Innovation & Entrepreneurship

“Creepiness” is not a bug, it’s *the* feature

by on March 4, 2013 · 2 comments

Geordi

Yesterday I explained why I’m not too worried about Silicon Valley’s penchant for “solutionism,” which Evgeny Morozov tackles in his new book. Essentially I think that as long as we make decisions about which technologies to adopt via market processes, people will reject those applications that are stupid or bad. Today I want to explore one reason why I’m optimistic that, in the long run, the public will get the technology it wants, despite the perennial squeamishness of some intellectuals.

The problem some thinkers and pundits have with my sanguine let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom approach is that inevitably the public will embrace some technologies that the thinkers don’t like. The result is usually a lot of fretting and hand-wringing by public intellectuals about what the scary new technology will do to our brains or society. Eventually, activists take on the cause and try to use state power to limit the choices the rest of us can make—for our own good, rest assured.

Today it seems that the next technology to get this treatment will be life-logging and personal data mining, as I discussed in my last post. Squarely in the crosshairs right now is Google Glass.

In this CNN op-ed about Glass Andrew Keen waits only seven words before using the adjective “creepy”—the watchword of nervous nellies everywhere. His concern is that those wearing Google Glass will be spying on anyone in their line of sight. Mark Hurst expresses similar concerns in a widely circulated blog post that also frets about what happens when we’re all not just recording but also being recorded.

This time around, though, I think the worrywarts face an uphill battle. That’s because in the case of life-logging and personal data mining, the “creepy” parts of the technologies are one in the same with the technologies themselves. The “creepiness” is not a bug, it’s the feature, and it can’t be severed without destroying the technology.

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People are smarter than they look (or, why I’m not worried about solutionism)

by on March 3, 2013 · 6 comments

solutionism

In the New York Times today, Evgeny Morozov indicts the “solutionism” of Silicon Valley, which he defines as the “intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are ‘solvable’ with [technology].” This is the theme of his new book, To Save Everything, Click Here, which I’m looking forward to reading.

Morozov is absolutely right that there is a tendency among the geekerati to want to solve things that aren’t really problems, but I think he overestimates the effects this has on society. What are the examples of “solutionism” that he cites? They include:

  • LivesOn, a yet-to-launch service that promises to tweet from your account after you have died
  • Superhuman, another yet-to-launch service with no public description
  • Seesaw, an app that lets you poll friends for advice before making decisions
  • A notional contact lens product that would “make homeless people disappear from view” as you walk about

It should first be noted that three of these four products don’t yet exist, so they’re straw men. But let’s grant Morozov’s point, that the geeks are really cooking these things up. Does he really think that no one besides him sees how dumb these ideas are?

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Smart technology’s seen and unseen

by on February 23, 2013 · 0 comments

[Evgeny Morozov in the WSJ](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324503204578318462215991802.html) is afraid that ‘smart technology’ might make us a bit unthinking:

> The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning.

> It’s great when the things around us run smoothly, but it’s even better when they don’t do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions—many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded—and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity.

I think he overestimates how successfully engineers will eliminate friction. Even as new technologies solve some problems, they introduce new ones. He also overestimates how accepting people will be of these technologies. I know several persons with WiThings scales, but none of them tweet their weight. And Google Glass’s official unveiling has been met mostly with derision. I agree with Morozov that preserving experimentation and serendipity are important for human flourishing, but we should be careful not to forgo technologies that might unlock our curiosity and humanity in ways we can’t now predict.

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What “Big Bang Disruption” Says About Technology Policy

by on February 18, 2013 · 3 comments

In the upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, my colleague Paul Nunes at Accenture’s Institute for High Performance and I are publishing the first of many articles from an on-going research project on what we are calling “Big Bang Disruption.”

The project is looking at the emerging ecosystem for innovation based on disruptive technologies.  It expands on work we have done separately and now together over the last fifteen years.

Our chief finding is that the nature of innovation has changed dramatically, calling into question much of the conventional wisdom on business strategy and competition, especially in information-intensive industries–which is to say, these days, every industry.

The drivers of this new ecosystem are ever-cheaper, faster, and smaller computing devices, cloud-based virtualization, crowdsourced financing, collaborative development and marketing, and the proliferation of mobile everything.  There will soon be more smartphones sold than there are people in the world.  And before long, each of over one trillion items in commerce will be added to the network.

The result is that new innovations now enter the market cheaper, better, and more customizable than products and services they challenge.  (For example, smartphone-based navigation apps versus standalone GPS devices.)  In the strategy literature, such innovation would be characterized as thoroughly “undiscplined.”  It shouldn’t succeed.  But it does. Continue reading →

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The Brookings Patent Report is Bogus

by on February 8, 2013 · 0 comments

Brookings has a new report out by Jonathan Rothwell, José Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, and Mark Muro that “examines the importance of patents as a measure of invention to economic growth and explores why some areas are more inventive than others.” (p. 4) Since I doubt that non-molecule patents have a substantial effect on growth, I was curious to examine the paper’s methodology. So I skimmed through the study, which referred me to a technical appendix, which referred me to the authors’ working paper on SSRN.

The authors are basically regressing log output per worker on 10-year-lagged measures of patenting in a fixed effects model using metropolitan areas in the United States.

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Toward a Technology “Watchful Waiting” Principle

by on January 17, 2013 · 6 comments

When the smoke cleared and I found myself half caught-up on sleep, the information and sensory overload that was CES 2013 had ended.

There was a kind of split-personality to how I approached the event this year. Monday through Wednesday was spent in conference tracks, most of all the excellent Innovation Policy Summit put together by the Consumer Electronics Association. (Kudos again to Gary Shapiro, Michael Petricone and their team of logistics judo masters.)

The Summit has become an important annual event bringing together legislators, regulators, industry and advocates to help solidify the technology policy agenda for the coming year and, in this case, a new Congress.

I spent Thursday and Friday on the show floor, looking in particular for technologies that satisfy what I coined the The Law of Disruption: social, political, and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially.

What I found, as I wrote in a long post-mortem for Forbes, is that such technologies are well-represented at CES, but are mostly found at the edges of the show–literally. Continue reading →

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Gabriella Coleman on the ethics of free software

by on January 8, 2013 · 0 comments

Gabriella Coleman, the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department at McGill University, discusses her new book, “Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking,” which has been released under a Creative Commons license.

Coleman, whose background is in anthropology, shares the results of her cultural survey of free and open source software (F/OSS) developers, the majority of whom, she found, shared similar backgrounds and world views. Among these similarities were an early introduction to technology and a passion for civil liberties, specifically free speech.

Coleman explains the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. She also discusses the tension between the overtly political free software movement and the “politically agnostic” open source movement, as well as what the future of the hacker movement may look like.

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Wendell Wallach on robot ethics

by on December 18, 2012 · 0 comments

Wendell Wallach, lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, co-author of “Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong,” and contributor to the new book, “Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics,” discusses robot morality.

Though many of those interested in the ethical implications of artificial intelligence focus largely on the ethical implications of humanoid robots in the (potentially distant) future, Wallach’s studies look at moral decisions made by the technology we have now.

According to Wallach, contemporary robotic hardware and software bots routinely make decisions based upon criteria that might be differently weighted if decided by a human actor working on a case-by-case basis. The sensitivity these computers have to human factors is a vital to ensuring they make ethically sound decisions.

In order to build a more ethically robust AI, Wallach and his peers work with those in the field to increase the sensitivity displayed by the machines making the routine calculations that affect our daily lives.

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Why Sell Phones With Subscriptions?

by on December 14, 2012 · 6 comments

Why do mobile carriers sell phones with a subscription?  My roommate and I were debating this the other night.  Most other popular electronics devices aren’t sold this way.  Cable and satellite companies don’t sell televisions with their video service.  ISPs don’t sell laptops and desktops with their Internet service.  Bundling phones with mobile service subscriptions is pretty unique.  (The only mass-market analogs I can think of are satellite radio and GPS service.)

Why might this be?   Continue reading →

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CFTC Targets Prediction Markets; Hits First Amendment

by on December 12, 2012 · 4 comments

Would you pay good money for accurate predictions about important events, such as election results or military campaigns? Not if the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has its way. It recently took enforcement action against overseas prediction markets run by InTrade and TEN. The alleged offense? Allowing Americans to trade on claims about future events.

The blunt version: If you want to put your money where your mouth is, the CFTC wants to shut you up.

A prediction market allows its participants to buy and sell claims payable upon the occurrence of some future event, such as an election or Supreme Court opinion. Because they align incentives with accuracy and tap the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets offer useful information about future events. InTrade, for instance, accurately called the recent U.S. presidential vote in all but one state.

As far as the CFTC is concerned, people buying and selling claims about political futures deserve the same treatment as people buying and selling claims about pork futures: Heavy regulations, enforcement actions, and bans. Co-authors Josh Blackman, Miriam A. Cherry, and I described in this recent op-ed why the CFTC’s animosity to prediction markets threatens the First Amendment.

The CFTC has already managed to scare would-be entrepreneurs away from trying to run real-money prediction markets in the U.S. Now it threatens overseas markets. With luck, the Internet will render the CFTC’s censorship futile, saving the marketplace in ideas from the politics of ignorance.

Why take chances, though? I suggest two policies to protect prediction markets and the honest talk they host. First, the CFTC should implement the policies described in the jointly authored Comment on CFTC Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts, July 6, 2008. (Aside to CFTC: Your web-based copy appears to have disappeared. Ask me for a copy.)

Second, real-money public prediction markets should make clear that they fall outside the CFTC’s jurisdiction by deploying notices, setting up independent contractor relations with traders, and dealing in negotiable conditional notes. For details, see these papers starting with this one.

[Aside to Jerry and Adam: per my promise.]

[Crossposted at Technology Liberation Front, and Agoraphilia.]

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