Time spent in lockdown can be used to think about the big things in life. Like artificial intelligence. Netopia has a mini-theme on artificial intelligence, with Peter Warren’s story on insuring self-driving cars and Ralf Grötker’s review of Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible. Both put artificial intelligence in context. No, artificial superintelligence will not eliminate humans anytime soon. Yes, there are completely different issues we need to debate to make AI useful for humans.

Exponential growth is a popular way to think about digital phenomena. Innovations added to innovations in an ever-accelerating pace. This mindset leads to quotes like “change will never again be so slow as it is now”. It brings the conclusion that there will come a point where innovation happens all at once and the speed of change explodes into the “singularity”.

In this virus pandemic, we have been looking at a lot of exponential growth curves and thinking about ways of flattening them. While the virus might be disruptive in its own way, it is driven by mutation rather than innovation.

Exponential growth is seductive. Apply it to any process and you get mind-blowing results. The problem of course is that not all processes can accelerate exponentially. Let’s look at self-driving cars. If computing power (whichin theory grows exponentially according to Moore’s Law), that would make the AI smart enough to take over from the driver anytime soon. The first problem is that AI relies on a number of other technologies, such as GPS, cameras, lidar, radar and many other sensors and communication technologies. Each of these technologies develops at its own pace, but not necessarily with exponential speed. 5G telecom networks, for example, are often mentioned as a key to self-driving cars, but the roll-out pace is held back by many factors: legal, financial, political etc.

The second problem is the data-set. One way to make AI useful is to train it on a big set of data and make it find the patterns. This is what machine-translation has done. In the old days, machine-translation tried to replicate how humans learn languages with grammar and glossary and such. The break-through came with predictive statistics applied to huge samples of real language (corpuses), where the AI can guess with some accuracy what the most likely next word will be from the context. This is what auto-maker Tesla tries to do with its auto-pilot system, which silently observes how real drivers deal with various traffic situations (such as stopping at red lights), uploading that to a central system which then analyses the best driver behaviours and feed them back to the autopilot. That brings the philosophical question if all traffic situations can be predicted and simulated. If the answer is no, self-driving cars will never be 100% self-driven, just like machine-translation can never be 100% accurate.

Put together, this means that exponential growth in self-driving cars may exist in simulation but not on the road. In real-life, incremental innovation is a better explanation. We make the camera a little better, so the car can navigate in rainy conditions. Then we make the wheel sensors a little better, so the AI can get more feedback about the tires grip and calculate braking power better. Then we add more videos to the data-set so that the AI better recognizes road indications and can keep the car in lane. All these things little steps amount to great progress, but it makes for systems that assist the driver (lane departure warnings, automatic high beams), rather than the computer replacing him. Mathematically this is logarithmic growth, which means diminishing returns, also know as Achilles and the Turtle.

In many real-life AI applications, logarithmic growth may be a better explanation than exponential, only not as spectacular. If we keep this distinction in mind we can have a better informed debate about the threats and opportunities of artificial intelligence. Also, next time somebody says exponential growth, you can ask “sure it’s not logarithmic”?

Now, if we could only flatten the corona-virus curve in the same way…

Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki published a statement yesterday on how the video platform responds to the corona virus outbreak. It is worth reading.

Wojcicki says “It remains our top priority to provide information to users in a responsible way.” Sounds great. Could that not be the policy always? So maybe we would not have to live with alt.right-propaganda, election interference, ISIS execution videos and such things that would never be published in proper media. That would make the internet better, regardless of virus outbreaks, right?

“YouTube will continue to quickly remove videos that violate our policies when they are flagged” – Another great idea. Hope it’s not like pirate videos where rights holders must go through a slow bureaucratic process just to have the videos uploaded again right after. Except the really responsible thing would be to not have those videos posted in the first place. That would really help stop virus misinformation! (and the creative economy)

Perhaps that can’t be done because of the way Youtube works? But wait, Wojcicki has the answer:

“In the days ahead, we will enable ads for content discussing the coronavirus on a limited number of channels, including creators who accurately self-certify and a range of news partners”

Great idea, perhaps similar things can be applied to the other problems Youtube brings upon the world?

Thanks to Susan Wojcicki for speaking out. There are two problems here. The first is that this is not enough if Youtube wants to live up to its parent company’s motto Do the right thing. This fits more into the familiar pattern of “do as little as possible” which is justified with anything else would “break the internet” (or Google’s profit forecast). The second is that at previous occasions, the standard response from Google, Youtube and most of Big Tech has been something along the lines of “it’s the algorithm we don’t know what it does” or “that would be like in China”. Wojcicki’s statement shows that they can if they want to. Great, now do that more often. And better.

(A similar issue related to a smear campaign against Michelle Obama. Watch this great TED Talk!)

They say time flies, but it also true that time is slow.

Netopia first started ten years ago. Since then much has happened. But much is the same.

Netopia launched February 16^th 2010 in Swedish. With a bang! An op-ed in the #1 daily Dagens Nyheter described the mission. If democratic institutions and rule of law are not present online, that void will be filled by others. This basic premise guides Netopia still. The Manifesto remains.

Sweden in that time was like nothing else. It was the Sweden that brought The Pirate Bay, which in itself started as an experiment by the pirate think-tank Piratbyrån (“The Pirate Bureau”). It was the Sweden that elected The Pirate Party to European Parliament with 7,3% of the votes (but not to Swedish parliament the year after). “Polarized” may be a cliché, but it was polarized back then because there were only two positions available in the public conversation: pro or against “new technology”. Having worked in game development for many years, I did not feel at home in that dichotomy. I wanted to be pro-technology but also pro intellectual property rights. It felt wrong that the ruleset that connects creative work to the regular economy (=copyright) should be less important. Quite the opposite, I thought it should be more important since digital output is intangible. So I set out on this search for a third position. A few wrong turns later, it had occurred to me that the issue was much bigger than copyright. It was about power, competition, freedom, democracy and big words like that.

So I started Netopia, to be able to invite others to help figure it out. Turned out many were interested. I published work from historians, scientists, lawyers, creators, business people, policy-makers… and some pirates too. They looked at technology, law, China, human rights, history and many other topics, in different ways connected to the “digital society”. I was able to convince some organisations in the entertainment industry to bankroll this soul-searching. They didn’t always like the things I posted, but generously let me carry on. (Thank you, you know who you are!)

It was also controversial, almost an insult to some. The pirate movement took turns swinging at me. Responding to the comments on the launch op-ed took six(!) blogposts. It was fun and a bit overwhelming but the pushback in social media was quite different from what I met in other places: it turned out a lot of different people had shared my sense of unease with the polarized debate and welcomed the search for a third position. Tertium non datur is not very helpful.

It was frustrating too. Trying to take part in a global debate in a small language. The people I wanted to talk to (and argue with!) mostly wrote in English. I did read them but they could not read Netopia. Also, as a balance to the power of the internet monoliths, the Swedish democratic institutions were not much. The EU on the other hand, that could be something to put one’s trust in. So in 2013, Netopia switched language to English and moved to Brussels.

Since 2010 everything has changed and nothing has changed. There is a bigger understanding now of the problems with the lack of rule of law online. There is an appetite for regulation that did not exist in 2010 (no I’m not saying Netopia made it happen, only that it was part of the change in mindset). But to a large extent, the power battle is the same. If anything, the monoliths have become more monolithic.

Netopia is ten years. Who knew? Here’s to another ten. And to the hope that those ten will be plenty.

Skål!

The Swedish edition of Netopia is still online here:

www.netopia.se

Here is an evergreen topic: does piracy really hurt legal sales?

Last week, film-maker legend Werner Herzog said at a film-festival in Switzerland that pirates have his blessing if they can’t find a legal source for his movies.

Gizmodo conveniently disregarded the second part and added the pirate’s old pet theory that piracy may help legal sales. To support this argument – which is not what Herzog said – Gizmodo cherrypicks two studies: one is the infamous Ecorys-study which was commissioned by the EU Commission (no pun) but buried – most likely not because of some inconvenient truth but for its inferior quality. More on that report here. The other, if you read it, recommends fighting piracy, at least pre-release. Pretty weak support, considering the heap of studies that come to the opposite conclusion.

But maybe that old argument is less interesting, because Werner Herzog is right of course. If he makes a film, it belongs to him and its for him to decide what happens with it. That decision is his and nobody else’s. Unless of course he chose to sell that right to somebody else (maybe in exchange for a production budget), in which case that right belongs to the buyer.

Werner Herzog also said the stupidity in social media is what scares him the most. Netopia concedes.

The go-to-answers to any form of criticism of the tech business have always been “freedom of speech”, “human rights” and “it would turn us into and China”. But as of today, Big Tech must come with a new answer. Amnesty International has called the bluff.

The report Surveillance Giants was published today. It calls Google’s and Facebook’s offers “a system predicated on human rights abuse” and says it is:

an assault on the right to privacy on an unprecedented scale, and then a series of knock-on effects that pose a serious risk to a range of other rights, from freedom of expression and opinion, to freedom of thought and the right to non-discrimination

Read that again. “Unprecedented”. As in “never before”. That means that it trumps the historical atrocities of the KGB, Stasi, North Korea… even the Sesame Social Credit in China.

Yes, Google and Facebook protested (and Amnesty has graciously included the responses in the report) and said they help freedom of speech. Except Amnesty International is a better judge of that.

Next time Chinese dissidents complain about surveillance, the Communist Party can say “at least it’s not as bad as Facebook”.

The biggest illusion around the internet is that lack of regulation brings freedom. It does not. It only cedes the power of regulation to the tech companies, rather than keeping it in the hands of democratic representatives.

The mythology is strong, though. Tech gurus are fond of saying that immunity from responsibility is the heart of how the internet works. Without it, no Wikipedia. No freedom of speech. No innovation. And, surprise surprise, more power to Big Tech.

The mythology is strong, though. Tech gurus are fond of saying that immunity from responsibility is the heart of how the internet works. Without it, no Wikipedia. No freedom of speech. No innovation.

US legislators were the first to stumble into this trap. When they passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act some 23 years ago, they meant to empower intermediaries to tackle illegal content on message boards and chat rooms.  They thought – mistakenly – that shielding intermediaries from responsibility for what users do would turn them into so-called “Good Samaritans.”  The reality turned out to be very different.

The EU’s E-commerce Directive is a bit more balanced. It makes a distinction between passive and active service providers.  That’s not enough for Big Tech, which has urged the US government to export Section 230 to Europe through a trade agreement, giving them “certainty” that they’re free from any possible liability.

EU leaders, meanwhile, worry that they may have already gone too far. They are asking tough questions about the need to revisit rules made long before things like smartphones, social media and fake news.

Even if we wanted the internet to be completely “open” and “free”, do blanket immunity laws like Section 230 bring that? The answer is no. Intermediaries instead intervene when they like. Pressed on hate speech, Cloudflare took offline the infamous anything-goes chat forum 8Chan. The big platforms have banned right-wing-extremist Alex Jones and his Infowars-channel.

Easy to agree with those actions, but this is not legal certainty. Quite the opposite: random responses to outside pressure. In each parliamentary hearing, Zuckerberg promises to hire thousands more moderators to fix whatever the issues. But we can only guess what those moderators actually moderate. Facebook bans emojis that can be used for innuendo, but allows political ads with no restrictions on… lying. Is this what “open” and “free” looks like? Is this freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech is the right to express your own opinion. It’s not the right to distribute other people’s works and expressions against their will. It’s not the right to operate a taxi service without following taxi service rules. It is not the right for a machine to distribute any data without restriction.

Innovation does not happen from lack of government. In fact, sensible government intervention often supports innovation. The internet itself is a good example: 50 years ago, the Americans where ticked that the Soviets beat them to space. So they started pouring money into advanced military research. One thing that came out was the internet. No government, no internet.

Yeah, Wikipedia. We love the convenience, but is it really that neutral? Some entries are more like battlegrounds for fake news bots. And how come Wikipedia blacked out in Italy and Poland, protesting copyright reform? That smells more like activism than unbiased knowledge.

And if Big Tech wouldn’t suffer from changes to Section 230, how come they lobby against every such change?

EU policy-makers should see through the illusion of intermediary immunity. When making law for the digital age, they should not fall into the 230 trap. Instead, approach the internet as any other field, where balanced regulation provides the rights of the individuals and promotes fair competition, institutions protect those rights and oversees those markets, and democratic process runs those institutions. Let’s call it a proven concept.