MSP69 [] Fixing It: Working for the Machine

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's one Friday, my name is Jasan. One of the reasons that this show exists is to demonstrate some of the many ways that technology is dramatically improving our lives. But what do you do when the technology that is supposed to be making our lives easier seems to be serving other masters?

It is a fun Friday episode. Anyways, this sounds like another one of those Game of Thrones inspired episodes. Are we back on your master and servant theme? Hey, Jeff, in my rately, I guess.

This is another one of those episodes I've had sitting on the burner for a while. And then the Bruja Ha about Facebook's supposed to pivot towards privacy broke cover last week. So I thought it was pretty much time to tackle this one. And before we head into Facebook, Lanna, again, do you want to give us a little bit of background today's show?

Well, as you mentioned in the intro, it's no secret to anyone that I think technology is fantastic. For the majority of humans in the developed world, at least this is still the best time to be alive. And part of that reason, or part of the reason for that, is the technology that we have. So it doesn't matter whether it's technology delivering information to your hand, your smartphones.

Safer and more reliable modes of transport, cheap and plentiful food, incredible medical advances. Everywhere you look, technology is chipping away at the brutalities of the past. You could argue that some of the technology is pretty brutal too, right? Absolutely.

We have an enormous capacity for violence and destruction. And one of the first things that we do with a lot of technological developments is to weaponize them and use them for so-called defence or security purposes. It doesn't matter if it's video cameras or advances in audio and sonic technology. That's not actually what we're talking about today, but if you are interested in that part of our development, there's a great article at New Scientist called How Humans Evolved to Be Both Shockingly Violent and Super Co-operative.

It's not the snappiest title I've ever read, but the piece written by Richard Rangam looks at the evolutionary and societal case for violence and cooperation. Alright, so when do you think we've lost control of the technology? I don't know if there's even an answer to that question. You could say that we lost control of technology hundreds of years ago.

Donald Trump loves to tell people how well walls have worked for millennia. And yet, they're great at keeping marauders and bandits out. But history is full of walled cities that fail to invaders. Some were more technologically advanced than the invaders, who simply encircled them and starved them out.

But often it was technology that breached those walls, sea, gens, catapults, crossbows, all of the things that human ingenuity could make. I told you, we weren't talking about walls and violence. I know, but when I start talking about looms and steel mills, people switch off. The things most people remember from their history classes are the battles and the walls.

And greater technology has often, not always, but often played a decisive role in who wins those walls. The US Civil War is a good example of that. The industrialized Union states literally had an enormous war machine that the more agricultural and slave-based economy of the Confederate states just couldn't compete with. So we've never been in control of technology?

Well, you know, you can own your own spade, but it doesn't make sense for everyone to have their own steel mill. So it's a really difficult question to answer. But I think throughout the 20th century, at least, there was a feeling that the technology served us, whether it was electricity, telephones, cars, bridges, air conditioning, TVs, you know, all that paraphernalia of last century's consumer culture. But somehow, our ability to grasp that technology seems to be declining.

Is that from the perspective of understanding how things work or from the actual ownership of a product? A little bit of both, I think, and they do seem to be synonymous. The more complicated the technology in our lives becomes, the less ownership we take of it. Or rather, the more willing we are to allow the manufacturer or seller to retain some of those ownership.

In what sense? Well, when I bought a new car a few years ago, it didn't come with a CD player. You still play a CD player? OK, this isn't that show, but yes, I still buy in-play CD.

So the guy at the service center told me they couldn't install a CD player for me. Even though I found a CD player that the manufacturer sells in other countries for precisely those reasons. I said, I'll import the player, they said they couldn't install it. And then they told me that if I installed it myself or had a CD player installed by a third party, it would invalidate the warranty on the entire car.

So what did you do? Well, I bought a car with a CD player. But like I said, this isn't that show. It was only after that I thought how monumentally weird and arrogant that was.

To buy a car that had a CD player. To be told I can't do something with my own car. If I do something as minor and inconsequential as changing the media center, then the manufacturer won't cover me if the gearbox falls out or the ECU fails. You know, we take a lot of these things for granted and it's not accidental.

There are numerous examples where we're pretty much groomed to accept these very weird restrictions around the technology we use every day. I guess Apple's breaking of jailbroken iPhones is just one of the most obvious examples, right? Yeah, and let's be clear, this isn't just an Apple issue. So most of the big tech companies, product and service companies included, are guilty of this kind of high handedness.

But the Apple example is a useful one because it was so high profile. Do you want to remind people who may have forgotten what the story was about? Or they've never owned an iPhone and couldn't be bothered to just follow the story? OK, I'm trying to pull it out of the dusty roller decks of the mind where my memories are stored.

But essentially, some people wanted to be able to play around with their iPhones in ways that Apple didn't prove of. And that basically meant doing all the basic tweaking, rather, that standard on Android phones or to sideload apps that didn't meet Apple's terms and conditions, or were from developers who didn't want to submit themselves to Apple's set of ethics and conditions as well. So that could range from apps that anonymized your phone and stopped it from sending data back to servers to priority copies of retail apps from the app store, which people could then add free or at a much reduced cost. And what was Apple's response?

Well, to issue updates that detected if the phone was in jailbroken and bricked it and bricking is a slang term for rendering it inoperable, i.e. turning it into a sleek glass-fronted brick, which depending on the ethos of the day, the company might choose to unlock for you at a cost or simply leave dead. And how did the people respond? Well, people who had bought these really expensive phones they could no longer use were rightly outraged, but as for the wider public, it was pretty much, you know, who cares?

And I think that, and similar accounts as other tech companies, sent a strong signal that we were prepared to let them get away with pretty much anything. It showed that most people were quite happy to go along with whatever set of conditions came along with the device. And crucially, that the people who didn't go along with those conditions didn't have a sufficiently large voice or enough influence to make people understand the fundamental weirdness of that approach. That you don't own the things you buy?

Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to buy something with financing. So, you know, you want a house or a flat, you need a mortgage, and until you finish paying, the finance company gets first dibs on any sale of that property, or if you go into a rears, they can take it back from you. But you buy a phone from Apple or Samsung or whoever, and that company dictates how you can use the device. That's very strange.

You know, you wouldn't let your mortgage company tell you what colour the walls in your flat had to be, with furniture you could use, or who you were allowed to let into the property. But that's routinely the arrangement we accept with electronic devices and tech services these days. All right, when we come back to how we're being groomed by the big tech companies into World B5, 89.9. Bright, formidable media, BFM, 89.9, the business station.

And we're back. It's Fun Friday. My name is Jasan Dutka with Culture, Bob's Mat Amatage. Today we're looking at some of the ways that our relationship with technology and the companies that make these programs and the control that they have with the technology are breaking down.

Mat, before you use that loaded term grooming, what do you mean when you say that? Well, again, I don't want to get into that conspiracy theory territory. And I don't think it is a grand conspiracy. I think it's more a case of people jumping on the bandwagon.

And of course, you know, there are a lot of agencies and consultants sitting in the background, touting these ideas as best practices to their clients. But those EULAs, EULAs that we all blithely click on in terms of conditions for apps. When you look at how they're structured, they want you to click yes without reading, partly because most of us are going to fall into an arco-optic coma halfway through point one, but also because it's the most efficient and machine-like way of getting through the service. But we're not supposed to be machine-like.

Well, that was something that we touched on in last week's episode's Data Babies, which is available on all good podcast platforms, if you haven't listened to it yet. Now, there's this idea that we are deliberately remaking ourselves in the machine's image. There's a great article by John Norton at The Guardian. It's actually from November 2018.

It's called Computers Have Learned to Make Us Jump Through Hoops. Again, I don't know what the problem is with these articles and titles. Anyway, he briefly goes through some of these grooming exercises and reading it is one of those, ah-ha, type, you know, eureka type moments. Ah, for example.

Well, you know, there's recaptured tests that ask us to prove we aren't robots. Yeah, exactly, you're laughing already. You know, they take you to a bunch of pictures where you have to identify road signs or traffic lights. So what we're actually doing is helping to train artificial intelligence, probably Google's Waymo self-driving car, to recognize and identify the things that they're going to see as they drive around.

And we're doing that work for them for nothing. And then when I finally prove I am a real boy, that thing I just signed up for asks me for all kinds of personal information and preferences, that it then uses to try and sell me stuff. So it's just a Turing test? But it's not a Turing test.

So as Norton points out, it's actually an inversion of the Turing test. The Turing test is for robots to try and pass as humans. These tests are for us to prove to a robot that we're human. And that's what I mean about the relationship being very wrong.

It's like one of my speakers announces battery low, please charge now. Is it talking about me or itself? You know, we have companies telling us how to use their products, not allowing us to change a thing, and then making us complete a series of challenges to prove that we're human enough to be their customers. It is completely absurd.

Which I imagine is what's going to bring us back to Facebook. Yeah, I mean, today's poster child for everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley, which I imagine has taken a lot of pressure off Uber. And let's face it, we hardly even notice when Twitters Jack Dorsey posts pretty pictures of temples and ignores what many commentators have classified as ethnic cleansing or potentially genocide in countries visiting. Because Facebook will probably have done something tone deaf and foot shooting during that same news cycle.

And what's the latest example? Well, of course, last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would pivot towards privacy. I think one of the examples he used was that Facebook was founded on the idea of people living globally and overlooking the simple fact that many people want to live locally. What does that mean?

Who knows? If anyone does know, please feel free to tweet us your explanation. I'd like to say we have a prize for the best one, but we don't. One of the major steps Facebook has just announced is that it will unify the messaging platforms of WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

And how does that protect our privacy? Well, in theory, it means that the same encryption can be used to secure all the platforms. But you can do that without unifying them. I can understand that Facebook thinks it's paying out a lot of money to replicate systems.

I understand that. But if that's your business case, then tell us. At least then we can make an informed decision to carry on using the services. Or we can just migrate somewhere else.

Don't show us a grapefruit and tell us. It's an orange. We know as soon as we take a bite. So can Facebook make privacy a priority?

I mean, it just can't. We've discussed it here so often. Facebook's business model relies on exploiting the privacy of its users and selling that information to its real customers, the people who advertise on its platform. A lot of the comments I've seen online suggest that this could be a move to integrate various parts of the company more tightly in case it's ordered to break up or divest certain divisions in the next few years.

Is that likely? Well, there is a growing public and political consensus that some of these companies are already too big and too powerful. And that's something we'll have a look at in more detail next week. Honestly, I'm on the fence.

Does Google dominate in search? Yes, it does. But how do you break that up? You can get the company to split or sell off its other divisions like maps.

But how do you reduce its dominance in search? And if you do, are you just creating another monopoly to rise in its place? Like I said, more on that next week. But there is a growing consensus that something at least needs to be done.

And it seems to be the focus of the Democratic presidential nomination campaign in the US? Yeah, I think Elizabeth Warren issued comments about breaking up the tech giants and then had her adverts for Facebook banned temporarily until they complained. So she's saying that these companies have too much power and then their responses to use the level. And that's happened to me as well.

When I try to come out certain of these shows, if I use Facebook in the description, it gets rejected by the ad server and I have to reword it. So there are things that need to go on. We do know that the European Union, for example, is looking at the possibility of anti-trust cases against some of the tech companies, similar to the one that forced Microsoft to break up parts of its business in the year 2000. So a lot of people are seeing the Facebook announcement as a pre-active move.

Turning Facebook, what's happened Instagram, into basically a single product would make it much harder for any lawmaker anywhere in the world to order them to be broken up. And in doing so, of course, it locks users even more tightly into that Facebook-owned ecosystem. Now we've talked about interoperability before, especially when it comes to IoT and the home control system. Is this another area where technology is just failing us?

To an extent, because we're often talking about commercial standards rather than open source one. Obviously, companies want to sell you as many of their own products as possible. So they don't necessarily want their washing machine to communicate seamlessly with a rival's tumble dryer as it will their own. But we're sold that as an advantage rather than a drawback.

And even when the systems are more open, they still rely on a commercial third party like Google Home or Amazon Alexa. So the standards are still set by a company that can decide to freeze you out or directly complete with you or replicate your own product. So once again, it favors those entrenched operators rather than the innovators and the emerging businesses. We've been mostly talking about the tech's usual suspects today, but this issue is much more broader than that, isn't it?

Well, yeah, I mean, one of the reasons we talk about these kind of tech giants because the shows are quite short and it's easier to use examples that people recognize. For example, when I talk about steel mills and looms, people don't want to hear. But many of the subjects we tackle on MSP are valid for, as you said, a much broader range of companies, especially when we talk about all the ways technology can be used to create divides in society, to favor the people who have wealth and power and to continue to increase the gap between them and the people who don't. So last week, for example, there was a breakthrough in drugs to fight depression.

So this drug was announced to be close to clearing its FDA approvals in the USA. I'm not going to name it. I'm not a good guy if you want to find out more, but it's derived from a commonly used anesthetic drug called acetamin. And how does it work?

Well, that's the weird thing. Nobody is actually really sure, but it seems to work really well on people who are resistant to the serotonin class of antidepressants, and rather than taking it every day, forever, you can take a short course of the drug, under medical supervision, and for many people, then mood starts to lift within a few days of those first treatments. And that treatment can then be repeated as required, if the illness returns. But for many people within the tests, they were clear of the depression for months and months after this short course is a treatment.

And isn't that a good thing? It's a fantastic thing. people are opening up, we can actually have conversations about mental health, but this breakthrough is also a very expensive thing. A course can cost thousands of US dollars, which you'll pay again every time you need a top up.

And that's fine if you've got really good medical insurance or if your country's healthcare system will cover that treatment. That's the only how healthcare works. Of course, but there are some dangers there as well. Firstly, ketamine is a widely used medical drug.

It's available in generic form, so it's actually very cheap. But because of that, few companies are willing to fund trials to have it classified as an anti-depression medication. But if you tweak the formula and then patent it, suddenly you have your miracle wonder drug that commands premium prices, even though it's essentially the same as the old generic. And the second danger?

Well, ketamine has been used as an illicit drug for decades. It's easily available on the street. And that's where you see people being failed by the technology and development, where desperate and vulnerable people whose depression is drug resistant might decide to turn to illegal sources for treatment. And they'll be using drugs of uncertain provenance.

They'll be using drugs that don't have an exact dosage and they're using it outside medical supervision. And that's a horrible risk to take when someone else is able to obtain pretty much the same treatment, perfectly legal, just because they have more money. Now, this week we hosted the BFM Enterprise Rocks, it's a conference from retailers and also other small business owners. You appeared on a panel about small businesses using data to boost their own businesses.

And one of the topics we covered was how the small businesses use the same practices as the big tech companies without alienating their own customers. Yeah. Now, due to the conflicts of time and in the spirit of full disclosure, we're actually recording this show before BFM Rocks. So I'm actually talking about what I'm planning to say rather than what I actually said.

But I know, well, what can you do? You're telling future math that gets to travel back within forwards. But it is difficult. That edge that data on your customers can give a company that can make a really significant difference to small businesses and retailers.

And I'll be honest, when clients ask me about this, it's the area where I'm most conflicted. So I usually outline the fact that some people are starting to break away from the data systems created by companies like Facebook and Amazon. They want the convenience of retailers that know something about them and their taste without the intrusion of continuous attempts to reap their data. And it comes down to your own business ethics, especially when it comes to systems that allow facial recognition for customers and monitor their behavior in store.

I'd advise businesses to be upfront with their customers, let them know that you're using these systems, give them an opt out and make your data retention policies very, very clear. One of the reasons we get so frustrated with big tech companies is because they aren't upfront about their intentions. They don't answer straight questions and worse. They still refuse to come clean when we can see straight through them.

So I would say be as honest as you can. Don't pass off actions you're taking to improve your business as things you're doing to improve the life of your customers. Treat them with respect, give them great prices, give them great service and give them a reason to come back and shop with you again. So hopefully in the future we will stop working for the machines but we might end up just working for Cloud2POP though.

We might do and also our BFM rocks. I might just say take all the data from everyone and use it for your own good. We'll be right back with Geeksforx after you can find all the transcripts and information about today's show on Cloud2Pops website. It's Cloud2POP with a K.

There's also one spot if I like that. I'll just mention we'll be right back with Geeksforx after this be a bit of 8.9.