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- Singularity is post-human
- Privacy Answers
- Your data is owned by you and you can use it to improve your own life
- IoT outweighs privacy because it can stop a deadly flu outbreak, including the deadly bird flu
- People can scramble their own data
- Transparency reduces police abuse
SINGULARITY LINKS!IoT promotes singularityQuentin Hardy, January 1, 2016, New York Times, Looking Beyond the Internet of Things, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/technology/looking-beyond-the-internet-of-things.html?_r=0 DOA: 9-25-16 SAN FRANCISCO — If you have sent email on Google or used Microsoft’s browser or databases, you have touched the technology handiwork of Adam Bosworth. Mr. Bosworth, a tall and grizzled but still trim 60-year-old, is a Johnny Appleseed of sorts in the tech industry, with a penchant for being intimately involved in the creation of generations of widely used technology. While it is never easy to predict what the next big thing will be, identifying what Mr. Bosworth is working on is always good for clues. Right now, along with competitors at companies like Amazon and Google, he is building what some call a “data singularity.” Imagine if almost everything — streets, car bumpers, doors, hydroelectricdams — had a tiny sensor. That is already happening through so-called Internet-of-Things projects run by big companies like General Electric and IBM. All those devices and sensors would also wirelessly connect to far-off data centers, where millions of computer servers manage and learn from all that information. Those servers would then send back commands to help whatever the sensors are connected to operate more effectively: A home automatically turns up the heat ahead of cold weather moving in, or streetlights behave differently when traffic gets bad. Or imagine an insurance company instantly resolving who has to pay for what an instant after a fender-bender because it has been automatically fed information about the accident. Think of it as one, enormous process in which machines gather information, learn and change based on what they learn. All in seconds. “I’m interested in affecting five billion people,” said Mr. Bosworth, a former star at Microsoft and Google who now makes interactive software atSalesforce.com, an online software company that runs sales for thousands of corporations. “We’re headed into one of those historic discontinuities where society changes.” It is lofty language, no doubt, but he and others believe they are on the brink of one of the next big shifts in computing, perhaps as big as the web browser or the personal computer. But building an automated system that can react to all that data like a thoughtful person is fiendishly hard — and that may be Mr. Bosworth’s last great challenge to solve. It is difficult to say just how big this business could be, but there are two good indicators: Analysts at Gartner estimate that by 2019 retail cloud computing — the data center side of the equation Mr. Bosworth is working on — will double in size, to $314 billion. The sensors on objects will be a $2.6 trillion business, an increase of 250 percent, Gartner estimates. Mr. Bosworth went to Harvard with Bill Gates, where he took just one class in computers while studying Asian history. He nonetheless landed a job on Wall Street, where he persuaded his bosses to give him $1 million for minicomputers — the cutting edge of computing before personal computers — that could deliver the first instant reports on how business was doing. He got interested in tech’s next big thing, PCs, and wrote an early spreadsheet program. He joined Microsoft in 1989. His first years there were spent on databases, but as the Internet got big he helped turn browsers from software that looks up web pages to software that interacts with the web. He and Mr. Gates repeatedly argued over the importance of the Internet, according to people there at the time. Mr. Gates may also have goaded Mr. Bosworth, knowing he is the sort who does not like to be told something is not possible. “He sees out into the future, but not too far that you can’t build something,” said Brad Silverberg, a Seattle venture capitalist who has known Mr. Bosworth since 1981 and was his boss at Microsoft. “If you want to make sure something gets done, tell him not to do it.” The son of a demanding private school headmaster, Mr. Bosworth also clashed with Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, while working there on interactive software and a failed effort to build online health services. “We had styles that weren’t synergistic,” said Mr. Bosworth. “He looks intensively at massive amounts of data-gathering, and assumes he’ll be able to do something with it using math. I was focused on getting people to communicate with other people.” He left Google in 2007 to start Keas, an online health management company. He left in 2011 for Salesforce, but is still on Keas’s board. Marc Benioff, the chief executive at Salesforce and a friend of Mr. Bosworth, asked him to look at the technology being used at the San Francisco company, which was founded in 1999 and was one of the first to use cloud computing technology. Over lunch a few months later, Mr. Bosworth told Mr. Benioff that his once-revolutionary company was in peril. “Computers are 50 times faster than when Salesforce started,” he said. “I told Marc, ‘There is a whole new technology that is going to overtake you, the way the web overtook Microsoft.’” That technology — the data singularity — is what Mr. Bosworth is now working on at Salesforce. If he is right, this new era in computing will have effects far beyond a little more efficiency. Consumers could see a vast increase in the number of services, ads and product upgrades that are sold alongside most goods. And products that respond to their owner’s tastes — something already seen in smartphone upgrades, connected cars from BMW or Tesla, or entertainment devices like the Amazon Echo — could change product design. Analysts foresee a scramble to own and manage these systems and their data, and ever more power accruing to just a few companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which already have the global computing systems and reach to make it happen. “The idea is turning the world into a smart object that can be continuously improved, and we couldn’t be more excited,” said Matthew Wood, the general manager of product strategy at Amazon Web Services, or A.W.S., the retailer’s giant cloud computing business. Few outfits have the engineering talent to manage this sort of thing. One year after starting the business, for example, Microsoft’s cloud handles a trillion sensor messages a week. Salesforce, which is worth $54 billion, is an underdog compared to that tiny group of tech behemoths. It lacks global data centers, but does control important data, like information about what customers are buying. Who will ultimately control that data, from the sensors to the cloud and back, is one of the most contentious questions in tech. “You’ve got Amazon knowing everything about purchasing, Google knowing everything about what people do on the Internet, and Salesforce knowing everything about the revenue side of a business,” said Scott Raney, a venture capitalist at Redpoint Ventures who invests in companies related to what Mr. Bosworth is working on. “Lay computer processing on all that, and it’s powerful to a point where a little creepiness sets in; no one else will have the data,” he added. “I’m buying the stock of all the companies. I just hope they’ll be benevolent dictators.” Singularity is post-humanAdrian McWewen & Hakim Casimally, 2014, Designing the Internet of Things, http://madsg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Designing_the_Internet_of_Things.pdf Adrian McEwen is a creative technologist and entrepreneur based in Liverpool. He has been connecting devices to the Internet since 1995—first cash registers, then mobile phones, and now bubble machines and lamps. He founded MCQN Ltd., an Internet of Things product agency and (along with Hakim and others) is co-founder of DoES Liverpool, a hybrid co-working/ makerspace that incubates Internet of Things startups in NW England. He is also CTO of Good Night Lamp, a family of Internet-connected lamps. He was one of the first employees at STNC Ltd, which built the first web browser for mobile phones and was acquired by Microsoft in 1999. Adrian concentrates on how the Internet of Things intersects with people’s lives and how heterogeneous networks of devices should work together, and lectures and speaks on these issues internationally. Despite an education in Italian and English literature, once Hakim Cassimally discovered software development, he hasn’t looked back. He is a staunch proponent of Perl and was one of the organisers of YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa. These days, however, he is likely to be writing Python for 3D printers or for civic hacking projects with mySociety.org. He co-founded (with Adrian and others) DoES Liverpool An inexorable and definingly human advance towards a full selfrealization through technology: This might lead to a new state for the species (the post-human singularity or the spread of mankind to other planets) or simply suggest that every advance leads us to a stable utopia. Privacy AnswersYou can shape how the data is used and control any privacy lossPatrick Tusker, 2014, The Naked Future, Kindle edition, page number at end of card, Patrick Tucker is a science journalist and editor. Tucker’s writing on emerging technology has appeared in The Atlantic, Defense One, Quartz, National Journal, Slate, Salon, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The Futurist, BBC News Magazine, and Utne Reader, among other publications. Tucker, Patrick. The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Today, we’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t have improved public safety without giving up liberty. But perhaps in the future, children will see this trade-off as unnecessary, a failure of imagination. We’ve discounted the possibility that we can use public data and personal data in ways that empower individuals without making them feel uncomfortably exposed or more dangerous to one another. Get involved in how your local department uses or plans to use advanced analytics. Start a Facebook page that discusses how more involvement in how local police treat data is the trade-off we have to make for greater safety. You may get the brush-off, or you may be surprised to discover a bunch of smart public servants who are eager for more citizen participation. When police chiefs confront the reality of how income, employment, housing density, schooling, taxation, and even urban planning affect robbery, assault, and murder, they often start sounding less like cops and a lot more like sociologists. Tucker, Patrick. The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (pp. 221-222). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Your data is owned by you and you can use it to improve your own lifePatrick Tusker, 2014, The Naked Future, Kindle edition, page number at end of card, Patrick Tucker is a science journalist and editor. Tucker’s writing on emerging technology has appeared in The Atlantic, Defense One, Quartz, National Journal, Slate, Salon, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, The Futurist, BBC News Magazine, and Utne Reader, among other publications. Tucker, Patrick. The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. The threat of creeping techno-totalitarianism is real. But the realization of our worst fears is not the inevitable result of growing computational capability. Just as the costs of using big data have decreased for institutions, those costs will continue to trend downward as systems improve and as consumer services spring up in a field that is currently dominated by business-to-business players. The balance of power will shift— somewhat— in favor of individuals. Your phone may be from Apple; your carrier may be AT& T; your browser may be Google; but your data is yours first because you created it through your actions. Think of it not as a liability but as an asset you can take ownership of and use. In the naked future, your data will help you live much more healthily, realize more of your own goals in less time, avoid inconvenience and danger, and, as detailed in this book, learn about yourself and your own future in a way that no generation in human history ever thought possible. In fact, your data is your best defense against coercive, Target-like marketing and perhaps even against intrusive government practices. Your data is nothing less than a superpower waiting to be harnessed. T We still have choices to make. I’ll discuss some of the forms those choices will take. But the worst possible move we as a society can make right now is demand that technological progress reverse itself. This is futile and shortsighted. We may be uncomfortable with the way companies, the NSA, and other groups use and abuse our information but that doesn’t mean we will be producing less data anytime soon. As I mentioned earlier, according to the research group IDC there will be forty-four times as much digital information in 2020 as there was in 2009.4 You have a clear choice: use your data or someone else will. This is not a book about a change that is going to happen so much as a change that has already occurred but has yet to be acknowledged or fully felt. This is not a declaration of independence from corporate America, the government, or anything else. It’s the record of our journey to this new place: the naked future. Tucker, Patrick. The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (p. xviii). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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