Scott Smith and his family moved from the USA to the Netherlands and discovered that despite living in the most heavily surveilled moment in human history, neither his old country nor his new one can figure out how to relate to them.
I’ve gone through this myself, in both directions, repeatedly, over a decade, moving back and forth between Canada, Europe and the USA. It’s not just the kafkaesque process of getting working papers and figuring out how to pay your taxes (try convincing the British not to charge you tax on the income you paid tax on in California!), it’s all the rest of it: establishing credit, and, especially, working out access to all the clouds.
I have a Kindle account that I established with a US credit-card, which meant that, while I lived in the UK, I was able to buy US ebooks (but not UK ones, even after I established UK credit-cards too). For a while, the Amazon MP3 store would sell to me from its US branch, then not at all, then from its UK store. Now that I don’t have any UK credit-cards, I can’t buy from it at all again.
Phones are the worst. I changed my UK-based Three SIM to a pay-as-you-go plan, but I can’t top it up with a US-based credit-card (I used to have this problem with my Rogers Canada SIM, too, but then I switched to Wind, which lets me top up with a card from anywhere). I’m in Germany today, and I’ve made a dozen calls and online attempts to figure out how to get my phone working – and now I’ve been locked out of my account.
Did I say phones are the worst? No, utility bills are the worst. Getting set up with the local gas and power companies – a prerequisite, weirdly, for enrolling our daughter in public school! – was a bizarre process of showing up with money-orders (sometimes) or cash (sometimes) and handing it across the counter, getting stamped pieces of paper, bringing them to other windows, and…
Actually, banking is the worst. I got set up with my local credit union (who also needed those utility bills!), only to discover that I couldn’t install their app on my phone. The nice thing about a local credit union is that level-two tech support is the CTO. My CU’s CTO put me in touch with the company’s mobile app developer, who told me that they had deliberately locked their apps so that they wouldn’t install on Android devices that were registered to non-US Gmail accounts, and that Googlerequired them to do this.
Luckily, I know some very senior googlers. But they shamefacedly told me that as far as Google Play and its Android services were concerned, I would always be a UK resident, because I’d turned on merchant services for my Gmail account, so that I could accept payments. Once that bit has been flipped, it could never be unflipped. If I wanted to have a US Android domicile, I’d need to set up a new identity, buy all my apps all over again, and, depending on how I wanted to do things, get all new devices to run that identity on.
Plan B: I got the head of communications for Google Play to give me an on the record statement that said that Google Play doesn’t require region-locking of its vendors, and in fact, it actively discourages the practice. Armed with this statement and the evidence that my CU’s vendor had built apps for half a dozen other US financial institutions that could be installed on UK-based devices, I spent five months helping my credit union’s CTO lobby the vendor to turn off its region-locking bit. As of last week, I have my credit union’s app on my phone.
This all may sound like First World Problems, but it’s just the reverse. The vast numbers of refugees fleeing conflict zones have all of these problems and more, because they’re traumatized and broke as well as disoriented and tempest-tossed. They don’t know senior googlers. They struggle with language barriers. They don’t have high-priced immigration lawyers who go to battle on their behalf.
Changing countries is very nearly impossibly bureaucratic for people with agency, money, connections, and the luxury of time to plan and think. When I get cut off from my SIM, I can pick up another one and email my relatives to let them know how to reach me. But if your relatives are refugees in a distant camp, losing your phone number can mean losing your family (possibly forever).
The borderless world of money and business is, ironically, a world of ever-more-imposing borders for humans. For example, governments have made ineffectual gestures at getting multinationals to pay their taxes, creating systems that assume an adversary with a huge and well-oiled accounting machine. The resulting system is virtually impossible for individuals to understand or comply with.
This is getting worse, not better. I’ve been a country-swapping expatriate for all of this century, and it keeps getting harder – even as the number of people who’re doing what I did, involuntarily, without the support and resources I have, continues to grow.
Awkward Engineer’s Model AWK-105 Analog Voltmeter Clock costs $139; it began life as a successful Kickstarter and is now an object of commerce, in off-white or khaki. I love that the “twitchy” analog needles that display the time are connected to an Attiny44 CPU. (via Red Ferret)
Gartner’s top strategic predictions for 2016 and beyond (my 2¢)
Daryl Plummer, VP of Gartner, announced Gartner’s Top Predictions during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. It’s all about digital business, the race against competitive autonomous machines, IoT and smart devices talking to each other, the relationships between people and machines et cetera. Usual stuff, if you’re following. Therefore, let’s see what 27 analysts (!) have produced:
By 2018, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines.
By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support.
Interesting narrative development. They’ve probably thought: We’re oversaturated of simple IoT devices forecasts. So let’s add “they need support” and create something unique and new. Well done. I wonder what would happen if 6 billion devices request suppport at the same time? Denial-of-service.
By 2020, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in 5% of all economic transactions.
Hm. Just 5%? What about all the fintech bots and algorithmically driven agents that conclude deals in milliseconds, execute VC investment decisions, support financial advisors with automated advices and the general development of electronic trading? What about the Blockchain? And don’t forget the socio-tech trend, that rich people increasingly prefer to get their financial advice from robots. Pent-up demand.
By 2018, more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “roboboss.”
Trending topic atm, so I’m surprised to see it here. But a quick internal search shows, that the issue had already been adressed last year. Furthermore, there are a lot of portents for a Mechanical Turk economy. In a probable future, we’ll only get jobs because we’re cheaper than machines. With the words of Lilly Irani: “Automation doesn’t replace labor. It displaces it.”. Highly recommended talk: Johannes Kleske - Mensch, Macht, Maschine. Automatophobia.
By YE18, 20% of smart buildings will have suffered from digital vandalism.
YE18? Do we see here the the emergence of a new calendar1? Anyway, digital vandalism in smart environments is just another term for hacked infrastructure. It’s an unsettling thought and YES we need better security and privacy systems for home automation, smart homes, offices, their APIs etc. But I’m looking forward to friendly art hacks where nobody gets hurt. And keep in mind: Not everything has to be connected. Be sure to read “Understanding the connected home” by Peter Bihr and Michelle Thorne for more informations about the ecosphere of smart homes, UX and future settings. Futures noir.
By 2018, 50% of the fastest-growing companies will have fewer employees than instances of smart machines.
Digital Transformations = speed, cost savings and productivity improvements. I don’t know current market stats and figures but if you’re looking at the success of UBER, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Alibaba etal and A16z presentations you’ll see the gigantic market power of software driven companies. The interface is where the profit is. Software is eating the world.
By YE18, customer digital assistants will recognize individuals by face and voice across channels and partners.
Ahm, I don’t understand this one tbh. According to Gartner, a customer digital assistant is powered by facial recognition, voice identification, emotion detection, natural-language processing and audience profile data. A pimped up Siri or PS4 if you like, that has access to your profile and interaction data. Think of a mobile (!) skype call with an animated character instead of using the amazon website. Confused.
By 2018, 2 million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.
By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate.
Another trending topic. Big fan. Instead of using apps, we’ll rely on textinterfaces and (human/bot) agents in the future. Hybrid AI, Intelligent Assistants, social robots, domestic AI, on-demand mobile Virtual Assistants, Personal Assistants or Assistive Intelligence. Call it as you like. We’ll have to face NLP- and machine learning driven software and hardware, orchestrating our life over APIs and hidden backchannels. But first we have to talk about trust. AI.
Through 2020, 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
People have always been the greatest security risk. Don’t know why that should change, or is worth mentioning. No brainer.
Conclusion
You have to admit, that they know how to write predictions and forecasts, although 27 authors are 22 too much (somehow they have to justify their prices). No matter. There’s enough background material if you’re willing to sign up. The predictions are therefore more conjectures - reasoned speculations about the future - than mysterios omens based on augury or hepatoscopy (= hype cycle methods).
However, the underlying dystopian echo is surprising. A lot of the predictions advertise futures with a bad aftertaste. Even the summary sounds like a prelude to a mediocre near-future robo-corporate-surveillance-scifi flick:
The dramatic rise of smart machines and autonomous devices is driving radical shifts in business practices and individual behaviors. Enterprises and individuals face the urgent need to define and develop harmonious relationships between people and machines.
Either way. At the end, all of the predictions above are marketing material. If you’re afraid, ask Gartner. If you want to make money, ask Gartner. If you want to know more, ask Gartner. If you want to know what the future brings, ask Gartner. Don’t believe me? Here’s Gartner’s top 1 recommendation:
Use Gartner’s predictions as planning assumptions on which to base your strategic plans.
At least they’re honest. And now: Everyone please stand up and follow Gartner into the future.
Footnote: Spelling and Grammar unaudited.
Sjef enlightened me: “YE18 = 18th cycle of the rule of our Lord Kanye, may the Futch be upon him.” Praise shingy'ism. ↩
As rents increase with a neighborhood’s desirability, the metropolitan lifestyle becomes inaccessible to millennials and beyond. But Kasita could pave a way for the democratization of urban living, with its modern, movable apartments, which are affordable but comfortable alternatives to conventional luxury apartments. READ MORE…
"The hackers can control Siri and Google Now from the distance of 16 feet without the owner hearing anything. The hackers can for instance have Siri navigate to a certain web site and have malware installed via the page."
Maciej Cegłowski’s posted another of his barn-burning speeches about the Internet’s problems, their origins and their solutions (previously), a talk from the Fremtidens Internet conference in Copenhagen called “What Happens Next Will Amaze You.”
Cegłowski traces the history of “clickfraud,” the practice of using software bots to load, click on, and interact with ads in order to generate fraudulent income for unscrupulous “publishers” who run the bots. In order to defeat the advertisers’ countermeasures, the bots grew incredibly sophisticated – watching videos, filling in forms, and otherwise impersonating legitimate traffic – and so did the countermeasures.
This created a full-blown ecosystem of ad-tech that aggressively monitored users and aggressively shoved ads into their face (as Cegłowski notes, it was considered fraud when a bot tricked an advertiser into thinking an ad had been seen, but it’s totally legit for an advertiser to trick you into seeing an ad), and fraudbots that figured out how to get past the countermeasures.
Meanwhile, all this surveillance was changing the way ads were delivered. If you have a ton of data on readers and their activities across the Web, why not use that to target and re-target ads that follow them.
These databases have not yet been publicly breached, but they will rupture, because all databases rupture. The tracking data held by ad-tech companies is vaster and potentially more damaging than the data breached by Ashleymadison, the Office of Personnel Management, and other high-profile dumps.
Some people try to draw a distinction between government surveillance and corporate surveillance, but it’s a distinction without a difference. The NSA and other spy agencies use advertising tracking cookies as a cheap and easy way of tracking individual users across multiple devices, locations and accounts.
That means that regulators who are supposed to be overseeing ad-tech companies are working for governments who depend on mass-scale ad-tech surveillance to make government spying cost-effective.
Cegłowski finishes his talk with a set of six proposals aimed at regulators, tech companies, publishers and users. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but they’re provocative and plausible, and let us know that all hope is not lost.
