The Digital Single Market is expected to create Billions of Euros (between 17 and 415 per year, depending on whom you ask). Except on closer inspection, those Billions are not added to the economy – they are cost savings thanks to productivity increases and lower consumer prices. Increased digitalization means cheaper production, increased online competition means lower consumer prices at least in theory (digital markets gravitate toward dominant players). Cheaper production and lower prices are of course great, but they don’t add to the economy – they can make room for investment and new opportunity, but that does not appear automagically. Owners and managers can choose to enjoy better profits rather than investing in new business.

Parallel to the Digital Single Market policies is a debate about automation and robots. Does automation kill jobs? If so, what to do? This is the flipside of productivity increases and cheaper services: each job produces more, each consumer pays less. Fewer workers are needed. These are the concerns behind those 17 or 415 Billion Euros: the job market may change fundamentally with digital transformations. Bill Gates suggests a robot tax to pay for re-education of those workers. French presidential candidate Benoît Hamon wants “basic income” for all citizens. European Parliament debated a report on the issue, but chose not to take stand.

Should we tax the robots? Try to stop digitalization? Say no to productivity increases and cheaper services? Throw the towel on jobs and pay all Europeans to stay home and smoke e-cigarettes all day? Here’s another idea: why not make the Digital Single Market about growth and creating new jobs? Three ingredients are needed: investment capital, education and functioning digital markets.

Investment first, interest rates are low but investors are risk-averse. Silicon Valley based much of its success on the generous federal loan guarantees in the 1960s that gave 4(!) public dollars for each private dollar invested. EU investment funds are plentiful but difficult to access. Education second, EU has world-class educations by any standard. Take Bill Gates’ point about re-education and also add creative skills and it can be even better. Last but not least, digital markets: curb the niche monopolies that grow from the winner-take-all online economies, not only with competition cases but also upstream regulation. And make sure intellectual property rights are protected online: the output from tomorrow’s jobs will be immaterial, intellectual property is the key to the digital economy.

This is Netopia’s newsletter of March 9 2017

Basic income is sometimes regarded as an inevitable result of technological progress. If automation takes away all jobs, the state will have to pay people to do nothing goes the logic. This could be paid for by a tax on robots, say some. Netopia has lots of objections to this argument, as has been discussed previously. But what about the other perspective – what happens after basic income? What does life look like? Because sci-fi really only works well as dystopia, of course the take is not very positive in the James S A Corey-short story The Hunger After You’re Fed that Wired Magazine published as part of its fiction-special earlier this year. Read it as a cautionary tale. Or as comment on writing. Or just to find out Héctor Prima is.

You know the future is already here when the European Parliament has a report on robots and AI. Not only the rapporteur, Luxemburg socialist MEP Delveaux Stehres, and Netopia take an interest in these topics, but also such prominent thinkers as Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates. The irony is that arch-capitalist-gone-philantropist Gates and French socialist presidential candidate Benoît Hamon have arrived to the same idea: tax robots to compensate for jobs lost. Gates wants to use the money for jobs in the public sector. Hamon prefers to give it out to citizen’s no questions asked as a “basic income”.

This begs many questions: does automation kill jobs? Will new jobs not come this time around? Is it useful to give out money carte blanche? How to pay for a program like that? Do we need a new tax-base besides labour? Will AI:s outsmart humans? Wake up and become “self-aware”? Even kill us as many a sci-fi writer have suggested? These are great questions, but today I have a different one on my mind. What is a robot?

Of course a robot can be a tin jar with arms, antennae on its head and a flat voice. Or it can be something like the Star Wars droids R2D2 and C3PO – different in appearance but with strong personalities. Or it can be a manufacturing robot spraypainting car bodies in a plant, basically a big hydraulic arm with a spray can on one end. But there are also software robots playing poker or chess, algorithms trading on the stock market, autopilots in airliners and self-driving cars. Turns out a robot can be many different shapes and sizes and probably difficult to distinguish from dumb machines in a meaningful way. So we’re looking for a useful metaphor here, let me suggest one: What if robots are dogs? No, wait, let me try to make this case…

Dogs can be useful and productive, like guide dogs, sled dogs, narc dogs, truffle-sniffing dogs… you get the idea. Dogs can also be pets, but so can robots. In facts, robots can be unintentional pets: in my house, we have a vacuum robot in our living room, it’s rather useless for cleaning (gets stuck under the comfy chair every time) but it’s so fun to watch it has become a party trick when we have guests. Watching the vacuum robot move across the floor is fun in the same way as watching cats do stupid things in online videos. So robots can be like dogs. Dogs have some rights: it’s against the law to abuse or hurt dogs. And dog behavior has consequences: if a dog bites a human, it will be put down.

In their 2013 book Big Data, Oxford professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Economist editor Kenneth Cukier suggest that companies should be held responsible for abuse of big data, creating an insurance system and specialist big data engineers. That could be a clue for how to deal with robots.

Or, you know, just treat them like dogs.

Singularity University is a think-tank in Silicon Valley, perhaps the most important place in the world for technology philosophy. It appears there is no problem that technology can’t fix: Death? Trans-humanism suggests to freeze your head until medicine develops far enough to sew it onto a new body. Or maybe upload your mind to the cloud and live forever? World hunger? The internet will set you free, once the satellites, balloons or drones are up and beam connections to remote places, the blessings of the internet will give the hungry access to world markets plus bring them freedom of speech and democracy as a bonus. Maybe.

Don’t get me wrong, living longer sounds great and who can argue against putting an end to world hunger? But I have issues with the image of technology as an evolutionary force which can only go in one direction and our job is to cheer along the way. As much as real problems like hunger and death are about humans, the techno-ideology solution leaves humans out of the equation.

The idea of uploading a person’s mind to a computer was first articulated by sci-fi author Jerry Sohl in The Altered Ego (1954). Great fiction, but I’m not sure Sohl meant for it to be taken seriously. Living forever as a digital mind assumes that the mind can be disconnected from the body. I’m not sure I’m convinced. The other day, I had new shoes and they we’re hard on my feet. It hurt and I got grumpy and moody. But that night, I had my favourite food (spaghetti puttanesca) for dinner and felt much better. What happened to my body was much a stronger influence on my mind that any of the conscious thoughts I had that day. Peter Diamandis is the visionary and charismatic co-founder and executive chairman of Singularity University. His ideas are intriguing, but I must ask: can he make uncomfortable shoes for the digital mind?

It can of course be debated if death is a “problem” or rather a part of life. Is life without death meaningful? Is looking for a way to cheat death a meaningful way to spend one’s life? Legend has it that Caesar had a slave whose only job was to occasionally whisper in his ear the words memento mori. Remember you are mortal.

Digital issues entered the global media focus this week, as the coverage of President Trump’s immigration ban developed day-by-day. On Tuesday, a long list of tech companies announced they would meet and discuss filing an “amicus brief” (unsolicited lawsuit) to push back on the executive order. While recent court rulings may have reduced the urgency of such an initiative, it is easy to sympathize with the sentiment. Many Silicon Valley-profiles are immigrants, including Google co-Founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and activist investor Peter Thiel. Netopia agrees with the idea that more perspectives bring greater creativity, that business needs openness and that the internet has made the world more global, so in particular for technology companies, nationalism is weird.

But while the initiative is commendable, the question is if these same companies may be part of the problem. Advanced social media strategies, tailored to individual users, playing filter bubbles to its own advantage was a big part of the Trump campaign. Psychography is the operative word and the company in this case is called Cambridge Analytica. Another term that became popular with the Trump presidency is “fake news”. Assumingly, fake news contributed to a media climate where traditional reporting was more difficult. But it may not be Russian hackers that is the biggest problem. Belarusian-American writer Evgeny Morozov (another immigrant!) says the problem is not fake news, but how the internet giants’ algorithms are set up. It is integral to the ad-funded, data-driven, freenomics of social media.

While it’s great to see democratic commitment in Silicon Valley, perhaps their energy is better used focusing on their own business practices than legal action.

US tech workers pledge to not help build a data-base of religion, should president Trump carry out his campaign promise to build such an index of Muslims. Neveragain.tech is signed by thousands of software developers (and sympathisers) who fear that their employers may be called upon to release personal information of the users of their services relating to race, religion or national origin. The pledge recognises the historic role of technology in genocide and ethnic persecution such as the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII and others.
Netopia supports these brave tech workers who have taken this strong stand. Their resolve may be tested though, should some of the more pessimistic interpretations of the Trump agenda play out, as only one of the eight big Silicon Valley companies clearly ruled out helping such an effort, according to one survey. (Twitter was the odd one out, though there may be some method problems as five of the others did not answer rather than actively decline to comment).
If you ever looked for a case that technology is made by humans, its evolution guided by human choice and ideology, it would be difficult to find a more beautiful way to make that point. A message of hope for the new year, in spite of so many discouragements in 2016. Let’s make 2017 better. Happy new year!

How can Santa deliver so many Christmas presents in such a short time? A question every child has asked, perhaps the first step in doubting Santa Claus’ existence. Can new technology be the answer to Santa’s secret? Perhaps he uses drones or 3d-printers? Or does Santa Claus tap into the sharing economy, using low-wage workers on temporary contracts do the heavy lifting for him? Or maybe it is crowd-sourcing, as in the neighborhood wino dressing up in a red costume and a beard? While the latter maybe a tradition of sorts, did the other options arrive to help Santa? Or are they part of a bigger pattern?

In other words: Is technology a force unto itself? Or is it the result of human effort? If the latter sounds more reasonable, consider how the discussion on digital topics gravitates toward inevitabilities such as “you can’t stop new technology”. (Tech-philosopher Kevin Kelly’s new book is congenially titled The Inevitable) If the technology evolution is pre-determined, the role of the inventor is merely to discover what is meant to come. It’s an argument that dates back more than two thousand years. Plato regarded the physical world as a shadow of its universal form (or rather, he put such words in Socrates’ mouth in his dialogues).

The physical chair I sit on as I write this, is only a shadow of the ideal chair that exists in the abstract. The internet, then, that I use to send this message to you, dear reader, is only a bleak copy of the ideal digital communication network. I would agree that there is some “room for improvement” on the internet, but the rest? Aristotle disagreed with Plato on the theory of universals, rather he saw the physical world as the first and abstraction as a consequence of human understanding of the world. Not sure my philosophy professor would agree, but perhaps Aristotle would see the internet as work in progress, something that we humans can (and should) improve on.

Netopia is with Aristotle on this issue, not least because it gives us more options and freedom to take action. If all we can do is to create imperfect versions of the ideal abstracts, we might as well yield to the higher powers of technology. Instead, Netopia thinks we should debate how we can improve technology and put it to better use for human kind. Whether it is improving Santa’s gift delivery system or making online markets a better place for SME:s. Humans have the power to influence the destiny. Or to quote a more recent philosopher, The Terminator: No fate but what we make.

Netopia wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2017.

This is Netopia’s newsletter in December 2016

In today’s news, Finland will carry out an experiment with universal basic income. The idea that the state should provide a small income for all citizens is popular in tech ideology. Robots will put us all out of work, so the state will have to step in, goes the logic. The Finnish case talks less about robots and more about making the welfare system more efficient, but the basic idea is the same: free money, no questions asked. What could possibly go wrong?

In the Silicon Valley-flavour, it is the idea that the system of innovation and ever improving computers will inevitably bring a situation where human work is increasingly superfluous. Some love that idea, some see it as the end of civilization, some talk about a new kind of capitalism. But the system is not impossible to change. I see three levels: business, government and technology. Looking at the business, of course all try to maximise profits (or stock value) and it is fair to say they are locked in. But the ad-funded freenomics are not the only alternative, look at how Microsoft, Sony, Samsung or even Apple to some extent go about creating online market places where everybody can make money. Google Play not so much. But Google may not be able to grow infinitely on ads, at least that’s what its chief economist professor Hal Varian told me last year. So there are more than one way for business to operate within the system.

Next government, author Andrew Keen makes these points brilliantly in The Internet Is Not the Answer (Atlantic, 2015) how the government created the internet. I would add that the safe harbour/net neutrality-regime has been fundamental to how the digital economy has come to be about selling ads rather than content. With a different policy, there would have been a different outcome. Imagine if Google were required to patrol the re-upload of infringing videos on Youtube, the situation for music and audiovisual industries would be much different.

Lastly, technology. The way the IP/HTTP-protocols work, means every attempt to charge for content will have to be added on as an after-thought rather than integral to the system. I dream of an internet were packets would also have authors and pricetags but that is the stuff of hypothetical arguments and non-starters like Xanadu. Except, with blockchain technology there may be a new opportunity (one speaker said “blockchain enables transfer not copy”).

I would add that it is also a matter of ideology. Google is a result of what was discussed and taught at Stanford in the 80s and 90s. And remember Peter Thiel’s four laws from the Stanford review: no tax, no government, no competition and no copyright (brilliantly analysed by Jonathan Taplin https://vimeo.com/122361826).

So I think we do not need to rely on a new kind of capitalism, I think the solutions may already be in the kind we have.

Robots and AI-revolution: I’m not convinced it will take away all those jobs. Short term, it may be more a question of taxation: automation means replacing work with capital, we tax work much more than capital. With a different tax system, the incentives would change. Perhaps easier to make happen than minimum income? Or perhaps it’s not one or the other?

Finally, coming to minimum income, I find it difficult to see how it would play out. Take my home country Sweden, arguably one of the places with the most advanced publicly funded social systems. If every Sweden over the age of 18 would get €1000 per month, that would amount to €86 Billion per year. That is three times what the Swedish government spends on the social system today. Where is all the money going to come from? Minimum income would likely mean less tax revenue for the state, not more. Also, many of those who receive various kinds of support need and get much more than €1000 per month. I just can’t make the math work. Perhaps the Finnish experiment will produce better data?

“Kevin Bacon, please don’t die.” The punchline of the old meme leaps to mind when I try to make sense of the US presidential election. “We used to have Bob Hope, Johnny Cash, and Steve Jobs; now we have no hope, no cash, and no jobs,” goes the setup. Now, it appears the American voters hope a Trump card will fix all of the above (perhaps minus the bacon).

I used to like Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice. In fact, I liked it so much, I read two of his books: How to Get Rich and Think Like a Billionaire (how can you not love those titles?). They didn’t work on me, though. I’m still not rich.

There are several candidates for digital topics in this election. The Clinton e-mail server. The Russian hacker attacks. The late-night/early-morning Trump Twitter rage. Fake news stories. Facebook’s alleged liberal bias. Suspicion of hacked voting machines. The role of social media and the lack of publishing ethics in new media. But what strikes me most are the shortcomings of the polls and predictions. Most had Clinton as a clear winner. The Trump victory surprised many. There are theories about why you can’t trust polls, for example, that the selection is biased or that answers tend to favour the more “politically correct” candidate (whereas actual votes are anonymous and carry no such stigma). Another reason could be that those who answer polls do not constitute a representative selection; for example, higher-income voters may be more active in polls, or pollsters have difficulties finding respondents in some groups that may not have landline phones or for some other reason.

Google used to claim it could predict things like how the flu spreads and, that’s right, election results through analysis of search results. There’s even a word for it: “nowcasting.” Did Google pick the winner this time around? Turns out the answer is “yes.” But then again, no. Trump led the search for most of the election campaign (Fox News being the congenial source). This is simply looking at how many searched for Trump, with the assumption that those who do would also vote for him. That’s a bit of a stretch; there can be many other reasons why one would search for a candidate’s name. This is the weak link in big data analytics. It can find relationships, but not necessarily causality. In the 2012 primary elections, Google Trends was right about 50% of the time. Just as accurate as a coin toss, in other words. Google Flu—the service that used nowcasting to predict flu spread—was taken offline in 2014 after having made false predictions 100 out of 108 weeks. So yes, Trump was more popular in search, which was in line with the outcome of the election. Except the opposing candidate won the popular vote, so Google Trends was wrong, while it was right at the same time. The conclusion is that nowcasting is a shaky tool for predictions. That no system is perfect. Those numbers can be deceiving.

You never know. But in any case, Kevin Bacon, please don’t die.