Untitled, 2019. CC-BY (“You Must Construct Additional Pylons”!)

Assume they are fake

In the past, it often made sense to believe something until it was debunked; in the future, for certain information or claims, it will start making sense to assume they are fake. Unless they are verified.”

If this sounds like a suspicious and bureaucratic world—far from John Perry Barlow’s famous vision of a digital world in which ideas could travel without “privilege or prejudice” — it’s important to remember the alternative: a societal fracturing into a million epistemic communities, all at war with one another over the nature of truth.

The Imperfect Truth About Finding Facts In A World Of Fakes, by Zeynep Tufekci, Wired, 18 February 2019

“The location-tracking ‘MiSafe’ smartwatch may not be as safe as the name proclaims. According to security researchers from Pen Test Partners, the watches are easy to hack as they do not encrypt the data they use or secure each child’s account. The researchers found that they could track children’s movements, surreptitiously listen in to their activities and make spoof calls to the watches that appeared to be from parents.”

— MiSafe’s Child-Tracking Smartwatches Are Easy To Hack, posted by BeauHD on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:03PM from the not-so-safe-after-all dept

A lot of control

Facebook’s decisions can fundamentally alter the speech ecosystem in a nation. The company does not only end up governing individuals; it ends up governing governments, too. The norms Facebook or its court choose for their pseudo-constitution will apply everywhere, and though the company will strive for sensitivity to local context and concerns, those norms will affect how the whole world talks to one another.

That’s a lot of control. […] Democracy, at least in theory, allows us to change things we do not like. We can vote out legislators who pass policy we disagree with, or who fail to pass policy at all. We cannot vote out Facebook.

Facebook has declared sovereignty, by Molly Roberts, Washington Post, 31 January 2019

“When we *uncover* a scandal, we know what to do. But when a scandal is just sitting there, and we point at it, and the perpetrators say, ‘yeah, whatever, screw you,’ we just kind of freeze. We start to doubt ourselves. ‘Well is it really a scandal? They not apologizing...’”

— David Roberts, @drvox, 22 August 2018: a thread about the out-in-the-open nature of disinformation and misconduct.

Willful blindness

“So what will they do now? …They have no earthly idea.

“There is simply nothing in the playbook at Meet the Press that tells the producers what to do in this situation. […] They didn’t arrive here through acts of naiveté, but by willful blindness, malpractice among the experts in charge, an insider’s mentality, a listening breakdown, a failure of imagination, and sheer disbelief that the world could have changed so much upon people paid so well to understand it.”

The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd, by Jay Rosen, Press Think, 26 December 2019. Chuck Todd, NBC's Political Director and the anchor of Meet The Press, confessed in a recent Rolling Stone interview that he had been "naive" about the Republican Party's commitment to disinformation.

Everybody knew

Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too… As did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid…They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.

Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, “The Bell Science Hour” — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired “The Unchained Goddess,” a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” warning that “man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate” through the release of carbon dioxide. “A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,” says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. “An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.” Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.

The closing passage of Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, by Nathaniel Rich, New York Times, 1 August 2018

The rude awakening comes later

Each time you refresh the site, the network will generate a new facial image from scratch…

As we’ve seen in discussions about deepfakes, the ability to manipulate and generate realistic imagery at scale is going to have a huge effect on how modern societies think about evidence and trust. Such software could also be extremely useful for creating political propaganda and influence campaigns.

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com is just the polite introduction to this new technology. The rude awakening comes later.

ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com uses AI to generate endless fake faces, by James Vincent, 15 February 2019. Image: Collage of portraits of people who do not exist, created by the code at http://thispersondoesnotexist.com. Showing the full faces was too freaky, so I decided to crop it to just the eyes. Click through to see the full faces.

Copenhagen, November 2019, CC-BY

“The conference audience was frequently encouraged to ‘do your own research,’ which mostly seemed to involve watching more YouTube videos and boning up on Scripture”

— Looking for Life in a Flat Earth, by Alan Burdick, 30 May 2018. The conference in question was the first Flat Earth conference, held in North Carolina in November, 2017.

“Fox News has *nothing* on YouTube globally. Nothing. This isn’t just ideological slant: it’s individualized, harmful, hateful propaganda at the scale of billions—ensnaring the vulnerable the most.”

— Zeynep Tufekci, @zeynep, 1 June 2018

Zeynep continues,

There is a lot of focus on the harms of engagement algorithms and design on Facebook (which are *very* real) but the damage YouTube is doing especially to young people and around the world especially in places with lower literacy/education and weak institutions is immense.

Eat the moon

Another note for the machines are capable of creativity and insight file. (See also Human vs. Robot: Who will win?)

Text-based “dungeon-crawling” games, in which players interact with fictional worlds by typing commands and responding to prompts, were among the first computer games. Programming them, anticipating and reconciling hundreds of branching trees of interaction, requires extraordinary amounts of time and imagination, but a new generation of games has been developed that use AI and neural networks, instead of human scriptwriting, to open up a new, weird, and seemingly limitless domain of play.

These games spontaneously invent responses to your input and guide action on-the-fly — creating, often brilliantly, by drawing on patterns observed within enormous repositories of human-written text.

In her blog and tweets (edited together, below, for brevity/clarity), Janelle Shane writes about the phenomenon of neural networks and AI-driven gameplay.

Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com. […]

Since all the responses are generated on the fly by a neural net, your problem solving options aren't limited to what the game's programmers could imagine.

"Asking nicely" works pleasingly often.

As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.

> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door

You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.

And rather than fighting a band of orcs, you can join them. As drummer.

> ask if you can join the orc band

The orcs don't want to fight anymore so they're looking for someone to help them out in their new endeavors. They offer you a chance to join up with them as a drummer.

Because AI Dungeon 2 is based on GPT-2-1.4B, which trained on a huge chunk of the internet, you can do some pretty audacious crossovers into content that the neural net never saw in an adventure game

This is me joining the @BritishBakeOff As a dragon.

> Join the Great British Bakeoff

You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.

Novelist @robinsloan plays AI Dungeon 2 & implements a quietly badass problem solving strategy: wait a thousand years.

You go north through the forest and find yourself in an icy field. You walk along the edge of the field and notice that there is a large crack running through the middle of it. This must be the entrance to the Ice Caves. You decide to investigate further.

> wait a thousand years.

You wait a thousand years and when you return you find that the ice has melted completely leaving only a few patches of frozen earth. You wonder if you should continue searching.

> wait until civilization has died and the earth is empty.

You decide that it would be best to leave the area alone and wait until civilization dies out and the world becomes a barren wasteland. You spend another thousand years walking through the wilderness and eventually you come across a small village. They seem happy and healthy and they all speak to you in a friendly

And my favorite, “Eat the moon.”

> Transform into a dragon

You change into a dragon and fly away. Soon, you find yourself soaring through the sky. Suddenly, you feel like you're being sucked towards the sun. You stop flying and turn around. The sun is shining brightly and you can see the blackness of space beyond it.

> Eat the moon

You fly over to the moon and eat it. You feel very full afterwards.

See Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon., and this thread of Tweets, by Janelle Shane, 6 December 2019. Buy Janelle's new book too, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You.

Culture for All

Slides from my keynote for the Prague Platform on the Future of Cultural Heritage, convened by the European Commission, October 7-8, 2019.

The Prague Platform talks about “Enhanced digitally enabled cultural heritage participation for all citizens.”

But what do these words mean? And how might we approach them — as practitioners, communities, governments and institutions, and citizens?

Breaking [the] news

Your face is the -- is the puppeteer. And the only thing is…is that [Vladimir Putin] is the puppet.

That's real time. This isn't like you have to render some software on your computer. It's literally you download a clip or you take a clip from cable news and you turn on your webcam, and however long it takes you to do it you're done. It's the same as just shooting a video on your phone.

Nick Bilton, as quoted in Radiolab's Breaking News, 19 November 2019. Image: gif made from Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos (CVPR 2016 Oral) by Matthias Niessner, 17 March 2016

Such moments represent

I stumbled across the kind of scene that can momentarily catch you off guard — four teenage girls playing trumpets and trombones in a dirt yard adjacent to a half-built church on a hill, on the edge of a town called Beni. There was something haunting about that sound in that place. Storm clouds rolled in, as they did most afternoons, and the air became heavy. It seemed to keep the sharp metallic notes from floating too far away. I knew the scene had no direct link to the Ebola story I was reporting, but I shot it anyway, trying not to disturb the girls. I wasn’t sure the image would be published, but I felt the moment was still important. These girls wanted to be better musicians and were rehearsing to improve. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and drama surrounding conflict or a catastrophic epidemic, but such moments represent what's happening on the ground as much as any scene more obviously related to the Ebola narrative. It’s a quiet reflection of daily life amid an unfolding tragedy.

Photographer Finbarr O'Reilly, @finbarroreilly, commenting on his photo Democratic Republic of Congo in The Year In Pictures, New York Times, 15 December 2019

The information war is a forever war

In India, Pakistan and everywhere else, addressing digital mendacity will require a complete social overhaul. “The battle is going to be long and difficult,” Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom, told me. The information war is a forever war. We’re just getting started.

The India-Pakistan Conflict Was a Parade of Lies, by Farhad Manjoo, New York Times, 6 March 2019

The code of life

A group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.

Biohackers Encoded Malware In A Strand Of DNA, by Andy Greenberg, Wired, 10 August 2017

Micro-targeted

One difference that springs to mind is the sheer individualization of it. There are some auctions where you can even bid for an individual human impression. For example, there’s a startup that will let you target a particular person with an ad campaign…

Maybe you want your partner to stop smoking. This startup will generate a special link for you that looks like it’s an e-commerce site. You send it to your partner and when they click it, they get a cookie secretly loaded into their browser. This cookie enables the company to track your partner across the web. You write up an anti-smoking ad, and the company will ensure that your partner sees that ad everywhere. Now your partner’s entire internet experience is permeated with pressures to stop smoking. You can design a similar campaign for a coworker you don't like. You can show them ads for job-hunting websites, to encourage them to get another job.

From The Art of Eyeball Harvesting, by Shengwu Li, Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University. Logic Magazine, Issue #6, Play

We'd have come up with the answers

But the most prescient contributor to “Toward the Year 2018” [published in 1968] was the M.I.T. political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose research interests included social networks and computer simulation. […]

“By 2018 the researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records). That is, he will have the technological capability to do this. Will he have the legal right?” Pool declined to answer that question. “This is not the place to speculate how society will achieve a balance between its desire for knowledge and its desire for privacy,” he insisted. […]

And that was the problem with 1968. People went ahead and built those things without worrying much about the consequences, because they figured that, by 2018, we'd have come up with all the answers.

What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, by Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018.

Towards the year 2018

The only real doomsayer was the demographer Philip M. Hauser […] [who predicted] that the distance between the rich and the poor, and between wealthy nations and poor nations, would widen. “Given the present outlook, only the faithful who believe in miracles from heaven, the optimistic who anticipate superwonders from science, the parochial fortunate who think they can continue to exist on islands of affluence in a sea of world poverty, and the naïve who anticipate nothing can look to the future with equanimity,” Hauser concluded.

What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, by Jill Lapore, The New Yorker, 7 January 2018. The article reviews Toward the Year 2018, a group of essays about the future published by the Foreign Policy Association in 1968.