Big Data and Causation

The new book on Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Ken Cukier is a good intro to the age of big data, with a slightly optimistic telling of its benefits and a fair estimation and treatment of its risks. One thing the book points to remains troubling to me, weeks after reading: "Most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: Not knowing  why but only what. This overturns centuries of established practices and challenges our most basic understanding of how to make decisions and comprehend reality". Yes, it is a revolutionary approach but is the prediction correct? The point is certainly well taken when you examine, for example, how marketing works in an era of big data. Is the same thing going to be true for cutting edge cancer research?  Or has Mayer-Schonberger picked up on something else, that statistical analysis cannot demonstrate causation, and the more data we have (and the more time we spend crunching it), the less time we will have for causal analysis? However, less time for causal analysis should not mean abandoning it. I still find this concept troubling and struggle with giving up the notion of causation - isn't that what the entire scientific process is about? I suspect that M-S is at leats partially correct in his factual view of the rise of correlation, but must causation therefore be diminished? Can it? I'm just not sure.

Andrew Keen needs a "chill pill"

This blog is about limitations on technology - those imposed by law and other rules, and those imposed by human nature. We always welcome a dose of humanistic-oriented technoskepticism as an appropriate antidote to rampant and un-thought-through) techno-utopianism. But Andrew Keen needs, in my daughter's words, to take a "chill pill". His two most recent works, "Digital Vertigo" and "Cult of the Amateur" are overly alarmist, viewing the end of civilization as nigh due to the rise of the amateur and the fool.  Yes, it is true - traditional institutional gatekeepers of moderated "truth" - great newspapers, encyclopedias, etc. are suffering and having their lunch eaten by blogs, digital startups and Wikipedia.  Yes, that will have a significant deleterious effect on what we consider to be appropriate and acceptable as knowledge. Yet Keen misses several larger truths at work. First, present conditions never continue, and neither will these.  Some of the large media and knowledge companies have adapted to the age of "digital diarrhea" and some haven't; others will certainly take their place. But no need to fret (yet) about them - the major players are doing what they can to reinvent themselves, and the winners in the race to replace them may not be so bad themselves. Second, digital overload, whether from amateurs or professionals, is giving rise to a colossal need for curation. Admittedly, some of that curation is coming from big data algorithms, but some (much?) is from human curation. Count me as dubious that big data, standing alone, can curate properly, or even write a proper and insightful sentence. Full disclosure - my daughter is thinking of attending grad school for journalism. Everyone tells her she's crazy except me. I think that quality writing and quality editing will always have a place - perhaps not in the locations it heretofore had, perhaps to be appreciated in different ways - but a place nonetheless. So, "chill out" Mr. Keen - current trends accentuate the amateur and the stupid in life, but there is plenty of reason yet for hope.

Naomi Baron's "Always On - Language in an Online and Mobile World"

Following closely (conceptually) on the heels of Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" is Naomi Wolf's "Always On - Language in an Online and Mobile World". Unlike Carr's Cassandra-ish view of the Internet's effect on our brain functioning, Baron asks a different and more limited question - is Internet communication and mobile communication creating a new language? In sum, her answer is "no", though she admits that certain phrases (LOL, LMAO, et al) may indeed find their way into the Oxford English Dictionary or some other arbiter of "official" language.  Her viewpoint is linguistic and narrow (full disclosure - I love linguistics but know that it's not a topic for everyone) and the book gets highly technical (she advises the reader at the outset that she may wish to skip several chapters in toto). Nonetheless the question is a fascinating one - does the electronic mediation of language affect its substance? Well, language exists (purists notwithstanding) to communicate ideas, and it is continuing to do so even if reduced to acronyms, IMHO.  But there can be little denying a variation on a McLuhanesque argument - the medium affects the message. The sheer volume of electronic communication, in shorter and shorter bursts, means that we are talking more but saying less. The art of creating long-form arguments and essays is being affected (adversely) by the rise of shorter, eye-catching phrases and memes. Our concern about appearing well-written and erudite is dissipating. The mass of electronic language (and especially its social component) is disintermediating the authority of "correct" language. In her most cogent chapter, she refers to the rise of the "whatever" generation, characterized by a cavalier attitude toward far too many things - should proper language not be one of them?  Will language be subject to a linguistic equivalent of Gresham's law (bad money chases out good)? Baron is too smart to be definitive on this - all languages are constantly evolving, shifting meaning and orthography. She makes an impassioned case for the survival of a written culture, without falling fully into the trap of "print nostalgia". Data are not yet in (though what is in is not encouraging) for the decline in overall writing quality among students 6-12 and undergrad, the digital natives.  It will certainly be worse than 20 years ago, but may still not yet be a cause for worry - ya know?  

Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows" - Is the Internet Eating Your Brain?

It's hard to come to a single conclusion about Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows". It's interesting, it's accurate, in places it's obvious but at the end of the day it almost seems pointless. Here's the argument in a nutshell - recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the brain has immense plasticity and that it behaves something like a muscle - use certain parts and they get stronger, don't use certain parts and they get weaker. The nature of the Internet, with endless distractions and hyperlinking, dulls the brain's neural pathways (developed over an admittedly short period of time of near-universal literacy) that engage is deep reading and reflective thought. In Kahneman's phrase, it dulls System 2 thinking. Well, maybe. First, we do not know what the architecture of the Internet (and human interface) will be in 10 years, so it seems a stretch to make predictions on the long term effects of current Internet architecture. Second, dulling a neural pathway is not eliminating it, and people still  do (and hopefully will continue to ) spend time in the offline world where System 2 thinking has more of a chance to flourish.   Third, I have no truck with Carr's point on the reduced quality of our writing, the brain's inability to multitask (unless our neuroplasticity enables us to evolve to do so better)  or the poverty of e-communication as opposed to face to face communication. But those are social and educational issues more than technological ones, even if they are given a huge assist by technological means. Carr's point seems to be a form of McLuhanesque techno-neural determinism, that the Internet will shape our brain function. Maybe so, but so what? So will many other things, and we have yet to determine fully what we are gaining and losing, we're still in mid-path.  Carr's book is interesting and diverting, and it is not written in the breathless "the Internet is eating your brain" style prose of technophobes. But beware taking a photo of a moment in time and extrapolating from it  - I am reminded of the famous photo of a racehorse with all 4 feet off the ground. Looking at it in isolation, one might think that horses fly....

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

Forgetting a virtue? Absolutely. Think about it - imagine if you could remember every moment of every day of your life - how would you separate what was meaningful (signal) from what wasn't (noise). Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's book cites the life story of a woman who has that ability - and she hates every second of her life.  Human psychology is designed toward forgetting - not because our brains have limited capacity but because some things (traumas, for example), need to be forgotten lest they ensnare us. WE are designed for repression as a survival mechanism. So what happens, asks Mayer-Schonberger, when digital technology (think lifebloggers) makes perfect memory possible, on the one hand, and forgetting (think finding a compromising photo from 10 years ago, or a youthful membership in a sectarian organization) impossible? Bad things, he says, and he's dead right. "First, comprehensive digital memory may exacerbate the human difficulty of putting past events in proper temporal sequence. Second, digital remembering may confront us with too much of our past and impede our ability to decide and act. Third, when confronted with digital memory that conflicts with our human recollection of events, we may lose trust in our own remembering... As digital remembering relentlessly exposes discrepancies between factual bits and our own human recall, what we may lose in the process is trust in the past as we remember it". This point is almost Proustian - what do we prefer, a video of Swann's life or the beauty and drama of the memories, triggered by a madeleine, not an "enter" key? Can digital remembering, of any sort, substitute for the wave of associations (2500 pages worth) of memories triggered by the madeleine? Could anything be worse than having to revisit every one of our failures, our fears - at every hour of every day? I'll hit that "delete" button, thanks.

McKinsey's Disruptive Technologies Report

The McKinsey Global Institute recently issued its report on disruptive technologies that will transform life, business and the global economy. Among these technologies - mobile internet, automation of knowledge work, the Internet of things, cloud computing, 3D printing (my vote for most disruptive technology), advanced genomics and so on. Many of these technologies will indeed make life and business better - they could truly revolutionize medicine, manufacturing, safety and provision of services, among other things. All this should be welcomed, but there is a price to be paid, mostly at the lower end of the labor spectrum.   I have long been critical of people who moan about the loss of "good jobs" when they themselves have failed to keep their skills sharp or changed with changing demand. But as technology scales, and even lower level knowledge work becomes automated (ie, more voice recognition hell, but perhaps somewhat improved), how are we as a country to deal with those whose intellectual skills and ability just aren't up to (an ever-accelerating) speed?  We have always had room in the economy for drawers of water and hewers of wood; those jobs were replaced by lower-tech service jobs. What happens when those lower-tech service jobs become automated? What do we do then? Mc Kinsey recognizes this -"It is not surprising that new technologies make certain forms of human labor unnecessary or economically uncompetitive...this has been a repeated phenomenon since the Industrial Revolution". True, but in each of those previous instances the new positions that were created required skills that the masses could adapt to quickly. Now, the greater and greater need for brainpower is leaving a greater and greater percentage of the population unable (regardless of their motivation) to find work. McKinsey's answer is an evasion of sorts - "Business leaders and policy makers will need to find ways to realize the benefits of these technologies while creating new, innovative ways of working and providing new skills to the workforce". Even leaving aside our perpetual "crisis" in education, this last statement seems lacking. What seems more likely is an increased division and distance between manual labor (to the extent not replaced by robotics) and intellectual labor, with the latter category getting more and more concentrated at the top. I don't want to sound negative in light of the many amazing benefits we will reap as a society from all these technologies; I just want to make sure that as technology inexorably marches forward, we can have a sustained and inclusive (OMG, did I actually say that) economy along with it.

Morozov's "To Save Everything, Click Here"

I admit it - Evegny Morozov's thought is, in many respects, what this blog is all about.  Reading him is like reading Christopher Hitchens - a sly joy, with many "gotcha" moments of truth, and generally an intellectual good time. In "The Net Delusion", he utterly destroyed the notion that "the Internet" and social media were inherently democracy-inducing.  Techno-utopians forgot the basic reality that the Internet can be controlled (hello China!), can be used to spy on citizens (hello US!) and that its architecture, not its inherent nature, will determine whether it is used for democracy or authoritarianism. In his latest book, he takes on "technological solutionism", the notion that (a) every glitch represents a problem to be solved, and (b)  worse still, that technology has a solution for it. On its face, the book is a clarion call for recognition of the human dimension of technological limitation - that human functioning (like messy democracy itself) is not necessarily a problem (but perhaps its own solution), and that tech fixes aren't necessarily solutions. Whether it's algorithms telling us "what we want to hear" without knowing who we really are, or the conceit of being technologically able to remember and document everything (no I do not want to recall every moment of my life and I prefer Proust's selective memory), the book is a refreshing reminder not of technology's technological limits but of the limits of its human application. At times Morozov is less than convincing (as in his defense of gridlocked politics), and the book lingers far too long (for my tastes) on dense social theories.  Overall, though, while being slightly off in places, it is a fascinating, refreshing, well-done piece of techno-social thought.

Boston Marathon Suspect Capture and Technology

First and foremost, kudos to all law enforcement officials involved in capturing the Boston Marathon suspect - local police forces, FBI, DEA, HS, ATF  - all of them. They captured the subject, alive and with no additional collateral damage. Their work was flawless. Technology certainly played its part - thermal imaging in the helicopter above, and most importantly, communications technology which has been honed post-9/11. The ability of teams to communicate in voices barely above a whisper, across platforms and with all other agencies involved, was critical to the success of the mission. The technology, though, did not take the place of human police work, or of human observation. Crowdsourced police work? To a limited degree - certainly the decision to post photos of the suspects led to helpful tips. But in the end, it was Mr. 67 Franklin Street who went outside, saw blood on his boat, went back inside and called police, that brought this mini-drama to an end. Human observation before heat-seeking infrared.

The SEC Finally "Gets" Twitter - Almost

Last week the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a rare Report of Investigation announcing the closure of its asinine enforcement action against Netflix and its CEO Reed Hastings. The investigation stemmed from Hastings having tweeted  in July 2012 the following: "Congrats to Ted Sarados and his amazing content license team. Netflix monthly viewing exceeded 1 billion hours for the first time ever in June...Keep going Ted, we need even more!". The SEC's complaint was that this tweet violated Regulation FD which is (rightfully) intended to prevent public companies from making disclosure of material, non-public information to select shareholders only. Regulation FD provides that material non-public information must be disseminated either by a filing with the SEC itself or in a manner "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public".  The legal issue then was whether disclosing information via Twitter was "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public". The SEC fudged - it said that companies could use Twitter feeds to disclose information but only if they had told their shareholders in advance they might do so. Hello? This reminds me of an exchange between Moe and Curly of the Three Stooges - Moe: "How dumb can you get?" Curly: "How dumb do you want me to get?" Reality check: Twitter has 500 million users, 340 million tweets per day and 1.6 billion search queries per day. Market professionals (and amateurs with even limited digital skills) always follow their companies (and company CEOs) on Twitter.  The SEC is still living in the days of press releases and purely curated content by large news organizations. Rather than taking the correct step of simply saying - "yes, Twitter is an appropriate platform for disclosure", it goes through the charade of making companies add a bit of boilerplate disclosure to the "Further Information" sections of their SEC filings saying "please follow our Twitter feeds for more info". That language adds nothing, and ignores the information-feed reality of the past few years.  Epic fail.

Off Message

I'm going off-message here for once because this post is not about technology or law, and I refuse to accept it as a post about limitations.  It's about Pope Francis, the Catholic Church and Argentina's Dirty War. Allegations are arising now that Pope Francis may have been complicit in the murder of two priests during the Dirty War and, at a minimum, he was not a figure of any resistance to the murderous regime of the generals. Let's assume for argument's sake that he was not complicit in any murder and that his only offense is "not having done enough" (like Pope Pius XII). If so, was that defensible? A little history is in order - since the time of Charlemagne (and arguable since Constantine), the Catholic Church has been consistently aligned with the powers of state - they received money and legitimacy from being the official faith and performed quasi-governmental tasks (keeping the population in line, worrying about the afterlife instead of the here-and-now).  Certainly the Church has produced extraordinarily spiritual and temporal leaders during that time (John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Joan or Arc, et al) but for the most part it was involved in protecting its position and its hide (as the recent pedophile scandals have amply demonstrated). So when an officially Catholic state (the President of Argentina must be a Catholic, leading to the conversion of Menem) engages in un-Christian evil, what is a Church devoted to goodness to do? Is it too much to expect that the Church (or the head if the Jesuit order in that country) will actively speak out against torture and murder?  Some brave churchmen did (Oscar Romero in El Salvador, Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian archbishop during Brazil's dictatorship). My beloved rabbi Marshall Meyer did so at risk to himself and his family. Why not Francis? Even if he did not have much actual temporal power, would such a statement not have sent a message of hope to the victims? Quiescence, cowardice, following orders - I don't know what answer he would give, but a major world religion should ask more of its priests and certainly of its Pope. That's why beatifying Pius XII is so wrong - even if he could have done nothing as a practical matter, he had an obligation as a moral leader to speak truth. Neither he nor Francis did. The brilliance of John Paul II's papacy was to give up on the Church's quest for secular power and to focus on the Church as a moral power (yes, he was myopic about pedophilia) in the public square. I wish Francis well, but do not see in him a man with guts and vision.

Catholicism in Latin America (as in Western Europe) has always been a mile wide and an inch deep. That's why 25% of the Latin American population has shifted to other religious movements in the past 50 years. The Catholic Church has a lot of 'splaining to do, and sadly, I don't think Francis is the man to do it. The ultimate limitation is individual courage. You either have it or you don't.

On "Turing Machines" and Artificial Intelligence

In his recent book, "Turing's Cathedral", historian of technology George Dyson (son of Freeman and sister of Esther) says the following: "The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child and let intelligence evolve".  Leaving aside our advantage of being able to look backwards in time at Turing and his machines, is that observation true? How did artificial intelligence evolve from Turing's "simple" calculating machines to its present state? Does machine "consciousness" have to rise to the level of Ray Kurzweil's "singularity" for this statement to be true? I think the answer is no for several reasons. First, we already have incredibly complex systems which, while to a degree learning-recursive, do not fully act "intelligently". Second, isn't general relativity a system which behaves intelligently but is capable of being understood by us? Third, and I pose this as a question to coders - are we not still far from the point of true AI?  Yes, we have recursive learning. Yes, we have machines that can "write" poetry. Is that enough? We humans are incredible electrochemical and electromechanical machines. Will our functionality (not our genetic material) be duplicatable in a machine, even if every electrochemical/mechanical process in our bodies is finally understood?  Will the machines that artificially run or duplicate those processes function well when randomness is factored in? I think not - I don't think machines will have the curiosity of children and, as one who views the "singularity" as  a dystopia, I hope that "type" of intelligence does not evolve.