Google Declares War On The Human Race

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt finally admitted yesterday something that the likes of Jaron Lanier have been warning us about for some years now: he believes there's actually a race between computers and people. In fact, many among the Silicon Valley elite fervently believe in something called The Singularity. They even have a university dedicated to achieving it.

The Singularity refers to an alleged moment when machines develop their own, independent 'superintelligence' and outcompete humans to the point of extinction. Basically, humans create machines and robots, harvest the worlds data until a vast proportion of it is in the machines, and those machines start making their own machines  and so on until they become autonomous. Stuart Armstrong reckons "there's an 80% probability that the singularity will occur between 2017 and 2112".  

If you follow the logic, we humans will never know if the Singularity actually happened. So belief in it is an act of faith. In other words, Singularity is a religion.

Lots of horrific things have been done in the name of one religion or another. But what sets this one apart is that the believers are, by definition, actively working to eliminate the human race.

So Schmidt is being a little disingenous when he says "It's a race between computers and people - and people need to win," since he works with a bunch of people who believe the computers will definitely win, and maybe quite soon. The longer quote on FT.com suggests he added:

“I am clearly on that side [without saying which side, exactly]. In this fight, it is very important that we find the things that humans are really good at.”

Well, until extinction, anyway.

Of course, the Singularity idea breaks down on a number of levels. For example, it's only a human belief that machines will achieve superintelligence. If machines were to get so smart, how would we know what they might think or do? They'd have their own ideas (one of which might be to look after their pet data sources, but more on that shortly). And there's no accounting for 'soul' or 'free will' or any of the things we regard as human, though perhaps the zealots believe those things are superfluous and the machines won't need them to evolve beyond us. Finally, this is all in the heads of the Silicon Valley elite...

Anyhow, Schmidt suggests we have to find alternatives to what machines can do and only humans are really good at. He says:

"As more routine tasks are automated, this will lead to much more part-time work in caring and creative industries. The classic 9-5 job will be redefined." 

Which is intended to focus our attention away from the trick that Google and others in the Big Data world are relying on to power up their beloved machines and stuff them full of enough data to go rogue. 

By offering some stupid humans 'free' services that suck in lots of data, Big Data can charge other stupid humans for advertising to them. That way, the machines hoover up all the humans' money and data at the same time.

This works just fine until the humans start insisting on receiving genuine value for their data.

Which is happening right now in so many ways that I'm in the process of writing a book about it. 

Because it turns out humans aren't that dumb after all. We are perfectly happy to let the Silicon Valley elite build cool stuff and charge users nothing for it. Up to a point. And in the case of the Big Data platforms, we've reached that point. Now its payback time.

So don't panic. The human race is not about to go out of fashion - at least not the way Big Data is planning. Just start demanding real value for the use of your data, wherever it's being collected, stored or used. And look out for the many services that are evolving to help you do that.

You never know, but if you get a royalty of some kind every time Google touches your data, you may not need that 9 to 5 job after all... And, no, the irony is not lost on me that I am writing this into the Google machine ;-)

Image from Wikipedia

Monetizing You

Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and writer, has been busy explaining that we need to reward each person for the data they reveal or post on the Internet, otherwise it will become unsustainable as an ecosystem. This idea perhaps chimes with the EU's requirement for much more explicit consent to 'cookies', futile as it has proved to be so far. Could we see the advent of paid-for marketing cookies, or will technology evolve to get rid of this problem entirely?

To date, the debate about the future of the Internet has largely been driven by investors, principally, who have insisted that online businesses generate short to medium term profits. Fearful of killing off a nascent commercial channel, most Web 2.0 giants have clustered around the advertising model, making their services 'free' to the consumer, and leaving advertisers to pass on the cost of marketing, as happens offline. Others have adopted the 'Freemium' model, in which perhaps only 10% of customers are relied upon to pay for extra functionality and so on, thereby subsidising a free ride for the rest. Indeed, Jakob Nielson has estimated that:

"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

But since the dawn of television, in particular, advertisers and ad agencies have been on a quest to figure out who sees their advertisements and how to target their ads ever more accurately. The open nature of Internet technology and the advent of the 'cookie' has made it easier to follow users from site to site, targeting advertising at them along the way, and some internet service providers have gone so far as to filter traffic as it passes through their services. 

Now it's one thing for advertisers to rely on data from your TV set, but people are understandably less comfortable about being followed around all day and having their every preference logged. Jaron Lanier says participants should be paid for that privilege, and I have to agree. Unless participants feel they are being compensated directly enough, they will stop participating online - to the extent they have the choice. This is not just a matter of persuading the 1% to remain high content contributors, or the 10% to actually pay for stuff in the Freemium context. The other 90 to 99% also need some recompense for agreeing to reveal evidence of their behaviour. Great service may be enough in some cases, but otherwise people will surely want a fairly direct economic return for disclosing their location etc., whether in the form of cash or some other sufficiently direct economic benefit, like genuine discounts or cost savings.

While a legal solution seems rather unlikely, the battleground is at least becoming more defined as the European Commission struggles to hold the perimeter of its (unduly broad) General Data Protection Regulation. Unfortunately, the media appears to be naively positioning this as simply big business against the individual, equating BT's interests with those of US retailers. But this fails to recognise that old world institutions, like the telecommunications companies and traditional media empires have the knives out for the revenue streams enjoyed by facilitators like Google, Facebook and others. Yet it's also important that the interests of consumers are represented in a balanced way, rather than by unduly paranoid consumer advocates or European Commission officials zealously toting their single market fantasy. The European Parliament isn't exactly the best candidate to stand in for the pragmatic consumer...

However, for any problem on the Internet it's always worth looking for an acceptable technological solution before a legal one.

The first is the addition of payment features within online games and other applications. In-app payments are increasingly common, but there is a lot more scope to make it easier to charge for content. It's not enough to be able to host advertisements on blogs or email. We need low-friction features to enable direct payment without erecting pay walls, like the TipJar on Vimeo. Others, like HonestyBoxx, are enabling people to monetize their advice by adding an application to their blogs and and personal web sites. But now that we've been forced to endure all these 'cookie' consent boxes that hover around European web sites, why not add payment functionality to sweeten the deal?

Of course, all these solutions suffer from being human-readable, and I believe that the Internet will evolve to remove the issue altogether. As I explain in my recent article for SCL, once product data is published in machine-readable format, the marketing challenge won't be to find customers, but to enable products to be found by customers' machines as required. In a 'Linked Data' world, our computers won't need to disclose anything about us. Our own personal 'spiders' can run around the Internet collecting and analysing openly available data and reporting their findings to us personally. As a result: 

 "a combination of Midata, Open Data and Big Data tools seems likely to liberate us from the tyranny of the 'customer profile' and reputational 'scores', and allow us instead to establish direct connections with trusted products and suppliers based on much deeper knowledge of our own circumstances."

Image from TheTechStuff.

On The Futility Of Cookie Consents

It's a month or so since the Cookie Law took effect and already it's an exercise in futility. I haven't clicked on a single cookie consent, yet I know my browser and hard drive are lousy with the things - both the helpful kind that improve my experience of using the web site I'm visiting, and the small proportion that feed information about me to third party advertisers.

There are two reasons for not clicking on cookie consents. 

Firstly, I don't reserve a single minute in my day for reading cookie consents. Life is short. Every second spent not reading cookie consents is a priceless investment in something potentially productive. Sleeping is a better use of time. Not reading cookie consents is in the same category as never watching American celebrity murder trials, or Big Brother or X Factor. Or... well, you get the picture. Reading cookie consents is a true waste of time.

Secondly, the Cookie Law is a one-size-fits-all requirement for user consent before setting all types of cookie - both those that will help you retweet this post and immediately return to read more, as well as those that will lead someone to conclude you have a passion biscuit recipes after you've read this post. I have no problem at all with the first kind, and it seems overkill to ask me to opt-in or out to them being set. I can clear them if I want to. And making me click "I accept" for all types of cookies doesn't even scratch the surface of the very specific, difficult challenges posed by the second kind of cookie: how and why the data about my movements is going to be shared with advertisers, and ensuring it is in fact used appropriately. Those challenges need the pragmatic, holistic attention of a WEF 'tiger team', not the overly zealous intervention of Eurocrats using data protection law as a means of delivering the single market fantasy.

Image from Jefferson Park.