MSP63 [] We Are The Robots

This is an download from the FM89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jazandu. On last week's MSP, man, I'm a taste of rilders with a tale of swash buckling, misadventure and miss-spoken grammar. This week we're heading further beyond the age of sanity to ask, whose robot are you?

Should we assume that this is another one of those shows talking about our entire existence, being a computer simulation and that the creator of our universe is actually a pre-team working on a school computer project, Matt? That's a very specific example. You've been thinking about this one. So, anyways, what's the point of all of this if we're only ones and zeros?

Well, I'd probably point you in the direction of Rob Reese's Demimond series of books. Simulations aren't actually what we're talking about today, by the way, but if it was, then your life still has as much meaning as it did before you actually realised it was a simulation. It's not like pain or joy is any less real or when you broke your wrist. Right.

Or the taste of food. It's very unlikely that we'll be in that kind of matrix-type situation. I don't think anyone is holding our body's prisoner while our minds have plunged into some fiction. This is our existence.

It doesn't really matter if it's a simulation or not. And I think it's probably as simple as that. So why are we robots? Well, this is building on from something we were talking about in last week's Geek Squad.

Now, radio listeners will know that these shows, MSP and Geek Squad, are kind of a pair. They come together. But I have had some of our podcast listeners tell me that they know about one show, but not the other. So both shows are me and Jeff.

I get to wander off into fantasy realms and thought experiments on MSP, whereas on Geeks we're a bit more grounded in the events of the week, looking at big or quirky stories from the world of tech and culture. All right, that's it for the cross promotion. That's done now. So how does this follow up from last week's Geeks?

We were talking about 10-year challenge and how that information can be used to train machine intelligence to identify, track and even age humans more effectively. We also mentioned some other areas where we are inadvertently helping to train artificial intelligence. So you're being literal here. You're saying that we're actually robots?

Well, not in a mechanical sense, but in the sense that we are often used as objects that are the possession of someone or something, which of course begs the question, who's robots are we? Who actually thinks that they own us? This is a very light and fluffy topic for a fun Friday. And that's why they call me Teddy Bear.

Oh, what calls you? Teddy Bear. I know we can't start these things until you put them out there. I'm going to paraphrase the American author, scholar and professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, Shazana Zuboff.

Now she said, once we thought of digital services as free, and now those digital service companies think of us as free. Oh, that's a little chilling. And that's why they call me Teddy Bear. No, but like Teddy Bear, it's really just about putting a name and an explanation to all the things that make us uncomfortable about the digital era.

So we'll come back to Professor Zuboff later on, and more specifically the concept that she's been working on, which she calls surveillance capitalism. So amid the discomfort of all of this digital life, we've seen the first stirrings of anxiety in both the popular protests against establishment politicians, and also the backlash that many technology companies have faced over the last couple of years. So it's like that sixth sense or that itch you can't quite scratch. You know something is wrong.

You know that something isn't the way you want it, but you don't quite know how to shape or vocalize those thoughts and doubts. What's that itch? Well, in your case, it's probably something that needs a medical attention. But this is one of those tropes that we come back to so often on the show.

The scale of transformation that we've undergone in the last 20 years, we've seen all kinds of models that have stood for decades, if not hundreds or even thousands of years, being turned upside down since the millennium. We've seen information move out of buildings and books where it had to be painstakingly found and researched and cross-referenced. We can communicate instantly. We don't have to schedule phone calls, or we don't have these slow exchanges of letters.

Money zips around the world in seconds. You know, we don't spend half our free time schlepping around shops in different parts of town anymore. We just buy things online. Everything has gotten faster, and depending on the way you look at it, more convenient.

You know, most people argue that these are good changes. And they are. There are so many ways in which our wealth has improved, and those improvements have been fueled by this rapid spread of technology. But so often we're happy to accept whatever shiny new service or app or startup disruption somebody hunts to us.

Now we've mentioned before, we've reached that point where the technology is too complex for us to grasp. You know, when I was a kid, you could open up the hood of your car, and there was an engine that, today, there'll be some kind of protective cover of most of the engine, which is mainly there to stop you tinkering with it or trying to understand how it works. And so sometimes there's no engine at all. Well, precisely in the case of electric cars, yeah.

So we're actively discouraged from understanding how things work. Well, you know, in the world that we know, money is the currency, so we might not have a lot of it, but we can see it, we can touch it, and we want to find out where we can get more. In the new digital economy, which we'll actually talk a bit about in geeks as well, information is the currency data is information and money derives from that information. So no, it isn't in the best interests of any information gathering company to have us look too closely at how that data is generated, retained and used.

So that lack of clarity and definition is a deliberate act? Well, it may not be deliberate. As soon as you start saying things like deliberate, you start cooking up these conspiracy theories. Yeah, exactly.

And that kind of theory isn't helpful because it becomes insular and self-defeating or even self-fulfilling. So what we have is a group of independent companies, independent actors, but these companies share a common goal. So I'd say it's probably more of a tacit understanding than it is any kind of direct agreement. Is this where the ideal surveillance capitalism comes in?

Thank you. I was wondering how I would box my way out of that corner and get back to the capitalism. So we'll get to the surveillance part, especially in a minute. So I'm still working through the concept myself, especially as I can't actually buy Professor Zubov's book until the end of the month.

It's called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It came out in the US last week, but my kindle account is set to the UK. So I can only get hold of it at the end of January. But one thing I definitely agree with her on is this idea she has about the need to identify a name, what's happening in the world.

I thought last week we determined that you don't care about the origins of terminology. Yes, and we found out that you think Adam Antyne is the magic metal of the Marvel comics. So earlier I mentioned that we find it hard to keep up with the pace of change. It feels as though we're all lagging behind the technology.

And part of that is down to the fact that we don't know exactly what it is that we're lagging behind. And that allows other people or companies to turn wild bets and assumptions into actual norms. And eventually those norms become laws or they become de facto behaviours that we all accept and follow. Oh, like the military term, truth on the ground.

Yeah, exactly like that. So the last 20 years in terms of the behaviour of the new class of disruptive tech companies, especially those with a focus on data has been an epic land grab in many ways. And I think this is an analogy that Professor Zubov uses. I can't actually quite remember.

It's a bit like the behaviour of the European colonists. It's the idea of rushing out into the unknown and simply taking something and declaring it as your own. Is it at its business? Well, yes, to an extent.

And sorry, I'm a little bit vague with some of the stuff, because as I said, I haven't read the book. So I'm getting a lot of the information from interviews with Zubov and from her columns in the German news site, Frankfurter, Al-Gamais, and Zeitung, which those columns are actually in English, in case you're interested in reading them. There's a particularly good interview on the Guardian's website from last weekend. It's with Professor Zubov and another one of my favourite writers and technology voices, John Norton.

So yes, to an extent, it is just business. The internet at the turn of the century was kind of this unknown territory. And we were all we were about to go through that first dot com crash. So it was that first realisation that this wasn't the field of dreams, that you had to do more than just build something.

And the internet companies, like normal companies, actually needed a business model. And that model was free or freemium? Yeah, as you know, the supposedly free model of the internet is one of my pet peeves, as we talked a lot towards the end of last year. People have suddenly woken up to the value of their data.

And when I say data, what I really mean is the value of themselves. And I think that's probably one of the things that I haven't hyped enough. And it's something that Professor Zubov does brilliantly. Because we see our lives and we see the data we generate as being separate things.

The companies that we donate that data to don't necessarily make that distinction. Our lives are their data streams. And that's where the surveillance part comes in. Our lives are a commodity to be searched and stored.

I guess we'll have some more of that after the break. All right, we are the robots, Matt is trying to convince me. And anyone listening to this, we are actually the robots. We'll see how far he gets towards the end of the show.

Stay tuned for the air back. 89.9. Bulldozing fine measures. BFM 89.9, the business station.

And we're back. It's one Friday. My name is Jasad Doud together with Culture Box Matt Amadeh. I'm not quite sure if Matt is winning this battle, but he's on a mission to convince all of us that we are robots.

Apparently, he's halfway through the mission. Now, just before the break, we were talking about the whole business model free and free. So let's go back to that idea, the free and freemium model that we landed just before the break, man. Halfway through.

You have no idea. This is my mission for 2019. This is the opening salvo. This isn't even a battle.

This is a skirmish halfway through. Okay, look, when the dot com crash hit, Tech firms had to figure out how to monetize their business model. And of course, one of the models they landed on was the one that we understand today, which is the ad funded model. So it could equally have been subscription based, but the model that really chimed with consumers was the idea of getting free stuff, because we shouldn't overlook how expensive going online actually was in the early days.

The idea of spending all day looking at the internet from your phone was laughable, partly because of the speed, but mostly because it was cripplingly expensive. I mean, you were literally being charged by the bytes. And the last thing people want is when they eventually landed online, was to face another round of charges. Yeah, exactly.

You didn't want to spend all that money and then pay again for the sites that you landed on. So free services seem to be the answer to everyone's needs, but to make money online, you needed information. So you needed data about the people that you were trying to deliver advertising to. So suddenly, we're being sold on this idea of the democratization of information.

That's still a point of discussion to be had there, though, like creating that free flow of information that has transformed the way we learned the knowledge we have access to. Which is why this is just a skirmish. And, you know, let's look at something like Wikipedia. For all its faults, it's an incredible undertaking.

Being able to look through newspapers and government databases, all of these things that we find online. But that's actually just a very small part of this overall data story. And it's entirely separate from the discussion about how Facebook and Google and hundreds of other companies ended up owning our data. So by portraying the idea of this democracy of data, those companies were also able to assert ownership of the information that we shouldn't forget.

We generate for them. But there was no law that said that should or shouldn't be the case. So it's kind of like the gambler at the roulette wheel. You choose a number and throw.

They're just chasing their luck. When we push back, when we knock the companies back, they tend to retreat. But they continue to push at the limits of what we will let them get away with. Which is where that idea of naming comes in.

Yes, because until we define the system, we can't identify our place or our role in it. It's like that analogy I made last year about the social media model and farming. So the farmer has cows. He milks the cows.

He sells the milk to supermarkets and to their customers. So in that model, we think we're the customers, but we're not. We're the cows being milked. You know, we're looked after just well enough for the farmer to pull a profit from us.

How does this fit in with the idea of surveillance capitalism? Well, first of all, let's look at the surveillance part. So traditionally, we look at surveillance as something that a government or some official body does. But over the last year, we've heard terms like opposition research.

And these things have kind of come into public knowledge and public consciousness. And it throws kind of harsh light on the fact that companies, I'm not going to use the word spy, but they do keep tabs on people and other institutions. I'll say it's by. OK, you say it.

But we do still tend to think of that surveillance in classic spying terms. We don't envisage it as being a trail of data. As a surveillance tool. Well, yeah, companies don't need to be watching and listening to you to know everything that you're doing.

They know what you bought for lunch. They know what funny product you just saw in the pharmacy. They know what you're wearing today. They know where you drove to and from, how long you worked out for, what route you took on your jog.

You know, they even know from the phrasing of your posts and comments, what frame of mind that you're in. And all of that information is neatly geostamped and time coded. Almost people don't seem to care. Which is why these definitions are actually so important and why the science of the digital economy have so little interest in those distinctions being made or that clarity being brought.

I mean, if you look at it in a different way, let's say my company, CultureBok, hands you a free notebook when you're at an event, or maybe even comes and puts it through your letterbox. You use it to keep a private journal of your actions, your thoughts, your feelings. Then suddenly I pop along and ask to borrow the journals and read them and record them. I can't imagine most people wanting you to know they are most intimate secrets.

Why? What would I use it for? I'm not a bad actor. You know, I'm somebody that you can trust.

But then take it a stage further. What if I simply grab that journal and tell you it's mine and that everything in it is mine, that the book was always mine and that I only lent it to you to write him? And that's the world that we've somehow, if not exactly agreed to, then not actively protested against. And in this version of the world, that lack of protest is actually interpreted as acquiescence.

And we started off the show asking the question, who's robot are you? Where does the robot pack come in? Well, go back to the farm analogy. So in a surveillance economy, we are a product.

So again, we look at the 10-year challenge. And if you haven't read it yet, please check out Kato Neil's insightful piece on the challenge at Wired.com. But for most of us, that challenge was just a fun little exercise. You post a picture of yourself today and another one from 10 years ago.

Perfectly harmless, right? But that information, and let's not forget that every piece of data we give away is information. That information can be used to train a facial recognition, artificial intelligence. But the argument is that if they have access to our photos and our profiles, can't those machines already draw those perils?

They can, but your online pages are full of noise. Think of the number of pictures that a lot of people post. It's multiples a day. How many of those are selfies or other shots that have you in them?

You know, most people are not as fastidious as I am about keeping their face offline. What the challenge does, therefore, is shortcut the work to train that machine intelligence. You are choosing two images that you think are a good representation of how you looked, then and now. That's an incredible shortcut through all of that noise of thousands of potential images of you.

And perhaps having to tune out people may be relatives who have more than a passing resemblance to you. In other words, we could look at it as if we had just been sent a piece of code and completed a programming request. Yeah, exactly. And you can see that pattern being repeated throughout the hundreds of interactions we have with technology every day.

We're being told the technology is there to make our lives easier. And there is some truth to that in certainly a superficial sense. But we are the information and the companies are using us to train and shape the products of tomorrow for them to sell back to us and to other people. It's like having the world's most comprehensive and practically free research and development center.

It still brings us back to that same question. Why does it matter? Because you have to get your head around the fact that in this new digital world, you have viewed as bytes a data set, not as a living, breathing, thinking organism. So what sounds like a simple question requires a really long and complicated answer.

And everything with you is long and complicated? Well, this is where I get to flash my Douglas Adams card again. In a sense, the answer is simple and seemingly nonsensical. And it's that we are information.

But it's like the Douglas Adams answer 42. When you see that answer, you begin to see how vast and layered the question really was. And that's partly the reason I think that writers like Norton and Zubar Van O'Neill are shining a light on this area. So let's flash back to those politicians asking Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai questions last year.

The questions were mostly relevant because the politicians had no frame of reference with which to pose them. You were looking at people living in alternate realities. They're using the same words, but they're using them to speak very different languages. But it does come back to that idea of the kind of society we want to live in.

Yeah, you know, you can't make those decisions without defining what the society is going to be. So this week, there was a story that Microsoft would be making $500 million available to provide affordable housing in Seattle. Because one of the curses of the technology industry is that they move into livable cities. And then those cities become unlivable and unaffordable as a result of the distortion that their presence creates.

So on the face of it, it's a really nice story. Microsoft gives back to the city it calls home. Yeah, it's a it's a it's a feel good story. And also it's a good us to Microsoft are doing it, right?

Exactly. But as some pundits have pointed out, it's not a gift. It's an investment that money will essentially be in the form of loans and building property that will turn the investment company that's doing it on Microsoft's behind it. It will turn them a profit.

So one article also pointed out that the investment vehicle being used actively blocked attempts by the city council to enact a small tax on local companies, a tax that would probably have raised the city much more than that 500 million in revenue from all of the companies taxed within the city limits. But it's still a choice people should make for themselves. So yeah, if you want to live in a society where companies are responsible providing public services, by all means, select that option. By defining the system, you can do that.

You're deciding to place your trust and faith in a private company that is responsible to a board and shareholders and not to you. You're preferring to place that trust in them over elected officials whose job it is to represent and protect you. Now, I don't agree with that choice, but at least arm yourself with the knowledge that allows you to make it. But don't lose sight of the fact that the system is a machine and that at best you're a robot.

You're an automaton carrying out a subroutine. I don't know about you, but I think Matt is slightly meaning this battle because I do feel like maybe I am just a robot, not a very good robot. I haven't even got to the mind control. Oh dear, let's not go there.

Also, geeks wants to be next after this. 89.9.