“Surveys have shown that most Americans vastly underestimate the existing extent of inequality, and when asked to select an “ideal” national distribution of income, they make a choice that, in the real world, exists only in Scandinavian social democracies.”
The amazing thing is that most people simply don’t realize just how bad things are. Human beings have a tendency to compare their life quality with that of their neighbors and relatives, not with the millionaires and billionaires.
Surveys show that Americans generally believe that the top 20% of wealthy Americans possess just 59 percent of wealth [source]. Or that the bottom 40% possess 9 percent of wealth. This is nowhere near the truth (actually, the top 20% possess 84 percent of wealth, and the bottom 40% possess only 0.3 percent of wealth)[source].
Here’s How Bad Things Actually Are:
Between the years 1983 – 2009, Americans became more wealthy as a whole. But the bottom 80 percent of income earners saw a net decrease in their wealth.At the same time, the top 1 percent of income earners got more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth increase.[source].
Overall, the earnings of the top 1 percent rose by 278 percent between 1979 and 2007. At the same time, the earnings of the median people (that’s probably you and me) only increased by 35 percent [source – The Second Machine Age].
Inequality (as measured by the CIA according to the GINI index) in the US is far more extreme than it is in places like Egypt, Croatia, Vietnam or Greece [source].
Between the years 2009 – 2012, 95 percent of total income gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent [source].
Economic mobility in the US – i.e. whether people can rise (or sink) from one economic class to another, is significantly lower in comparison to many European countries. If you were born to a family in the bottom 20% of income, you have a 42 percent chance of staying in that income level as an adult. Compare that to Denmark (25 percent chance) or even Britain (30 percent chance) [source]. That means that the American dream of achieving success through hard work is much more practical if you’re living in a Nordic country or even in the freaking monarchy of the United Kingdom.
Inequality also has implications for your life expectancy. Geographic inequality in life expectancy has increased between 1980 and 2014. Some counties in the US have a life expectancy lower by 20 years than the highest counties. Yes, you read that right. The average person in eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia basically has twenty years less than a person in, say, central Colorado. And the disparity between the US counties shows no sign of stopping anytime soon [source].
What It All Means
Reading these statistics, you may say that inequality is just a symptom of the times and of technological progress, and there’s definitely some evidence for that.
You may highlight the fact that the ‘water rises for everyone’, and indeed – that’s true as well. Some may rise more rapidly than others, but in general over the last one hundred years, the average American’s life quality has risen.
You may even say that some billionaires, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are giving back their wealth to society. The data shows that the incredibly wealthy donate around 10% of their net worth over their lifetime. And again, that’s correct (and incredibly admirable).
The only problem is, all of these explanations doesn’t matter in the end. Because inequality still exists, and it has some unfortunate side effects: people may not realize exactly how bad it is, but they still feel it’s pretty bad. They realize that the rich keep on getting richer. They understand that the rich and wealthy have a large influence on the US congress and senate [source].
In short, they understand that the system is skewed, and not in their favor.
And so, they demand change. Any kind of change – just something that will shake the system upside down, and make the wealthy elites rethink everything they know. Populist politicians (and occasionally ones who really do want to make a difference) then use these yearnings to get elected.
Indeed, when you check out the candidate quality that mattered the most to voters in the 2016 US elections, you can see that the ability to bring about change is more important by far than other traits like “good judgement”, “experience” or even “cares about me”. And there you have it: from rampant inequality to the Trump regime.
Now, things may not be as bleak as they seem. Maybe Trump will work towards minimizing inequality. But even if he won’t (or can’t), I would like to think that the politicial system in the US has learned its lesson, and that the Democratic Party realized that in the next elections cycle they need to put inequality on their agenda, and find ways to fight it.
I was asked on Quora what Google will look like in 2030. Since that is one of the most important issues the world is facing right now, I took some time to answer it in full.
Larry Page, one of Google’s two co-founders, once said off-handedly that Google is not about building a search engine. As he said it, “Oh, we’re really making an AI”. Google right now is all about building the world brain that will take care of every person, all the time and everywhere.
By 2030, Google will have that World Brain in existence, and it will look after all of us. And that’s quite possibly both the best and worst thing that could happen to humanity.
To explain that claim, let me tell you a story of how your day is going to unfold in 2030.
2030 – A Google World
You wake up in the morning, January 1st, 2030. It’s freezing outside, but you’re warm in your room. Why? Because Nest – your AI-based air conditioner – knows exactly when you need to wake up, and warms the room you’re in so that you enjoy the perfect temperature for waking up.
You go out to the street, and order an autonomous taxi to take you to your workplace. Who programmed that autonomous car? Google did. Who acquired Waze – a crowdsourcing navigation app? That’s right: Google did.
After lunch, you take a stroll around the block, with your Google Glass 2.0 on your eyes. Your smart glasses know it’s a cold day, and they know you like hot cocoa, and they also know that there’s a cocoa store just around the bend which your friends have recommended before. So it offers to take you there – and if you agree, Google earns a few cents out of anything you buy in the store. And who invented Google Glass…? I’m sure you get the picture.
I can go on and on, but the basic idea is that the entire world is going to become connected in the next twenty years. Many items will have sensors in and on them, and will connect to the cloud. And Google is not only going to produce many of these sensors and appliances (such as the Google Assistant, autonomous cars, Nest, etc.) but will also assign a digital assistant to every person, that will understand the user better than that person understands himself.
I probably don’t have to explain why the Google World Brain will make our lives much more pleasant. The perfect coordination and optimization of our day-to-day dealings will ensure that we need to invest less resources (energy, time, concentration) to achieve a high level of life quality. I see that primarily as a good thing.
So what’s the problem?
Here’s the thing: the digital world suffers from what’s called “The One Winner Effect”. Basically it means that there’s only place for one great winner in every sector. So there’s only one Facebook – the second largest social media network in English is Twitter, with only ~319 million users. That’s nothing compared to Facebook’s 1.86 billion users. Similarly, Google controls ~65% of the online search market. That’s a huge number when you realize that competitors like Yahoo and Bing – large and established services – control most of the rest ~35%. So again, one big winner.
So what’s the problem, you ask? Well, a one-winner market tends to create soft monopolies, in which one company can provide the best services, and so it’s just too much of a hassle to leave for other services. Google is creating such a soft monopoly. Imagine how difficult it will be for you to wake up tomorrow morning and migrate your e-mail address to one of the competitors, transfer all of your Google Docs there, sell your Android-based (Google’s OS!) smartphone and replace it with an iPhone, wake up cold in the morning because you’ve switched Nest for some other appliance that hasn’t had the time to learn your habits yet, etc.
Can you imagine yourself doing that? I’m sure some ardent souls will, but most of humanity doesn’t care deeply enough, or doesn’t even have the options to stop using Google. How do you stop using Google, when every autonomous car on the street has a Google Camera? How do you stop using Google, when your website depends on Google not banning it? How do you stop using Google when practically every non-iPhone smartphone relies on an Android operating system? This is a Google World.
And Google knows it, too.
Google Flexes it’s Muscles
Recently, around 200 people got banned from using Google services because they cheated Google by reselling the Pixel smartphone. Those people woke up one morning, and found out they couldn’t log into their Gmail, that they couldn’t acess their Google Docs, and if they were living in the future – they would’ve probably found out they can’t use Google’s autonomous cars and other apps on the street. They were essentially sentenced to a digital death.
Now, public uproar caused Google to back down and revive those people’s accounts, but this episode shows you the power that Google are starting to amass. And what’s more, Google doesn’t have to ban people in such direct fashion. Imagine, for example, that your website is being demoted by Google’s search engine (which nobody knows how it works) simply because you’re talking against Google. Google is allowed by law to do that. So who’s going to stand up and talk smack about Google? Not me, that’s for sure. I love Google.
To sum things up, Google is not required by law to serve everyone, or even to be ‘fair’ in its recommendations about services. And as it gathers more power and becomes more prevalent in our daily lives, we will need to find mechanisms to ensure that Google or Google-equivalent services are provided to everyone, to prevent people being left outside the system, and to enable people to keep being able to speak up against Google and other monopolies.
So in conclusion, it’s going to be a Google world, and I love Google. Now please share this answer, since I’m not sure Google will!
Note: all this is not to say that Google is ‘evil’ or similar nonsense. It is not even unique – if Google takes the fall tomorrow, Amazon, Apple, Facebook or even Snapchat will take its place. This is simply the nature of the world at the moment: digital technologies give rise to big winners.
A few months ago I wrote in this blog about the way augmented reality games will transform the face of the gaming industry: they’ll turn the entire physical world into a gaming arena, so that players would have to actually walk around streets and cities to take part in games. I also made a forecast that players in such games will be divided into factions in order to create and legitimize rivalries and interesting conflicts. Now Pokemon Go has been released, and both forecasts have been proven true immediately.
By combining the elements of augmented reality and creating factions, Pokemon Go has become an incredibly successful phenomenon. It is now the biggest mobile game in U.S. history, with more users than Twitter, and more daily usage time than social media apps like WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat. One picture is worth a thousand words, and I especially like this one of a man capturing a wild Pidgey pokemon while his wife is busy giving birth.
But is the game here to stay? And what will its impact be on society?
Pokemon Go in the Long Haul
It’s no wonder Pokemon Go has reached such heights of virality. Because of the game’s interactions with the physical world, people are being seen playing it everywhere, and in effect become walking commercials for the game. Pokemon Go also builds on the long history – almost twenty years – of pokemon hunting which ensures that anyone who’s ever hunted pokemon just had to download the app.
Will the game maintain its hype for long? That’s difficult to answer. Dan Porter, one of the creators of Draw Something – a game that garnered 50 million downloads in just 50 days – wrote a great piece on the subject. He believes, in short, that the game is a temporary fad. It may take a year for most people to fall off the bandwagon, so that only a few millions of the hardcore gamers will remain. That’s still an impressive number, but it’s far from the current hype. As he says –
“For the casual Pokemon Go player, the joy of early play I believe will eventually be replaced by gyms that are too competitive and Pokemon that are too hard to find.”
I agree with his analysis, but it does depend on one important parameter: that the game does not undergo evolution itself, and continually readapt itself to different groups of users. Other social games, like World of Warcraft, have successfully undergone this transition to maintain a large user base for more than a decade. Niantic may be able to do that, or it may not. In the long haul it doesn’t matter: other, more successful, AR games will take over.
Pokemon Go is bringing in a lot of revenues right now, with the estimates ranging from $1 to $2.3 million a day. Some analysts believe that the game could pull in a billion dollars a year once it is launched worldwide. That’s a lot of money, and every half-decent gaming company is going to join the race for AR very soon. It could be Blizzard that will recreate Starcraft’s fame in an AR fashion, with teams running around buildings, collecting virtual resources and ambushing each other. Or maybe Magic the Gathering or Hearthstone, with players who can collect thousands of different cards in Hearthstops around the world much like Pokemon Go, and use them to build decks and fight each other. Heck, I’d play those, and I bet so would the tens of millions of gamers whose childhood was shaped by these games. The dam gates, in short, have been broken open. AR games are here to stay.
And so we must understand the consequences of such games on society.
A Whole New World
Pokemon Go is already starting to change the way people interact with each other. I took the following picture from my house’s window a few days ago, depicting several people walking together, eyes on their phones, without talking with each other – and yet all collaborating and being coordinated with each other. They were connected via the layer of augmented reality. In effect, they were in a world of their own, which is only tenuously connected to the physical world.
In Australia, a hastily advertised Pokemon Go meeting has brought together 2,000 players to a single park, where they all hunted pokemon together. And coffee shops-turned-gyms around the world have suddenly found themselves buzzing with customers who came for the win – and stayed for the latte. And of course, the White House has been turned into a gym, with all three Pokemon Go teams competing over it.
The game has made people to go to places they would not ordinarily go to, in their search for pokemon. As a result, at least two dead bodies have been discovered so far by players. If you watch players walking on the streets, you’ll also notice their peculiar pattern of movement: instead of following the road, they’ll periodically stop, check their smartphones and change course – sometimes making a U-turn. They’re not following the infrastructure in the physical world, but rather obeying a virtual infrastructure and entities: pokestops and pokemon.
And that’s just a sign of what’s coming, and of how power – the power to influence people and their choices – is starting to shift from governments to private hands.
The Power Shift
What is power? While many philosophers believed that governments had power over their citizens because of their ability to mobilize policemen, the French philosophers Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault realized that the power control mechanisms are inherent in society itself. Whenever two people in a society exchange words with each other, they also implicitly make clear how each should behave.
Infrastructure has the same effect over people. And has been used since time immemorial as a mechanism for directing the populace. For a very long time now, governments used to control the infrastructure in urban places. Governments paved roads, installed traffic lights and added signs with streets names. This control over infrastructure arose partly because some projects, like road paving, are so expensive but also because things like traffic lights and signs have an immense influence over people’s behavior. They tell us where we’re allowed to go and when, and essentially make the government’s decisions manifest and understandable for everyone. There’s a very good reason that I couldn’t erect a new traffic sign even if I wanted to.
But now, with Pokemon Go, the gaming industry is doing just that: it’s creating an alternative virtual reality that has new rules and different kinds of infrastructures, and merges that virtual reality with our physical one so that people can choose which to obey.
Is it any wonder that authorities everywhere are less than happy with the game? It has fatwas being issued against it, religious leaders wanting to ban it, Russian politicians speaking against it, and police and fire explaining to citizens that they can’t just walk into jails and fire stations in their search for pokemon.
In the long run, Pokemon Go and AR in general symbolizes a new kind of freedom: a freedom from the physical infrastructure that could only be created and controlled by centralized governments. And at the very same time, the power to create virtual infrastructure and direct people’s movement is shifting to the industry.
What does that mean?
In the short term, we’re bound to see this power being put to good use. In the coming decade we’ll see Pokemon Go and other AR games being used to direct people where they could bring the most good. When a kid will get lost in the wilderness, Niantic will populate the area with rare pokemon so that hundreds and thousands of people will come search for them – and for the child too. Certain dangerous areas will bear virtual signs, or even deduct points from players who enter them. Special ‘diet’ pokemon will be found at the healthy food sections in stores.
In the long run, the real risk is that the power will shift over to the industry, which unlike the elected government does not have any built-in mechanisms for mitigating that power. That power could be used to send people to junk food stores like McDonald’s, which as it turns out is already in partnership with Pokemon Go. But more than that, AR games could be used to encourage people to take part in rallies, in political demonstrations, or even simply to control their movement in the streets.
This power shift does not necessarily have to be a bad thing, but we need to be aware of it and constantly ask what kind of hidden agendas do these AR games hold, so that the public can exercise some measure of control over the industry as well. Does Pokemon Go encourage us to visit McDonald’s, even though it ultimately damages our health? Well, a public outcry may put a stop to that kind of collaboration.
We’ve already realized that firms that control the virtual medium, like Facebook, gain power to influence people’s thinking and knowledge. We’ve also learned that Facebook has been using that power to influence politics – although in a bumbling, good-natured way, and seemingly without really meaning to. Now that the physical world and the virtual world become adjoined, we need to understand that the companies who control the virtual layer gain power that needs to be scrutinized and monitored carefully.
Pokemon Go is not going to change the world on its own, but it’s one of the first indicators that can tell us how things are about to change when physical reality is augmented by virtual ones. The critical question we must ask is who controls those added layers of reality, and how can we put constraints on the power they gain over us. Because we may end up controlling all the pokemon, but who will gain control over us?
In the last few days we’ve been hearing all kinds of allegations about the Brexit voters. They’ve been accused of racism, of narrow mindedness, and stupidity in general. We’ve been assured that the Brexit voters are the radical right-wing nationalists. But now come the results of the surveys and demonstrate that the reasons behind Brexit are more complex. It turns out that the main force that turned the tables came from the working-class voters.
In other words, the decision was made by the people who are most frustrated about the new economy and their perceived and very real inability to influence it.
A few months ago I wrote in this blog that the UK is turning into a plutonomy: a nation in which the wealthy and the prosperous are driving the economy, while everybody else tags along. The term plutonomy first appeared in a memo sent by the global bank Citigroup to its wealthiest clients. As the writers of the memo report –
“There is no such thing as “The U.S. Consumer” or “UK Consumer”, but rich and poor consumers in these countries… The rich are getting richer; they dominate spending. Their trend of getting richer looks unlikely to end anytime soon.”
The data reveals that this analysis has much merit. As The Equality Trust reports, the top 10% of earners in the UK have an income over 27 times larger than that of the poorest 10%.
It also turns out that in terms of income distribution, the UK is one of the most unequal developed countries in the world.
Of course the rich and the wealthy – residing mainly in London and in the South East – are largely satisfied with current affairs. In the 2014 State of the Nation poll inquiring about the level of trust citizens place in the UK political parties in general, those two regions were the most trusting of all. In the meantime, citizens from all other parts of the country gave devastatingly low grades (an average of 3.54 out of 10) to indicate their lack of trust in UK political parties.
The evidence, when taken together, means that the working class is dissatisfied and frustrated. The average worker in the UK knows he or she has no real power, and is feeling increasingly alienated from the political, economic and cultural elites in London. As Peter Mandler recently wrote –
“…the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded, not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but more crucially from power.”
So what happens when those citizens of a plutonomy, who realize they have no real power, are suddenly given the option to influence events? They eagerly grab at the rope they’ve been given, and yank on it – and damn the consequences. This is the real story behind Brexit: that of people who’ve been deprived of power for the last decade or two, suddenly being given the chance to make themselves heard. And they certainly did.
This analysis has implications for the future of other countries as well. The United Kingdom is not the most unequal nation in terms of income distribution. There are five other countries in the developed world with worse inequality: Mexico, Israel, Spain, Greece and the United States of America. These are all countries in which large parts of the electorate feel neglected and removed from power in the day-to-day happenings. But once every four years in America, the public gets the chance to choose who’ll sit in the White House – and Donald Trump campaign’s success shows just how much the public wants change and distrusts the current state of affairs.
Brexit is a demonstration of how the inherent tensions in plutonomies can explode, since the rich and wealthy may control the economy, but the current political system still gives some power to the public. This means that the rich still can’t allow themselves to ignore the general public, or the public will come back to bite them when they least expect it.
Right now, the general consensus among the wealthy and the celebrities of the UK is that the public is dumb. It’s not. It’s just frustrated and wants to make a point. If the people on top want to avoid such disastrous decision making in the future, they should stop blaming the public, and instead find ways to change the political environment so that the public will gain more power in the daily affairs of nations. Any other course of action would lead to tensions building up again and being released explosively at the next Spainexit, Greecexit, or – who knows – maybe even Trumpexit.
“You don’t understand,” said the soldier who sat next me, who was speaking into his phone. His hand was shaking. “They’re dangerous. Really dangerous. You need to find somewhere safe! Go to your mother, and call me as soon as you get there.”
He hung up, and held the phone with both hands on his lap. I could see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
“Is everything OK? Is there something I can help with?” I asked politely.
He shot a frightened look toward me. “Did you hear what’s happening on LinkedIn?” he asked.
“A bit,” I said. “What, exactly? What did they do now?”
“It’s not what they did, it’s what was done to them,” he muttered, and buried his head between his hands. “Didn’t you hear that LinkedIn was hacked? One hundred and seventeen million encrypted user passwords are now being sold to anyone who can pay all of two thousand dollars for them, and I’ve heard that hackers who’ve scanned these encrypted passwords were able to decipher ninety percent of them. That means that over one hundred million user accounts are now hacked. What’s more, I’ve just returned from Afghanistan. Do you know what this means?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“I fought the Taliban there, and now, they know who I am,” he muttered. “I had always worn a nametag on my uniform, and any Afghan wanting to take revenge on me will have already found my password. He’ll know where I live, based on the personal details in my account. They know who my wife is. They know how to get to our house!”
“Oh.” I said. “This is the world without privacy that we’re all afraid of. But it’s OK. They won’t find your wife.”
He looked up with a miserable glance. “Why not?”
“Because LinkedIn was already hacked once, four years ago, in 2012.” I explained. “They just didn’t understand how serious the problem was back then. They thought that only six and a half million passwords were stolen. Now, it turns out for all of that time, Russian hackers had all of those passwords, and although they really may have used them during that time – they might have already sold them to the Chinese, to ISIS, or to other centers of power – you can still set your mind at ease, provided that you changed your password.”
“Actually, I did,” he said. “In 2013, I think.”
“So you see? Everything’s OK,” I reassured him. “Or, in more exact terms, sufficiently OK, since this whole episode should teach us all an important lesson. Real privacy doesn’t exist any more. One of the more secured companies in the world was hacked, and this event wasn’t exposed for four years. Now, think about it, and tell me, yourself – what are the chances that some of the world’s databases hadn’t been hacked yet by the intelligence services of countries like Russia, China, or even the United States, working under the radar?”
He thought for a moment. “None?” he suggested.
“That’s what I think, too.” I said. “Hey, Snowden managed to steal enormous amounts of information from the National Security Agency of the United States, and no one was even aware that the information disappeared until he let the cat out of the bag himself. He was just one more citizen concerned about what this agency was doing. What are the chances that the Chinese haven’t managed to bribe other people at the agency to send them the information? Or that the United States hadn’t located its own agents in Russian or Chinese communities, or anywhere else in the world? Chances are that all of this information about us – not just passwords, but identifying particulars, residential addresses, and so on – are already in the hands of large governments around the world. And yes, ISIS may also have gotten its hands on it, though that’s a bit less likely, since they aren’t as technologically advanced. But one day, a Russian or Chinese Snowden will funnel all of this information to Wikileaks, and we’ll all know about everyone else.”
“But only within the period that information was gathered in,” he said.
“Right,” I answered. “That’s why I’m claiming that we’ve all lost our historical privacy. In other words, even if one day we enact new legislation to protect private information, a large portion of the information will already be circulating around the world, but it’s only valid during the period it was gathered in. It’s nearly certain that by today, various intelligence services can piece together impressive profiles of much of the world’s population, though they can only rely on the information gathered during that time. So even if ISIS managed to get its hands on those passwords, and even if they managed to hack your profile during the period between 2012 and 2013 and extract data about you without you knowing about it, the big question is if you were even married at the time.”
“Yup,” he said. “But I was married to my ex-wife, in a house I used to live in. Does this mean that ISIS could get to her?
“If all of these assumptions are true, then yes.” I said. “Maybe you should call her and warn her?”
He hesitated for a moment, and shrugged.
“It’s OK,” he said. “She’ll manage.”
This article was originally written by me in Hebrew, and translated and published at vpnMentor.
Players of World of Warcraft love to complain. There’s nothing new to that. Blizzard largely seems to ignore the players’ pleas, yells and moans, and yet recently one of the executives has decided to answer the community. In a response to a forum thread, assistant game director Ion Hazzikostas explained how World of Warcraft is actually working right now. His response tells us a lot about the inner works of a world of abundance – where everyone have their basic needs fulfilled.
Catering to Minorities
The first thing we need to understand, according to Hazzikostas, is that World of Warcraft is composed of many minority groups. As he says –
“A minority of players raid. A minority of players participate in PvP. A tiny minority touch Mythic raiding. A tiny minority of players do rated PvP. A minority of players have several max-level alts. A minority of players do pet battles, roleplay, list things for sale on the auction house, do Challenge Mode dungeons, and the list goes on.”
The result is that Blizzard – the omnipotent lord and god of World of Warcraft – is catering to minorities. In fact –
“…almost every facet of WoW is an activity that caters to a minority of the playerbase.”
This is what happens when you have a world of abundance. When people know that all of their basic needs will be taken care of, they feel free to do whatever they like. A minority will create art. A minority will sail boats. A minority will focus on re-engineering their bodies, roleplay or do robot battles.
And the government will need to cater to all of these minorities.
The Self-Focused Minorities
Another point made by Hazzikostas is that the minorities are extremely self-focused. As he puts it –
“…due to the cooperative nature of the game, players tend to make connections with others who favor a similar playstyle. I’m generalizing a bit here, and there are certainly exceptions, but I’d guess that a typical Gladiator-level player probably doesn’t have a WoW social group that consists of people who mostly solo-level alts and explore the world. And most small friends-and-family guilds don’t spend a lot of time talking to competitive Mythic raiders. So when there’s a change, or a feature, that is aimed at a portion of the game that isn’t your personal playstyle, it’s easy and in fact natural to have the sense that “everyone” dislikes it.”
Hazzikostas is essentially talking about group polarization – a phenomenon that occurs in groups in which people agree with each other. Their views resonate between each other, and the group member become more polarized in their opinions. In a way, they become detached from the complex reality of each situation, and become unable to consider things from other points of view.
Group polarization is happening in the real world too, and it’s gaining speed. Ezra Klein recently wrote about political polarization and how it’s becoming an issue in the United States. People are becoming more polarized in their political views, and part of it has to do with the virtual world. In the past, you would’ve needed to interact with people from other factions everywhere you went. Today, Facebook automatically makes sure via its algorithms that most of your interactions are with the people who think the same as you do. As a result, people are essentially segregating themselves willingly into self-selecting groups, and their views become more polarized, so that each group finds it more difficult to agree with the other groups than ever before.
A Mirror for the Future
In those two aspects at least, World of Warcraft is a mirror of our future. As we reach a state of abundance in food and shelter, we will start identifying ourselves according to our hobbies and our interests. A world of abundance would therefore also be a world of minorities. And due to the virtual nature of much of that world, those minorities would find it more difficult to agree with each other than ever before.
It just might be the in the long-term, the only viable solution would be to essentially create a different world for every kind of minority. This proposition is, of course, impossible in the physical world where resources are limited by their nature. It can be achieved, though, in the interaction between the physical and the virtual worlds.
In the case of World of Warcraft, the virtual environment ensures that funds are essentially unlimited. Blizzard sets the challenges and the rewards, which are virtual in nature. Luckily for us, many aspects of our lives in the future are going to be virtual as well. As virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) become part of our lives, we will receive highly personalized and individualized information from physical reality. In many cases, the virtual layer of reality will allow us to transcend the physical bottom layer.
To understand that, consider that in twenty years at most, many of us are likely to walk around with augmented reality goggles over our eyes. These will provide an additional virtual layer over everything that we see. In that way, a signpost on the street can consist of just a white background and a QR code in the physical world. The AR goggles, however, will translate the QR code into a personal ad that will fit specifically for the individual using the goggles. Similarly, every house can be virtually transformed into a palace, by wearing an AR device. A palace, or a cave, or a torture dungeon, or a boat. To each minority – their own.
World of Warcraft is a virtual world, in which players enjoy a state of abundance. In a way, it serves as a social or political studies lab, and the insights we gain from it can be valuable. Those insights can help us better understand the future of a world of abundance, and of a world in which the virtual and the physical layers become intermixed. If you want to know what the future holds in store for us – you probably want to keep on watching how World of Warcraft evolves.
We’ve all known for decades that politicians have used tax shelters for money laundering purposes, to avoid paying tax in their countries, and to avoid being identified with companies they were affiliated with in the past. Now the cat is out of the sack, with a new leak called The Panama Papers.
The Panama Papers contain about 11.5 million highly confidential documents that have detailed information about the dealings of more than 214,000 offshore companies. Such companies are most often used for money laundering and for obscuring connections between assets and their owners. Offshore companies are particularly useful to politicians, many of whom are required to declare their interests and investments in companies, and are usually required by law to forego any such relations in order to prevent corruption.
It doesn’t look like that law is working too well.
BBC News covered the initial revealings from the Panama Papers in the following words –
“The documents show 12 current or former heads of state and at least 60 people linked to current or former world leaders in the data. They include the Icelandic Prime Minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugson, who had an undeclared interest linked to his wife’s wealth and is now facing calls for his resignation. The files also reveal a suspected billion-dollar money laundering ring involving close associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
According to Aamna Mohdin, the Panama Papers event is the largest leak to date by a fair margin. The source, whoever that is, sent more than 2.6 terabytes of information from the Panama based company Mossack Fonseca.
What lessons can we derive from the Panama Papers event?
Journalism vs. Government
The leaked documents have been passed directly to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Altogether, 109 media organizations in 76 countries have been analyzing the documents over the last year.
This state of affairs begs the question: why weren’t national and international police forces involved in the investigation? The answer seems obvious: the ICIJ had good reason to believe that suspected heads of states would nip such investigation in the bud, and also alert Mossack Fonseca and its clients to the existence of the leak. In other words, journalists in 76 countries worked in secrecy under the noses of their governments, despite the fact that those very governments were supposed to help prevent international tax crimes.
Artificial Intelligence can Help Fight Corruption
The amount of leaked documents is massive. No other word for it. As Wikipedia details –
The leak comprises 4,804,618 emails, 3,047,306 database format files, 2,154,264 PDFs, 1,117,026 images, 320,166 text files, and 2,242 files in other formats.
All of this data had to be indexed so that human beings could go through it and make sense of it. To do that, the documents were processed using optical character recognition systems that made the data machine-readable. Once the texts were searchable, the indexing was essentially performed automatically, with cross-matching of important persons with the relevant data.
Could this investigative act have been performed without having state of the art computers and optical character recognition systems? Probably, but it would’ve required a small army of analysts and investigators, and would’ve made the challenge practically impossible for anything less than a governmental authority to look into the matter. The advance in computer sciences has opened the road for the public (in this case spearheaded by the International Journalists Consortium) to investigate the rich and the powerful.
Where’s the Missing Information?
So far, there has been no mention of any American politician with offshore connections to Mossack Fonseca. Does that mean the American politicians are all pure and incorruptible? That doesn’t seem very likely. An alternative hypothesis, proposed on EoinHiggins.com, is that certain geopolitical conditions have made it difficult for Americans to use Panama as a tax shelter. But don’t you worry, folks: other financial firms in several countries are working diligently to provide tax shelters for Americans too.
These tax shelters have always drawn some of the ire of the public, but never in a major way. The public in many countries has never realized just how much of its tax money was being robbed away for the benefit of those who could afford to pay for such services. As things become clearer now and public outrage begins to erupt, it is quite possible that governmental investigators will have to focus more of their attention on other tax shelter businesses. If that happens, we’ll probably see further revelations on many, many other politicians in upcoming years.
Which leads us to the last lesson learned: we’re going into…
A World without Secrets
Wikileaks has demonstrated that there can no longer be secrets in any dealings between diplomats. The Panama Papers show that financial dealings are just as vulnerable. The nature of the problem is simple: when information was stored on paper, leaks were limited in size according to the amount of physical documents that could be whisked away. In the digital world, however, terabytes of information containing millions of documents can be carried in a single external hard drive hidden in one’s pocket, or uploaded online in a matter of hours. Therefore, just one disgruntled employee out of thousands can leak away all of a company’s information.
Can any information be kept secret under these conditions?
The issue becomes even more complicated when you realize that the Mossack Fonseca leaker seems to have acted without any monetary incentive. Maybe he just wanted the information to reach the public, or to take revenge on Mossack Fonseca. Either way, consider how many others will do the same for money or because they’re being blackmailed by other countries. Can you actually believe that the Chinese have no spies in the American Department of Defense, or vice versa? Do you really think that the leaks we’ve heard about are the only ones that have happened?
The world is rapidly being shaken free of secrets. The Panama Papers event is just one more link in the chain that leads from a world where almost everything was kept in the dark, to a world where everything is known to everyone.
If you think this statement is an exaggeration, consider that in the last five years alone, data breaches at Sony, Anthem, and eBay resulted in the information of more than 300 million customers being exposed to the world. When most of us hear about data breaches like these ones, we’re only concerned about whether our passwords have found their way into hackers’ hands. We tend to forget that the hackers – and anyone who buys the information from them for a dime – also obtain our names, family relations, places of residence, and details about our lives in general and what makes us tick. If you still believe that any information you have online (and maybe on your computer as well) can be kept secret for long, you’re almost certainly fooling yourself.
As the Panama Papers incident shows, this forced transparency does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. It helps us see things for what they are, and understand how the rich and powerful operate. Now the choice is left to us: will we try to go back to a world where everything is hidden away, and tell ourselves beautiful stories about our honest leaders – or will we accept reality and create and enforce better laws to combat tax shelters?
Jason Hughes is a white hat hacker – a ‘good’ hacker, working diligently to discover and identify ways in which existing systems can be hacked into. During one of his most recent forays, as described in TeslaRati he analyzed a “series of alphanumeric characters found embedded within Tesla’s most recent firmware 7.1”. According to Hughes, the update included the badges for the upcoming new Tesla model, the P100D. Hughes tweeted about this development to Tesla and to the public, and went happily to sleep.
And then things got weird.
According to Hughes, Tesla has attempted to access his car’s computer and significantly downgrade the firmware, assumedly in order to delete the information about the new model. Hughes managed to stop the incursion in the nick of time, and tweeted angrily about the event. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, tweeted back that he had nothing to do with it, and seemingly that’s the end of the story. Hughes is now cool with Musk, and everybody is happy again.
But what can this incident tell us about the future of private ownership?
A Decline in Private Ownership?
One of Paul Saffo’s rules for effective forecasting is to “embrace the things that don’t fit”. Curious stories and anecdotes from the present can give us clues about the shape of the future. The above story seems to be a rather important clue about the shape of things to come, and about a future where personal ownership of any networked device conflict with the interests of the original manufacturer.
Tesla may or may not have a legal justification to alter the firmware installed in Hughes’ car. If you want to be generous, you can even assume that the system asked Hughes for permission to ‘update’ (actually downgrade) his firmware. Hughes was tech-savvy enough to understand the full meaning of such an update. But how many of us are in possession of such knowledge? In effect, and if Hughes is telling the truth, it turns out that Tesla attempted to alter Hughes’ car properties and functions to prevent damages to the company itself.
Of course, this is not the first incident of the kind. Seven years ago, Amazon has chosen to reach remotely into many Kindle devices held and owned by private citizens, and to delete some digital books in those devices. The books that were deleted? In a bizarre twist of fate they’re George Orwell’s books – 1984 and Animal Farm – with the first book describing a dystopian society in which the citizen has almost no power over his life. In 1984, the government has all the power. In 2016, it’s starting to seem that much of this power belongs to the big IT companies that can remotely reprogram the devices they sell us.
The Legal Side
I’m not saying that remote updates are bad for you. On the contrary: remote updates and upgrades of system are one of the reasons for the increasing rate of technological progress. Because of virtual upgrades, smartphones, computers and even cars no longer need to be brought physically to service stations to be upgraded. However, these two episodes are a good reminder for us that by giving the IT companies leeway into our devices, we are opening ourselves to their needs – which may not always be in parallel with our own.
I have not been able to find any legal analysis of Hughes’ and Tesla’s case, but I suspect if the case is ever being brought to court then Tesla might have to answer some difficult questions. The most important question would probably be whether the company even bothered to ask Hughes for permission to make a change in his property. If Tesla did not even do that, let them be penalized harshly, to prevent other companies from following in their footsteps.
Obviously, this is not a trend yet. I can’t just take two separate cases and cluster them together. However, the mechanism behind both incidents is virtually the same: because of the everpresent connectivity, the original manufacturers retain some control over the devices owned by end-users. Connectivity is just going to proliferate in the near future, and therefore we should keep a watchful eye for similar cases.
This is a new ground we’re travelling and testing. Never before could upgrades to physical user-owned devices be implemented so easily, to the benefit of most users – but possibly also for the detriment of some. We need to draw clear rules for how firms can access our devices and under what pretense. These rules, restrictions and laws will become clearer as we move into the future, and it’s up for the public to keep close scrutiny on lawmakers and make sure that the industry does not take over the private ownership of end-user devices.
Oh, and Microsoft? Please stop repeatedly asking me to upgrade to Windows 10. For the 74th time, I still don’t want to. And yes, I counted. Get the hint, won’t ya?
Almost four years ago, the presidential elections took place in the United States. Barack Obama competed against Mitt Romney in the race for the White House. Both candidates delivered inspiring speeches, appeared in every institute that would accept their presence, and employed hundreds of paid consultants and volunteers who advertised them throughout the nation. In the end, Obama won the race for the presidency, possibly because of his opinions and ideas… or because of his reliance on data scientists. In fact, as Sasha Issenberg’s article of the 2012 elections in MIT Technology Review describes –
“Romney’s data science team was less than one-tenth the size of Obama’s analytics department.”
How did Obama utilize all of those data scientists?
Analyzing the Individual Voter
Up to 2012, individual voters were analyzed according to a relatively simplistic system which only took into account very limited parameters such as age, place of living, etc. The messages those potential voters received to their phones, physical mailboxes and virtual inboxes were customized according to these parameters. Obama’s team of data scientists expanded the list of parameters into tens of different parameters and criteria. They then utilized a system in which customized messages were mailed to certain representative voters, who were later surveyed so that the scientists could figure out how their opinions changed according to the structure of the messages sent.
This level of analysis and understanding of the individual voters and the messages that helped them change their opinions aided Obama in delivering the right messages, at the right time, to the persuadable people. If the term “persuadable” strikes you as sinister, as if Obama’s team were preying on the weak of mind or those sitting on the fence, you should be aware that it was used by Terry Walsh, who coordinated Obama’s campaign’s polling and paid-media spending.
Of course, being a “persuadable” voter does not mean that you’re a helpless dummy. Rather, it just means that you’re still uncertain which way to turn. But when political parties can find those undecided voters, focus on them and analyze each one with the most sophisticated computer models available to find out all about their levers and buttons, how much free choice does that leave those people?
I could go on describing other strategies utilized by Obama’s team in the 2012 elections. They identified voters who were likely to ‘switch sides’ following just one phone call, and had about 500,000 conversations with those voters. They supplied to a data collection firm the addresses of many “easily persuadable” voters, and received in return the records of TV watching in those households. That way, the campaign team could maximize the efficiency of TV advertisements – fitting them to the right time, in the right channels, and in the right destinations. All of the above is well recorded, and described in Issenberg’s article and other resources (like this, that, and others).
The Republican Drowning Whale
Obama wasn’t the only one to utilize big data and predictive analytics in the 2012 campaign. His opponent, Mitt Romney, had a team of data scientists of his own. Unfortunately for Romney, his team didn’t even come close to the level of operations of Obama’s team. Romney’s team invested much of its effort in an app named Orca, which was supposed to indicate which of the expected republican voters actually turned up to vote – and to send messages to the republican slackers and encourage them to haul their tucheses to the voting booths. In practice, the app was horribly conceived, and crashed numerous times during Election Day, leading to utter confusion about the goings on.
Regardless of the success of the Democrats data systems vs. the Republicans’ ones, one thing is clear: both parties are going to use big data and predictive analytics in the upcoming 2016 elections. In fact, we are going into a very interesting stage in the history of the 21st century: the Data Race.
From Space to Data
The period in time known as the Space Race took place in the 1960s, when the United States competed against the Soviet Union in a race to space. As a result of the Space Race, space launch technologies developed and made progress in leaps and bounds, with both countries fighting to demonstrate their superior science and technology. Great need – and great budgets – produce great results quickly.
In 2016, we will see a new kind of race starting – the Data Race. In 2012 it wasn’t really a race. The Democrats basically stepped on the Republicans. In 2016, however, the real Data Race in politics will be on: The Democrats will gather their teams of data scientists once more, and build up on the piles of data that were gathered in the 2012 elections and since then. The Republicans – possibly Trump with his self-funded election campaign – will learn from their mistakes in 2012, hire the best data scientists they can find, and utilize methodologies similar or better than those developed by the Democrats.
In short, both parties will find themselves in the midst of a Data Race, striving to obtain as much data as they can about the American citizen, about our lifestyles, habits, choices and any other tidbit of information that can be used to understand the individual voter – and how best to approach him or here and convert him to the party’s point of view. The data gathering and analysis systems will cost a lot, obviously, but since recent rulings in America allow larger contributions to be made to political candidates, money should not be a problem.
Conclusion: Where are We Heading?
It’s quite obvious that both American parties in 2016 are going to compete in a Data Race between them. The bigger questions is whether we should even allow them to do it so freely. Democracy, after all, is based on the assumption that every person can make his or her own mind and decisions. Do we really honor that core assumption, when political candidates can analyze human beings with the power of super-computers, big data and predictive analytics? Can an individual citizen truly choose freely, when powers on both sides are pulling and pushing at that individual’s levers and buttons, with methods tested and proven on millions of similarly-minded individuals?
Using predictive analytics in politics holds an inherent threat to democracy: by understanding each individual, we can also devise approaches and methodologies to influence every individual with maximal efficiency. This approach has the potential to turn most individuals into mere puppets in the hands of the powerful and the affluent.
Does that mean we should refrain from using big data and predictive analytics in politics? Of course not – but we can regulate its use so that instead of campaign managers focusing their efforts on the “easily persuadable”, they will use the data gleaned from the public to understand people’s real concerns and work to address them. We should all hope our politicians are heading in that direction, and if they aren’t – we should give them a shove towards it.
A week ago I covered in this blog the possibility of using aerial drones for terrorist attacks. The following post dealt with the Failure of Myth and covered Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) – a futures studies methodology meant to counter the Failure of Myth and allow us to consider alternative futures radically different from the ones we tend to consider intuitively.
In this blog post I’ll combine insights from both recent posts together, and suggest ways to deal with the terrorism threat posed by aerial drones, in four different layers suggested by CLA: the Litany, the Systemic view, the Worldview, and the Myth layer.
To understand why we have to use such a wide-angle lens for the issue, I would compare the proliferation of aerial drones to another period in history: the transition between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.
From Bronze to Iron
Sometime around 1300 BC, iron smelting was discovered by our ancient forefathers, assumedly in the Anatolia region. The discovery rapidly diffused to many other regions and civilizations, and changed the world forever.
If you ask people why iron weapons are better than bronze ones, they’re likely to answer that iron is simply stronger, lighter and more durable than bronze. However, the truth is that bronze weapons are not much more efficient than iron weapons. The real importance of iron smelting, according to “A Short History of War” by Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, is this:
“Iron’s importance rested in the fact that unlike bronze, which required the use of relatively rare tin to manufacture, iron was commonly and widely available almost everywhere… No longer was it only the major powers that could afford enough weapons to equip a large military force. Now almost any state could do it. The result was a dramatic increase in the frequency of war.”
It is easy to imagine political and national leaders using only the first and second layer of CLA – the Litany and the Systemic view – at the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age. “We should bring these new iron weapons to all our soldiers”, they probably told themselves, “and equip the soldiers with stronger shields that can deflect iron weapons”. Even as they enacted these changes in their armies, the worldview itself shifted, and warfare was vastly transformed because of the large number of civilians who could suddenly wield an iron weapon. Generals who thought that preparing for the change merely meant equipping their soldiers with an iron weapon, found themselves on the battlefield facing armies much larger than their own, because of new conscription models that their opponents had developed.
Such changes in warfare and in the existing worldview could have been realized in advance by utilizing the third and fourth layers of CLA – the Worldview and the Myth.
Aerial drones are similar to Iron Age weapons in that they are proliferating rapidly. They can be built or purchased at ridiculously low prices, by practically everyone. In the past, only the largest and most technologically-sophisticated governments could afford to employ aerial drones. Nowadays, every child has them. In other words, the world itself is turning against everything we thought we knew about the possession and use of unmanned aerial vehicles. Such dramatic change – that our descendants may yet come to call The Aerial Age when they look back in history – forces us to rethink everything we knew about the world. We must, in short, analyze the issue from a wide-angle view, with an emphasis on the third and fourth layer of CLA.
How, then, do we deal with the threat aerial drones pose to national security?
First Layer: the Litany
The intuitive way to deal with the threat posed by aerial drones, is simply to reinforce the measures and we’ve had in place before. Under the thinking constraints of the first layer, we should basically strive to strengthen police forces, and to provide larger budgets for anti-terrorist operations. In short, we should do just as we did in the past, but more and better.
It’s easy to see why public systems love the litany layer, since these measures create reputation and generate a general feeling that “we’re doing something to deal with the problem”. What’s more, they require extra budget (to be obtained from congress) and make the organization larger along the way. What’s there not to like?
Second Layer: the Systemic View
Under the systemic view we can think about the police forces, and the tools they have to deal with the new problem. It immediately becomes obvious that such tools are sorely lacking. Therefore, we need to improve the system and support the development of new techniques and methodologies to deal with the new threat. We might support the development of anti-drone weapons, for example, or open an entirely new police department dedicated to dealing with drones. Police officers will be trained to deal with aerial drones, so that nothing is left for chance. The judicial and regulatory systems are lending themselves to the struggle at this layer, by issuing highly-regulated licenses to operate aerial drones.
Again, we could stop the discussion here and still have a highly popular set of solutions. As we delve deeper into the Worldview layer, however, the opposition starts building up.
Third Layer: the Worldview
When we consider the situation at the worldview layer, we see that the proliferation of aerial drones is simply a by-product of several technological trends: miniaturization and condensation of electronics, sophisticated artificial intelligence (at least in terms of 20-30 years ago) for controlling the rotor blades, and even personalized manufacturing with 3D-printers, so that anyone can construct his or her own personal drone in the garage. All of the above lead to the Aerial Age – in which individuals can explore the sky as they like.
Looking at the world from this point of view, we immediately see that the vast expected proliferation of aerial drones in the near decade would force us to reconsider our previous worldviews. Should we really focus on local or systemic solutions, rather than preparing ourselves for this new Aerial Age?
We can look even further than that, of course. In a very real way, aerial drones are but a symptom of a more general change in the world. The Aerial Age is but one aspect of the Age of Freedom, or the Age of the Individual. Consider that the power of designing and manufacturing is being taken from nations and granted to individuals via 3D-printers, powerful personal computers, and the internet. As a result of these inventions and others, individuals today hold power that once belonged only to the greatest nations on Earth. The established worldview, in which nations are the sole holders of power is changing.
When one looks at the issue like this, it is clear that such a dramatic change can only be countered or mitigated by dramatic measures. Nations that want to retain their power and prevent terrorist attacks will be forced to break rules that were created long ago, back in the Age of Nations. It is entirely possible that governments and rulers will have to sacrifice their citizens’ privacy, and turn to monitoring their citizens constantly much as the NSA did – and is still doing to some degree. When an individual dissident has the potential to bring harm to thousands and even millions (via synthetic biology, for example), nations can ill afford to take any chances.
What are the myths that such endeavors will disrupt, and what new myths will they be built upon?
Fourth Layer: the Myth
I’ve already identified a few myths that will be disrupted by the new worldview. First and foremost, we will let go of the idea that only a select few can explore the sky. The new myth is that of Shared Sky.
The second myth to be disrupted is that nations hold all the technological power, while terrorists and dissidents are reduced to using crude bombs at best, or pitchforks at worst. This myth is no longer true, and it will be replaced by a myth of Proliferation of Technology.
The third myth to be dismissed is that governments can protect their citizens efficiently with the tools they have in the present. When we have such widespread threats in the Age of Freedom, governments will experience a crisis in governance – unless they turn to monitoring their citizens so closely that any pretense of privacy is lost. And so, it is entirely possible that in many countries we will see the emergence of a new myth: Safety in Exchange for Privacy.
Last week I’ve analyzed the issue of aerial drones being used for terrorist attacks, by utilizing the Causal Layered Analysis methodology. When I look at the results, it’s easy to see why many decision makers are reluctant to solve problems at the third and fourth layer – Worldview and Myth. The solutions found in the lower layers – the Litany and the Systemic view – are so much easier to understand and to explain to the public. Regardless, if you want to actually understand the possibilities the future holds in any subject, you must ignore the first two layers in the long term, and focus instead on the large picture.
And with that said – happy new year to one and all!