I discovered there's now a mini-explosion of discussion of the Internet of Things as the geek power struggle for it heats up, and fortunately, that also means some more critical discussion.
Here's a guy named Ken Craggs who followed me on Twitter because he follows this topic (I'm out of follow spots so put him in a list with a few others in his stream) and he has published a cautionary post about the Internet of Things called "Panopticon".
The IOT (will there be an ID IOT?) has had all kinds of ominous developments that I've missed because I've been focusing on virtual worlds, social media, and occasionally augmented reality, all of which may be incorporated into IOT, of course.
When I first saw the IOT prototype put up by Babbage Linden in 2006 or 2007, it was virtualizing virtuality further by tagging all the objects so you could instantly find them on the sim, then track them, add more content to them, etc. Semantic web, I guess. So you could find "petunia" and write some message on "petunia". Remember how Babbage wanted to play petanque with pianos? I hated that, because I found it so casual and destructive. And really that was indicative of the commodification of everything. All property just becomes somebody's plaything and absurd.
Craggs notes that something called CALO has emerged at the forefront of the IOT:
The CALO project overview from Stanford informs us that, “CALO as an adaptive agent, is incredibly complex…At CALO's heart is the ability to take autonomous control…As CALO…adapts its behaviour over time, there is an underlying assumption that there will be a user in the loop whom CALO is serving”. And this document from the ‘Internet of Things’ European Research Cluster, states (p.84) that “The IoT needs to handle virtually all modes of operation by itself without relying on human control.”
Gosh, that sounds just lovely, doesn't it? It sounds like that Linden dream -- the "emergent behaviour" and "ambient intelligence."
Remember, what Philip Rosedale and the other Lindens wanted with Second Life was to make *that* the Brain -- the entire thing would be the emergent and ambient Brain. So all of us who had "invested our consciousness in a toy" as Will Wright once so stunningly explained it regarding the sim (avatar) in The Sims would be executing perfect right-angle walks around objects and having out chat logged and mined for God-knows-what and would be accommodating ourselves to the "affordances" of virtuality like flying which of course had their "deficits" like...sitting on your ass in the real world for hours at a time...
So picture the whole world like that, and your friends able to "map" you. We haven't begun to see anything like the massive debate there will be over "mapping your friends". We had it first in The Sims, where they enabled you to turn it off, but where your presence marker in the "friendship balloons" would then become a trail showing where you had been. So you went to that strip club or that other girl's house, it's in your balloons! Like spore.
Then we saw in Second Life with the mapping which people like FlipperPAY who couldn't figure out how to tell their friends to stop IMing them, or defriending annoying people, and demanded the ability to be online, but not show as online. OK, fair enough, except there is a difference between *mapping* and "seeing online". Remember when I said the problem with point-to-point teleporting is that people would TP on your head? And the first hour they implemented it we used Philip's friendship card to TP on to his head so he "got it". Then they put in the granularity -- friendship with or without mapping (I think that was the sequence).
Right now, unlike Second Life, in real life I can't geolocate my "friends" whose telephone numbers I have in my i-phone. But soon I will, and the argument will start up. "The government" will know where you are. "The corporations" will market-data-strip you. OK, but the real problem is governance -- the freedom from *each other*. That will be much harder to deal with -- that boss who can't understand why you don't want to be mapped all day during work hours...
But what I want to say about COLA -- about which of course I have to read a lot more know -- is that I don't believe in the "autonumous nature" of the thing. Again, as I always insist, code is concretized will of human beings. It is not magic. It is not separate. It is not "other". It is not autonomous. It's just irresponsible. It's just not accountable. And getting more so. Every "emergent behaviour" is at some level planned and thought about *and enabled* and not enough thought and care put into making sure bad behaviours are *disabled*. You know, like making the default "damages" instead of "safe"?
Again, my mistake (and it came from the geeks themselves) in thinking about the risks of the IOT was that it would be done with sensors or RFIDs. Remember when I criticized David Orban and Joi Ito going around putting RFIDS on things to make the "spimes" of science fiction come to life faster? I said if I found them I'd grind them up with my shoe and drown them in cans of Coke? And Joi Ito then deliberately blocked my blog on Technorati, which he controlled, it was incredible. I had a good rating, and then suddenly my posts couldn't even be searched. After complaining and publicizing this problem, it changed, but now years later after their various "revisions" I'm completely gone from there now, I don't know why I even bother to post key words there from Typepad.
But RFIDs aren't the main thing, or at least, not know. It's that the things already wired now connect to your smart phone, and it's in your hand, not "out there"? So the IOT and the spimes are now much more intimate but also paradoxically much more individually controlled. There is less of "the geeks putting things everywhere and listening" and "me deciding I want this thing connected". Except, the push by geekland to wire things up so they can listen, too, will be enormous. Need to get those databases populated!
Craggs conceives of this problem in the classic geek fashion -- and the fashion many savvy Internet users have adopted -- as one of "the government" having its Big Brother eye on you:
Just as government agencies can monitor and filter e-mails people send, context-aware machine listening could possibly be used to listen for certain spoken words and phrases, which would indicate that an individual or group of individuals, communicating by speech, are likely to be a threat to other people and/or property and/or the state. A simplistic way to explain how this might work is that the personal details and other info of the 7billion+ people on earth would be on a database. Whenever an individual says what is considered by government to be an inappropriate word or phrase, the individual is given a negative mark. Every so often CALO (or another adaptive system) queries the database to ascertain how many negative marks each individual has. The number of negative marks that each individual has accumulated could then be used to help identify, potential criminals, activists, troublemakers, ringleaders and so-forth, based on the kind of subject matter each individual prefers to discuss.
But I have to say, that's NOT the way it will work, at least not ubiquitously, and not the way it's ALREADY working.
What REALLY happens is that coders control platforms and silence you. THEY silence you, not "the government". The community leaders (ugh) put in place to manage discussions on Facebook; the "thought leaders" who command huge followings whether a Robert Scoble or Jeff Jarvis -- they are the ones who mute, control, delete, ban. Not the government. They do. They are identifying the "troublemakers" who dissent against their IOT or whatever other gadget they are hawking, and they stifle dissent. In fact, the government is something you may come to appeal to in order to secure the secular and free space for debate and dissent under the First Amendment, because these platforms won't protect it. The problem is all the social media nerds in Gov 2.0 have those same clutchy censorious instincts as they come from the same clan, and they silence debate as well.
Craggs is imaging the government running the reputation system. You wish! They could run it under the rule of law, with standards, and it would be justiciable and subject to checks and balances.
The problem is that the systems are ALREADY run by geeks -- Klout, Facebook likes, G+ -- whatever. Those systems already have tremendous sway. The reputation system we saw in Second Life was a classic example of something gamed and misused for griefing and harassing and silencing dissent, not rewarding innovation. The government is not the problem. Facebook, which already automatically blocks posts now if they are "too long" or have key words they don't like in them like "breast" is the problem.
The Wired State, which I have constantly warned about isn't the state as we know it now -- you wish. You may come to long for the day when you'd have more or less an assurance that a neighbourhood precinct cop might come and save your from assault or harassment or enforce a judge-issued order of protection. Instead, in the Smart World, you will have Community Leaders siccing people on you -- the pizzas delivered by Anonymous to their enemies are only the tip of the iceberg.
Again, the security isn't merely about privacy, but about governance and the ability to be free from other non-state actors, not just the state or corporations.
And as per usual with this discussion, there is little awareness that private property and privacy have to remain linked, that privacy with the erosion of private property will not be possible. To the extent that we are in fact saved now from legions of greedy ap engineers and only the plaything of contracted market data scrapers on Facebook, it's due to the walled-garden nature of Facebook. Good! I'd much rather have an ad I don't like in the margins of my social network than become the "girl near me" unasked on somebody else's rapacious ap, you know? That's the reality of the IOT.
The part I find least persuasive in Cragg's useful piece is the bit about the nano-things that can "read your brain". Hmm. Really, guys? And I can't put tinfoil on my head and prevent that lol?
What's more easy to do is read intentions based on searches -- Google can predict what you will think about, search for, do, etc. just by looking at all your searches.
The problem isn't that the government is going to put a nano-device into me and monitor it and even switch it off and make me a non-citizen -- which is of course, a possibility and to be guarded against.
The real problem is that people like a Linden I once debated on this subject thought it was backward and reactionary of me to fear nanobots because it was just like medicine particles that had various chemical effects in the body. Um, right. So people like that guilty trip others to take nanobots to "improve" their alertness, get rid of oxidants, become more thin, whatever -- and then they can control them via those little critters. The government in fact will be what you turn to, in order to regulate this menace.
The nightmare that Craggs describes with the nano-implant -- cut off from food, housing, etc. by a totalitarian state -- is exactly what the Soviets implemented with their propiska or resident permit and domestic passport system, still in effect today throughout the former Soviet Union, and explaining why Tajik migrat workers can starve or be killed with impunity. And the problem isn't just the state, but all the people who then accept bribes to help you around this state which become another kind of problem.
Recent Comments