What's real? What's fake? Technology challenges our perception of reality.

In honor of Philip K. Dick, let's plunge into an age-old topic of philosophy, science fiction, and nerdy sophomores everywhere... "what is real and how can we tell?" After all, how do I know I am the emperor, dreaming I'm a butterfly, or the butterfly, dreaming I'm a sci fi author?   Starting off --

Artificial Intelligence is Killing the Uncanny Valley - and Our Grasp on Reality: Sandra Upson’s article in WIRED explores the ability of modern AI systems to visually create almost any semblance – or falsification – of reality. “Some AI-generated content will be used to deceive, kicking off fears of an avalanche of algorithmic fake news. Old debates about whether an image was doctored will give way to new ones about the pedigree of all kinds of content, including text.” 

To which I respond that folks should read my chapter from The Transparent Society: “The end of photography, as proof of anything at all.”  There’s not a word I’d change, as the world has caught up with this long- predicted problem… and even parts of the predicted solution.

Sure, the prospect is daunting. “If you were to see a picture of me on the moon, you would think it’s probably some image editing software... But if you hear convincing audio of your best friend saying bad things about you, you might get worried. It’s a really new technology and a really challenging problem.”

Amid all the media frenzy and panic, a small number of folks have written to me about an interview I gave on CNN-Money, way back in 2000, at the tail end of the 20^th Century, which seems all too relevant in 2017, touching upon politicians and sex scandals and the ramifications of these (naturally, in 2000, talking about Bill Clinton). And it mentioned how the public responses to the scandal tended to be wise and proportionate.

== Communities & Communication Key ==

My friends at Alphabet's "X" company received FCC permission to fly their Project Loon balloons over Puerto Rico restoring LTE cell phone connections to the beleaguered populace. I'd be surprised if it happened without serious arm-twisting on those unimaginative stodges at Verizon and AT&T. Had they a scintilla of innovation or patriotism in their souls, they would have long ago activated a capability that's already in all Qualcomm chips, allowing peer-to-peer text passing when phones cannot detect an active cell tower. 

I've been hectoring our Protector Caste for this, for two decades. If it existed, Katrina and the recent Maria devastation would have been far less harmful to millions of people, who could have communicated, self-organized and recovered far faster. Hurrah for X! and Yay Qualcomm. Stay independent and creative.

(Coincidentally, I'll be speaking at "X" on Friday.)

It occurs to me that this might be a good time to call a mini conference about Resilient Communications. The Cell-companies have proved undeserving of the public trust. Here’s my explanation of how phones could work well even in crises. 

I am a big supporter of EFF and you should all join! (Especially in memory of John Perry Barlow.) We have a slight difference over emphasis, but I support their efforts (1) in favor of near-term privacy for citizens and (2) accountability for elites of government, commerce, wealth and police. 

It's just that beyond the near term, nothing will prevent those elites from seeing us... no laws or restrictions or technologies. Over the long run, it is #2 that will matter. If we have enough of that (accountability for all elites) then what they know about us cannot be used to actually harm us! 

What they do is more important than what they know.  And we can limit what they do to us only if they are naked to sousveillance.

Rent the movie The President's Analyst.  And see how it is coming true.

Oh, but – “Purdue Engineering researchers have developed a system that can show what people are seeing in real-world videos, decoded from their fMRI brain scans — an advanced new form of  “mind-reading” technology that could lead to new insights in brain function and to advanced AI systems.” 

Ponder what that tool would mean to secret police in a future dystopia. It could empower Big Brother so that no resistance will ever be possible. Or else…

…if distributed to all, so that we can detect the lies of politicians or the mighty, such tools could empower us all to make sure that Big Brother happens… never.

== Obsessed with whether they might make us... buy stuff? ==

I'm going to race through a bunch of transparency/freedom related links, now. Hold on.

The Acuvate site asked 22 AI experts: “What is your prediction on how AI will impact the enterprise workplace?” And… well… yes, I came first. But go past and you’ll get some folks who know what they are talking about.

Many articles and words have been spouted over whether big net companies should be getting rich by mining “our information.”  This essay suggests that: “If Data is the New Oil, Are Tech Companies Robbing Us Blind?” Alas, the problem is obvious, while hand-wringers almost always leap to the wrong conclusions or proposed solutions. 

The handy, cheap cameras I’ve been describing and predicting for 25 years are here.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, is a recent book by UCSD’s Benjamin H. Bratton, who suggests seven different regimes wherein planetary scale computing will affect our future —from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User.

A sci-fi-ish disturbing video depicts near-future ubiquitous lethal autonomous weapons, or “slaughterbots.” Of  course, as always, the makers of the film point to a dangerous tech-possible trend… and prescribe rules to limit it, never considering the question of how those rules will apply to the worst and most deviously secretive forces in the world.

Watch the video! Be disturbed, as the makers intended!  Then watch it again and note that the evil deeds happen precisely because of asymmetry of light.  And the only solution… the only possible solution… is to concentrate on shining light on villains, including villainous elites. It is how we got the relative freedom and safety we have now!  It is the only way we can keep it.  See The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

Okay, it's hard keeping secrets in an open society. We must find ways to max out the advantages, while minimizing the hazards. And there will always be the unforeseen: Fitness tracking app gives away location of secret U.S. army bases.

== We may all need to be heroes ==

Back in the 1930s, my father, Herb Brin, infiltrated far right groups like the German American Bund.  Later, in his seventies, he boldly went to Aryan Nations compounds and demanded tours and interviews, knowing that their personality type would fall all over themselves to show him around. We have a web site dedicated to this noted journalist and poet, who sat with Hannah Arendt through the Eichmann Trials and covered some of the top events of our era.

Here’s a young journalist walking in those footsteps, infiltrating today’s lunatic fringe.

Are Things Improving?

Even with civilization at stake, there's got to be some time set aside for... civilization. So here are some things that ours has been up to, lately.

==ARE THINGS IMPROVING?==

A fascinating tidbit from Benny Peiser's newsletter: Democracy, GDP, and Natural Disasters: The average annual percentage of the global population killed by natural disasters decreased 10-fold from the period 1964 to 1968 compared with the period 2000 through 2004, from 0.01 percent (roughly one killed for every 10,000 people) to 0.001 percent (one in 100,000) respectively. At the same time, the average annual number of recorded disasters increased five-fold between 1964 through 1968 (64 per year) and 2000 through 2004 (332 per year). The events that continue to result in the major number of fatalities are the relatively small percentage of events that occur with large recurrence intervals, such as massive floods, strong earthquakes and direct strikes from intense hurricanes, or events that are unusual in the area in which they occur.

Clearly, the impact of a natural disaster is not simply a function of the natural event itself, but is determined also by society's ability to respond to the disaster. Over the same time period that we observe a decreasing number of disaster deaths, two great global socioeconomic trends of the last half century have also occurred: democratization and economic development. To evaluate the role that democracy and economic development play in reducing the humanitarian impact of natural disasters, we measured 133 countries' natural disaster death tolls against both their average democracy ranking and their average per capita GDP. We excluded only those nations with a population of fewer than 1 million people, or which have experienced five or fewer disasters between 1964 and 2004.

The Role of Democracy: More than 80 percent of the total global disaster deaths from 1964 to 2004 occurred in just 15 countries, including China, Ethiopia, Sudan, Indonesia and Bangladesh, among others. Of these fifteen nations, 73 percent are below the median global GDP and 87 percent are below the median democracy index. The democracy index is the average of the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicator values for voice and accountability, political stability, absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption.

The exceptions to the trend that high GDP correlates with a low death toll after a natural disaster are Iran and Venezuela, both oil-rich countries with significant wealth but low democracy indices. Because the two outliers have high GDP and relatively high death tolls, they suggest that democracy, rather than GDP, may play the more pivotal role in reducing deaths from natural disasters. The strong exponential correlation between democracy and GDP, however, makes it difficult to differentiate the two.

= PROGRESS AND THE NATURE OF REALITY =

Robert Wright gives a terrific talk: Progress is not a Zero-Sum Game: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict Alas, though we agree on very much, I think Rob underplays the role that old-style human nature plays, in thwarting the new synergies of enlightenment positive sum games. Wright discusses this further in his book: NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

In case you missed this... (how could you?) Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by Oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science".The parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the US physicist Hugh Everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed. In Everett's "many worlds" universe, every time a new physical possibility is explored, the universe splits. Given a number of possible alternative outcomes, each one is played out - in its own universe.

According to quantum mechanics, unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options. The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.

”Can explain” That is a far cry from “proves”. It seems that even in science reporting, polemical zing trumps accuracy.

What caused the extinction of mammoths and the decline of Stone Age people about 13,000 years ago remains hotly debated. Overhunting by Paleoindians, climate change and disease lead the list of probable causes. Now a group reports evidence that a comet or low-density object exploded in the upper atmosphere and triggered a devastating swath of destruction that wiped out most of the large animals, their habitat and most humans of that period, ending the Clovis culture. If so, this certainly lets proto Amerindians off the hook... though the timing seems strangely auspicious.

What I find more interesting, even still, is that this is about the time that many changes occurred in the Middle East, like the surge of agricultural villages and use of copper tools and advanced pottery

DUAL REALITY is the concept of maintaining two worlds, one virtual and one real, that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks. Both the real and virtual components of a dual reality are complete unto themselves, but are enriched by their mutual interaction. See this site for a tour of the MIT Dual Reality lab and for slides for a talk given at the MIT Media Lab's Spring 2007 Things That Think consortium

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.

When Salmonella typhimurium food bugs were flown in special flasks on the shuttle, they were found to alter the way they expressed 167 genes. The bacteria were almost three times as likely to kill infected mice compared with standard samples held on Earth. The study has important implications for astronauts going to the Moon or Mars. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7011828.stm


”We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.” - George Bernard Shaw


==A FLICKER OF THE STINKING “POLITICAL LAMP”==

The collated and collected version of “Ostrich Hunting” is now posted online at:

Ostrich Hunting: The Bill Clinton Gambit Part 1

Ostrich Hunting: The Bill Clinton Gambit Part 2

This is a preliminary version that - per Stefan’s advice - I may show to the guys at Salon. It still needs your help! (See below in comments where I may announce further changes.)

* There are lots of points and facts that could use links to back them up. Yes, many are “common knowledge” but attribution always helps.

* More items? Places where it’s too repetitious, even for me?

Thanks and onward.