Zag To The Zig :: Issue #6
🙏 Hello all. Reaching edition 6 feels good. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it this far. Thanks for having me. And if you have suggestions about what to include and what not, please do let me know.
This week, in the Tech room
This is mental. China’s TenCentVideo is planning to insert ads into movies. Not as an overlay or pre-roll, but actually integrated into the footage.
Lots of mad AI-related news this week. The next thing to worry about: full body deep fakes.
On the other hand. Who needs AI when you have a group of dedicated people? This is the spy-story about people using public online data to point out the guy accused of the Skripal poisoning in the UK *did* have connections with the high-level Russian military. I once saw the guys from Bellingcat speak about the MH17 flight and their stuff is intriguing.
The ethics/fairness room
This is why using tech/digital to optimise existing processes is always going to involve some tears, big or small. Government projects using AI can actually have the reverse effect and increase poverty.
Technology Review made an intriguing interactive long-read about the problems with predictive algorithms used in US courts. If you’re into data and moving sliders, this is your thing.
I’ve been paying more attention to cookies/trackers recently and even a newspaper like the Guardian is somehow using an incredible amount.
(continue reading under the video)Here is the insane list of personal trackers and and tech firms @guardian uses to keep tabs on users. Feels unending at times. @shoshanazuboff @PaulNemitz #permissionlessinnovation
On the other hand, they are one of the only ‘we-used-to-be-paper’ news sites that have installed the Brave plug-in, which means they automatically get rewarded BAT-tokens by users who chose to reward in this ‘attention currency’ (I do). Minimal impact, I’m sure, but at least they’re aware and experimenting with alternatives to the lets-sell-your-data-to-as-many-vague-companies-as-possible model.Funny-not-funny. An AI that scans privacy policies from tech companies and rates them. Ratings go from A+ (very good, like Telegram) to F (for Facebook-products?).
The Economy Room
Think about Facebook’s Libra what you want, but it did kick off a think storm around ledger-based digital currencies. While G7 etc all say no to Libra, the digital Chinese renminbi is on the way. And of course, the Americans want a digital (read: tokenised) dollar too (WSJ-€).
2 former financial regulators claim that a global digital currency by a competitor (read: Facebook or China) will "eventually erode the dollar’s status as the most popular currency for international exchange"
Interesting to see how these people keep thinking in nation economies and national currencies.Meanwhile, in Bermuda, the government accepts USDC, a crypto-stable version of the dollar, backed by the Coinbase exchange.
Individuality is a feature, not a bug. Welcome to the passion economy! My prediction is you’ll hear this term a lot in the near future. While everyone tries to scale and become the next Gig Economy platform, more platforms are allowing people to make money from their individual passion. I’ve called them 'me-entrepreneurs’ before and I know quite a few people who are looking into this.
In the Tool Shed
This looks like a really interesting tool and playbook for design around collective intelligence. In-depth but I will look into this.
Random ZTTZ
💾 I hope they know what they’re doing. The US military is will stop using floppy disks to control their nuclear program.
🏁 End note: 1 thing I’ll be doing this week…
Reading. I’ve been asked to give a workshop on blockchain for legal people, so will check how Kevin Werbach, a Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, approaches it in his book: ‘Blockchain and New Architecture of Trust’. Never too old to learn.