T - domestic, T - politic, W - future, W - now

The CyberSyn Revolution

The state plays an important role in shaping the relationship between labor and technology, and can push for the design of systems that benefit ordinary people. It can also have the opposite effect. Indeed, the history of computing in the US context has been tightly linked to government command, control, and automation efforts.

But it does not have to be this way. Consider how the Allende government approached the technology-labor question in the design of Project Cybersyn. Allende made raising employment central both to his economic plan and his overall strategy to help Chileans. His government pushed for new forms of worker participation on the shop floor and the integration of worker knowledge in economic decision-making.

This political environment allowed Beer, the British cybernetician assisting Chile, to view computer technology as a way to empower workers. In 1972, he published a report for the Chilean government that proposed giving Chilean workers, not managers or government technocrats, control of Project Cybersyn. More radically, Beer envisioned a way for Chile’s workers to participate in Cybersyn’s design.

He recommended that the government allow workers — not engineers — to build the models of the state-controlled factories because they were best qualified to understand operations on the shop floor. Workers would thus help design the system that they would then run and use. Allowing workers to use both their heads and their hands would limit how alienated they felt from their labor.

[…]

But Beer showed an ability to envision how computerization in a factory setting might work toward an end other than speed-ups and deskilling — the results of capitalist development that labor scholars such as Harry Braverman witnessed in the United States, where the government did not have the same commitment to actively limiting unemployment or encouraging worker participation.

[…]

We need to be thinking in terms of systems rather than technological quick fixes. Discussions about smart cities, for example, regularly focus on better network infrastructures and the use of information and communication technologies such as integrated sensors, mobile phone apps, and online services. Often, the underlying assumption is that such interventions will automatically improve the quality of urban life by making it easier for residents to access government services and provide city government with data to improve city maintenance.

But this technological determinism doesn’t offer a holistic understanding of how such technologies might negatively impact critical aspects of city life. For example, the sociologist Robert Hollands argues that tech-centered smart-city initiatives might create an influx of technologically literate workers and exacerbate the displacement of other workers. They also might divert city resources to the building of computer infrastructures and away from other important areas of city life.

[…]

We must resist the kind of apolitical “innovation determinism” that sees the creation of the next app, online service, or networked device as the best way to move society forward. Instead, we should push ourselves to think creatively of ways to change the structure of our organizations, political processes, and societies for the better and about how new technologies might contribute to such efforts.

 

Ref: The Cybersyn Revolution – Jacobin

T - work, W - future

The World’s First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road

The truck in question is the Freightliner Inspiration, a teched-up version of the Daimler 18-wheeler sold around the world. And according to Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, it will make long-haul road transportation safer, cheaper, and better for the planet.

[…]

Humans Don’t Want These Jobs

Another point in favor of giving robots control is the serious and worsening shortage of humans willing to take the wheel. The lack of qualified drivers has created a “capacity crisis,” according to an October 2014 report by the American Transportation Research Institute. The American Trucking Associations predicts the industry could be short 240,000 drivers by 2022. (There are roughly three million full-time drivers in the US.)

[…]

Killing the Human Driver

The way to handle that growth isn’t to convince more people to become long haul truckers. It’s to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the role of the human. Let the trucks drive themselves, and you can improve safety, meet increased demand, and save time and fuel.

The safety benefits of autonomous features are obvious. The machine doesn’t get tired, stressed, angry, or distracted. And because trucks spend the vast majority of their time on the highway, the tech doesn’t have to clear the toughest hurdle: handling complex urban environments with pedestrians, cyclists, and the like. If you can prove the vehicles are safer, you could make them bigger, and thus more efficient at transporting all the crap we buy on Amazon.

[…]

The end game is eliminating the need for human drivers, at least for highway driving. (An autonomous truck could exit the interstate near the end of its journey, park in a designated lot, and wait for a human to come drive it on surface streets to its destination.)

// Interesting comments

The reason for the driver shortage is partly due to pay and benefits. If you want a driver to be away from his/her family for weeks at a time you have to pay them enough to make it worth the loss of family time. Also partly due to unrealistic expectations for delivery times by dispatchers, which adds a lot of stress to a job that already has enough of that already. So yeah I can see where companies would love a driverless semi because it would eliminate them having to consider the human/personal considerations. I haul fuel locally so not much chance of this technology replacing me, but I hate to see more jobs lost.

–

There are 3.5 million truck drivers in US alone, not to mention countless other transportation related jobs. Those are mostly average to decent paying jobs. Think for a second about the far reaching consequences of elimination of these jobs and secondary jobs that are also related. Further we are looking at elimination most any human-related job in the next 25 years. Do you truly feel it is a good-progress? Is it humane and progressive to live in a world where less than one 0.1% of people enslaves the rest?

Ferguson or Baltimore is not a fluke…it’s not just about racial tension. It is a fabric of our society starting to tear. Where people feel powerless and disenfranchised, the only option to be heard thats left is often violence. Whats happening there is just a beginning of what is about to come next.

–

One thing that has always bothered me is they always say “A truck can’t stop as fast as as a car can”, and yet we accept that excuse for a ratio of tires, weight, and lives lost due to inadequate breaking. Everything has improved, but we have stopped making progress in trying to stop a loaded truck faster.

Imagine telling the public the truth. It’s too expensive to add tires to cut breaking distance, or haul lighter loads. (or use trains).

 

Ref: The World’s First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road – Wired

T - war, W - now

NSA’s Skynet

As The Intercept reports today, the NSA does have a program called Skynet. But unlike the autonomous, self-aware computerized defense system inTerminator that goes rogue and launches a nuclear attack that destroys most of humanity, this one is a surveillance program that uses phone metadata to track the location and call activities of suspected terrorists. A journalist for Al Jazeera reportedly became one of its targets after he was placed on a terrorist watch list.

[…]

Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, bureau chief for Al Jazeera’s Islamabad office, got tracked by Skynet after he was identified by US intelligence as a possible Al Qaeda member and assigned a watch list number. A Syrian national, Zaidan has scored a number of exclusive interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden himself.

Skynet uses phone location and call metadata from bulk phone call records to detect suspicious patterns in the physical movements of suspects and their communication habits, according to a 2012 government presentation The Intercept obtained from Edward Snowden.

The presentation indicates that Skynet looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” It also looks for suspicious behaviors such as someone who engages in “excessive SIM or handset swapping” or receives “incoming calls only.”

The goal is to identify people who move around in a pattern similar to Al Qaeda couriers who are used to pass communication and intelligence between the group’s senior leaders. The program tracked Zaidan because his movements and interactions with Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders matched a suspicious pattern—which is, it turns out, very similar to the pattern of journalists meeting with sources.

Ref: So, the NSA Has an Actual Skynet Program – Wired

T - war

The Cathedral of Computation

Here’s an exercise: The next time you hear someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with “God” and ask yourself if the meaning changes. Our supposedly algorithmic culture is not a material phenomenon so much as a devotional one, a supplication made to the computers people have allowed to replace gods in their minds, even as they simultaneously claim that science has made us impervious to religion.

[…]Each generation, we reset a belief that we’ve reached the end of this chain of metaphors, even though history always proves us wrong precisely because there’s always another technology or trend offering a fresh metaphor. Indeed, an exceptionalism that favors the present is one of the ways that science has become theology.

[…]

The same could be said for data, the material algorithms operate upon. Data has become just as theologized as algorithms, especially “big data,” whose name is meant to elevate information to the level of celestial infinity. Today, conventional wisdom would suggest that mystical, ubiquitous sensors are collecting data by the terabyteful without our knowledge or intervention. Even if this is true to an extent, examples like Netflix’s altgenres show that data is created, not simply aggregated, and often by means of laborious, manual processes rather than anonymous vacuum-devices.

If algorithms aren’t gods, what are they instead? Like metaphors, algorithms are simplifications, or distortions. They are caricatures. They take a complex system from the world and abstract it into processes that capture some of that system’s logic and discard others. And they couple to other processes, machines, and materials that carry out the extra-computational part of their work.

Unfortunately, most computing systems don’t want to admit that they are burlesques. They want to be innovators, disruptors, world-changers, and such zeal requires sectarian blindness. The exception is games, which willingly admit that they are caricatures—and which suffer the consequences of this admission in the court of public opinion. Games know that they are faking it, which makes them less susceptible to theologization. SimCity isn’t an urban planning tool, it’s  a cartoon of urban planning. Imagine the folly of thinking otherwise! Yet, that’s precisely the belief people hold of Google and Facebook and the like.

Ref: The Cathedral of Computation – TheAtlantic
T - tech, W - now

Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

[…]

The drone intercepts mark the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas. They also point to a potentially serious vulnerability in Washington’s growing network of unmanned drones, which have become the American weapon of choice in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

[…]

Last December, U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered copies of Predator drone feeds on a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter. “There was evidence this was not a one-time deal,” this person said. The U.S. accuses Iran of providing weapons, money and training to Shiite fighters in Iraq, a charge that Tehran has long denied.

The militants use programs such as SkyGrabber, from Russian company SkySoftware. Andrew Solonikov, one of the software’s developers, said he was unaware that his software could be used to intercept drone feeds. “It was developed to intercept music, photos, video, programs and other content that other users download from the Internet — no military data or other commercial data, only free legal content,” he said by email from Russia.

Ref: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones – WallStreetJournal

T - tech, W - now

Researchers Plan to Demonstrate a Wireless Car Hack This Summer

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences this August, security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have announced they plan to wirelessly hack the digital network of a car or truck. That network, known as the CAN bus, is the connected system of computers that influences everything from the vehicle’s horn and seat belts to its steering and brakes. And their upcoming public demonstrations may be the most definitive proof yet of cars’ vulnerability to remote attacks, the result of more than two years of work since Miller and Valasek first received a DARPA grant to investigate cars’ security in 2013.

“We will show the reality of car hacking by demonstrating exactly how a remote attack works against an unaltered, factory vehicle,” the hackers write in an abstract of their talk that appeared on the Black Hat website last week. “Starting with remote exploitation, we will show how to pivot through different pieces of the vehicle’s hardware in order to be able to send messages on the CAN bus to critical electronic control units. We will conclude by showing several CAN messages that affect physical systems of the vehicle.”

[…]

Some critics, including Toyota and Ford, argued at the time that a wired-in attack wasn’t exactly a full-blown hack. But Miller and Valasek have been working since then to prove that the same tricks can be pulled off wirelessly. In a talk at Black Hat last year, theypublished an analysis of 24 automobiles, rating which presented the most potential vulnerabilities to a hacker based on wireless attack points, network architecture and computerized control of key physical features. In that analysis, the Jeep Cherokee, Infiniti Q50 and Cadillac Escalade were rated as the most hackable vehicles they tested. The overall digital security of a car “depends on the architecture,” Valasek, director of vehicle security research at security firm IOActive told WIRED last year. “If you hack the radio, can you send messages to the brakes or the steering? And if you can, what can you do with them?”

Ref: Researchers Plan to Demonstrate a Wireless Car Hack This Summer – Wired

T - domestic, W - future

Americans Want Self-Driving Cars for the Cheaper Insurance

Of the 1,500 US drivers the Boston Group surveyed in September, 55 percent said they “likely” or “very likely” would buy a semi-autonomous car (one capable of handling some, but not all, highway and urban traffic). What’s more, 44 percent said they would, in 10 years, buy a fully autonomous vehicle.

What’s most surprising about the survey isn’t that so many people are interested in this technology, but why they’re interested.

The leading reason people are considering semi-autonomous vehicles isn’t greater safety, improved fuel efficiency, or increased productivity—the upsides most frequently associated with the technology. Such things were a factor, but the biggest appeal is lower insurance costs. Safety was the leading reason people were interested in a fully autonomous ride, with cheaper insurance costs in second place.

[…]

That’s why “a vast number of insurance companies” are exploring discounts for those semiautonomous features, Mosquet says. For example, drivers who purchase a new Volvo with the pedestrian protection tech qualify for a lower premium. “The cost to [the insurer] of pedestrian accidents is actually significant, and they’re going to do everything they can to reduce this type of incident.” That’s already started in Europe and is spreading to the US.

Ref: Americans Want Self-Driving Cars for the Cheaper Insurance – Wired

T - ethics

Geneva Meeting – Killer Robots

Many of the 120 states that are part of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) are participating in the 2015 CCW meeting of experts, which is chaired by Germany’s Ambassador Michael Biontino who has enlisted “friends of the chair” from Albania, Chile, Hungary, Finland, Sierra Leone, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and Switzerland to chair thematic sessions on a range of technical, legal, and overarching issues including ethics and human rights.

[…]

The session proved to be one of the most engaging this far at the 2015 experts meeting. The UK made a detailed intervention that included the statement that it “does not believe there would be any utility in a fully autonomous weapon system.” France said it has no plans for autonomous weapons that deploy fire, it relies entirely on humans for fire decisions.

Three states that have explicitly endorsed the call for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems have reiterated that goal at this meeting (Cuba, Ecuador, and Pakistan), while Sri Lanka said a prohibition must be considered. There have been numerous references to the CCW’s 1995 protocol banning blinding lasers, which preemptively banned the weapon before it was ever fielded or used.

Ref: Second multilateral meeting opens – CampaignsToStopKillerRobots

T - ethics, W - now

Can We Trust Robot Cars to Make Hard Choices?

However, as humans, we also do something else when faced with hard decisions: In particularly ambiguous situations, when no choice is obviously best, we choose and justify our decision with a reason. Most of the time we are not aware of this, but it comes out when we have to make particularly hard decisions.

[…]

Critically, she says, when we make our decision, we get to justify it with a reason.

Whether we prefer beige or fluorescent colors, the countryside or a certain set of job activities—these are not objectively measurable. There is no ranking system anywhere that says beige is better than pink and that living in the countryside is better than a certain job. If there were, all humans would be making the same decisions. Instead, we each invent reasons to make our decisions (and when societies do this together, we create our laws, social norms and ethical systems.)

But a machine could never do this…right? You’d be surprised. Google recently announced, for example, that it had built an AI that can learn and master video games. The program isn’t given commands but instead plays games again and again, learning from experience. Some have speculated that such a development would be useful for a robot car.

How might this work?

Instead of a robot car making a random decision, outsourcing its decision or reverting to pre-programmed values to make a decision—it could instead scour the cloud processing immense amounts of data and patterns based on local laws, past legal rulings, the values of the people and society around it, and the consequences it observes from various other similar decision-making processes over time.In short, robot cars, like humans, would use experience to invent their own reasons.

What is fascinating about Chang’s talk, is that she says when humans engage in such a reckoning process—of inventing and choosing one’s reasons during hard times—we view it as one of the highest forms of human development.

Asking others to make decisions for us, or leaving life to chance, is a form of drifting. But inventing and choosing our own reasons during hard times is referred to as building one’s character, taking a stand, taking responsibility for one’s own actions, defining who one is, and becoming the author of one’s own life.

 

Ref: Can We Trust Robot Cars to Make Hard Choices? – SingularityHub