Via Jeremy Keith, I came across this fun short SF story on blockchain and car based AIs breaking up marriages across the Nordic for profit by matchmaking their rides. One woman takes it out on the DAO and the car that broke her marriage or ‘wedblock’. After reading bought the existing 4 novels by the Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi for summer reading.
Tag: blockchain
Suggested Reading: Imbecility, Replication Crisis, IoT and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- Initial circumstances mostly trump intrinsic capabilities. Basically the evolutionary space available. Delayed gratification is based on affluence at the outset, not indicative of doing better in future: Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test
- Can’t afford it, society without social contract, techno-determinism, salvationism, denial. Five kinds of stooopid: Umair Haque on The Age of the Imbecility and how not to join it
- “Embrace and Extend” usually means “embrace and smother” in the context of organisations like Microsoft, and I expect lots of devs to head for the exit, though some see it in a positive light: Microsoft buying GitHub
- Allow proper citing of blogs, added to the ‘someday’ project list: Joi Ito adds a citation widget to his blog
- An analysis of the proliferation of Internet of Things Manifestos: A CHI 2018 paper, Calling for a Revolution
- This isn’t about open data, despite the original title, but controlled sharing in defined ecosystems: In Japan, Mitsubishi Estate and Fujitsu put blockchain in the service of shared data
- If you can answer this letter, you can likely handle anything GDPR related: So You Received the Nightmare GDPR Letter
- Why Doc Searls is probably right about GDPR popping the adtech industry, and why consent in the ePrivacy Directive is to be interpreted as GDPR style consent: Personal Data Processing for Behavioural Targeting needs unambiguous consent
- Networked agency is not about enabling individuals but people in their meaningful social context. So yes, open tools need to have the networked effect built in : To bring people to the open web it needs to be the best version of the web.
Suggested Reading: AI, SDG’s, Data Protection and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- World Bank data on the status of the global sustainable development goals, by the WB data team (whom I know due to my work for the WB’s open data efforts): The 2018 Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals: an all-new visual guide to data and development
- It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge, to stick to enlightenment ideals in developing AI. Privacy and using big data aren’t opposites. Let’s not confuse purposes and outcomes, and explore hidden assumptions. EU style AI efforts are merely hard in a different way than the surveillance capitalism variety in the US and the data driven authoritarianism variety in China : AI Has a Big Privacy Problem And Europe’s New Data Protection Law Is About to Expose It
- Quick overview of how EU is positioning in the AI space. Ethics a key component, and various funding initiatives underway: Key points from the EU Artificial Intelligence strategy
- My Swiss colleague André Golliez talks sense in this radio interview on the meaning of GDPR also to Switzerland (in Swiss-German): GDPR a Paradigm Shift for Data Protection
- An oldie, 2016, from Doc Searls, but still relevant. Your browser is your castle: The Castle Doctrine
- Data and the machine learning it enables is of geopolitical importance: The Chinese 2018-2020 Action Plan for AI
- Doc Searls, who expects GDPR to kill microtargeting as a business model, celebrates May 25th as ‘Privmas’ and writes about the : Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQ) for the GDPR
- Another old article (from 2013), but still a relevant thought, how to connect things up while staying personally in control: The Internet of My Things
Suggested Reading: Barcelona, LETS, Freedom of Speech and more
Some links I thought worth reading the past few days
- CTO Francesca Bria says “We are reversing the smart city paradigm”, creating “a new social pact — a new deal on data”: Fighting back against surveillance capitalism in Barcelona (leading the ‘fearless cities’ network)
- I had to miss it at the time itself, but enjoyed watching it afterwards, part of my braintrust Bryan Alexander hosts a Future Trends Forum with Cory Doctorow on Walkaway: Talking education and technology, the Walkaway perspective.
- The first example I’ve come across that looks at using blockchain for a local exchange and trading system (LETS), a local currency. Not sure why fiat currency related fears like ‘managing supply and demand’ of coins are mentioned, when you tie creation to a transaction like they describe: Hullcoin: can blockchain unlock the hidden value in Hull’s economy?
- Dealing with asymmetries in power over transmission, gatekeeping, scoring: Nibbling away at The New Octopus
- Last month XML-RPC was 20 years old. I should not be surprised Dave Winer helped create it. Twenty years on my webhoster blocks it to prevent brute force attacks on my blog: Dave Winer looks back on 4 years of XML-RPC in 2002.
- Trolling Trump with the US Constitution: Twitter blocking violates First Amendment
- Once more a way how geo data is part of privacy discussions: Open Street Map preparing for GDPR
The blockchain links I read this week
Cryptocurrency Art Gallery, public domain image by Namecoin
I am interested in blockchain as a distributed way of organizing things through software. I have questions that center around in which situations that distributedness, having a public ledger, and having a permanent ledger is actually useful. Also in general for any defined user group, available blockchains are all global by nature. This takes away any agency that group has concerning ensuring the availability and soundness of the technology they use. This is a threat to a group’s resilience basically (e.g. when a group in northern Poland runs their transactions on something that is dominated by opaque Chinese computing clusters). So I am interested in how to deploy blockchain for a specific group (that can then run their own nodes for the needed calculations.) The potential to subvert a blockchain in such a situation is theoretically bigger, but at the same time it is also more strongly embedded in existing social relationships which provides its own robustness.
Here’s a number of links concerning blockchain I came across and read the past few days:
Explaining blockchain
- A good read, ‘A Letter to Jamie Dimon‘, which takes as perspective that the distributedness is less effective than centralized solutions but also the key aspect for the intended user groups, as this is the only way to avail themselves of specific affordances. Distributedness is a tool to increase resistance to censorship (also read as ‘access’), and blockchain allows creating fully distributed applications.
- A talk by Richard Bartlett at Re:Publica Dublin, on whether a blockchain is decentralizing power or not.
The ICO hype is unfolding
ICO, initial coin offerings are campaigns to sell tokens for your specific blockchain application. You can buy them usually only with Bitcoin or Ethereum. What amazes me is how much money (millions) are getting invested in short times (the term vaporware comes to mind), and that minimum investments are often in the 5.000 or 10.000 Euro range.
- ICO going wrong, the Tezos example
- An ICO for trading your genome data
- An ICO for dispute resolving, that will only deliver code or apps well after the ICO
- An ICO for Electroneum, meant for mobile use and mining, getting 40 million in a short amount of time.
- Market authorities, in this case in Switzerland, getting worried
Examples
- A tech consultant using his own blockchain and tokens to determine who wants his free time the most (an interesting blockchain for a specific group example)
- Dutch Digital Delta diving into blockchain (Dutch).