Why the Internet Is the Greatest Reflection of Humanity

The last few weeks have been rather full -- including wonderful opportunities to join folks at an international data summit in Dublin to discuss the future social implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence as well as join friends Vint Cerf and Shari Langemak on the work still had for a people-centered internet regrading identity, data, and local empowerment.

This post aims share reflections from my journeys on how our world is being changes by advances in technology and how, as I shared at the data summit (in a modern adaptation of James Madison's Federalist Papers No. 51):

The internet is the greatest reflection of humanity – the internet is us – it's both positive and negative, good and bad.

While the world still has much work to connect more of the planet, already for the 3.4 billion of us who are connected we already are seeing both behaviors and moments of reflection that hold a mirror up and the full spectrum of all that we human do, say, and enact.

There's no textbook or set of instructions for how we should address the future ahead. Personally I believe the future is going to require a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and beliefs working together in a plurality for us to navigate the complicated issues ahead.

In addition, I am concerned that the internet is not encouraging tolerance of different perspectives – we're becoming "echo chambers" and to a degree the internet seems to be devolving into affinity groups that homogenize ideas or beliefs on how the world works and what we should do for the world ahead. If we do devolve into affinity groups intolerant of other ideas foreign to our own, that risks becoming autocracies of thought.

We need to remember President Lincoln's quote of "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."

Our world needs a plurality of ideas and approaches to address the challenging intersection of exponential technologies, issues globalization as well as global fragmentation, and questions of both the future of work and life ahead.

1. Diving In To The Future of Work – and of Jobs

While at the data summit had the fortunate opportunity to join friends Chris White (previously from DARPA, now at Microsoft), Mary Aiken (one of the first forensic cyberpsychologists), and Barry O'Sullivan (Director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork) for afternoon discussions on stage on Thursday.

Demonstrating that it is a small world, Chris and I both were deployed to Afghanistan though in separate years, he went in 2010 and I went in 2009 both assigned to help "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues. Mary and Barry I met about six months earlier when were discussing the interesting intersection of human behaviors both online as well as in-person in our internet era.

Our panel discussions touched upon the potential future impacts of artificial intelligence on society, to include possible impacts on the future of work – and the future of human purpose in an era in which machines are able to do some part of each of our jobs. While I hope that AI frees us from doing rote and repetitive work, I also think that as part of our shared responsibility to one another, as human societies we need to think of ventures that look at using technologies to help deliver better:

1. Internet-delivered, personalized training for individuals seeking new types of jobs, to include folks looking for a second/third career or a transition from manufacturing to a new line of work;
2. Internet how-to guides and online community encouragement of entrepreneurial, community enhancing activities at local levels, to include education for folks who don't normally see themselves as entrepreneurs and assisting them on getting started; and
3. Internet-enabled opportunities, recognitions, and microgrant support for individuals who want to contribute to their local neighborhood or pursue a hobby or vocation as part of a larger community.

Our Thursday panel also discussed whether people could trust algorithms – recognizing machine learning is only as accurate as the data provided to it. I pointed and that some apps using machine learning have been fed non-representative data, and as a result unfortunately draw conclusions that we as humans would find morally wrong, such as what happened with FaceApp and its improper beautify feature.

As a potential solution, I suggested that we may need the equivalent of "data ombuds" functions that review the data being fed to a machine learning algorithms , both to ensure that the data sets are appropriately diverse and protectively of individual privacy.

To address this, the same data ombuds functions for an organization would also review the conclusions made by algorithms to make sure they were correct, as free from bias as possible, and not making spurious correlations – such as divorce rates in Maine supposedly being linked to margarine production. With large data sets false correlations will occur without some level of contextual review.

2. Empowering Choice Regarding Sharing Identity and Data

On day two of the Summit, friends Vint Cerf and Shari Langemak continued the discussion with reflections about what could we do encourage a more people-centered internet regarding identity, data, and local empowerment. We all advocated for the ability for individuals to have control over their internet identity/identities and the ability to decide to share what parts, when, for how long, and with whom they want to share such data separate from platforms that use this identity and associate data streams.

While professionally I think "The Blockchain" has a lot of challenges to overcome in terms of scale, the ability to do peer-to-peer secure use of tokens from one immutable audit log within a completely separate immutable audit log, yet still moved back to the original chain if necessary – a practice known as sidechaining – is worth future exploration.

Especially if sidechaining techniques are also tied to distributed sharding, a type of database partitioning that separates very large databases the into smaller, faster, more easily managed parts called a "data shard".

For example, what fellow #ChangeAgent Phil Komarny is doing at the University of Texas with sidechaining of identity-linked data represents both an interesting and compelling approach.

If done at internet scale, sidechaining, sharing, and other decentralized approaches potentially could empower individuals to make professional and personal choices of what parts, when, for how long, and with whom they want to share both data associated with their identity and data that they may have in general in a decentralized form.

3. Do We Need a "Digital Profession Renaissance"?

Vint, Shari, and I also took questions from the audience and discussed how society might be able to keep up with the pace of change in machine learning and artificial intelligence – to include how could the trust what a machine learning algorithm was doing or what the organizations associated with the algorithm were intending.

During the panel, I suggested we borrow a page from an era when we started to travel beyond the town where we were born and raised and similarly had questions of trust of strangers in a new town. As noted in an earlier post, for most of our human species' history we only met 80 people in our entire lives and most of those were close members of a similar "clan".

Only in the last 350 years – when technology allowed us to start venturing beyond the settlement or town of our clan to other towns – questions of whether you could trust the practitioner of medicine, law, or advanced studies arose.

To address these questions of trust arose the idea of professional certifications and "professional societies", representing organized groups that promised the public to self-police themselves in terms of:

• Who they permit as members into the profession?
• What demonstrated "know-how" and knowledge is needed to be a member of the profession?
• What code of ethics members of the profession are expected to follow?
• What contributions to the public and demonstrated value to society the professional group embodies?
• When and how members will be censured or removed from the profession if they do not adhere to professional standards?
• How cumulatively activities of the profession assure members of the public that you can trust a "credentialed" member?

Historically, professional certifications and professional societies arose in areas where strangers to a new town needed to trust members of a profession – and lacked the ability to know if what was provided was truthful, real, and to the best of the professional's abilities. In cases like agriculture, the quality of food generally could be determined by all member of the public and so a self-policing profession was not needed. Same with business, where the measured outcomes of return on investment and price per good were visible to everyone.

In the past, it was more in the areas of medicine, law, architecture, engineering and academia where qualifications could not readily be determined by strangers – and so 19th and 20th century societies afforded professional societies the ability to self-police themselves insomuch that the public felt that this was a benefit and they weren't taken advantage of by professional members. If scandals occurred or if it was revealed the profession wasn't doing a good job of self-policing, the public would pull back on the freedom of the profession and add more oversight.

For our exponential times, we may need a resurgent renaissance of "digital professional societies" around artificial intelligence, data integrity, and more – with the caveat such self-policing will only work as long as it operates with a level of integrity that maintains demonstrated value to society and the public interest.

Otherwise, if "digital professional societies" around artificial intelligence and data integrity only focus on their own interests and not that of the public, one potentially could expect the public to respond with concerns surrounding their integrity and need for oversight?

Similarly, it is interesting to note that the internet – as a "great leveler" – continues to flatten several parts of what was previously modern 20th century societies.

In turn this flattening has produced a collective amnesia on the value of professional societies to self-police themselves (vs. top-heavy oversight) insomuch that they demonstrate they behave ethically and in the interest of the public in addition to their own.

It will be interesting to see in the next five years professions like medicine, law, and academia can more enthusiastically embrace exponential technologies to transform their business models while still preserving their professional character – or if the "digital wave" of the internet will completely overcome such institutions?

Closing Thoughts (For Now)

I will close with thoughts similar to what I had last year when life threw my wife and I a collective punch, specifically:

Only positive #ChangeAgents who choose to lead with love – specifically love to assist others – will help us through these turbulent times in our world. Love to help someone who’s not a family member or someone we know – love to help someone solely because that person is a part of what makes “us” We The People of the United States and the world.

Even if we disagree or have different perspectives with a person, positive #ChangeAgent leaders who truly care still provide love, compassion, and assistance regardless of these differences. 

This includes leadership as love embodied in public service – to include improved partnerships with members of the public concerned on a particular issue, public-private partnerships that exist to help the public, and those professionals here to serve the public. Here's to the future ahead,

-d. (new Twitter handle: @chief_ventures)