TrustNoRobot

Category: better capitalism

  • Managing: The Root of Better Capitalism

    Far too little attention is paid to the physical nature of humans in the modern workplace. By this I mean not only ergonomic chairs and doilies, I also mean the way people stand when talking to each other.

    The tone of a person’s voice during a one-on-one discussion is far more important than what is being said, at least usually.

    When people give speeches to their manager about their state – for instance in response to a question like “how are you liking your job?”, They will often launch into words crafted through various discussions with others. It’s a soliloquy. You should listen to the content, but also listen instead to their voice, the character they are choosing or having chosen for them for the the performance. Does is quiver or rage? Does it sound hurt or joyous?

    And don’t only observe: then, try to figure out what emotion the person would like to be feeling, and how it would hurt or help others, and try to help them see how to get there within the context of the job.

    Management isn’t a psychology job, it’s a sociology one. As a manager you are trying to maintain a healthy society, which with Americans means they must have a say in the direction.

    See, a good manager makes the people she manages into amazing fountains of enthusiastic output, a good manager creates an elite force with esprit de corp. In fact, this should be the explicit goal of all managers, to build such a spirit of comradely excellence.

    It doesn’t always work, but always the attempt has value.

    There are few things more worthwhile than helping people help themselves, and if we are going to do this silly Capitalism thing as managers, let’s kick some ass and do some good for folks.

    Never lie. Never undermine others. Never allow questionable behavior. Build climates of trust, and support the propagation of knowledge in the company. Give all employees a path and opportunity to grow. Try to get fair pay at market rates+ for everyone.

    If only every manager, in every company, committed to these simple principles, Capitalism wouldn’t suck so much for almost everyone.

    Render by Mike Winkelmann

  • Bot Networks Are False Advertising

    Bots that are posing as human are immoral and illegal. While upcoming legislation about to be enacted in CA this summer will make this clearer, and I have also made the argument that bots pretending to be human are breaking existing computer abuse and fraud acts, I believe there is an ever clearer case to be brought against bots and those who use them.

    False advertising.

    False advertising is the use of false, misleading, or unproven information to advertise products to consumers. The advertising frequently does not disclose its source.

    Bots that suggest they are real humans through photos of real or generated humans are labelling an algorithm as a human. This kind of labelling is clear cut false advertising, especially if it has been paid for. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a product or Politicians they are pushing or attacking, the humans that have knowledge of or support these bot networks are guilty of a crime.

    Is this a big problem? Well, right now most of the focus is on ‘click fraud’, bots pretending to be human to manipulate the costs of online advertising, and as these statistics make clear, the online ad industry is a mess of bad actors and in a crisis.

    But you will find little online about the more dangerous game being paid, of spreading information and brands through fake humans on social networks. Why not? Because those ad folks screaming about bot click fraud are desperate for better use of their ad dollars, and using social influencers, even those driven by false bot armies, seem to be a reasonable answer.

    But using tools to coordinate bot networks isn’t some cool new way to advertise. It’s fraud.

    Is a picture or description, that suggests you are human, implying you are human in systems like Facebook and Twitter? Of course it is. When you open an account and upload a photo and description, it appears in the same location as a bot’s false information does. If you are human, and if you are reading this you likely are, then by definition those systems are built to suggest human presence through their user interface and experience.

    And is a post by a bot on Twitter or Facebook an ad? Well, if people paid for the act of promotion, and it captures attention, it’s a walking and talking duck in my book.

    If we had an actual operational FTC that enforced our laws, this is the kind of fraud they should be targeting.

    Like many, I have turned off my Facebook and keep Twitter on only to post this blog. I consider both these organizations to be acting in bad faith, propagating clear fraud for their own profits. If you have knowledge of false advertising or computer fraud and do nothing, you are complicit in conspiracy to commit that crime.

    Image above of more traditional false advertising from 1946 cigarette ad.

  • California’s SB 1001 – Bot Disclosure Law

    Why should you care that your opinion is constantly being manipulated by hoards of fake humans, bot armies that have infiltrated and devalued our social networks, video sites, commerce, and political discussion?

    You should care because the use of these bots is a Federal crime.

    And more explicitly, A bot pretending to be human is also against the law in California as of July 1, 2019.

    The law, which goes into effect on July 1, 2019, was signed by Governor Jerry Brown on Friday, September 28. It will apply to companies who operate online chat services, where a bot can supply assistance to customers.

    However, the law – SB 1001 – is intended to tackle commercial and political bots, that seek to sway the opinions of people online. This includes bots used on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

    “[B]ots can be – and are often – weaponized to spread fake and misleading news, reshape political debates, and influence advertising audiences,” said the bill’s author, Senator Robert Hertzberg (D-Los Angeles), noted CBS Sacramento.

    “SB 1001 sheds light on the fake accounts that simulate real people and spread waves of false information across social media platforms.”

    Per the law, any bots used online will have to clearly state that they are indeed a bot.

    And from the bill itself:

    This bill would, with certain exceptions, 
make it unlawful for any person to use a bot 
to communicate or interact with another person
in California online with the intent to mislead
the other person about its artificial identity
for the purpose of knowingly deceiving the person
about the content of the communication in order 
to incentivize a purchase or sale of goods 
or services in a commercial transaction or to 
influence a vote in an election.

    Yes. This is exactly the kind of legislation we need on the federal and state level. And of course the movement starts in California. We will see how the law gets implemented in coming months.

    But you should also care because:

    1. Your attention is the largest and most valuable commodity you possess

    2. These false human networks, controlled by less ethical humans, are being used to cynically manipulate you by stealing your attention and directing it to the purposes of those individuals

    Bot networks turn innocent people into slaves of misinformation.

    These are malicious AI networks, using algorithms to find the most effective fake identities for influencing certain population groups.

    The people who use bots who pose as humans have ruined our infospace, and I will no longer entertain the argument that these nefarious techniques of opinion manipulation are legitimate expressions of freedom of speech.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Make Management Changes Continuous

    When you build Software, a good rule of thumb is “make changes small and deploy quickly”. This ensures the things you break by bad decisions only create small annoyances that can be rapidly fixed.

    But more importantly, we know from queueing theory that big batches of changes tend to get stuck in queue and threaten all progress. A great book on this is The Principles of Product Development Flow by Reinertsen. Highly recommend.

    But this post isn’t about building software, it’s about management changes. I have noticed lately that management changes (promotions, moving people between teams, making people into managers) suffer from the same challenges of queueing that software projects do.

    The antipattern is that too many changes get queued up and released to the org at the same time, which creates two problems. One, it creates anxiety for the organization because all the desk shuffling etc has to happen all at once. Two, it creates anxiety in the folks who did not get the promotions or team moves they desired. Who now believe they have to wait for the next huge management release cycle.

    And this causes people to look for greener pastures. Someplace where they are noticed and appreciated.

    But of course, they very much might be appreciated in their current workplace, but because upper management wants to make all these changes “at once” it forces them to wait while the squeaking wheels are attended to.

    But waiting, when you are running a queue, is a bad thing.

    The wait/release cycle for management changes is generally a local optimization for upper management and finance departments that does not actually save any time or reduce anxiety in employees. The best approach is, like in building software, to make improvements quickly, in very small batch sizes.

    That is not to say that employees should not learn patience in a healthy organization that wants to promote slow growth. But treat these folks as individuals. Make your promotion cycles consistent and quarterly at least. And when someone says “we have to do this once a year for everyone”, ask them why not do promotions throughout the year for each individual on their yearly anniversaries? The chance of making a large mistake, and losing valuable employees, is massively reduced.

  • The Identity Trade Tax

    When you visit a website and see an ad, this ad is sometimes delivered to you based on your past behavior. This is actually a form of prediction, and can be done in a complicated manner with machine learning et al., but can also be accomplished with simple algorithms that have been refined over the last 40 years.

    This was always the goal of advertising, as an industry. Maximum impact for lowest spending. Show ads only those who might be influenced by them. Ads are expensive, even if they don’t contain Danny Devito.

    So something funny-peculiar happened in the last few years. You hear concerned individuals talking about how this kind of tracking and ad serving is stealing your data.

    I understand the concern. I have even felt it. But now I’m ready for a different tack.

    It’s not your data.

    It was data left as a trail in the public commons you moved through.

    See, the data inside you is your data. Your thoughts and memories and hopes and dreams. When you write or create something the copyright is automatic, but should still be defended. But that is also your data.

    The web site you visited? And got free entertainment on? Oh yeah, they saw you come in the door and click around. That info is theirs, and whether you want them to or not, they are going to make money with it. And leave it exposed on S3.

    And now we get to another question. If the analogy above holds on any level, the real question is not “should websites be able to sell your metadata”? That horse has left the barn. What do you think Equifax is? There are massive industries that exist to trade info about you, in particular and aggregate. Your identity has been a traded commodity for well over a hundred years.

    The issues we face now are twofold:

    1. How do we regulate this trade of our identity and metadata with internationally binding rules and laws?

    2. How do we make money from this trade?

    We deserve a cut.

    I propose an Identity Trade Tax, levied on every trade of my identity through any two corporate entities, to be collected on my behalf by the State and split with me.

    So if company A serves advertising to me, using data from company B, then I get a piece of that ad buy. A very small piece, but a piece nonetheless.

    Or maybe I could set the rate that I charge, and companies can bid on it. So, if you are a more valued consumer, who buys a lot through trackable ads, then you could potentially make more money if data collection companies (ie. social media) indicate such.

    Or I could choose to not be tracked at all.

    Once we have an attention marketplace that is taxable for our benefit, then that choice is going to be enforceable by the Government. The folks with guns and flamethrowers.

    This isn’t about data or identity, this is about grabbing part of a revenue stream that we are the crucial component of.

    A monthly identity trade rebate check. This a form of an attention meter. It’s time to get paid for our attention, and to use machine learning systems to detect when we are not getting our cut. And hey, I imagine the government would take a cut also. They always do, but in this case, well earned.

    And with taxes comes regulations, which are clearly needed. So you answer the regulatory question with the economic one. Tends to work.

    Image appears in this story.

  • The Trump Silver Lining Exercise

    Exercise: enter a contemplative state.

    Consider the last two years of Trump as President, as objectively as possible. Good luck.

    Now think of Obama’s terms.

    Now Bush. Clinton. Stretch back so far as you can go. You might even make it to Carter. If you can go further back you win.

    Now ask yourself this question: if instead of a President in the last 30 years, what if we instead had a small group of high school administrators making budgets and decisions? Or a group of local firefighters? Or pick any room full of adults. Or even children.

    Would we be better off, maybe? Or what I really want to ask is: why is having a singular entity as President an advantage in any way? We have not faced any actual 3am phone calls as a nation, and when we did on 9/11 we blew it. Bottlenecking power and decisions at the CEO level is the great mistake of business that doesn’t let it scale.

    Putting power into the presidency is our great mistake. We don’t need a President, liberal or conservative or pick a political shade.

    What we need is new types of government. But first, we need a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket, all connected and encrypted.

    Wait…hmm…might take a little while to get it right. Estonia evoting has had issues, but so does any innovation worth doing. Last I checked cars still were killing plenty of people a year.

    There is only one silver lining to any of this. It’s that maybe this causes us to quit thinking that any man or woman or person can bring us together. It’s just a granfalloon fallacy, thinking that we are supposed to be a big family. We’re not. We are in business together, and we need smart contracts between each other.

    Letting one human, or any small group, have control of the destiny of the planet is absurd. No matter the country or time, no man should be beholden to a lesser man, at least not for long.

    Once we realize how powerful our mobile devices are, it’s game over for traditional corporate and government structures, as well it should be.

    It took 80 years after the creation of the movable type printing press for someone to create an index for a book. Think about it. We are just 25 years or so into the creation of the web and already we have tons of things figured out. When we figure out owning our own identities, the gameboard will radically shift.

    Voting isn’t just an exercise in opinion, it’s an exercise in identity. And the idea that we have to vote periodically for representatives will someday be seen as silly as thinking that a King was granted power by God.

    Illustration from silver lining on wikpedia.

  • What Happened, 18 Years Ago

    What Happened, 18 Years Ago

    The Documentary that I made in 2001/2 about the dotcom crashes recently passed 100k views, which to me is pretty amazing seeing as I would have been happy if a few thousand folks ever watched it in the days before YouTube.

    Shout out to Aldo Bello and Michael LeFort the director and producers, and all the other great folk who helped get this done. It was a blast, and if it had been 30 minutes shorter would be perfect. My bad, first time as assistant editor. But I wouldn’t lose the Aeron chair interview for the world. And I also got to make the music and cheesy title sequences which was loads of fun.

    Maybe we should get the band back together and do another one…

  • The World To Come

    When the managers brought in robots to take the jobs of the auto workers, we said “well they were just lazy union people anyway” and drove away in our VWs.

    When the managers brought in robots to take the jobs of fast food workers, we said “well they had crappy jobs anyway”, and we shoved three more McNuggets into our mouths.

    When the managers brought in machine learning searches to take away the jobs of lawyers we said “nobody cares about the lawyers,” and our schadenfreude grew.

    When the managers brought in AI to take the jobs of call center folks, we didn’t care because those jobs were all in Asia already.

    When the managers brought in robots to take the jobs of managers we said, “wait, can they do that?” and our slack jaws opened while McNuggets dribbled out.

    And all the wealth flowed into a small number of people who had controlled the managers with money and promises that one day, they could be ultra wealthy too.

    But then a funny thing happened. The myth of working hard to pull yourself out of poverty started to crumble, because there was no work to be had. And the ultra wealthy frantically tried to hide their money offshore because they knew what was coming.

    Because the easiest thing to replace with a robot is an ultra wealthy person. In fact, you don’t even need a robot. You can just replace them with a myth, a story we tell our children about how the world became so riddled with inequality that it made the Middle Ages look egalitarian.

    And then we moved on.

    We don’t need the ultra wealthy. We don’t need managers even. And we certainly don’t need wealthy politicians to tell us how to feel and what to do.

    We have been given the most powerful tool in the universe, artificial intelligence, to serve us as individuals.

    A single person is weak, a liability. A small group of people can change the world. A society can change history. Add machine learning and robots to this equation and you begin to see true power. Soon we will decide to build a world designed for people, and not just ultra wealthy people, using AI as our tool.

    This is going to get very, very interesting.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Trucking in the Right Direction

    It’s heartening to see manufacturers not betting on robots replacing humans, but on assisting them to do their jobs better and safer. This truck will make the roads safer for everyone:

    Daimler Trucks North America’s general manager for marketing and strategy, Kary Schaefer, says that the systems will have positive safety benefits and pointed to a 72-percent reduction in rear-end collisions with the automatic braking assist. (ABA is also claimed to reduce serious driver injuries by 78 percent and fatalities by 82 percent.) The safety benefits of lane departure protection are more modest, but even this system is touted as reducing crashes by 26 percent and serious driver injuries by 20 percent.

    It is my hope that when self driving vehicles happen, they will be viewed as an embarrassment and will not permeate popular culture. They will have their place in the tech stack of our modern world, as do other embarrassing technologies.

    Let’s make laws to ensure a human is always behind the wheel. Trust no robot, and do not trust the humans trying to displace and destroy the livelihood of other humans.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag

  • Of Luddites, Bots, and the FTC

    A Luddite is not anti technology. They are anti fraud.

    The Luddites were a secret oath-based organization[1] of English textile workers in the 19th century, where a radical faction destroyed textile machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting against the use of machinery in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labour practices.[2] Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste, as machines would replace their role in the industry.[3] It is a misconception that the Luddites protested against the machinery itself in an attempt to halt the progress of technology. Over time, however, the term has come to mean one opposed to industrialisation, automation, computerisation, or new technologies in general.[4]

    Language is defined by the winners of conflict, and in this case, the Luddites lost the deeper conversation about unequal distribution of the spoils of capitalism to the thrill of industrialization. Just as a language is a dialect with an army and Navy, a definition is a sound with implied threat and reward.

    The Luddites made a mistake, besides being violent and murderous. 200 years ago they were happily smashing machines all throughout England, but then they tried to smash the wrong machine. The British army.

    The British Army clashed with the Luddites on several occasions. At one time there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula.[27][d]

    Not only did the Luddites begin to lose badly to the army, they lost badly to the legal system. As the Luddites gasped their last breath:

    A Parliament by the voting 3% made “machine breaking” (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Frame Breaking Act of 1812[32]and the Malicious Damage Act 1861.[33] Lord Byron opposed this legislation, becoming one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites after the treatment of the defendants at the York trials.[34] Coincidently, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace would become the first computer programmer by combining the technology of the Analytical Engine with the Jacquard loom[35].

    The daughter of the lone defender of the Luddites was Ada Lovelace. Huh.

    And so being a Luddite become an anti-technology slur, a joke, a way to suggest that you didn’t understand the economics of change. Economists even call this the Luddite Fallacy.

    Far be it for me to suggest that economics itself is chock full of fallacy and pseudo science.

    But the reason I bring up Luddites is not only because I was once in the band called the Luddites. (There are a couple such bands, I was in the one in Atlanta that played “Giant Robots”).

    I want to be clear this is not an anti-technology blog. Nor would I condone violence for political gain. I am not a Luddite in the traditional or Neo sense.

    But, I do think that the technology of Laws and Armies and Nations can and should be oriented to protect people, and not just a few people. Everyone. Every Singleton in the universe.

    There is no sum total of human experience, there are only discrete human experiences. Anyone who suggests they can “add it all up” is trying to sell you something. Likely their BA in Economics.

    The conversation about the threat of AI in terms of economic disruption needs to shift gears away from trying to make people afraid. People are afraid already, that battle is won.

    The conversation needs to be about which entity will protect us. Sure the ACLU will do their part, but how about the FTC protecting us from bot fraud as I have written about? How about city government banning autonomous vehicles without a human driver with hands, and moral responsibility, available.

    The Luddites did not have true democratic means to pass laws to ensure a safe and meaningful life for their children. So they broke stuff. We do have those means. And we don’t even need to elect new people to do it. We just need to let our government know that we demand it do its job.

    Protect us. Not from immigrants. Not from bots. From the people who would use bots to create fear of immigrants, distracting us from the real issue:

    Fraud.

    Fraud against consumers. Stealing our attention, our only real commodity. Making us believe the unreal is real, that code is a human. Faking out our natural tribal instincts. We need to throw a real legal wrench in the use of bots in this manner. People need to go to jail.

    FTC, do your job.

    Painting by Simon Stålenhag