Trustworthy data will transform the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill at the Financial Times: “The internet’s original sin was identified as early as 1993 in a New Yorker cartoon. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” the caption ran beneath an illustration of a pooch at a keyboard. That anonymity has brought some benefits. But it has also created myriad problems, injecting distrust into the digital world. If you do not know the provenance and integrity of information and data, how can you trust their veracity?

That has led to many of the scourges of our times, such as cyber crime, identity theft and fake news. In his Alan Turing Institute lecture in London last week, the American computer scientist Sandy Pentland outlined the massive gains that could result from trusted data.

The MIT professor argued that the explosion of such information would give us the capability to understand our world in far more detail than ever before. Most of what we know in the fields of sociology, psychology, political science and medicine is derived from tiny experiments in controlled environments. But the data revolution enables us to observe behaviour as it happens at mass scale in the real world. That feedback could provide invaluable evidence about which theories are most valid and which policies and products work best.

The promise is that we make soft social science harder and more predictive. That, in turn, could lead to better organisations, fairer government, and more effective monitoring of our progress towards achieving collective ambitions, such as the UN’s sustainable development goals. To take one small example, Mr Pentland illustrated the strong correlation between connectivity and wealth. By studying the telephone records of 100,000 users in south-east Asia, researchers have plotted social connectivity against income. The conclusion: “The more diverse your connections, the more money you have.” This is not necessarily a causal relationship but it does have a strong causal element, he suggested.

Similar studies of European cities have shown an almost total segregation between groups of different socio-economic status. That lack of connectivity has to be addressed if our politics is not to descend further into a meaningless dialogue.

Data give us a new way to measure progress.

For years, the Open Data movement has been working to create public data sets that can better inform decision making. This worldwide movement is prising open anonymised public data sets, such as transport records, so that they can be used by academics, entrepreneurs and civil society groups. However, much of the most valuable data is held by private entities, notably the consumer tech companies, telecoms operators, retailers and banks. “The big win would be to include private data as a public good,” Mr Pentland said….(More)”.

Liquid democracy uses blockchain to fix politics, and now you can vote for it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Danny Crichton at TechCrunch: “…Confidence in Congress remains pitifully low, driven by perceived low ethical standards and an increasing awareness that politics is bought by the highest bidder.

Now, a group of technologists and blockchain enthusiasts are asking whether a new approach could reform the system, bringing citizens closer to their representatives and holding congressmen accountable to their voters in a public, verifiable way. And if you live in western San Francisco, you can actually vote to put this system into office.

The concept is known as liquid democracy, and it’s a solid choice for fixing a broken system. The idea is that every person should have the right to give feedback on a policy issue or a piece of new legislation, but often people don’t have the time to do so. Using a liquid democracy platform, however, that voter can select a personal representative who has the authority to be a proxy for their vote. That proxy can be changed at will as a voter’s interests change.

Here is where the magic happens. Those proxies can themselves proxy their votes to other people, creating a directed network graph, ideally connecting every voter to politicians and all publicly verified on a blockchain. While there may be 700,000 people in a congressional district, potentially only a few hundred of a few thousand “super proxies” would need to be deeply engaged in the system for better representation to take place.

David Ernst is a leader of the liquid democracy movement and now a candidate for California Assembly District 19, which centers on the western half of San Francisco. He is ardently committed to the concept, and despite its novelty, believes that this is the path forward for improving governance….

Following college (which he began at age 16) and a few startup jobs, Ernst began working as CTO of a startup called Numerai, a crypto-backed decentralized hedge fund that allows data scientists to earn money when they solve data challenges. “The idea was that we can include many more people to participate in the system who weren’t able to before,” Ernst explained. That’s when it hit him that the decentralized nature of blockchain could allow for more participation in politics, fusing his two passions.

Ernst followed the campaign of the Flux Party in Australia in 2016, which is trying to implement what it calls “issue-based direct democracy” in that country’s legislature. “That was when something clicked,” he said. A congressman for example could commit to voting the calculated liquid democracy position, and “We could elect these sort of remote-controlled politicians as a way to graft this new system onto the old system.”

He built a platform called United.vote to handle the logistics of selecting personal representatives and voting on issues. More importantly, the app then tracks how those votes compare to the votes of congressmen and provides a scorecard….(More)”.

When citizens set the budget: lessons from ancient Greece

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in The Conversation: “Today elected representatives take the tough decisions about public finances behind closed doors. In doing so, democratic politicians rely on the advice of financial bureaucrats, who, often, cater to the political needs of the elected government. Politicians rarely ask voters what they think of budget options. They are no better at explaining the reasons for a budget. Explanations are usually no more than vacuous phrases, such as “jobs and growth” or “on the move”. They never explain the difficult trade-offs that go into a budget nor their overall financial reasoning.

This reluctance to explain public finances was all too evident during the global financial crisis.

In Australia, Britain and France, centre-left governments borrowed huge sums in order to maintain private demand and, in one case, to support private banks. In each country these policies helped a lot to minimise the crisis’s human costs.

Yet, in the elections that followed the centre-left politicians that had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate robust discussion about public finances. Without a justification for their generally good policies each of these government was defeated by centre-right opponents.

In most democracies there is the same underlying problem: elected representatives do not believe that voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

For decades, we, independently, have studied democracy today and in the ancient past. We have learned that this assumption is dead wrong. There are more and more examples of how involving ordinary voters results in better budgets.

In 1989, councils in poor Brazilian towns began to involve residents in setting budgets. This participatory budgeting soon spread throughout South America. It has now been successfully tried in Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, the United States, Poland and Australia, and some pilot projects were set up in France too. Participatory budgeting is based on the clear principle that those who will be most affected by a tough budget should be involved in setting it.

In spite of such successful democratic experiments, elected representatives still shy away from involving ordinary voters in setting budgets. This is very different from what happened in ancient Athens 2,500 years ago….

In Athenian democracy ordinary citizens actually set the budget. This ancient Greek state had a solid budget, in spite of, or, we would say, because of the involvement of the citizens in taking tough budget decisions….(More)”.

The Social Media Threat to Society and Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
George Soros at Project Syndicate: “It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. And there is a real chance that, once lost, those who grow up in the digital age – in which the power to command and shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies – will have difficulty regaining it.

The current moment in world history is a painful one. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish his own mafia-style state but cannot, because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it….

The rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant American Internet platform companies is contributing mightily to the US government’s impotence. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown ever more powerful, they have become obstacles to innovation, and have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware…

Social media companies’ true customers are their advertisers. But a new business model is gradually emerging, based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep more of the benefits that they would otherwise have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further, but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market economy.

Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention, directing it toward their own commercial purposes, and deliberately engineering addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents.

There is a similarity between Internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook customers to the point that they gamble away all of their money, even money they don’t have.

Something similar – and potentially irreversible – is happening to human attention in our digital age. This is not a matter of mere distraction or addiction; social media companies are actually inducing people to surrender their autonomy. And this power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies.

It takes significant effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called the freedom of mind. Once lost, those who grow up in the digital age may have difficulty regaining it.

This would have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential election.

There is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon: an alliance between authoritarian states and large, data-rich IT monopolies, bringing together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with already-developed systems of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined….(More)”.

You weren’t supposed to have to think about politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bonnie Kristian at The Week: “You were not supposed to have to think about politics.

Not this much, anyway. Good citizenship was not supposed to entail paying obsessive attention to a 24-hour news cycle. It was not supposed to demand conversational knowledge, at any given moment, of at least 15 issues of national importance. It was not supposed to be the task of each American to have An Informed Opinion on What the Government Should Do about every matter of state.

America’s founders never wanted politics to be a major occupation of your mind. It was not supposed to feature prominently among your worries. Most of the time, it was not supposed to be your responsibility.

I know, I know, we learn in grade school that America is a democracy, and each of us must do our part to ensure good governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This may be inspirational for children, but it is not entirely true.

The United States’ government has democratic elements, yes, and, in some ways, it has become more democratic with time. (In other ways, it hasbecome less democratic, and I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the net change is a loss or gain.) To say our country is a republic rather than a democracy is also misleading, but it does remind us of an important point: Our federal system is representational. It is not direct democracy. Each of us does not weigh in on everything. Instead, we periodically vote on representatives who will weigh in on our behalf while we do other, better things.

This is with good reason. At the most practical level, direct democracy was always impossible for a country of the United States’ size. And even now, assuming technology could be secure enough to use without concern over hacking and other malicious manipulation, there is cause to reject direct democracy: A system designed to force every responsible citizen to pay constant attention to politics is not desirable.

We elect representatives to do the great bulk of our politicking for us because we have more important things to do. We have families to raise and jobs to work and homes to maintain. We have our own areas of interest and expertise, our own relationships to cultivate. And, crucially, we have limited time, energy, and mental space. Some of us may choose to make politics our hobby or occupation, but all of us should not have to make that choice.

Politics is one aspect of our society. It is one part of many. We all no more need to be politicos, amateur or professional, than we all need to be philosophers or writers or tailors or dog rescuers or plumbers. Philosophy, books, clothes, rescue dogs, and working toilets are all important, just as politics is, but they are not everyone’s concern all the time. They are some people’s profession and the hobbies of others, but for most of us, these and any other field of work or pastime are only occasionally encountered…(More)”

The End of the End of History?

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Introduction to Special Issue of The Hedgehog Review: “Although Francis Fukuyama never said the triumph of liberal democracy was inevitable, his qualified declaration of the “the end of history” captured the optimistic, sometimes naive tenor of the early post-Cold War era. But how quickly that confidence faded! Unmistakable signs of history’s resumption began to appear less than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In its 2008 annual report on political rights and civil liberties around the world, the democracy watchdog Freedom House took troubled note of the reversal of progress in a number of key countries in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the former Soviet space.

This “profoundly disturbing deterioration,” as Freedom House put it, has continued, and not only in countries with fragile democratic institutions. The most recent survey found that “in 2016 it was established democracies—countries rated Free in the report’s ranking system—that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks.” The report’s authors went on glumly to note that the US election of 2016 “raised fears of a foreign policy divorced from America’s traditional strategic commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order that it helped to construct beginning in 1945.” And if this were not enough, they pointed to a growing “nexus” of mutual support between authoritarian regimes and populist movements in both weak and strong liberal democracies.

It would be somewhat reassuring to think the United States is the “exceptional nation” resisting the tide. But President Donald J. Trump’s casual, sometimes caustic, disdain for democratic norms and his inexplicable coziness with Vladimir Putin and lesser authoritarians have raised concerns in America and abroad, particularly among traditional allies.

Disturbing as the behavior of the forty-fifth president is, honesty compels us to recognize that Trump’s presidency is less the cause of America’s democracy woes than the product of them. Surveys and studies, including The Vanishing Center of American Democracy, published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture last year, reveal a steady decline in Americans’ confidence in their political institutions as well as various other bulwarks of a liberal and civil society. A declining faith in democratic norms has only exacerbated the culture war divisions of the last four decades, divisions that have in turn been intensified by what some call a new class war between “credentialed” elites and (mostly) white lower-income earners who see their fortunes declining. And as many have noted, democratic norms are bound to suffer when there are no shared conceptions of truth or objectivity, and when all products of journalism are dismissed, from one partisan angle or another, as “fake news.”

Is it time to declare the end of the end of history, as we tentatively suggest in the title to this issue’s theme? More fundamentally, is there something deeply flawed in what many people have long believed was the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment: not merely the idea of governments of, for, and by the people but states undergirded by commitments to personal and civil liberties. Are we witnessing the exhaustion of the once-vital liberal tradition that supported our politics, both its progressive and conservative strands, and which made politics a (relatively) civil enterprise, and compromise a desirable outcome of that enterprise?

The contributors to this issue propose widely differing answers to these questions. But all agree that the questions are urgent and the stakes are high, not only for America and other liberal democracies but also for the relatively stable global order that emerged after World War II, an order built on faith in the universal worth of liberal principles….(More)”.

Invisible Algorithms, Invisible Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Forlano at Public Books: “Over the past several decades, politicians and business leaders, technology pundits and the mainstream media, engineers and computer scientists—as well as science fiction and Hollywood films—have repeated a troubling refrain, championing the shift away from the material and toward the virtual, the networked, the digital, the online. It is as if all of life could be reduced to 1s and 0s, rendering it computable….

Today, it is in design criteria and engineering specifications—such as “invisibility” and “seamlessness,” which aim to improve the human experience with technology—that ethical decisions are negotiated….

Take this example. In late July 2017, the City of Chicago agreed to settle a $38.75 million class-action lawsuit related to its red-light-camera program. Under the settlement, the city will repay drivers who were unfairly ticketed a portion of the cost of their ticket. Over the past five years, the program, ostensibly implemented to make Chicago’s intersections safer, has been mired in corruption, bribery, mismanagement, malfunction, and moral wrongdoing. This confluence of factors has resulted in a great deal of negative press about the project.

The red-light-camera program is just one of many examples of such technologies being adopted by cities in their quest to become “smart” and, at the same time, increase revenue. Others include ticketless parking, intelligent traffic management, ride-sharing platforms, wireless networks, sensor-embedded devices, surveillance cameras, predictive policing software, driverless car testbeds, and digital-fabrication facilities.

The company that produced the red-light cameras, Redflex, claims on their website that their technology can “reliably and consistently address negative driving behaviors and effectively enforce traffic laws on roadways and intersections with a history of crashes and incidents.”Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the cameras were unnecessarily installed at some intersections without a history of problems; they malfunctioned; they issued illegal tickets due to short yellow-lights that were not within federal limits; and they issued tickets after enforcement hours. And, due to existing structural inequalities, these difficulties were more likely to negatively impact poorer and less advantaged city residents.

The controversies surrounding red-light cameras in Chicago make visible the ways in which design criteria and engineering specifications—concepts including safety and efficiency, seamlessness and stickiness, convenience and security—are themselves ways of defining the ethics, values, and politics of our cities and citizens. To be sure, these qualities seem clean, comforting, and cuddly at first glance. They are difficult to argue against.

But, like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they gnash their political-economic teeth, and show their insatiable desire to further the goals of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than merely slick marketing, these mundane infrastructures (hardware, software, data, and services) negotiate ethical questions around what kinds of societies we aspire to, what kind of cities we want to live in, what kinds of citizens we can become, who will benefit from these tradeoffs, and who will be left out….(More)

Dawn of the techlash

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Botsman at the Guardian: “…Once seen as saviours of democracy, those titans are now just as likely to be viewed as threats to truth or, at the very least, impassive billionaires falling down on the job of monitoring their own backyards.

It wasn’t always this way. Remember the early catchy slogans that emerged from those ping-pong-tabled tech temples in Silicon Valley? “A place for friends”, “Don’t be evil” or “You can make money without being evil” (rather poignant, given what was to come). Users were enchanted by the sudden, handheld power of a smartphone to voice anything, access anything; grassroots activist movements revelled in these new tools for spreading their cause. The idealism of social media – democracy, friction-free communication, one-button socialising proved infectious.

So how did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle….

Technology is only the means. We also need to ask why our political ideologies have become so polarised, and take a hard look at our own behaviour, as well as that of the politicians themselves and the partisan media outlets who use these platforms, with their vast reach, to sow the seeds of distrust. Why are we so easily duped? Are we unwilling or unable to discern what’s true and what isn’t or to look for the boundaries between opinion, fact and misinformation? But what part are our own prejudices playing?

Luciano Floridi, of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University, points out that technology alone can’t save us from ourselves. “The potential of technology to be a powerful positive force for democracy is huge and is still there. The problems arise when we ignore how technology can accentuate or highlight less attractive sides of human nature,” he says. “Prejudice. Jealousy. Intolerance of different views. Our tendency to play zero sum games. We against them. Saying technology is a threat to democracy is like saying food is bad for you because it causes obesity.”

It’s not enough to blame the messenger. Social media merely amplifies human intent – both good and bad. We need to be honest about our own, age-old appetite for ugly gossip and spreading half-baked information, about our own blindspots.

Is there a solution to it all? Plenty of smart people are working on technical fixes, if for no other reason than the tech companies know it’s in their own best interests to stem the haemorrhaging of trust. Whether they’ll go far enough remains to be seen.

We sometimes forget how uncharted this new digital world remains – it’s a work in progress. We forget that social media, for all its flaws, still brings people together, gives a voice to the voiceless, opens vast wells of information, exposes wrongdoing, sparks activism, allows us to meet up with unexpected strangers. The list goes on. It’s inevitable that there will be falls along the way, deviousness we didn’t foresee. Perhaps the present danger is that in our rush to condemn the corruption of digital technologies, we will unfairly condemn the technologies themselves….(More).

Managing Democracy in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Julia Schwanholz, Todd Graham and Peter-Tobias Stoll: “In light of the increased utilization of information technologies, such as social media and the ‘Internet of Things,’ this book investigates how this digital transformation process creates new challenges and opportunities for political participation, political election campaigns and political regulation of the Internet. Within the context of Western democracies and China, the contributors analyze these challenges and opportunities from three perspectives: the regulatory state, the political use of social media, and through the lens of the public sphere.

The first part of the book discusses key challenges for Internet regulation, such as data protection and censorship, while the second addresses the use of social media in political communication and political elections. In turn, the third and last part highlights various opportunities offered by digital media for online civic engagement and protest in the public sphere. Drawing on different academic fields, including political science, communication science, and journalism studies, the contributors raise a number of innovative research questions and provide fascinating theoretical and empirical insights into the topic of digital transformation….(More)”.

Governments are not startups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ramy Ghorayeb at Medium: “…Why can’t governments move fast like the private industry? We have seen the rise of big corporations and startups adapting and evolve with the needs of their customers. Why can’t the governments adapt to the needs of their population? Why is it so slow?

Truth is, innovating in the public sector cannot and should not be like in the private one. Startups and corporations are about maximizing their internalities while public administrations are also about minimizing the externalities.

Straight-forward example: Let’s imagine the US authorize online voting in addition to physical for the next presidential elections. Obviously, it is a good way to incentivize people to vote. You will be able to vote from anywhere at any time, and more importantly, the cost to make one hundred people vote will be the same as one thousand or one million.

But on the other side, you are favoring the population with easy access to the Internet, meaning the middle and upper classes. And more, you are also favoring the younger generations over the older.
These populations have different known political opinions. Ultimately, you are deliberately modifying the voting repartition power in the country. It is not necessarily a bad or a good thing (keeping only physical voting is also favoriting a specific demographic segment) but there are a lot of issues that need to be worked on thoroughly before making any change on the democratic balance. I’d like to call this the participatory bias.

This participatory bias is the reason why the public side will always have a latency to adopt technology.

On the private side, when a business wants to work on a new product, it will only focus on its customer. The goal of a startup is even to find a specific segment of the population with its own needs and problems, a niche, to test innovative solutions in order to improve their experience and optimize the acquisition and retention of this population. In other words, he will maximize the internalities.
But the public side needs to look at the externalities that its new products can create. It cannot isolate a population, but has to look at what are the negative effects on the others. And more, like a big corporation, it cannot experiment and fail like a startup does, because it has to preserve its reputation and trust legacy.

Now the situation isn’t locked. Thanks to the civic tech ecosystem, governments have found a way to externalize innovation and learn from experimentations, failure and successes without doing it themselves. Startups and labs are handling the difficult role of inventor, and are showing the good way to use tech for citizens, iteration by iteration. More interesting, they are also showing that they are not threaten by public side replications. In fact, they are finding their complementarity….(More)”