Microsoft Says Elite MIDS Should Govern our Data

Quite an interesting piece, certainly not obvious, a proposal for what are called MIDs or 'Mediators of Individual Data'.    I excerpt a short piece below, but the total document is quite long.   I believe in simple solutions, and this is very far from that.  An elite academic solution that is very unlikely be adopted.   Read it if your dare.  Sounds like Soviet Central Planning.  Uprooting democracy and capitalism?  Who governs these groups, influences them?   Beware an imminent nightmare. 

A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society   In the HBR  By Jaron Lanier and Glen Weyl  (both from Microsoft)

For individuals and platforms, the future requires a fundamental economic shift.

Digital transformation is remaking the human world, but few are satisfied with how that’s been going. That’s especially true in media, where the dominant model of targeted advertising derived from data surveillance and used to fund free-to-the-public services like social media and search is increasingly viewed as unsustainable and undesirable.

Today, internet giants finance contact between people by charging third parties who wish to influence those who are connecting. The result is an internet — and, indeed, a society — built on injected manipulation instead of consensual discourse. A system optimized for influencing unwitting people has flooded the digital world with perverse incentives that lead to violations of privacy, manipulated elections, personal anxiety, and social strife.  ... " 

" ... For data dignity to work, we need an additional layer of organizations of intermediate size to bridge the gap. We call these organizations “mediators of individual data,” or MIDs.
A MID is a group of volunteers with its own rules that represents its members in a wide range of ways. It will negotiate data royalties or wages, to bring the power of collective bargaining to the people who are the sources of valuable data. It will also promote standards and build a brand based on the unique quality and identity of the data producers they represent. MIDs will often perform routine accounting, legal, and payment duties but might also engage in training and coaching. They will help focus the scarce attention of their members in the interest of those members rather than for an ulterior motive, such as targeted advertising. ... " 

Jaron Lanier is Office of the Chief Technology Officer Prime Unifying Scientist (OCTOPUS) at Microsoft, a musician, and the author of several books, including Who Owns the Future? E. Glen Weyl is principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City and teaches economics at Princeton. His most recent book, coauthored with Eric Posner, is Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. .... 

Jaron Lanier on Behavior Modification

We connected with Lanier long ago on and in virtual worlds.  He does not like it when people he doesn't agree with seem to be keen on altering his behavior.  Or are not part of his tribe.   Don't disagree we should all consider it.   As marketers we were always interesting in influencing behavior.

Delete your account  in FastCompany
It’s a “great shame,” says Silicon Valley insider Jaron Lanier, that so much of big tech’s AI has been aimed at manipulating you. .... 

" ... His new book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, examines how a technology designed to bring people together (remember Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing dream of “connecting” the world) has instead helped tear apart humanity’s delicate social fabric. People, he argues, are becoming angrier, less empathetic, more isolated yet tribal, and sadder, crazier even. With every post and scroll, users feed a system built to influence behavior, in a sort of reward feedback loop. And as the 2016 elections demonstrated, the same system that’s used to sell you deodorant online can also be hijacked to wreak havoc on your political system. Lanier, who hasn’t been on social media for years, now likes to refer to Facebook and Google as “behavior modification empires.”  ... " 

Siren Servers Anticipating Social Uprisings

Seems a fairly obvious application.  Track social activity to determine potential social upheavals.   False positive linking to specific process may be key to its use, as in any 'alarm' scenarios.  Also note the term 'siren server' being originated by Jaron Lanier, who connected with us briefly.  The term' anticipatory' or 'predictive' is also used.

CIA ‘Siren Servers’ can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance
The CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days before it happens thanks to powerful super computers dubbed Siren Servers by the father of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier.

CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its “anticipatory intelligence” through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data.  .... " 

Multi Person Virtual Reality

Microsoft Lab research.  Not of the Second Life style, but wearing head sets and exploring a common space.  Look forward to seeing Hololens in more practical applications.

In Technology Review:
" ... Augmented or mixed reality, which renders virtual images in a view of the real world, can be spectacular to experience. But it may be even more fun when you bring a friend.

Researchers in the Microsoft lab of Jaron Lanier are experimenting with multi-person augmented reality, and the results of their work could help shape the way the technology is commercialized and used. Lanier was a pioneer of virtual and augmented, or mixed, reality in the 1980s.

Microsoft is testing a commercial augmented reality product, called HoloLens. Lanier stresses that his work is separate from HoloLens and does not reflect how that product will develop. Still, multi-person mixed reality is a long-standing challenge for those interested in the technology. Beyond gaming, there is hope that virtual and augmented reality could prove useful for communications, collaboration, and for new ways of accessing and handling information. .... "

Edge on AI

On the Edge:  A conversation with Jaron Lanier on the Myth of AI.   Can or will a recommendation engine fool us into thinking it has real content?  Is that the promise of AI?  No, but he makes some good points about being vigilant here.

Jaron Lanier vs the Web

We talked to Jaron Lanier a number of times as we looked at how to visualize and virtualize corporate process.   I have followed his work for years.  Most interesting of late his critical views of the Internet.  More in The Smthsonian,   " .. And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.”. .. " 

Jaron Lanier Flips on Wal-Mart, Apple and Google

We met computer scientist Jaron Lanier while doing work with the Institute for the Future.  In the Edge he talks about the local global flip.  Quite a long rant on the effect of corporations leveraging the network, collectivism and advanced computing.   "If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?"  

You are not a Gadget

Finished reading Jaron Lanier's You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto. (The Amazon link has a look-inside-the-book and a good Q&A with Lanier). We met Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, through the Institute for the Future. He does bring some needed sanity in discussing the relationship between humans and computers. Especially useful since the emergence of social networks. Since he is a musician he carefully discusses the whole issue of payment for creativity. Is at his best when he clearly dismisses the hive-brain idea. Anyone interested in both the possibility and implications of AI should give it a read. It is somewhat disjoint, having been created from articles in Discover Magazine. Still worth the read.

Hive Thinking

Jaron Lanier in the NYT. We were introduced to him and his Virtual Reality work years ago at the Institute for the Future. Some good points in the article, though it is ironic that this point is made in the NYT, a place where they try to mold our opinion and are now threatened by creative thinking on the Internet. The book is on my short list and may see a review here later

The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion
' ... Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity ... '