Every breath you take / Every move you make / I'll be watching you!

Take a look at this photo:

Looks like one of those coffee shops where young customers stay for hours while making use of free wifi, right?

Look again.  There is something hanging under his neck.  If somebody had asked me to guess what it is, I would have failed, and failed miserably.

It is a "sociometric badge."

I am with you--I have no idea what it means when somebody says "sociometric badge."  Guess what it is for?  "Combined with digital data, sociometric badge data can help organizations get a holistic view of how work gets done."

Even at this point, you might wonder what that means.  I am with you.  I didn't know about any of these until I read this essay on how digital technology and data on all kinds of things are enabling employers to monitor their employees every second.  It is one of the most depressing essays that I have read recently.  Ignorance is bliss!

That "sociometric badge"?  Ironically, the company that makes that is called Humanyze.  A company that is all about dehumanizing people and their work is called Humanyze!  It is a pioneer in something called "people analytics"--a phrase that I wish I had not heard or read. Referred to in short as PA.   "Worn around the neck and attached to microphones and sensors, the badges record their subjects’ frequency of speaking, tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language."  Note the kinds of data that the badge is collecting!

Very little "escapes the gaze of the sociometric badge and its associated technologies":

“Even when you’re by yourself, you’re generating a lot of interesting data. Looking at your posture is indicative of the kind of work and the kind of conversation you’re having.”

This is fucking insane!

Even scarier is this: Humanyze is not the only game in town.  All these PA firms "rely on combinations of wearables and computer-based technologies to monitor and control workplace behavior."

These companies boast that their systems can find out virtually everything there is to know about employees, both in the workplace and outside it. “Thanks to modern technology,” in the words of Hubstaff, a PA company based in Indianapolis, “companies can monitor almost 100 percent of employee activity and communication.”

Like I said, this is fucking insane!

The owners of these robots gain more wealth and power over labor that increasingly is left behind and becomes voiceless.  The demagogue who foul-mouthed his way to the Oval Office in order to fight for the forgotten men and women couldn't care less.  It was never about the forgotten!

We didn't start the fire? Yes, we did!

I don't make friends. And I piss off friends that I manage to make.  All because I want honest conversations, and it turns out that how much ever people are educated and worldly and sophisticated, well, unlike me most are good at making unprincipled tradeoffs as long as their objectives are met.  What an awful loser I am!

I would love to talk with rabid Barack Obama fans about his use of social media, given all the brouhaha over trump and bannon dealing with cambridge analytica.

Keep in mind that I am no trump sympathzier--I have not only been anti-trump from the day he announced his candidacy, I have banished from my social life trump voters, including friends and neighbors.

Back when Senator Obama launched his candidacy, he and his campaign worked the social media, which was a new thing at that time.  A couple of days after his historic election, the NY Times reported:

For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.
“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

We set out on a new election campaign approach--the internet and the social media.

The highly organized Obama team correctly figured that "the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms."

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technology—much of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineers—that redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and “targeted sharing” protocols mined an Obama backer’s Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didn’t just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

"Turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be."  That is from a 2012 essay in MIT Technology Review.  Political advertising had been successfully weaponized. PhDs were writing algorithms to microtarget voters.

Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politics—and to be changed by it.

Yep, every American was reduced to a series of numbers, who could be influenced by well-targeted ads.

We had started down a slope that was soon bound to end up in the hands of evil.  JFK mastered the television medium, yes.  But then it was also the same television through which another election was swung with the notorious Willie Horton ad. 

Yes, the trump team committed flagrant fouls. Egregious ones.  But, most people are sports nutcases and they will easily understand the following comparison: It is not uncommon in team sports for coaches and players to intentionally commit fouls in order to win games.  I find it deplorable. But, that is how it is done in sports and in politics.  And, often, fans cheer when their team commits those fouls and win games, but jeer when the opponent does that and wins.  As Michael Kinsley put it in the context of John Kerry being swift-boated: "People tell pollsters they are sick of nasty politics, then they respond to it every time."

The problem is not that fouls are committed, but that people--even the religious ones--have bought into the bottom-line:  "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

The dumb fucks we are!

One of my go-to technology columnists, Farhad Manjoo, has gotten me worried about the "frightful five" for a while now.  As if I needed more to ad to my near-paranoia!  In one of those columns, Manjoo wrote:

This is the most glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism: We are, all of us, in inescapable thrall to one of the handful of American technology companies that now dominate much of the global economy. I speak, of course, of my old friends the Frightful Five: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

There are a gazillion posts in this blog where I have expressed my worries about all these companies.  The worries have not ever abated, but get louder and louder and louder and ...

Yet, the public is apparently not worried.  What’s going on here?

Why are people still so unafraid of the world’s richest corporations, even as those corporations collect fine-grained data on almost every aspect of our lives and shape the way we work, communicate, and spend our free time?
One relatively obvious factor may be that the big tech companies make things that people love: iPhones, Gmail, Instagram, and other flagship products have hundreds of millions of loyal users. The warm feelings those devices and services engender may blind people to the industry’s darker undersides of mass surveillance, targeted advertising, and addictiveness.

Those dark sides.

Now add domestic and international politics to all those, and you get a pitch black darkness.  The Darkening Web is the book that is the context for an essay in the NYRB.

The interests that now guide what technologies they produce are not entirely commercial ones. The national security community has exploited the private sector to help develop America’s immense cyber-capabilities. In doing so it has placed an extraordinary array of potential cyber-weapons in the hands of unaccountable private companies.

"unaccountable."

That should worry you, too. A lot.

And keep in mind that there is a lot of mutually beneficial crossover between the unaccountable frightful five and the unaccountable national security interests of the government.

the development in Silicon Valley of a hybrid public/private economy in which the government assists in the creation of new technologies it needs for national security operations by investing in companies that can also commercialize these technologies.
Government agencies have mitigated risk and even helped to create markets for companies whose products, while ostensibly strictly civilian and commercial, satisfy their own needs. The driverless car industry will incorporate, test, and improve technologies devised for missile guidance systems and unmanned drones. Facial recognition software developed by intelligence agencies and the military for surveillance and identity verification (in drone strikes, for example) is now assuming a friendly guise on our iPhones and being tested by millions of users.

In short, the "direction of technological development in the commercial sector, in other words, is influenced by the agenda of government agencies in ways largely unknown to the public."

Zuckerberg, in a well-known incident he now surely regrets, was asked in the early days of Facebook why people would hand over their personal information to him. He responded, “They trust me—dumb fucks.” We’re finally starting to appreciate the depth of the insult to us all. Now we need to figure out how to keep the corporations we have supported with our taxes, data, and undivided attention from treating us like dumb fucks in the future.

The dumb fucks we are!

I know am not always happy. I am happy about it!

The other day, I swung by the box-store-that-liberals-hate in order to use the free blood-pressure reading machine.  The reading was all in the clear.  Any medical professional will be happy to see such numbers for pulse and blood-pressure.

I was relieved.  Because, I worried that my unhappiness and stress would have hiked up the numbers into unhealthy territory.

Yep, as many posts in the pasts have made it abundantly clear, I walk around with my own quota of stress and unhappiness.  Life in the ashram for this hermit is not simply eternal bliss.

The good thing is that many, many years ago, I figured that it will be very, very, very rare for a human to be stress-free and happy.  I mean truly stress-free and happy.  Which meant that happiness is something that emerges from and within the context of stress and unhappiness.  Of course, I have blogged about that very idea too; I wrote, for instance, when thinking about Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:

Happy families are those that are able to be happy despite their own versions of unhappiness.

Thus, when a student remarks that I always look too damn happy in my office, he has no idea how much of a validation it is for me that happiness is like a gorgeous lotus in a dirty pond.  The stress causing agents are all around me and yet, according to that student, I look happy all the time.

Source

With such a view of life, is it any surprise that I have never been a fan of strategies to create happiness?  The Bhutanese king's Gross National Happiness is merely an intellectual exercise for me.  But, beyond that intellectual idea, if it were to be designed as a public policy, I will be stressed and unhappy ;)

Why?  Because I don't want anybody telling me what happiness is.  I don't want any intrusion into life as I design it for myself.  I am happy, even with my unhappiness; what's your problem?

Why all this rant on a spring day, you ask?

Because, one of my daily go-to-websites had a link to this essay, with a lead that spoke to me:

Mood-tracking apps, chief happiness officers, positive psychology: When did being miserable become socially unacceptable?

So, of course, I read that essay, which is a review of a book titled The Happiness Industry. And now I am all the more suspicious about this "happiness" that everybody wants to maximize!

The reviewer writes:

Davies warns against the alliance that has developed between political authorities and academic researchers as well as those between economists and psychologists. I am usually in favour of interdisciplinary work. But Davies is right when he says that the notion of "happiness" has moved from being, as he calls it, a pleasant add-on, to a measurement useful in the business of making money – and at the expense of increased control over your life.

Exactly.

To be stressed, unhappy, to worry, to panic, all within a reasonable bound, are all very much part of being human.  Imagine if your taste buds all of a sudden can only feel the sweet taste and nothing else.  You will miss out on the subliminal lime in the cheesecake, the bitterness of dark chocolate, the tartness of an apple, the salt in the potato chips.  Life is not sweet happiness all the time.

At the Guardian, ahead of a debate, Davies writes:

We need to accept that people often have reasons to feel happy or unhappy, and that those reasons are as important as the feelings themselves.  Recognising this would lead us to focus on institutions that grant people a voice that is heard, both as individuals and as groups, and less on the vagaries of sensation and sentiment.

Thanks to "big data," we are now well on our way to slicing and dicing what makes people happy and then--here's the important thing--to manipulate us into being happy:

This data-led approach to understanding people under the guise of improving our happiness is leading to an expansion of surveillance capabilities to which we acquiesce. Big business and the state are able to condition our responses. So comes a seismic shift in the power balance between the individual and big business and more worryingly, between individuals and the state. We are, it seems, sleepwalking into the world of Larkin's "Essential Beauty", in which adverts depict "well-balanced families" but "Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares". As Davies implies in this readable, disturbing book, being depressed by the human condition will no longer be socially acceptable, or even an option.

Perhaps you think, "what hyperbole!"  Think again.  One of the ideas that Ray Bradbury explored in Fahrenheit 451, which was published way back in 1953, was this: the government in a future society decides that people reading books makes them unhappy.  Hence, the job of the "fire fighter" was to torch any book that was found, and to apprehend the book owner.  Remember?  Aha, you never read the book, did you?  Did you at least watch the "Thug Notes" in the previous post, where he provides a summary and an analysis?

Happy now?

I worry about the unholy mix of big data and higher education

I often remark to students--well, the few who register for my classes anymore--that one of the biggest advantages of teaching in higher education is that I deal with people who are legally adults.  Sometimes I share with them the comments I have heard from teachers in the K-12 system: according to most, teaching the lower elementary years is the best because many, many kids show a great deal of excitement and interest in learning new stuff.  Teaching high school children is not that great.  The worst, the nightmare of all, is teaching those in that transition--the awful middle school/junior high years of life.

Those K-12 teachers have that heavy, heavy responsibility of taking care of young minds, whose lives could be shaped/mis-shaped by what teachers do and don't do.  I, on the other hand, deal with adults.  Well, adults in the legal sense--there is an increasing worry that there seems to be a protracted teenage mentality well into the early twenties as well.  The law says they are adults and I am relieved.

Relieved because, as I often remind students, adults are responsible for the consequences of their actions.  Kids can always claim that they were being kids after all.  But, not so with adults.

Which is why I don't care whether they attend classes--only to sleep--or party or work, as long as they understand that they are responsible for the consequences.  As simple as that.  Of course, I remind them that studies have consistently demonstrated a high correlation between attending classes and successfully completing them.  But then, I add, correlation is no causation either.

I so miss Calvin. Damn you, Bill Watterson! ;)

You can, therefore, imagine why I find it awfully bizarre that universities are now tapping into technology and big data in order to track student attendance:

At Villanova University, student ID cards track attendance at some lectures. Administrators at University of Arkansas last semester began electronically monitoring the class attendance of 750 freshmen as part of a pilot program they might extend to all underclassman. And at Harvard, researchers secretly filmed classrooms to learn how many students were skipping lectures.

There is only one way I can possibly respond to this: WTF!

I understand the intention: we want students to complete their undergraduate education on time and with success.  But, hey, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That road includes things like:

The latest entrant into the market of tracking student’s whereabouts: Class120, a $199-a-year notification service that tracks a student through the GPS in their smartphone and alerts their parents (or another third party) in real time if their child isn’t within a geofence mapped around the classroom where they are scheduled to be.

WTF!

A student is no different from a prisoner released on parole with a monitoring anklet on?  OMG!

schools have realized they have a trove of new data to look at, such as how much a student is accessing the syllabus, taking part in online discussions with classmates and reading assigned material. Such technology “shows faculty exactly where students are interacting outside as well inside the classroom,” said Stephen Fugale, Villanova’s chief information officer.

Yes, we now have plenty of data and inexpensive computing to analyze the data in no time at all.  But, does it therefore mean that we ought to use them like this?

University of Arkansas began experimenting with mandatory attendance as a way to boost its 62% six-year graduation rate, said Provost Sharon Gaber. “We talk about helicopter parents,” she said. “Well, some of these kids haven’t learned how to get out of bed on their own yet.”

Ahem, somebody ought to remind Sharon Gaber that they are not "kids" but adults. Adults according to the law.  The same law that even forbids me from discussing anything about the student even with the student's "helicopter parents" who might even be paying for everything.  I wish I had been able to talk some sense into Sharon Gaber when we were fellow graduate students at USC's School of Urban and Regional Planning, as it was called then! ;)

But, this, too, will be a losing battle for me, and I will add it to the long and ever-growing list of windmills that I have charged against.

In the survival of the fittest, this idiot will be terminated by natural and artificial intelligence!

Sometimes I simply want to stop reading anymore.

I know it sounds strange.  But there are moments when I wonder if my life would have been a lot better and more enjoyable if I didn't care to engage in random reading.

Why?

Because, I feel all the more that I don't know a damn thing.  During those moments, the knowing that I don't know becomes a burden.  Which is when I wonder if I would have had a happier existence, you know, leading a normal life of doing a job, and then ...

But, I am stuck with who I am.  The good news is that the clock is winding down ;)

The latest realization about my idiocy came from reading this piece at Edge.  It is a conversation with Jaron Lanier, whom I have quoted before in this blog--as recently as, ahem, the last post.  As if that level of exposing my idiocy weren't enough, the commenters, my god!  Well, not some internet trolls, but people who were invited to comment.  It is like one huge all-star lineup.

The conversation is all about artificial intelligence, and algorithms beginning to take over our lives.  Lanier provides this example that most of us can relate to:

Since our economy has shifted to what I call a surveillance economy, but let's say an economy where algorithms guide people a lot, we have this very odd situation where you have these algorithms that rely on big data in order to figure out who you should date, who you should sleep with, what music you should listen to, what books you should read, and on and on and on. ...
I'll give you a few examples of what I mean by that. Maybe I'll start with Netflix. The thing about Netflix is that there isn't much on it. There's a paucity of content on it. If you think of any particular movie you might want to see, the chances are it's not available for streaming, that is; that's what I'm talking about. And yet there's this recommendation engine, and the recommendation engine has the effect of serving as a cover to distract you from the fact that there's very little available from it. And yet people accept it as being intelligent, because a lot of what's available is perfectly fine.
... But it does contribute, at a macro level, to this overall atmosphere of accepting the algorithms as doing a lot more than they do. In the case of Netflix, the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway.

A wonderful difference Lanier is alerting us to--"the recommendation engine is serving to distract you from the fact that there's not much choice anyway."  That is one heck of a scary thought, right?

So, on to the next step in this algorithmic world:

I want to get to an even deeper problem, which is that there's no way to tell where the border is between measurement and manipulation in these systems.

In case you are wondering what Lanier is talking about, he explains:

the only way for such a system to be legitimate would be for it to have an observatory that could observe in peace, not being sullied by its own recommendations. Otherwise, it simply turns into a system that measures which manipulations work, as opposed to which ones don't work, which is very different from a virginal and empirically careful system that's trying to tell what recommendations would work had it not intervened. That's a pretty clear thing. What's not clear is where the boundary is.

Exactly!  My worry has been this, but I had no idea how to articulate it.  I was all gobbledygook whenever I tried to get my brain to work on this!  Whether it is Netflix or Amazon or Facebook or Google,

All of these things, there's no baseline, so we don't know to what degree they're measurement versus manipulation.

Turns out there is more.

If people are deciding what books to read based on a momentum within the recommendation engine that isn't going back to a virgin population, that hasn't been manipulated, then the whole thing is spun out of control and doesn't mean anything anymore. It's not so much a rise of evil as a rise of nonsense. It's a mass incompetence, as opposed to Skynet from the Terminator movies. That's what this type of AI turns into.

 "Mass incompetence."  Hmmm ... it feels like it has already arrived.

The way big data/algorithmic world then works has tremendous economic consequences.  Like this one about the automatic translators and voice recognition.  Think Siri, for instance.  The more people use it, the better Siri gets, right?

The thing that we have to notice though is that, because of the mythology about AI, the services are presented as though they are these mystical, magical personas. IBM makes a dramatic case that they've created this entity that they call different things at different times—Deep Blue and so forth. The consumer tech companies, we tend to put a face in front of them, like a Cortana or a Siri. The problem with that is that these are not freestanding services.
... What this is, is behind the curtain, is literally millions of human translators who have to provide the examples. The thing is, they didn't just provide one corpus once way back. Instead, they're providing a new corpus every day, because the world of references, current events, and slang does change every day. We have to go and scrape examples from literally millions of translators, unbeknownst to them, every single day, to help keep those services working.
The problem here should be clear, but just let me state it explicitly: we're not paying the people who are providing the examples to the corpora—which is the plural of corpus—that we need in order to make AI algorithms work. In order to create this illusion of a freestanding autonomous artificial intelligent creature, we have to ignore the contributions from all the people whose data we're grabbing in order to make it work. That has a negative economic consequence.
This, to me, is where it becomes serious.

Why is this an economic issue?

The usual counterargument to that is that they are being paid in the sense that they too benefit from all the free stuff and reduced-cost stuff that comes out of the system. I don't buy that argument, because you need formal economic benefit to have a civilization, not just informal economic benefit.  

I.e., you can't buy a home with that informal benefit, can you?

In the history of organized religion, it's often been the case that people have been disempowered precisely to serve what were perceived to be the needs of some deity or another, where in fact what they were doing was supporting an elite class that was the priesthood for that deity.
That looks an awful lot like the new digital economy to me, where you have (natural language) translators and everybody else who contributes to the corpora that allow the data schemes to operate, contributing mostly to the fortunes of whoever runs the top computers. The new elite might say, "Well, but they're helping the AI, it's not us, they're helping the AI." It reminds me of somebody saying, "Oh, build these pyramids, it's in the service of this deity," but, on the ground, it's in the service of an elite. It's an economic effect of the new idea. The effect of the new religious idea of AI is a lot like the economic effect of the old idea, religion.

And then the commenters come in and critique Lanier.  At the end of it all, I came away wondering what the heck these smart people are talking about, and why I am feeling like an idiot.  You see why I think I would have been better off not reading that essay in the first place?

Let me leave you with this, that I have quoted before:

Apple is building a world in which there is a computer in your every interaction, waking and sleeping. A computer in your pocket. A computer on your body. A computer paying for all your purchases. A computer opening your hotel room door. A computer monitoring your movements as you walk though the mall. A computer watching you sleep. A computer controlling the devices in your home. A computer that tells you where you parked. A computer taking your pulse, telling you how many steps you took, how high you climbed and how many calories you burned—and sharing it all with your friends…. THIS IS THE NEW APPLE ECOSYSTEM. APPLE HAS TURNED OUR WORLD INTO ONE BIG UBIQUITOUS COMPUTER

Have a good day! ;)

Size isn’t everything. Especially when you are thinking with it

Because of my electrical engineering background, most graduate school faculty expected me to get into working with numbers and computers.  My first year assignment was to be a research assistant to a professor who wanted to develop a GIS-based approach in her project, back when GIS at the personal computer level was quite a joke by today's standards.  It was soon clear to her that I was not planning to be a data geek in the social sciences.

I was not after numbers by any means.  I was in graduate school to learn about ideas.  I was blown away that so much had already been said and written down.  Yet, I had not known even the tiniest bits of those ideas when I was led down a narrow alley called electrical engineering.  It is not that I did not value the empirical approach--after all, the background in science and math and engineering had provided me with enough and more evidence on the importance of empirical data.  But, theories and ideas mattered more to me than what the numbers could reveal.

Over the years, I have watched with fascination the rapidly growing collection of data at all levels.  The Big Data, as it has come to be called.  And how mining the Big Data will be the digital world equivalent of the oracle at Delphi--the data will tell us everything we would want to know.

Thus, with interest I read two lengthy opinion pieces on the flaws with Big Data.   The conclusion in one is:

Big data is here to stay, as it should be. But let’s be realistic: It’s an important resource for anyone analyzing data, not a silver bullet.

And the conclusion in the other is:

“Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever.

Both the essays methodically lay out their arguments, and I urge you to read them.  I especially liked the following:

we almost forgot one last problem: the hype. Champions of big data promote it as a revolutionary advance. But even the examples that people give of the successes of big data, like Google Flu Trends, though useful, are small potatoes in the larger scheme of things. They are far less important than the great innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries, like antibiotics, automobiles and the airplane.

Yes, the hype of it all!

Big Data's cheerleaders claim:

that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”.

So, what about those claims?

Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be “complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.”

Bollocks. Nonsense. I love such clear and succinct opinions!

All these remind me of a short reading that I assign students to read.  Well, it is an actually an interview with George Dyson--yes, he is Freeman Dyson's son.  George Dyson offers a profound observation that "information is cheap, meaning is expensive":

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

Go figure!  With or without Big Data, that is ;)

A Measuring Worm
By Richard Wilbur

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.