Distroid Issue 26

Seeing through the tech hype

Charles Adjovu

Dec 08, 2022

∙ Paid

photo of person holding teal smoke grenade — Photo by Tom Roberts on Unsplash

1. Introduction

Thank you for reading Distroid, a curated newsletter for discovering the frontiers of technology and society.

Contributors:

Charles Adjovu, Ledgerback, Curator & Writer

2. Outline

3. Prototype

Check out the search engine prototype for Distroid here.

4. Jobs

Looking for opportunities at the frontiers of technology and society? Check out our Jobs Board to find new roles and bounties.

5. Headlines

Favorite findings from the Issue 26 curated collection.

Thinking together

Gordon Brander discusses the need for better tools for thought (or thinking) to ensure our civilization can deal with the new information environment brought forth by the internet, and breach through the information scaling threshold

When a society hits the information scaling threshold, it stalls out. It can’t function until it invents new ways of making sense that can cope with the complexity of the information environment. And societies that don’t pull off this transition? The paper posits they collapse.

Rethinking data and rebalancing digital power

Valentina Pavel et al. imagine new futures for data stewardship in the public interest. Primarily, through a combination of four interventions to improve the digital ecosystem:

“Transforming infrastructure into open and interoperable ecosystems”;
“Reclaiming control of data from dominant companies”;
“Rebalancing the centres of power with new (non-commercial) institutions“; and
“Ensuring public participation as an essential component of technology policymaking.”

Imagine a world in which digital systems have been transformed, and control over technology infrastructure and algorithms no longer lies in the hands of a few large corporations.
Transforming infrastructure means what was once a closed system of structural dependencies, which enabled large corporations to concentrate power, has been replaced by an open ecosystem where power imbalances are reduced and people can shape the digital experiences they want.
No single company or subset of companies controls the full technological stack of digital infrastructures and services. Users can exert meaningful control over the ways an operating system functions on phones and computers, and actions performed by web browsers and apps.
The incentive structures that drove technology companies to entrench power have been dismantled, and new business models are more clearly aligned with user interests and societal benefits. This means there are no more ‘lock in’ models, in which users find it burdensome to switch to another digital service provider, and fewer algorithmic systems that are optimised to attract clicks, prioritising advertising revenue over people’s needs and interests.
Instead, there is competition and diversity of digital services for users to choose from, and these services use interoperable architectures that enable users to switch easily to other providers and mix-and-match services of their choice within the same platform. For example, third-party providers create products that enable users to seamlessly communicate on social media channels from a standalone app. Large platforms allow their users to change the default content curation algorithm to the one of their choice.
Thanks to full horizontal and vertical interoperability, people using digital services are empowered to choose their favourite or trusted provider of infrastructure, content and interface. Rather than platforms setting rules and objectives that determine what information is surfaced by their recommender system, third-party providers, including reputable news organisations and non-profits, can build customised filters (operating on the top of default recommender systems to modify the newsfeed) or design alternative recommender systems.
All digital platforms and service providers operate within high standards of security and protection, which are audited and enforced by national regulators. Following new regulatory requirements, large platforms operate under standard protocols that are designed to respect choices made by their users, including strict limitations on the use of their personal data.

From Waste Pickers to Producers: An Inclusive Circular Economy Solution through Development of Cooperatives in Waste Management

Rajesh Buch et al. developed a a holistic, inclusive circular economy framework that leverages cooperative enterprise models and low-cost micro-manufacturing technologies to enable new economic opportunities for waste pickers.

The transition to a global circular economy is often characterized as a solution to environmental problems, but this effort also presents opportunities to design solutions to alleviate inequity and social exclusion. Prevailing top-down approaches to waste management in developing countries, even if they mobilize waste picker cooperatives to facilitate recycling, encourage a race to the bottom in which waste pickers are squeezed by middlemen and left to the mercy of commodity market price fluctuations. Holistic, inclusive circular economy solutions would allow waste pickers to diversify their operations and develop new revenue streams; increase interdependency between waste pickers and conventional waste management actors to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation that leverages their distinct competitive advantages; and achieve greater efficiency by shortening waste supply chain movements through decentralized waste processing.
An approach that starts from the bottom up and mobilizes collaborative networks to empower waste pickers with training, organization, and technology will allow them to ascend the value chain by utilizing recyclable materials to manufacture value-added products rather than limiting their role to collecting waste and brokering low-margin sales to commodity buyers. The integration of the informal sector into waste management systems can increase recycling rates, while eliminating child labor; provide waste pickers with the benefits of formalization such as healthcare, education, and social recognition; and create new jobs and improved livelihoods [3]. More broadly, an equitable transition to a circular economy will improve occupational health and safety for waste pickers, create opportunities for job and venture creation and skills development, and reduce economic harm and displacement.
Although the needs of waste picker communities vary from city to city and country to country, a holistic, inclusive circular economy solution should incorporate the following basic pillars: (1) foster collaborative networks of international, national, and local stakeholders to support waste pickers; (2) establish and support cooperative enterprise models to integrate waste pickers into the formal economy; (3) build waste pickers’ technical skills and capacity for entrepreneurship; and (4) provide access to technologies and markets that enable waste pickers to manufacture upcycled products.

FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident

David Z. Morris details the multiple incidents that led to FTX filing for bankruptcy and upending the global cryptocurrency market.

At the heart of Bankman-Fried’s fraud are the deep and (literally) intimate ties between FTX, the exchange that enticed retail speculators, and Alameda Research, a hedge fund that Bankman-Fried co-founded. While an exchange ultimately makes money from transaction fees on assets that belong to users, a hedge fund like Alameda seeks to profit from actively trading or investing funds it controls.

The hidden market for your location data

Wailin Wong and Darian Woods cover the implications of how companies are acquiring location data from smartphone users via mobile apps (even for apps that do not explicitly need location data to operate) to sell on data markets to advertisers, governments, and other companies, often without the smartphone user’s consent.

Galactica: What Dangerous AI Looks Like

Alberto Romero calls for the need to critically think about AI models as to prevent AI hype overshadowing uses of AI that can be harmful or misleading to the public or non-domain experts.

By using these dubious practices, you get a mix of backlash from worried and angry scientists, a powerful open-source tool that can easily generate mis- and disinformation, and confused laypeople that can’t use the tool correctly due to incoherent user guidelines and are uncertain of whether they’d benefit from it or not.
This isn’t the picture we want to create for AI.

6. Research

Data Commons Primer

Alek Tarkowski, Jan J. Zygmuntowski
Open Future
2022-08

Choosing who can access data and use it – for knowledge-based decision-making, building AI products or conducting research for the public benefit – is a central societal question we have to answer. The challenge is to develop a sustainable information ecosystem that shifts the power balance, and control over data, back to societies, through the democratic management of data as a commons.

Improving data access democratizes and diversifies science

Abhishek Nagaraj, Esther Shears, Mathijs de Vaan
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
2020-09-08

The foundation of the scientific method rests on access to data, and yet such access is often restricted or costly. We investigate how improved data access shifts the quantity, quality, and diversity of scientific research. We examine the impact of reductions in cost and sharing restrictions for satellite imagery data from NASA’s Landsat program (the longest record of remote-sensing observations of the Earth) on academic science using a sample of about 24,000 Landsat publications by over 34,000 authors matched to almost 3,000 unique study locations. Analyses show that improved access had a substantial and positive effect on the quantity and quality of Landsat-enabled science. Improved data access also democratizes science by disproportionately helping scientists from the developing world and lower-ranked institutions to publish using Landsat data. This democratization in turn increases the geographic and topical diversity of Landsat-enabled research. Scientists who start using Landsat data after access is improved tend to focus on previously understudied regions close to their home location and introduce novel research topics. These findings suggest that policies that improve access to valuable scientific data may promote scientific progress, reduce inequality among scientists, and increase the diversity of scientific research.

7. News

Why CEFI is not DEFI

Shermin Voshmgir
Token Kitchen
2022-11-17

Decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to a collection of Web3 based financial service protocols that were designed to operate autonomously without a privately operated institution acting as clearing institution. The original vision was to build a more efficient, transparent, censorship-resistant, and open decentralized financial system using smart contracts. In a true DeFi setup, the role of the smart contracts is to connect all counter-parties to a financial transaction, using conditional rulesets of who is allowed to do what in the financial environment provided by a specific DeFi application. The smart contract — or a series of smart contracts — computationally formalize(s) and automatically enforce(s) these rulesets, thereby replacing many roles of classic financial institutions.
Token transfers, tokenized credit and lending services and other financial services are automatically triggered if the conditions to a smart contract are fulfilled and then executed and documented by the underlying blockchain network. The collectively maintained ledger of transactions acts as a permanent record for token ownership and token transactions, with more frictionless asset settlement than classic centralized finance (CeFi) system, also referred to as TradFi (traditional finance). The publicly verifiable nature of blockchain networks provides more transparency and accountability than CeFi services as well as higher settlement speeds.

This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.

Melissa Heikkilä
MIT Technology Review
2022-09-16

Those cool AI-generated images you’ve seen across the internet? There’s a good chance they are based on the works of Greg Rutkowski.
Rutkowski is a Polish digital artist who uses classical painting styles to create dreamy fantasy landscapes. He has made illustrations for games such as Sony’s Horizon Forbidden West, Ubisoft’s Anno, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. And he’s become a sudden hit in the new world of text-to-image AI generation.
His distinctive style is now one of the most commonly used prompts in the new open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, which was launched late last month. The tool, along with other popular image-generation AI models, allows anyone to create impressive images based on text prompts. For example, type in “Wizard with sword and a glowing orb of magic fire fights a fierce dragon Greg Rutkowski,” and the system will produce something that looks not a million miles away from works in Rutkowski’s style.

8. Books

Atlas of AI

Kate Crawford
Yale University Press
2021-05-25

The hidden costs of artificial intelligence—from natural resources and labor to privacy, equality, and freedom
""This study argues that [artificial intelligence] is neither artificial nor particularly intelligent. . . . A fascinating history of the data on which machine-learning systems are trained.""—New Yorker
""A valuable corrective to much of the hype surrounding AI and a useful instruction manual for the future.""—John Thornhill, Financial Times
""It’s a masterpiece, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.""—Karen Hao, senior editor, MIT Tech Review
What happens when artificial intelligence saturates political life and depletes the planet? How is AI shaping our understanding of ourselves and our societies? Drawing on more than a decade of research, award‑winning scholar Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth, to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers, to the data taken from every action and expression. This book reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than taking a narrow focus on code and algorithms, Crawford offers us a material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power. This is an urgent account of what is at stake as technology companies use artificial intelligence to reshape the world.

9. Videos & Podcasts

Digital Redlining, Friction-Free Racism and Luxury Surveillance in the Academy

Safa
Unsettling Knowledge Inequities
2022-11-21

For the final episode of our third season, we are joined by Chris Gilliard, a professor and scholar who is highly regarded for his critiques of surveillance technology, privacy, and the invisible but problematic ways that digital technologies intersect with race, social class and marginalized communities.
In particular, Chris’ work highlights the discriminatory practices that algorithmic decision-making enables – especially as these apply in the higher education context.
We discuss the various problems that surveillance technology and AI pose for higher education and the future of research, scholarship and academic publishing.

New Data Structures

Jerry Michalski
Tools For Thinking by Betaworks
2022-11-11

In this episode, we are discussing new data structures with the founder and CEO of Kosmik, Paul Roni, independent researcher Alexander Obenauer and John Underkoffler of Oblong Industries.

10. Events

The Longevity Summit 2022

Longevity SF
Longevity SF
2022-12-06

Welcome to The Longevity Summit’s second annual event! We gather the entire longevity ecosystem to tackle the aging problem: longevity entrepreneurs, existing pharma and biotech companies, investors, researchers, and government organizations. Developing aging interventions may represent the largest value creation journey in human history, and it’s going to require a coordinated industry.
The Longevity Summit creates a peer to peer learning environment focused on the business of longevity and the key areas of innovation needed to progress the longevity industry."

NeurIPS 2022

Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation
Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation
2022-11-28

NeurIPS 2022 will be a Hybrid Conference with a physical component at the New Orleans Convention Center during the first week, and a virtual component the second week.