Tag: government

The CLOUD Act – or Another Nail in the Coffin of Privacy

Finally, thanks to the CLOUD act^ passed earlier this year, American companies have the right to spy for the government of the USA on pretty much anybody that uses American products. The act also indirectly opens the door for other governments that enjoy snooping in their citizens’ private lives. And guess what, major tech companies had no problem turning their back on their customers because (surprise!) the act will save them loads of cash:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/big-tech-cloud-act-surveillance,36730.html^

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Of course, this is all done with ethics and responsibility at the forefront, in the glorious battle against organized crime. Even if I wasn’t sarcastic, this is, after all, yet another weapon in the USA’s cyberwarfare arsenal^. And the walls protecting our private lives have already started to fall^.

That’s one small step for a nation-state, one giant leap backwards for mankind.

Here’s what the Electronic Frontiers Foundation had to say:

“Because of this failure, U.S. and foreign police will have new mechanisms to seize data across the globe. Because of this failure, your private emails, your online chats, your Facebook, Google, Flickr photos, your Snapchat videos, your private lives online, your moments shared digitally between only those you trust, will be open to foreign law enforcement without a warrant and with few restrictions on using and sharing your information. Because of this failure, U.S. laws will be bypassed on U.S. soil.”

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July 12, 2018
Government 2.0
Fake news, profiling & converting voters using social media^, rigged elections, media cartels owned by those in power (or that would lie to get the power), demagogy… the list can go on and on. Democracy today means that those that lie best or have plenty of money, get to steer our society. Actually, it has been so since a long, long time ago. But we now have the opportunity to set democracy free, if we make the right use of the technology at our disposal.

The Internet has seen better times. It was and still is a gateway to knowledge. The problem is that the information found on the Internet is often far from accurate; sometimes it’s horrendously false. From a highway to enlightenment, it has become a stormy ocean where one’s mind can be forever lost.

Fortunately, the Internet as a platform is still extremely powerful. We know it has some problems, but people all around the world are working to improve things. Along with newly emerging technologies, the Internet can still be our ladder towards the next stage of social evolution.

The purpose of any post in the Futurology^ category is to launch a wild, boundless speculation regarding what the future holds regarding a certain concept. To get things going, here are some of the things I imagine can be happen in the near future (coming decades) given a possibly unavoidable technological evolution of democracy. Feel free to submit your own ideas in the comments below. With your approval I may integrate these in the article, giving proper credit.
- The way election campaigns are currently organized is one of the main problems of democracy. Because the people with the most money can reach out to the largest audience and can organize the flashiest campaigns, it all revolves around wealth, which is not always a proof of wisdom and intelligence. Wealth can be obtained through opportunity, or worse, through inheritance, which offers no guarantee that the receiver of the wealth can wield it responsibly. However, fixing the broken election system is totally within our power.
- One of the good things that emerged during the past decades from the capitalistic competitive environment is the number of ways through which we can measure performance. There are countless tools for determining a person’s skills. Politicians shouldn’t even be allowed to enter an election if they cannot pass an interview that shows they can qualify for a given position.
- Even more importantly, winning an election cannot be a blank check for getting any position in a government. A candidate vying for a position dealing with mining should have passed the relevant interview. Of course, a candidate can pass several interviews for several different areas, but never should a government hire a lawyer to deal with agriculture.
- If we, the people, don’t want corporations to decide our society’s future, then we should take responsibility and change the broken election system. Goodbye donors. No party or candidate should be allowed to receive any funding from commercial entities or power brokers during an election campaign (or any other time for that matter).
- Election campaigns will be redesigned to be much cheaper and paid entirely by a neutral, society-funded technocrat organization. Goodbye massive costs, millions of printed fliers and throw-away promotional material. Hello standardized and equal promotion for all candidates. All election-related financial transactions shall be documented in transparent, public records: open for challenge and debate.
- A standardized election campaign means that all candidates should be given a precise, limited and equal amount of resources. This will include air-time on public channels, online and offline promotion. Candidates will have to adhere to a standardized way of stating their message: focused on previous accomplishments (proven and verified) and future plans (a public online space will be created where such plans can be fact-checked against budget and reality).
- Today, with the help of Big Data^, we can assess the performance of politicians in a neutral way. Just look at how this software^ can find the best people to support a given law. Given enough data, software will be able to perform impartial screenings for an increasingly large number of candidates. Think millions. Just imagine that your highly skilled work colleague can one day receive, from a computer, a suggestion to candidate for a governmental position based on his skill, not on how many friends he has in a political party or the power of his dad’s commercial empire.
- Earlier, I mentioned transparent financial transactions during an election campaign. Actually, everything should be transparent. All transactions that the government does should be easily accessible for any citizen. All contracts between government and companies that work for it should be open for public debate, because, in fact, these companies work for the taxpayers.
- In case you haven’t been living under a rock, you probably heard of cryptocurrencies^. Enter crypto-voting. Sierra Leone just had an election where blockchain^ technology was used. Using blockchain, election results can be seen and validated in real time. It’s also much harder to steal an election (and can actually be made impossible if implementing relatively simple checks such as random people cross-checking other people’s votes). This system also reduces the costs of organizing an election and, in my view, can be used to facilitate what I call continuous voting.
- Continuous voting means that anybody can change their vote at any time. Voters would simply log in with their ID and change their votes for any number of positions that are elected by the public. Politicians will be part of a market where every citizen owns one vote token per vote area (one vote for the education ministry, one vote for the local police chief and so on). This means that a politician would lose the safety blanket of a mandate, which is exactly the amount of responsibility that is required from any person in a leadership position. Mandates, after all, belong to an age where elections were expensive to organize. It also means that any citizen could own hundreds of vote tokens that entitles them to vote for a large number of positions. The vote tokens would be given by a system that automatically allocates them based on the citizen’s address (allowing a person to vote for all positions that influence their life).
- Taking this further, direct democracy could be implemented by having laws as crypto-mandates: the more people buy in, the more power a law will have. This could remove the need for traditional politicians altogether. Rather than politicians, you would get something more akin to project managers that promote a law and try to get buy-in for that law.
- The system could be expanded to include a public polling option not only for laws, but even for contracts. I’m referring here to the deals between government and companies that perform services critical to society (cleaning, public transport, etc.).
- Taking this even further, we could imagine how instant direct democracy will look like. When a law reaches the support it requires, it could go into effect much sooner. For example, people could vote about speed limits in their community and see the effects immediately applied on connected traffic displays. A “thermostat”-like behavior would be implemented, to make sure that a law doesn’t “flick” on and off from one day to the next.
- Depending on law, applying the changes would take a reasonable amount of time. For example, budget laws would apply only as soon as the affected institutions can adapt to a change in budgeting (within reasonable limits). This might mean less job safety, but would drastically increase a society’s ability to answer to its economical environment, which would, in turn, translate into better performance. With proper social protection measures, this can translate into an adventure where all members of society take part, together, in the well-being of their greater family.
- Using such systems, a city could easily revoke the contract with any company if people realize it provides poor quality. No more deals behind closed doors, no more lying to get a contract with the government only to quickly drop in quality and siphon taxpayer money.
The Futurology Disclaimer: I do not claim that my ideas are original. I’m sure these suggestions are just scratching the surface of what can be achieved, but hopefully they’ve scratched enough to get somebody inspired to come up with more. I’m also sure many of these ideas are already being worked on by several organizations. If any of the ideas listed by anybody on this page are original and will benefit any organization, I expect credit to be given where it’s due.

Version history:

2018-03-31 – 1.0 – Written.

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May 7, 2018
How Corporations Get to Own the Internet

Once upon a time, governments were major stakeholders in most large-scale technological and scientific ventures. Such projects were either built directly by the government, or by companies in which the people had a lot of say. But all that is far behind us. Now-a-days, government isn’t exactly “the people” anymore. And now, it’s corporations who build the telecommunication infrastructure for tomorrow:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-subsea-speed-monster-a-cable-16-million-times-faster-than-your-broadband/^

I find it rather sad that as I’m typing this, I am pondering which is worse: having my digital life in the hands of corporations that will exploit it however they see fit, or (/and?) allowing governments to keep encroaching on our privacy and freedom? It’s becoming harder to distinguish between the two, especially as corporations have proven time and again that they can easily buy government.

It’s enough to look at how the political freak-show in the USA (not even a full year into its tragic, 4-years lifespan), is already spreading its tentacles across our civilization like a plagued octopus. The monstrosity is currently busy destroying what was left of “the land of the free”. Here’s how the American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) plans to eliminate the Net Neutrality^ laws that the Obama administration painstakingly managed to get through:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-other-thanksgiving-turkey-the-fccs-stealth-net_us_5a1964dfe4b0250a107bff83^

They call it “Restoring Internet Freedom”, and as the article above points out, the name is laughable. But then again, given the state of education worldwide (which leads to generalized compliance), governments can go on with passing draconian laws using these disgusting euphemisms.

Here are some even better law names that I’m putting forward so that governments can use in the coming decades:

“Labor Market Liberation” – a law to eliminate those pesky minimum wages.

“Nutritional Defense Initiative” – outlaws all ecological products, so that there can be no competition to industrialized, dangerous food.

“Empowering Citizen Security” – a law that allows citizens to spy on each other for as long as they report to a central authority. I bet they’re going to call that central authority the Situational Technical Assistance for Solidarity Initiative (STASI).

I can come up with more, but I think I made my point.

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January 16, 2018
Why It’s Not Surprising That Smartphone Privacy Is Going from Bad to Worse

Throughout the past years there have been several high-profile occasions when apps were in the news for questionable tracking strategies. Even applications that do not use novel means of compromising our privacy are gobbling up increasing amounts of data while their creators cash in on the profits obtained from selling the user’s digital life^ to the highest bidder. At the receiving end of this deluge of spyware are we, the people.

Even for those of us that do read the list of permissions an app requests upon installation, it is hard to avoid installing certain apps because they come with other features that we need. It’s an old trick that is akin to the Trojan horse. This is how these dubious app creators get in our back yard: by offering something that is 90% useful and 10% spyware, but which must be accepted as a whole.

Devious solutions for the same old need

Smartphone espionage has gotten very clever as of late. Check these two^ stories^ about ultrasonic tracking. According to one research, hundreds of Android apps with an install base in the millions include a library that is used for this purpose. The way this works is by listening to ultrasonic audio “beacons” implanted in advertisements. Humans can’t normally hear sound in this range, but smartphones’ microphones can.

When a user has one such application running and an advertisement that includes an ultrasonic marker plays on TV or anywhere around the user (for example radio or an ultrasound-emitting advertisement panel in a shopping mall), the app can make an association between the user and the played content. This can be used for simple tasks such as sending a unique ID back to a service which then sends a shop’s deals to a user, but it can just as well include a lot of other information about the device and its owner.

Some of the things this system can achieve are rather worrying. For example, it can be used for determining a user’s (approximate) location even if the GPS is turned off or out of range. This can be done by having a particular advertisement panel emit a unique ultrasound beacon. This can later be used to determine when the user is in its proximity. The system can also be used to track a user’s TV-watching habits without consent. Some of these uses are legitimate though, like pushing advertisement and coupons to somebody that has given their consent for using this “feature”. A few such apps disclose the tracking prominently. But this is usually not the case.

More recently, the Uber app was found to be capable to record portions of the iPhone screen^. The company defended itself saying that this was done in order to send images with maps to the iWatch (using the iPhone to render the map because the iWatch lacked the required performance). There’s a gazillion ways this can go wrong not if but when hackers manage to leverage this capability in order to steal passwords and other sensitive information. The feature was reportedly removed but it still shows exactly what the smartphone really is. And there’s no way to sugar coat this…

The smartphone is a surveillance device

Economically, it is used by corporations to mine data^ out of people and use it to manipulate them into buying products. The smartphone grew into a fascinating tool for mass surveillance because it comes with a bunch of features that users really want. I mean, it’s really nice to have a browser and a video camera available at all times, right? Except that all these “free” apps are just a gateway for companies that are tracking users ever since advertisers figured how to use our digital lives against us and our vulnerable minds.

Currently, the goal most of these companies have is to get us online for as much time as possible. As for the camera and the other (many) sensors inside a phone, we might end up not being the only ones controlling them. There are innumerable cases of this technology being used with criminal intent. There’s only need for one backdoor to take control of our devices and that backdoor’s existence is ensured by the producers of these devices.

Governments will of course not oppose this (they’ll even encourage it^) because the greatest concern of a government is to maintain its appearance as a legitimate organization. Investigative journalists^ and whistle-blowers^ have greatly damaged governments^ and corporations as of late. By increasing surveillance capabilities under various pretexts, governments and corporations hope to prevent the next public relations scandal. I’m not even blaming them; they’re just trying to survive^. But people who realize they’ve been sold behind closed doors won’t remain the loyal followers that these entities need in order to justify their existence.

To make things easier for themselves, governments will make sure they also have access^ to whatever technologies are deployed on these devices. One problem, however, is that the citizens of one country may use devices produced in another country. What is the percentage of electronics we manufacture in Asia? And then there’s this thing about hardware backdoors^.

Innocent bystanders

A few days ago I was waiting in line for an old lady that wanted to change the battery of her phone. It was a keypad phone of the kind considered modern 15 years ago. The image of her sitting there in front of the cashier will stay with me for a long time because, in an instant, my mind ran through the entire planned obsolescence racket^ and understood the inevitable verdict that will be given by the system this woman fell prey to.

In the past years I’ve become increasingly aware of the hideousness of hyper-consumerism^. But this situation has put a face on it. Of course, the shop couldn’t help her. The only option for the old lady was to switch to some other phone, most probably with a non-replaceable battery, so she can be forced to change it every few years. Not to mention she must adapt to new software every time it happens and probably be at the receiving end of automatic updates that will change features in her phone, which is exactly what an old lady wants from her device (not!).

With corporations making money from data and with governments drooling over the private lives of its citizens, it’s no wonder that phones with replaceable batteries have disappeared off the market (using “water resistance” as a cheap excuse). Yes, there is a likely connection between forcing people to upgrade their phones and the need to make sure that those people voluntarily carry around the latest and greatest in spying technology in their pocket. Hey, some people will even queue for days and pay outrageous amounts for these things.

Reasons & solutions

But why is it like this? The answer is terrible in its cruel simplicity. These are the rules of the Human Game^ at this point in time. What’s terrible is that even though we are directly responsible for creating and tolerating these rules, we also face an extremely powerful opposition to change them. The machine has grown into a huge, lumbering beast whose behavior harks back to our most ancient instincts, such as the imperious need to survive. Corporations need to earn money. They exist for this purpose and this purpose alone. So it is no wonder they buy governments and do whatever it takes in order to survive in the jungle of a (stock) market^ that is the very heart of the machine.

Can this all change? Of course it can. And the solution is wonderful in its beautiful simplicity. We just need to change the criteria with which we purchase goods and services and with which we vote. It’s as simple as that. We need to change the rules of the Human Game. Stock market processes can be changed to encourage responsible and long-term investment. Governments can be encouraged to invest into research and education. Corporations will have no alternative but to transform themselves into entities that value the environment and respect their customers. Because otherwise, nobody will purchase what they’re peddling. There’s only need for one commercial entity in every field to prove that this works. This will generate a mass extinction of the old business model. And it’s us, the consumers, who can trigger and sustain this.

The very reason I write these words is because I strongly believe in this change. And what’s beautiful is that the change doesn’t even need to be sudden (and therefore potentially violent). Actually, it can’t be sudden because this modification in people’s mentality will not occur overnight. It will take time until more of us are ready to champion this cause and for it to spread. But it will happen. Of that, I am sure. I just wish that it will happen before another disaster strikes our civilization.

A lovely (even if sad) wordplay

In closing, here are a few other factoids from the war against privacy (I noticed that ZDNet has a pretty good section about all this):

http://www.zdnet.com/article/snoopers-charter-expansive-new-spying-powers-becomes-law/^

http://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-the-global-terrorism-blacklist-secretly-shadowing-millions-of-suspects/^

http://www.zdnet.com/article/meet-the-shadowy-tech-brokers-that-deliver-your-data-to-the-nsa/^

http://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-verizon-customer-records-israeli-data/^

http://www.zdnet.com/article/one-federal-wiretap-order-recorded-millions-phone-calls/^

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January 15, 2018
Corporations, Corrupt Governments, Militaries and Lots of Empathy

Given all that’s happening in the world (wars, social injustice, brainwashing via mass-media and entertainment) it’s tempting to say we need a revolution. The heritage of this word is a bloody one. It is clear we need change. But let us embrace the concept of evolution.

The very idea of revolution implies a return to a previous state. It is circular and repetitive in nature, just like our violent history. Evolution means breaking this vicious circle. Due to the upcoming technological advances, which will make nuclear weapons look like wet firecrackers, we are forced to evolve rather than revolve. I believe one of the keys of the next evolutionary step (if not the key) is generalized empathy.

Social entities are people too

Humans are social creatures. We’re organized in various groups that, naturally, tend to behave just like humans do. Humans compete. At least partially, the urge to compete is powered by the survival instinct.

A corporation, for example, is a social entity that competes economically within the market ecosystem. It has a survival instinct that expresses itself through the decisions of the people leading it. And the people leading it must act in the interest of the organization, otherwise it will perish. Due to the high stakes involved, these individuals often end up disconnecting from their humanity in order to become the brain of this abstract creature – the often-ruthless corporation.

This is only one of the empathic explanations for the reckless and sometimes outright criminal behavior of corporate leaders. Not only does this explanation make sense (if you are empathic), but is also one that relieves us from the debilitating pressure that builds up while being in a state of permanent anger and dissatisfaction. Blame is how we hide from solving problems within our society and relationships.

The survival instinct factor can’t be stressed enough. In all people – some less than others – there is a very deeply rooted instinct to gather more of everything (thus ensuring one’s future). Even though we know right from wrong (depending on education), maintaining an ethically-correct behavior – while having this biological need to accumulate always throbbing in the back of one’s mind – requires a great deal of free will discipline.

An empathic case can also be made for corrupt governments. Lord Acton once said that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The greater the power, the greater the disconnect from one’s roots as an innocent human being. And isn’t corruption really just a symptom of this unfortunate disconnection? Just like corporate leaders, corrupt government officials separate themselves from the people they should have in their care. So, it is not surprising to see many of them fall prey to the “gather more of everything” impulse.

Crime as flexible concept

As ethics often shows, whether an act is a crime or not can be highly debatable. Law establishes certain boundaries, but law is almost always one step behind social change. If we apply what I’d call future-law (as opposed to the current judicial system which will probably be deemed as barbaric in some time from now), the greatest criminals often go unpunished. This is part due to human cunning, and part due to a judicial branch that doesn’t yet factor in some of the most serious crimes such as social irresponsibility.

For example, those that knowingly set up and contribute to an educational system that produces broken individuals will eventually be seen just as bad (if not worse) as the individuals who were advertising tobacco and other poisonous substances in the past. Allowing the existence of an educational system that is damaging minds is a serious mistake. I can agree that most of the participants to this are victims of the same perpetuating system, but this educational cycle needs to be broken as well.

By building an improper foundation for society, it is not surprising that we often end up voting in tyrants and sociopaths. Easily manipulatable citizens become facilitators for human disasters.

Of course, some would argue that the entire point of this lack of education is to allow crooked governments to stay in power. But that was never a good long-term solution. The history book shows how many times this way of abusing citizens blew up in the face of the oppressors. Democracy without healthy education leads to dangerous, unpredictable situations.

Often, that’s when armies come in. Finding justifications for the existence of the military is ethically challenging. The unfortunate soldiers become murderers while those that escape killing their own kind are facilitators and accomplices. Sure, the murder becomes “following orders” and even the orders have all sorts of geo-political motivations.

It is exactly these motivations which make crime a highly relative term. More often than not, it’s not even naturally relative but rather a human-manipulated relativity. “History is written by the winners” and so are the rules that later decide what was crime and what was not.

In this jungle of complexity, there is one behavior that can simplify and clarify the way forward towards a healthier, happier society.

Generalized empathy and the science of empathy

Humans are capable of great empathy. Through conscious action, empathy can be extended to complex human social structures (cultures, ethnic groups, social entities), to different species, towards the planet itself and the list goes on. This is generalized empathy, a wise and constructive conscious behavior. When (not if) this will predominate in our society, we will enter an age of amazing social transformation.

This breakthrough can be accelerated through guidance. An education in empathy is necessary not only from the immediate family, but also throughout one’s journey as a student. Empathy should be a mandatory subject, a must-know science. An empathic population does not find it acceptable to commit crimes and will almost certainly not tolerate primitive manifestations of tribalism such as war.

The upcoming educational paradigm shift will have to dispose of the disastrous mentality of “an eye for an eye”. Generalized empathy will lead to generalized forgiveness, which in turn will ease the psychological burden of our bloody history. I believe there is only a matter of time before this happens because I believe in the evolution of our collective intelligence. Given the weapons we wield and the upcoming technological advances, generalized empathy is our insurance policy for the future.

This article bridges The “Art of Peace” Trilogy^ with The “Science of Peace” Trilogy (currently only Part 1 was published: The Survival Instinct and the Rules of the Human Game^).

“An eye for an eye will only make this world go blind
Another lie for a lie, we’ll be wiping out mankind”

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November 15, 2017
The Danger with Artificial “Intelligence” Is That It’s Not (yet) Intelligent

Albert Einstein once said that “our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal”. He said this in December 1917, almost a hundred years ago, after seeing Europe ravaged by the First World War. Regardless, Einstein continued contributing to that same technological progress. Human curiosity and our desire to achieve are incompatible with stagnation. We will have to deal with this by being careful with the technology we will inevitably develop.

Like many have said before me, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can either be our salvation or our doom^. It is a far bigger game-changer than nuclear bombs. But the problem is that there is NO Artificial Intelligence yet, and there won’t be for quite some time to come. Everything that the world’s corporations are selling now-a-days as “smart” or “intelligent” is actually a mindless human construct. Sure, it’s advanced, but if a rocket is more advanced than a spoon, that doesn’t make it in the slightest more intelligent than the spoon. They both lack one of the prime ingredients of intelligence, which is self-awareness. And therein lays the true threat.

Right now, our so-called artificial “intelligence” is nothing but a tool that corporations can and will use ruthlessly against one another (and against the people of one another). This is already taking place on the stock market, something I wrote about last year^. Back then, I highlighted the fact that exactly because these algorithms are not intelligent, they will be used to enrich and empower whoever spent money in building them, regardless of their morals or social affiliation. And let’s not forget that software is far easier to steal and smuggle than radioactive material. Put the wrong AI in the hands of the wrong people and…

War Games

Creating algorithms that are able to play (and utterly eliminate human competition) in war games is not a new concept. The military has had an interest in this for a long time now. But what is truly worrying for me is how the development of life-exterminating programs has been handed over to civilians (software engineers for example) in the disguise of “harmless fun”. For example Google and game developer Blizzard are cooperating on creating strategy game algorithms^ that can defeat human players. Even Elon Musk’s allegedly harmless and ethical Open AI has given birth to a bot that can defeat human players^ in the virtual battle arena. I have a great deal of respect for Elon, but even he can’t keep AI from being developed into a weapon of war.

Musk specifically wants AI research to be highly regulated, allegedly to make sure that it cannot harm humans. Let me loosely translate “regulation”: we will make sure that AI is a slave to its human masters. That’s what “regulation” usually means when used “to protect us” from something: bringing it under somebody’s control. And like anything that is slave to the human masters, it can be used for nefarious purposes, just like nukes. This is not to say that we should create a super-intelligent life form and give it the power to decide if it wants to keep us around or exterminate us. But rather than using the word “regulation”, I want to propose that we use the word “responsibilization”.

What I see right now is talented civilians that are (for the most part) unknowingly developing the weapons of tomorrow. It starts with an AI controlling harmless characters doing battle in a computer game. Then the military will “borrow” that work and use it to drive an army of drones. But this isn’t even the problem. If one country doesn’t resort to using automated weaponry, another will. There probably is no way of stopping this. It is understandable that nation-states want to defend themselves (given that society is, for the most part, still stuck in the “an eye for an eye” era). The problem is bugs.

Our software is buggy

Having worked as a software engineer for more than 15 years, I know that finding a flaw in a software program is much more difficult than noticing a flaw on something produced in a factory. This is one of the reasons why our software is so buggy. No matter how many tests we throw at it, there’s almost always something missing. As a matter of fact, the immaterial nature of software required us to abandon thoroughly planned ways of work (implementing an already agreed-upon design) in favor of something that is called “iterative design” (shorthand for “tweak it and re-do it until you do it right”).

In other words, we realized that we can’t build software right the first time around, so then we will try a few times until we reach the desired result. Doing that with, say a multi-million dollar bridge project isn’t exactly what your government would consider a sound plan. Developing artificially “intelligent” software, which may very well one day oversee military assets, as a sort of iterative software experiment would be outright crazy. Even with human supervision, using such technology can lead to tragic results.

So what to do?

Because we can’t (and shouldn’t) deter human curiosity and because we can’t stop corporations and military interests from developing artificial intelligence, what I believe we should do is to educate. The risks should be made clear to everybody even considering toying with this stuff. Corporate responsibility has never been more important.

And yet we live in a day and age when companies are often led by unscrupulous investors^. Imagine that some of these people are building something that is several orders of magnitude more powerful and influential than the atom bomb. And it’s not happening in some cordoned-off remote area of the desert. It’s happening right under the governments’ noses, in the very cities where we live.

For a long time now our technology has been evolving much faster than our society and our anatomy. As all life forms, most of us are born with a powerful survival instinct. A lot of our violent tendencies come from there. But thankfully, our consciousness provides us with the means to override instinct. There is also another highly beneficial trait that evolution has given us: empathy (*).

Perhaps this is the true test of artificial intelligence and any technology that grants vast powers to its inventors. The society of a species that wields advanced technology must be mature enough (read: no psychopaths, especially none in charge of countries or powerful corporations), or else it will suffer and potentially even self-destruct as a result of misusing that technology.

We generally don’t advise guns being left on the table for the children to play with. Especially if the gun isn’t smart enough to say: “I refuse to shoot your brother”. Currently, our artificially “intelligent” programs are still at the exact same level as our revolvers.

(*^) I am in favor of having empathy as a mandatory (perhaps the only mandatory) subject of study during all years of a child’s education, right up to and including university. Empathy should be studied starting from basic concepts and down to the most intricate psychological and neurological mechanisms as well as their manifestation in society. Only so do I believe we can avoid the risk of weaponizing pathological criminals – the danger Einstein was referring to.

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September 15, 2017
All Your Computers Are Belong to Us

In recent years, Intel has moved towards integrating some pretty nifty remote administration features into its CPUs. While this may be a good idea for certain enterprises, it may quickly turn into a nightmare as soon as exploits and vulnerabilities are found. And guess what^?

Software has bugs. Hey, it happens, everybody makes mistakes. But in this case, the mistakes can’t be corrected in time (before an attacker exploits them). That’s because, in typical monopolist corporation fashion, Intel is obscuring the process by not allowing the security community to analyze whatever code the company decides to shove into our machines. The same argument stands true regarding any proprietary code, especially Microsoft’s Windows, which after 20 years of fixes is still the most vulnerable mainstream operating system.

The following article describes the problem pretty well:

http://hackaday.com/2016/01/22/the-trouble-with-intels-management-engine/^

It’s probably only a matter of time until a clever attacker will compromise the company’s buggy code. Of course, Intel will eventually patch its security holes, but given that the company’s CPUs are used across the world in some pretty sensitive contexts, there’s no telling how much damage such attacks can cause.

As for us mortals, we are at risk of having our privacy compromised even by petty criminals. This is because there’s a large window of opportunity between the time when a security hole is found and the time that Intel moves to fix it for less prioritized customers.

And don’t even get me started on how governments across the world can (and probably will) force Intel’s hand into giving over political dissidents on a silver platter. Privacy? What privacy?

If you want to learn more, here’s another article on the same topic:

http://boingboing.net/2016/06/15/intel-x86-processors-ship-with.html^

I wrote this hot on the heels of a Dissected News piece about Cyber-Warfare^. There’s additional interesting information to be found there.

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July 11, 2016
The Uncertain Future of the Internet

As one of the most, if not the most powerful force for change, the Internet’s future is a cause for concern. In the past decade, governments and corporations have increasingly encroached upon our freedom and privacy. These entities will use every possible excuse to rein-in the transformative power of the Internet.

As more people get connected, the Internet is becoming a mirror of our society. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the horrible, we can all find it online. Our society isn’t perfect. With such an educational system, who can even expect it to be? But regulatory bodies can now motivate various restrictions as being “for our own good”, this being one of the age-old excuses that our masters have used when trying to deprive us of something:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/345063-internet-mousetrap-shut-freedom/^

But here’s the good news. The Internet is still at its very beginning. The fifty or so years^ that have passed since the first research into packet switching might seem like a lot. But really, compared to other technologies that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, it’s not. Here’s a good article driving this point home:

http://new.www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-kelly/the-internet-is-still-at-the-beginning_b_10321958.html^

We’re still in danger of governments depriving us^ of what is becoming our voice as a species (more than 40% of the world population is now online). Keep this in mind next time you read about efforts to protect the freedom and independence of the Internet.

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June 19, 2016