TrustNoRobot

Category: anonymity

  • Disclaim the Bots

    I would never seriously propose a law. Only lawyers are allowed to do that from my understanding. Nor do I believe the idea I am proposing below should become an actual law.

    But…

    I ask just that you consider a world where such a law could exist, and what its shape would be.

    Here’s the little thought experiment. What if we passed a law or set a social norm that said that any website that didn’t validate identity had to have the following disclaimer visible on the front page:

    This site does not validate identity of content creators or statements as factual.

    Any content or promotions of content on this site may not be generated by humans, or be in your best interest to consume.

    A simple warning label. Just like cigarettes, alcohol, and rock albums from the 80s with explicit lyrics about Tipper Gore.

    But why? Why take the trouble to write something that probably won’t change behavior much?

    Because bad bots may currently represent over 20% of all traffic on the Internet.

    Because we don’t know what News or legitimate opinion is anymore. We don’t have any agreed upon definition of community shared facts, and in this unregulated space we are flooded with harmful data masquerading as fact. Promoted into our limited attention space by algorithms targeting us with organized disinformation campaigns.

    Science can’t put on its peer-reviewed pants before lies travel fifty times through our consciousness.

    But we can define what legitimate news and legitimate opinion isn’t. Because whether something is true or not, using bots to promote it should be given the same stigma as advertising cigarettes to children.

    If all sites had to have the bot disclaimer until they were given accreditation, perhaps granted by a machine learning approach that gives the probability that the content on the site was generated by humans, then we would have a built-in method of detecting dangerous places.

    Because 4chan and Reddit and (insert your most hated mainstream media site here) and Twitter etc should be allowed to exist, unregulated mostly, but not be given the same credibility as even a single confirmed human opinion. We need freedom of speech to be reserved for actual humans.

    To be clear, I believe sites that allow anonymous posting and commentary should be protected and encouraged. But as part of the greater dialectic, as part of the search toward truth and understanding. Thinking these sites represent raw truth is potentially deadly for the untrained mind.

    Ideas we consume may harm us, the laws should require that we are informed of this potential harm. Because if Government can’t protect us, it has no legitimacy at all.

    Technically speaking, the law could be enforced by the browsers – in other words by default a browser would have to show this text unless a valid token were provided by the site or post. Browsers already do this kind of warning for sites that don’t use encryption (https). We could even build confirmed validation of legitimate human generated content into simple content management systems like this WordPress blog.

    Would trustnorobot.blog need this disclaimer? No, because content creators here are all humans, and I do not artificially inflate or promote my posts.

    This is all my opinion, and I am Chas Mastin. And saying that matters. And expressing opinions and sharing news is what we need to protect on the web. But the ML generated and bot upvoted flood of lies has overwhelmed the voices of the real.

    Bots also break legitimate advertising, but let’s save that for another post.

    The deaths and pain caused by bot-propogated disinformation have just begun. It is time to use our words, our laws, and machine learning to defend ourselves and fight back. Bots take away your power as a real human to have meaningful interactions on the web. Grab the power back.

  • A New Shell Game

    Your house is a shell. Your car, a mobile shell. Your clothes, your preconceptions, your choice of news websites, your LLC, all form shells around the gooey center that is you.

    And even if you believe, as many do, that the self is an illusion, the no-thing hallucinating the self still loves shells around it.

    These shells form protection from the elements, from bad ideas, and hopefully from actual crimes against you. The largest crime that goes unanswered right now is theft of your attention.

    The trouble as I see it is that we have built machine learning tools that provide easy ways to crack our shells, by for instance spreading misinformation on trusted channels for advertising, but machine learning hasn’t been shown to actually protect us from much of anything.

    Nobody has built an AI shell for us. Yet. Sure, there are firewalls and anomoly detection for financial security that might use machine learning, but what I am talking about is an AI that knows you, and only you. That is, in effect, the information shell you will wear throughout your life.

    That will protect you, and only you. That is trained to identify you, by learning all of your biological and information patterns.

    I am a user of the Titan security key, which ensures that only devices I physically authorize can access my Google accounts. Now imagine a system that does this one better and removes the key itself. The key is the AI who knows you on millions of factors of authentication.

    And deep fakes become irrelevant. Without your true signature, provided by your AI shell, all is ignored.

    Because when we have absolute security of ourselves as individuals, when spreading information requires knowledge of the people behind the spread, we can halt the flood of disinformation. And we can rebuild Government and Corporations to serve humans better.

    There are those that believe that anonymity is still needed to allow leakers to speak truth to power. I disagree. Two points here: what happens when wikileaks gets taken over by Russians, or any other supposed anonymous bastion like the press is compromised? Being anonymous really only has power when the megaphone is trustworthy. And while I don’t agree with the president on much, I believe if you blindly accept what is on the front page of the NY Times after the second Iraq War then you are living in a seriously compromised shell. If an anonymous leak appeared there from this White House, I would assume nothing but malfeasance first.

    Secondly, the idea of anonymity has a lot more relevance when there is less noise. But right now, when bots create so much noise as semi-anonymous or fraudulent actors, we need more authentic humans to stand and be heard.

    It sometimes hurts, but we need to take the hits it takes to change the world. I realize my ideas in this blog, for instance, are beyond controversial. I am suggesting that we need to rebuild society based on a new understanding of the self and equality and technology. And while I believe we can do this successfully only without violence, so I am not really a traditional revolutionary, if you don’t think someone advocating replacing traditional governance with something completely different using self-focused machine learning isn’t sort of crazy, then it just proves my point that we are all over-saturated with information. Nothing shocks.

    But my point isn’t to shock, or convince people that the robots or people who build them are winning and inspire change through fear alone. My point is to tell you that there is a way forward if we place the individual Singleton human at the center of the change to come. If the shell we build for information protection becomes our second skin, filtering out the noise, giving our voices more and more power.

    Then we build a whole new shell game, an operating system for the world with encryption for individuals on by default.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • The Singleton Pattern as Kernel

    The Singleton Pattern is not a model of the internal states of self. It is solely a potentially practical political model of society and governance.

    This is a simple but effective model of what it means to be human. In non-programmer terms, it means there is only one of you, and you are a special kind of object in the universe, and you are special primarily because you can build an internal model of others and tie it to your internal reward and stress systems.

    This model also does not require us to come up with concepts like Rights to create Justice in society. We can instead just focus on each individual’s internal states, while understanding there are base limitations in what humans can feel and model.

    This is the core point to understand: I am suggesting that we need this new model not because our models of self and belief are somehow deficient. You should be able to hold any religious beliefs or view of self, or lack therefore, that your mind can contain. In the diagram above, the self or lack therefore and the soul and belief would reside in the green boxes where CPU, Memory and Devices reside.

    I am proposing that we follow this pattern to rebuild social order, because it puts individual humans at the center of our social equations and doesn’t accept simple unverifiable aggregations of our opinions, or even feelings, as being more important than protecting individual sentient life from the real threat.

    Which to me is clearly amoral and immoral humans using machine algorithms to attack and control our information networks, Governments, and markets.

    So, lest you think I am fear mongering, which I most certainly am, consider the news that legit natural text generation has most certainly been conquered.

    New AI fake text generator may be too dangerous to release, say creators | Technology | The Guardian

    It was pretty bad on r/politics back in 2016, but trust me the new bots to come will likely have years of personal history built up, and be able to pass credit checks. Which is just a crappy Turing test anyhow.

    We are about to be flooded with full gibberish. Entire news orgs will arise overnight generating trillions of flashing lights to draw us into the fires to control our attention. Chaos is going to become templated and installed via npm. Enterprise grade.

    To fight this, we need to hold dear our personal beliefs, but we must accept that the professions of politician and journalism have no regulations, are full of amateurs, and have already been compromised.

    What if instead we built a new society? And built it like you would an operating system. Free and open source.

    So, what’s the first line of code we would write? The first box on the whiteboard you would draw?

    In the core of an operating system is something called the kernel. It has complete control over all systems.

    In the Singletons Pattern, the core of our operating system is the Singleton, which is instantiated when you come into existence. It has public and private methods of access. It can model other things inside it, including Singletons, and it has constraints and limitations.

    And it has complete control, of you.

    The cool thing about a Singleton is you can write a test for it. And the first test we can write is to try to create a Singleton.

    The funny thing is, when you write a test against a Singleton to create the Singleton,

    Function create(chas)

    The test returns an error. Because the Singleton already exists from the beginning of the program, and only one can exist in the whole world throughout the lifetime of the program. This is the security measure that lets all humans control access to our identities, and if we own it, than the franchises and governments of the world must come to us for access.

    This is the core of our permissions and identity system for the future. Plus, we made Test Driven Governance.

    Now, what kind of social structures could we grow from this? Here’s the thing: probably lots of crazy organization systems. Who know what will work best in each situation?

    Software projects can we run lots of ways. But the best way is to let the team set the process. That’s the way an adaptable society should run.

    An operating system or kernel isn’t an app, it’s a framework for running them. The Singleton Pattern is not a new form of government, it’s a shared underlying framework for new forms of government to be built.

    To be clear, the Singleton Pattern is not a model of your private internal models. But we can build that protection in from the beginning. And we can validate our legitimate human status and stop this disinformation tidal wave, so it crashes harmlessly against the shores of our society, and we are strengthened by the test.

  • Without Confirmed Identity we Are Lost

    (Picture of Chas with great guitarists, identity confirmed)

    Prepare yourself for an unpopular opinion to be expressed, that will likely make no sides of the political spectrum happy.

    The opinion is: All humans should be immediately identifiable to other humans. In other words, the State or some entity or technology should be able to validate our true identity, and other humans should be able to confirm it.

    Don’t worry, I am not about to talk about the blockchain.

    I know the arguments against this from the left and the right. Liberals will usually point out how identity validation was used to disenfranchise voters in the American South in the past or is being used now to discriminate against those without IDs, the poor and minorities. This Atlantic article is a good sample of this position.

    On the Right, you will see the standard fear of the nanny state pop up, concerns about limitations on our freedom, etc. Also that people have a “right” to be anonymous.

    Generally speaking, these concerns around identity are valid, and should be seriously considered. To the Left I would say: let’s make sure everyone gets equal consideration in generating identity validation, and that isn’t going to happen at the county level. It will take a national movement to ensure this is done fairly. To the right I say: yep, ever vigilant, thanks for your service, etc. Seriously, identity has been used as a precursor to genocide in the past, and we should tread lightly.

    But my concern is not about voting or proportional representation. This is actually about protecting our species from those who would use bots to do us harm and take advantage of this massive hole in our security.

    In the last year I have had to replace my bank card three times. We live on the edge of deep fakes entering the popular discourse. The gaps in our current cobbled together system are apparent and are being filled by for-profit companies like Clear selling face recognition and biometric tech to law enforcement agencies without any real oversight.

    Soon, only cops will know who you really are. But that misses the point. We all need to know that you are a human Singleton and part of our larger tribe.

    The funny thing is, the only real way to validate identity is by having people who know you attest to your validity. That is the promise of our social networks. Instead, because they can be so easily manipulated with paid ads and false beings, they are bastions of fraud.

    But this can be fixed. We just need to accept the cost of helping each other prove we are real.

    When you interview for a job, you often have to provide references. You may think this is a cursory procedure, but humans are actually really good at finding red flags in simple conversations like “tell me about the company you worked at” kind of questions.

    So imagine if, with the help of machine learning, a transaction could be flagged as potentially fraud. Instead of having a bank rep call me to validate with canned questions or voice recognition, which is going to be easily faked by low level hackers in the next few years, what if instead we used video to validate identity with people you know and trust. Then you pass this valid token back to the ML system.

    All day long we talk to people over video conferences, posting vids of us and our kids, etc. Instead of just selling ads space, social media could sell us something actually valuable: protection. Validation of who I am.

    What will make all of the above happen will be the rise of deep fakes that can easily pass the elementary Turing test that a bank rep would give.

    A Singleton can only be in one place at a given time. There is only one of you in existence. If we cannot validate this, with hardware keys, multifactor auth, and the confirmation of other Singletons, we will have no defence when the real AI shows up in the 2020s.