How We Created A Virtual Workshop To Help A Group Of Brilliant Thinkers Explore 'Positive' Futures Around AI

from the it's-not-all-dystopia dept

Having spent two and a half decades writing about innovation, one of the things that’s most fascinating to me is how little most people can envision how innovation can have a positive effect on our lives. Perhaps it’s a lack of imagination — but, more likely, it’s just human nature. Human psychology is wired for loss aversion, and it’s much easier to understand all the ways in which technology and innovation can backfire to take away things we appreciate. History, however, tends to show that the positives of many innovations outweigh the negatives, but we’re generally terrible at thinking through what those benefits might be.

Part of the reason is just that it’s impossible to predict the future. There are just too many variables, and too much randomness. But, part of it might also be our general unwillingness to even try to imagine positive futures. But imagining positive futures is one tool for actually getting us to move in that direction. Even by suggesting what interesting innovations and societal changes might happen can inspire individuals, organizations, institutions, and movements to try to make what was first imagined into reality. And we sure could use a bit of positive thinking these days. This is the story of how we attempted to help create more positive visions of the future — specifically around artificial intelligence.

As some of you may recall, a few years back, we did a fun project, called Working Futures to use a (more fun) type of scenario planning to explore possible futures for work — and then turn those scenarios into entertaining science fiction. As many people know there are all sorts of concerns about what the future of work might look like. We’re living in disruptive times when it comes to innovation, and in the last few decades, it’s created a massive shift in the nature of employment, and there are many indications that this trend is accelerating. Historically, similar shifts in work due to technology have also been disruptive and frightening for many — but all managed to be worked out in the end, despite fears of automation “destroying” jobs.

However, simply saying that “it will work itself out” is incredibly unsatisfying and, even worse, provides little to no guidance for a variety of different stakeholders — from actual workers to policy makers trying to put in place reasonable policies for a changing world. The Working Futures project was an attempt to deal with that challenge. We created a special scenario planning deck of cards, and ran a one-day session which helped us build a bunch of future scenarios. We gave those to science fiction writers, and eventually released an anthology of 14 speculative future stories about the future of work (which is rated quite highly in Amazon reviews and on Goodreads as well).

Late last year, some people associated with the World Economic Forum and Berkeley’s Center for Human-compatible AI (CHAI) reached out to us to say that they had been engaged in a similar — but slightly different — endeavor, and wondered if we might be able to lead a similar scenario planning process. The two organizations had already been working on a series of events to try to imagine specifically what a “positive future” for AI might look like. We all know the doom and gloom and dystopian scenarios. So this project was focused on something different: explicitly positive futures. The end goal was to take some of these positive AI future scenarios and use them as part of a film competition from the X-Prize Foundation (not unlike our Working Futures project, but with films instead of written fiction).

They asked if we could take an approach similar to what we had done with Working Futures and run a workshop for around 90 attendees — including some of the top economists, technologists, science fiction writers, and academics on this subject in the world — and… they said they’d already invited people for the event just two weeks later.

It turned what would normally have been a quiet time in December into a frantic mad dash as myself and Randy Lubin (our partner in our various gaming endeavors) had to put together a virtual event. We’ve obvious done scenario planning events — including ones about the future of work. And even Working Futures was designed to be generally positive. But what WEF and CHAI were asking for was even more extreme, and required a real rethinking of how to put together a scenario planning program. Traditional scenario planning doesn’t put any conditions on the potential scenario outputs — so creating scenarios where the goal is for them to be explicitly positive presented a few challenges.

Challenge 1: Directing scenario planning towards a desired style outcome is a pretty big departure from how you normally do scenario planning (starting with driving forces, and following those wherever they may lead). There are risks in doing this kind of scenario planning, because you don’t want to preset the end state, or you lose the value of the open brainstorming and surprise discoveries of scenario planning.

Challenge 2: Something we had discovered with Working Futures: explicitly “positive” futures sometimes feel… boring. They make for a tougher narrative, because good stories and good narrative usually involves conflict and tension and problems. That’s much easier in a dystopian scenario than a utopian one. And if the end result of these scenarios is to drive useful story-telling, we had to consider how to create scenarios that were both interesting and “positive.”

Challenge 3:: With Working Futures, we did the scenario planning in a large room in San Francisco, and we had a custom card deck that we had made and printed, that everyone could use as part of the scenario planning process, to experiment with a variety of different forces. In this case, we had to manage to do the workshop via Zoom. This was a separate challenge for us in that while we’ve all done Zoom meetings (so, so, so many of them…) throughout the pandemic, for good scenario planning, you want to make use of smaller groupings, and we hadn’t had as much experience with Zoom’s “breakout room” feature. This presented a double challenge in itself. We had to create a series of exercises that people could follow — meaning with enough scaffolding in the instructions that they could go off into groups and do the creative brainstorming, but without being able to easily see how they were all doing. And, we had to keep the whole thing interesting and exciting for a large group of very diverse people.

In the end — somehow — we succeeded in overcoming all three challenges, and created a really amazing workshop. The feedback we got was astounding. The key ways that we worked to overcome the challenges and to create something useful was a realization that we’d start with a few more “broad” ideas to get people thinking generally about these kinds of distant future worlds, and with each exercise we’d focus more and more narrowly, building on the work in earlier exercises to help craft a variety of scenarios. The very first exercise was more of a warmup, but one that was still important to get creative juices flowing: figuring out new abundances and scarcities in such a world.

To me, this was a key idea. When we think about big, disruptive changes brought on by technology, they often involve new “abundances.” Cars make the ability to travel long distances “abundant.” Computers make doing complex calculations abundant. The internet makes information abundant. Yet, the more interesting thing is how each new abundance… also creates new scarcities. For example, the abundance of information has created a scarcity in attention. As you think through new abundances, you can start to recognize possible scarcities, and it’s almost always those new scarcities where you find interesting ideas about business models and jobs. So we had participants explore a few of those (here’s one example that came out of the exercise):

In the second exercise, we asked the breakout groups to build a “qualitative dashboard” to guide humanity in this new, positive future. We assumed that there would be a focus on optimizing certain aspects of life, and we asked the teams to develop a “dashboard” of qualitative concepts that should be optimized, and from there what quantifiable measures might be used to see if society was reaching those milestones. Here’s one example:

Of course, recognizing that whenever you try to “optimize” a particular value, it almost inevitably leads to unforeseen consequences (usually from focusing and optimizing too narrowly on a small number of quantitative values, and missing the bigger picture), we then had the teams present their dashboard to a different team, and had those other teams provide an analysis of what might go wrong with such a dashboard. How might optimizing on one of these items go badly awry.

The third exercise was, in part, an attempt to deal with the problem of a utopian world being too boring. We had the teams focus on figuring out what was “the final hurdle” to reaching that “positive” future, and we used a tool that we’ve used a few times before: news headlines. We asked the breakout groups to effectively write a narrative in four headlines, starting with a negative headline demonstrating a major hurdle preventing society from reaching that positive future. Then the second headline would note some positive development that might, possibly, overcome the hurdle. The third headline was a setback: in the form of some kind of resistance effort that might block the hurdle from being cleared, followed finally by the last headline: a story that showed evidence that the hurdle truly had been overcome.

From there, we started to really focus in. The headlines created a sense of this “world” that each group was inhabiting, but we wanted to look more closely at what kind of world that was. The fourth exercise explored what were the new essential institutions, participatory organizations, and social movements in this new world. The idea here was to think about what would life actually look like in this world. Would there still be “jobs” or would your daily activity look radically different?

Again, mindful of both the potential “boringness” of utopia, as well as the fact that perfection is impossible, in the middle of this exercise we introduced something of a “shock” to the worlds that were being built — telling participants that a major earthquake had struck, with millions of people wounded, possibly dead, trapped or missing — and with major infrastructure disrupted. We asked the teams to go back and look at the institutions, organizations, and movements they’d just discussed to see how they reacted and how well they handled this shock (and if new such groups formed instead):

The final exercise of the workshop was designed and run by WEF’s Ruth Hickin, diving in even deeper, and asking participants to explore specific individuals within these scenarios. Each person was assigned a future persona, and had time to explore what that persona might think about this world — and then had each of the participants take on that role, and have a discussion with the others in their group, in character, trying to answer some difficult questions about their obligations to society, and whether or not they could find meaning in this future world.

While Randy and I planned the whole event in two frantic weeks, making it actually work required a bigger team of incredibly helpful people. Caroline Jeanmaire at CHAI and Conor Sanchez at WEF helped organize everything, and gave us great feedback and guidance throughout the project design. The two of them also helped keep the event running smoothly, following a very detailed run of show to make sure breakouts happened in a timely and clean manner, and that we could re-assemble everyone for the group discussions in between each of the breakouts. They also brought together a group of facilitators who helped guide each of the breakout discussions and keep everyone on track.

Another incredibly handy tool that made this all work was Google Slides. Between breakouts, we’d assemble everyone and discuss the next exercise, including an example slide. Then each breakout room had their own set of “template” slides that had the instructions (in case they hadn’t quite followed them when we explained them), an “example” slide to get inspiration from, and then the template slides for them to fill out. It turned out that this had multiple useful features. Perhaps most importantly, it helped us record the brainstorming in a way that would live on and which could be used later for the X-Prize competition. But it also allowed us to “peek in” on the various tables while the exercises were happening, without having to jump into their Zoom breakouts, disturbing everyone. As the breakouts were happening, I would flip between the different group slides, and see if any of the groups appeared to be struggling or confused, and then we could send someone into that breakout to assist.

In the end, as noted, the event turned out to be a striking success. We’ve received great feedback on it, and are exploring possibly running it again (perhaps in a modified version) in the future. Randy also wrote up a post describing some more of the nuts and bolts of the workshop if you want more details about how we pulled off the whole thing.

From my end, the biggest takeaway was that a well-crafted event could create truly brilliant and inspiring ideas for what the future might look like, and it was somewhat humbling to see how our framing and scaffolding was embraced by such an eclectic and diverse group to generate such fascinating futuristic worlds and scenarios. Hopefully, some of these futures will inspire not just films or stories about this future, but will also inspire people to work to make something like those futures a reality.

Filed Under: ai, future, innovation, positive futures, scenario planning, working futures
Companies: world economic forum

Copia Gaming Hour: An Experiment In Getting Together (Virtually) To Play With The Future

from the what-do-you-think? dept

A few weeks ago, we ran a little experiment, with our first ever Copia Gaming Hour. We brought together (virtually) a group of people to test run a fun future scenario planning game we created called Hindsight 2030. The game involved players dividing up into teams, having to pick a “target” 2030 headline (each table had a list of 3 to choose from out of a giant list we created), and then create a narrative through five headlines to explain how we reached that 2030 headline. For example, the demo version we created used the following headline:

Massive lawsuit threatens Pirate Party?s satellite broadband network

And the demo example of the headlines we created leading up to that headline was:

If you can’t read those, the headlines read:

2021: Copyright bill compromises DNS system, adds harsh new penalties for file-sharers

2023: Can copyright infringement disqualify you from UBI? The courts are split

2025: Pirate Party wins first US victories on promises of open internet revival

2027: Invalidation of SpaceX patents ushers in age of hobbyist nano-satellites

2029: SatTorrent protocol sparks panic in Hollywood, author still a mystery

2030: Massive lawsuit threatens Pirate Party?s satellite broadband network

Each team then also had to create an “epilogue” headline for some event happening after 2030 (we left it open to each team to come up with how far in the future that would be). After teams presented their five headlines leading up to their target, we had everyone in the audience take guesses on what the epilogue headline would be — which resulted in some pretty hilarious suggestions. For our sample one we had:

2033: Satellite-killer missiles disrupt Pirate Party network, scientists fear collision cascade

This whole thing was an experiment in general about whether or not we could create (1) some quick and easy group games for smart people around topics of interest to us, (2) whether or not people would like them, (3) whether or not the whole process would work, and (4) whether it could be a fun way to get together with people virtually that wasn’t yet another “Zoom Happy Hour.” As some of you know, over the last few years we (in partnership with Randy Lubin from Leveraged Play) been creating a variety of different games to explain the present or explore the future — including our big online disinformation election simulation game. But most of those are very involved and complex. We wanted to create a more informal and casual environment to test out some ideas and to have some fun on a Friday afternoon.

Given that this first one was a clear success, we’re planning to do more of these. The first one was done entirely by invite to a small group of people we knew. Since this is still very experimental, we’re not yet ready to open the doors completely to the public on this, but if you do want to be considered for the invite list to future games, we’ve now set up a quick form to register your interest. This is not a guarantee that you will be invited to future gaming hours — as we may still experiment with the setup, the number of attendees, and such — and some of it may depend on what it is we’re looking to test with each game. However, if you want to be on the list of potential invitees, please fill out the form.

Filed Under: copia, future, games, scenario planning, scenarios
Companies: copia, leveraged play

Working Futures: The Future Of Work May Be Beautiful

from the you-never-know dept

Order your copy of Working Futures today »

We’re off today for the long weekend, but I wanted to use the opportunity to publish the last of our posts about the stories in our Working Futures science fiction anthology about the future of work. If you haven’t read the earlier ones, they’re here:

1. Welcome to Working Futures
2. The future of work is likely to be complicated
3. The future of work will have unexpected consequences
4. The future of work will blur the line between humans and machines

The post will cover the final two stories in the book, which both really stood out when we went through the selection process.

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Generation Gap, by Holly Schofield. This is Holly’s second story in our collection and among the many things we loved about it was how it really painted a picture of a potentially very different world — which held the possibility of being beautiful, but also possibly terrifying. Or perhaps something in between. And it raises questions about how our future world will connect with the past.

A Brief History of Algorithmic Life: Introduction, by Christopher Alex Hooton, is the final piece in the book for a reason. It’s such a lovely story, purporting to be the introduction of a long textbook about the history of “algorithmic life.” As Chris explained on our recent podcast, his goal with the story was to get away from the science part of science fiction and see if he could write just a “beautiful story.” And he succeeded, writing a touching story about an incredibly unexpected friendship between a human and an “algorithmic” life.

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I’m happy we’re closing out with both of these stories, because they’re probably the two most literary of the entire anthology. As with most of the other stories, the world they present has things that will frighten some people — and intrigue other people. Aspects of both utopia and dystopia show up in both, but what stands out about both of these stories is the relationships they portray, and the way in which both stories build an incredibly visual world in the future that comes alive via the stories.

So now we’ve summarized all 14 stories in the book — we hope you’ve been inspired to check out the collection. We’ll still have some more posts about the project coming in the future, but first we wanted to put the focus on what matters most: the stories the anthology includes.

Filed Under: ai, future, future of work, science fiction, speculative fiction, working futures

This Week In… Working Futures

from the history-of-tomorrow dept

Order your copy of Working Futures today »

Techdirt is taking a break for the long weekend — and while we’ve still got the comments post coming tomorrow, today instead of the usual history post we’re looking forwards, with our new Working Futures anthology.

For those who don’t know or who haven’t had time to check it out yet, Working Futures is a collection of fourteen speculative short stories by science fiction authors, exploring the question of what work will be like in the future as artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to transform our world. If you want a taste, you can check out the first half of one of the stories, A Quiet Lie in our pre-launch teaser post. Since then, Mike has been sharing summaries and thoughts about other entries in the book: about how AI and humans could keep each other in check, and how private services and social credit could define our lives, and how the lines between human and machine could blur in fascinating and challenging ways, among many other topics.

This week, we also had a special episode of the Techdirt Podcast in which Mike was joined by three of the authors: Katharine Dow, whose story The Funeral Company portrays a society divided by its reactions to both climate change and ubiquitous surveillance; James Yu, whose story The Mummer gives us eerily real characters in a not-too-distant future running up against the darker side of our interaction with robots; and Christopher Hooton, whose story A Brief History Of Algorithmic Life: Introduction closes out the anthology with a moving, lyrical tale about about the first true human-AI friendship.

And of course, Working Futures also contains a pair of stories by Mike himself, who hadn’t tried writing fiction in a long time, but hit the ground running with two engaging possible futures: one in which increasing centralization has put our lives in the hands of a few big companies that compete to offer the services and products for your entire life, and another in which the return to a truly decentralized online world has led to an energetic and anarchic knowledge economy. We’ve also got a story by our own Tim Geigner, who has been at this for a long time (his earlier sci-fi novels Digilife, Echelon, and Midwasteland are available as pay-what-you-want ebook downloads in our Insider Shop) and who went straight for the core of the “future of work” premise with a story about working in corporate human resources for not-so-human employees.

I hope some of that piques your curiosity. Techdirt will be off on Monday, so if you’re looking for something to read, grab a copy of the Working Futures paperback or ebook to see you through! And if you do read some or all of the stories, we’d greatly appreciate a review on Amazon and anything else you can do to help spread the word.

Filed Under: ai, future, future of work, science fiction, speculative fiction, working futures

It's Been 50 Years: Take Some Time This Weekend To Watch Doug Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos

from the history-in-the-making dept

Normally, on the weekend, we look back at what we wrote about on Techdirt five, ten and fifteen years ago, but I’m going to pre-empt at least a bit of that with this post. Ten years ago, we wrote about the 40th anniversary of the famous and iconic “Mother of All Demos” by Doug Engelbart on December 9th, 1968. A little over five years ago, we wrote about it again, unfortunately on the occasion of Engelbart’s passing.

But, Sunday will now mark the 50th anniversary of the demo, and there’s a very impressive looking Symposium about it happening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

It’s interesting, in Silicon Valley, how much disdain some have for the past. After all, it’s here that we’re always talking about inventing the future. Engelbart’s demo, 50 years ago, was exactly that. Before even the idea of a graphical user interface for a computer, or the concept of a wider internet, was conceived of, Engelbart was literally demoing a ton of ideas, products, concepts and services that we all use regularly today. Even the demo itself (let alone what he was demoing) was somewhat historic, as the demo showed what was happening on his computer on-screen, but part of it was done via teleconferencing and video sharing (again before most people even had the foggiest idea what that could mean). It demonstrated, for the first time, ideas like the computer mouse, a word process, windows, a graphical user interface, computer graphics, hypertext linking, collaborative editing, version control, dynamic linking and more.

I watch the entire 90 minutes every few years, and it’s amazing how inspiring it is. How miraculous it is. Every time we link to it, it ends up moving around or appearing in different chunks online, but the Doug Engelbart Institute now has it in three separate parts (each about 30 minutes) on YouTube, so I’ll post that version here:

Or, if you really don’t want to watch the entire thing, there’s a nicely done “interactive version” that breaks it down into sections and sub-sections, so you can just watch the clips that are of most interest to you (though, I still recommend watching the entire thing for context).

Part of what’s so inspiring about the demo, of course, is that we’re watching it in retrospect. We now know what transpired over the next 50 years. If none of what Engelbart had presented became common, the demo would probably just be seen as quirky nonsense, a la predictions of flying cars and moon bases. But, that’s not what happened at all. Instead, we know that watching Engelbart’s demo is watching real history in action.

It’s watching the impossible, the magical, become reality. It’s the very thing that has made Silicon Valley so much fun for the past 50 years. Making the impossible not just possible, but everyday. Enabling people to do amazing things.

Of course, we’re living now in an age where the narrative on technology has shifted. People are recognizing that innovation and advancement isn’t always all good for everyone. People are recognizing that it has consequences and creates problems — sometimes serious ones. And those conversations are vital.

But as that narrative has shifted, I worry tremendously about throwing out all of the good things that have come with innovation in our rush to prevent any possible downsides. I’m glad that there’s some level of reckoning happening, and people are proactively trying to think through the impact (both good and bad) of what they’re creating these days. But, I worry that the narrative has shifted so far that in order to prevent “bad” we’re going to end up tossing out much of the good that is set to come as well.

I’m not quite 50 years old yet, but the amount of technological change and innovation in my lifetime has been amazing — and I’d argue that the vast majority of it has been good. It has opened up new worlds. It has enabled new ways to communicate. It has brought knowledge and information to far flung corners of the globe. It has enabled people all over the world to have an impact. And it continues to change as well.

Watching the Mother of All Demos once again lets us wonder about what will happen in the next 50 years. And it gives us a chance to appreciate all that has happened (and has been allowed to happen) over the past 50 years. Engelbart didn’t lock up his ideas. He didn’t block others from using them. There aren’t stories of nasty patent fights (even if he had a bunch of patents). He shared these ideas for the world to see, and the world took these ideas and ran with them, built on them, improved on them and created the amazing world we now live in. This should not be the end of the history of innovation, but a sign of what happens when people do allow for great innovation, and seek to make the impossible, possible.

Filed Under: demo, doug engelbart, future, innovation, technology, the demo, the mother of all demos

Fighting The Future: Teamsters Demand UPS Ban Drones And Autonomous Vehicles

from the giving-unions-a-bad-name dept

As I’ve occasionally mentioned in the past, my undergraduate studies were in (of all things) “industrial and labor relations,” which involved many, many courses of study on the history of unions, collective bargaining and the economics around such things. I tend to have a fairly nuanced view of unionizing that I won’t get into here, other than to note that a big part of the reasons why unions get a bad name is when they take indefensible positions that they think will “protect” their members, but which actually are long term suicidal. This is one of those stories. Reports are coming out that as the Teamsters are entering negotiations on a new contract with shipping giant UPS, their demands include a ban on both drone deliveries and on the use of autonomous vehicles. These are, not surprisingly, both technologies that UPS has been experimenting with lately (as has nearly every other delivery company).

You can understand the short term thinking here, of course, UPS drivers see both of those options as potential “competition” that would decrease the number of drivers and potentially cause many to lose their jobs. And that might be true (though, it also might not be true as we’ll discuss below). But, at the very least, demanding that the company that employs you directly choose not to invest in the technologies of the future is demanding that a company commit suicide — in which case all those jobs for drivers would likely be eliminated anyway. While there are obviously a lot more variables at work here, it’s not hard to see how a competing delivery company — whether Fedex, the US Postal Service, Amazon or someone else entirely — could get drone/driverless car delivery right, and suddenly UPS’s service is seen as slower, more expensive and less efficient in many cases. If that’s the case, UPS would likely have to layoff tons of workers anyway.

The other key point: the idea that these technologies are simply going to destroy all the jobs is almost certainly highly overstated. They very likely will change the nature of jobs, but not eliminate them. Professor James Bessen has been doing lots of research on this for years, and has found that in areas of heavy automation, jobs often increase (though they may be changed). That links to an academic paper he wrote, but he also wrote a more general audience targeted piece for the Atlantic on what he calls the automation paradox. As Bessen explains:

Automation reduces the cost of a product or service, and lower prices tend to attract more customers. Software made it cheaper and faster to trawl through legal documents, so law firms searched more documents and judges allowed more and more-expansive discovery requests. Likewise, ATMs made it cheaper to operate bank branches, so banks dramatically increased their number of offices. So when demand increases enough in response to lower prices, employment goes up with automation, not down. And this is what has been happening with computer automation overall during the last three decades. It?s also what happened during the Industrial Revolution when automation in textiles, steel-making, and a whole range of other industries led to a major increase in manufacturing jobs.

He does note that the nature of many jobs can change, and also recognizes that just because this has happened in most industries in the past it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing will happen in the future.

But, if we were to game out the scenarios here, which one makes more sense? As explained above, forcing UPS to put a complete ban on these technologies will be devastating for the company and the people it employs should the technology take off. If, instead, as Bessen suggests, jobs change and demand increases, then wouldn’t the union’s membership be much better served by working with the company together on a program that enables the experimentation and deployment of these technologies combined with programs to help its current workforce transition into new or related jobs around the likely increased demand for shipping? Even if we see the worst case scenario that the union clearly believes, of drones/autonomous vehicles destroying jobs — as already discussed that will happen anyway if the Teamsters ban UPS from innovating while their competitors do.

This is, yet again, an example of short term thinking on the part of the union, and a near total lack of strategic vision for what will best serve membership in the long term. It is focused on pretending the future doesn’t exist, and if everyone just covers their eyes and ears and pretends these technologies don’t exist, they somehow, magically, won’t change the market. If I were a member of the Teamsters I’d be quite angry at this kind of short-term, destructive thinking by my union, rather than being forward-looking and aiming for solutions that will actually help the members in the long run.

Filed Under: adapting, autonomous vehicles, competition, drones, future, innovation, teamsters, unions
Companies: teamsters, ups

How Corporate Sovereignty Undermines Democracy By Irrevocably Binding Future Governments

from the how-is-that-even-possible? dept

Techdirt has been at the forefront of pointing out the dangers of including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in so-called trade agreements. Indeed, we even helped come up with a new term — corporate sovereignty — to make clear that ISDS is really about placing corporations on the same level as entire nations, and giving them a unique power to sue a country for alleged harms before special tribunals. But there’s an additional aspect to this, which is explored in an insightful article by Sam Fowles on The Conversation.

He points out that although we don’t know in detail what the US-EU TAFTA/TTIP agreement will contain, we do have the text for the one between Canada and the EU, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (pdf), known as CETA. The European Commission has said many times that it aims to build on the corporate sovereignty chapter in CETA when it comes to negotiating TTIP. One feature of ISDS in CETA is the following:

In the event that the present Agreement is terminated, the provisions of [Chapter X Investment] shall continue to be effective for a further period of 20 years from that date in respect of investments made before the date of termination of the present Agreement.

That is, even if a party pulls out of CETA, it will still be bound by the corporate sovereignty provisions for another 20 years, whether it likes it or not. Since we know that the US model investment treaty (pdf) also requires parties to continue allowing ISDS claims for ten years, it seems likely that TAFTA/TTIP, if it includes corporate sovereignty, will also have such a clause, for at least ten years, maybe more. Fowles explains why that is a problem — he talks about the UK Parliament, but it applies equally to the US:

Parliament represents the will of the people. Therefore it can make or unmake any law it wants. But there?s a caveat: parliament can?t make a law that would bind future parliaments. To do so would be undemocratic. The laws of one generation are often inappropriate for the next. Parliament must embody the will of the people at the time. When two ordinary laws conflict, the courts will always apply the one passed most recently.

But the 10/20-year extension of ISDS interferes with that. It says that whatever the views of government in power, it must still respect the ISDS chapter signed by one of its predecessors. One implication is that for a decade or two, any major policy changes could be subject to billion-dollar cases before corporate sovereignty tribunals — a strong disincentive to bring them in, whatever the public might want. The implication is clear. As Fowles writes:

If democracy is to remain the fundamental tenet of our constitution then TTIP must not be ratified. At the very least we must derogate from the 20-year clause. Living under a government you don?t like is the risk you take in a democracy, but being forced to live by rules agreed 20 years ago is fundamentally undemocratic.

As Techdirt explained last year, Canada has already signed a trade agreement with China that will take precedence over Canada’s constitution for 31 years. Let’s hope the US and EU aren’t foolish enough to follow suit by allowing corporate sovereignty to reign over them even after TAFTA/TTIP is terminated.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: binding, ceta, corporate sovereignty, future, governments, isds, tafta, tpp, trade agreements, ttip, us, ustr

A Dystopian Future Of Ads That Won't Stop Until You Say 'McDonald's' Could Be Avoided With More Transparency

from the and-control dept

I’ve discussed in the past how many people mistake privacy as some sort of absolute “thing” rather than a spectrum of trade-offs. Leaving your home to go to the store involves giving up a small amount of privacy, but it’s a trade-off most people feel is worth it (not so much for some uber-celebrities, and then they choose other options). Sharing information with a website is often seen as a reasonable trade-off for the services/information that website provides. The real problem is often just that the true trade-offs aren’t clear. What you’re giving up and what you’re getting back aren’t always done transparently, and that’s where people feel their privacy is being violated. When they make the decision consciously and the trade-off seems worth it, almost no one feels that their privacy is violated. Yet, when they don’t fully understand, or when the deal they made is unilaterally changed, that’s when the privacy is violated, because the deal someone thought they were striking is not what actually happened.

And, unfortunately, it often seems like people are increasingly being pressured into deals they don’t fully understand and don’t have full control over. Michael Price, over at the Brennan Center for Justice, took the time to actually read through the “privacy policy” on his new “smart” TV and it’s terrified him. Just the fact that a TV even has a privacy policy seems oddly terrifying, but it makes sense, given that at least some information goes outbound as part of the “smarts.” But how much? Potentially a lot more than people would expect:

The amount of data this thing collects is staggering. It logs where, when, how, and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect ?when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.? It records ?the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.? It ignores ?do-not-track? requests as a considered matter of policy.

To some extent, that’s not really all that different than a regular computer. But, then it begins to get creepier:

It also has a built-in camera ? with facial recognition. The purpose is to provide ?gesture control? for the TV and enable you to log in to a personalized account using your face. On the upside, the images are saved on the TV instead of uploaded to a corporate server. On the downside, the Internet connection makes the whole TV vulnerable to hackers who have demonstrated the ability to take complete control of the machine.

More troubling is the microphone. The TV boasts a ?voice recognition? feature that allows viewers to control the screen with voice commands. But the service comes with a rather ominous warning: ?Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.? Got that? Don?t say personal or sensitive stuff in front of the TV.

You may not be watching, but the telescreen is listening.

Now, yes, some of that certainly can be useful in creating interesting features and services. And, frankly, almost all of the same things can be said about the smartphone in your pocket with Siri or Google Now listening in to anything you say at any moment’s notice. But at the very least, with those smartphone systems people tend to see and understand the immediate benefits: they use those tools to get information and they’re fairly easy to turn off without creating other problems. With the TV, it seems to be more of the promise of potentially providing some future service — but it’s still willing and ready to listen in the meantime.

This is certainly not to argue that the technology is bad, but that these sorts of things shouldn’t be hidden in a 46-page privacy policy that no one is going to read. People should be fully aware of what the deal is, and they should have control over how it’s used, with some granular controls: maybe let people set the times in which the TV’s “ears” are on — so that maybe it only works during prime time when you’re likely to use the TV. Or let people have access to the logs and data that it’s snarfing up so they can view for themselves how it’s being used. Make sure that the people using it have both transparency and control, and suddenly this becomes somewhat less scary (well, until the NSA goes to the FISA court to use Section 215 to get all the “metadata” from all your smart TVs.)

And, of course, just as I was finishing up with that article, I came across a report of a patent from Sony from a few years ago. It actually got some attention back in 2012 for describing a system in which your TV may ask you to say the advertiser’s name to end a commercial. This figure in the patent is the one that quite reasonably got plenty of attention.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that some companies are considering something like this. In fact, some of the underlying ideas aren’t totally crazy. We’ve long argued that good advertising is about making it good content, and making ads that are interactive and fun is one way to do that. Of course, I don’t quite see how the above scenario is very much fun. To me, it sounds horrifying, but others may disagree.

Either way, it’s become quite clear that while the world is becoming more connected — between our computers, our phones, our TVs and much more, people are increasingly going to run into challenges around privacy. And, while some are going to jump to the conclusion that any information gathering and sharing is automatically bad and dangerous (or just crazy), it’s going to be important to recognize the trade-offs inherent in these new devices and services. If companies don’t want the public to totally freak out, they’d do well to make these processes much more transparent, clear and controllable by the users themselves. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet. The focus is still on hiding these things out of a fear that no one would use them if they knew what they were giving up. That seems like a recipe doomed to create privacy panics, rather than one that actually enables innovation to advance and which lets the public be comfortable with the choices they’re making.

Filed Under: advertising, future, privacy, smart tvs, transparency