digit “risk score” that courts use to decide who to lock up, and for how long.

The data used to train these models are a trade secret, closely held by the highly profitable companies that sell this service to courts. Unlike the rigorous machine-learning deployed by companies like Amazon, which retrain their models every time they fail (if Amazon shows you an ad it hopes will entice you to buy, and you don’t, it adjusts its model to account for this fact), these models have no formal system for gathering data about their predictions and refining the model to see whether it is performing well.

The predictions themselves can only be described as racist. Though the questions given to subjects don’t directly deal with race, they do address many of the correlates of race, such as poverty and acquaintance or relation to people with police records. The recommendations that the systems spit out – a single number between one and ten – recommend harsher sentences for brown people than for white people.

Propublica investigated the predictions of these systems, particularly those of Northpointe (acquired in 2011 by Canadian company Constellation Software). They confirmed that the software’s predictions are racially biased and incorrect: that is, they score brown people as higher risk for reoffending than the actual reoffense rate; and score white people as lower risks for reoffense than they actually end up being.

The issue is worse than racism, though. Because the training data and models used by Northpointe’s system are not subject to peer review or even basic scrutiny, no one can challenge their assumptions – meanwhile, the veneer of data-driven empiricism makes their numeric scores feel objective and evidence-based.

It’s a deadly combination, what mathematician and former hedge-fund quant Cathy O'Neil calls Weapons of Math Destruction – her forthcoming book on the subject devotes a whole chapter to algorithmic risk-assessment.

https://boingboing.net/2016/05/24/algorithmic-risk-assessment-h.html

boabjohn

Another cause for pause as we plummet upwards to algorithmic sentience.

stoweboyd

Thiel and Gawker

Elizabeth Spiers decides to stick her neck out for Gawker, the hard-to-like publisher wrestling with Peter Thiel, the gazillionaire apparently pissed off by coverage about him. [All emphasis mine.]

Elizabeth Spiers, On Peter Thiel and Gawker

[…] You have to admire Thiel’s sheer and apparently unending determination to make Denton and Gawker pay for coverage he didn’t like — it’s Olympic level grudge-holding. But the retribution is incredibly disproportionate in a way that seems almost unhinged. It would be hard to argue that Thiel was materially damaged by Gawker’s coverage in the way that he’s now trying to damage Gawker. His personal finances haven’t been destroyed and even the most egregious things Gawker has written haven’t put literally everyone who works for Thiel out of a job. (What did Lifehacker ever do to Peter Thiel?)

Even if Thiel wants to argue that Owen Thomas’s 2007 notorious “Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People” post had a cataclysmically negative emotional toll for him, trying to destroy the entire business via abuse of the U.S. legal system still seems so epic in its vindictiveness that I couldn’t help but wonder whether this kind of asymmetrical reaction is just part and parcel of what you can expect in Thiel’s orbit generally, if you choose to do business with him.

[…]

It seems unreasonable to me. But then I’m not the kind of person who shows up with a gun when what the enemy really deserves is a good solid wedgie.

I’m struck by the fact that Thiel’s been an obvious screwball for a long time, and some of the oddest things he’s said haven’t reemerged in this contretemps. Thiel wrote a ‘personal statement’ for the Cato Institute where he wrote,

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

He also suggests that woman’s suffrage was a bad thing:

Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.

If you’re interested in that thread, see Jacob Weisberg’s What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism? , and my Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian and Beware Peter Thiel.

But this mindset not limited to Thiel. He’s just the most unabashedly aggressive member of the techno-utopian lunatic fringe. Here’s ex-Facebooker and angel Chamath Palihapitiya being interviewed by Jason Calcanis in 2013:

Palihapitiya: The government, they’re completely useless.

Calacanis: The government got shut down today and the stock market went up 1 percent.

Palihapitiya: We’re in this really interesting shift. The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we’ve known it now for probably four or five years.

it’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in LA. It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and when there’s no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero …

Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us. It means they can neither do anything semi-useful nor anything really stupid.

So why not highjack the courts for a personal vendetta? What’s to stop you, if you’re a billionaire with an ax to grind?

boabjohn

Yep, skip the specific Peter Thiel angle and be stupefied by the implications of Techno's broader claims. I am girding myself for an era of furious valorisation of Ayn Rand!

prostheticknowledge

Terrapattern

Project by Golan Levin, David Newbury and Kyle McDonald is a visual search engine for Google Maps Satellite images, able to locate map tiles of similar appearance:

We present the alpha version of Terrapattern: “similar-image search” for satellite photos. It’s an open-source tool for discovering “patterns of interest” in unlabeled satellite imagery—a prototype for exploring the unmapped, and the unmappable.

Terrapattern provides an open-ended interface for visual query-by-example. Simply click an interesting spot on Terrapattern’s map, and it will find other locations that look similar. Our tool is ideal for locating specialized ‘nonbuilding structures’ and other forms of soft infrastructure that aren’t usually indicated on maps.

There has never been a more exciting time to observe human activity and understand the patterns of humanity’s impact on the world. We aim to help people discover such patterns in satellite imagery, with the help of deep learning machine vision techniques.

You can try it out for youself here, and find out more about the project here

boabjohn

Pretty cool thing here...map-centric pattern matching powered by deep algorithm.

Weirdly hypnotic, but is this just more Jetsons Dreaming ?

emergentfutures

Building blocks of life’s first self-replicator recreated in lab

One of the hardest steps in the origin of life on Earth may be easier than chemists thought.

RNA, or something very like it, has long been a strong candidate as the first self-replicating molecule in the origin of life. This is because it can both catalyse chemical reactions and carry genetic information.

But chemists first needed to explain how a large, complex molecule like RNA could form spontaneously to begin the process. They had done so for some, but not all, components of the RNA molecule.

The biggest sticking point was that until now, no one had identified a plausible way to generate the two purine nucleosides, adenosine and guanosine – A and G in the genetic code.

Now a team led by Thomas Carell, an organic chemist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, may have found a method.

Previous efforts made the parts of a nucleoside separately and then linked them together – a stepwise process that generally yields a useless mess of many possible configurations.

Instead, Carell’s team started with even simpler precursors and let the whole process unfold at once, under mildly acidic conditions that mimicked early Earth. Their approach worked, producing high yields of adenosine. Guanosine can then easily be made from this.

Better yet, Carell’s starting points – formic acid and molecules called aminopyrimidines – or their precursors have been found on comets, and thus were probably available at the origin of life.

Full Story: New Scientist

boabjohn

Here we go...spontaneous formation of order "even simpler than we thought". Worrisome that my link is from New Scientist, but hey...

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