18 August 2019 (Chania, Crete) – This summer I returned to Crete to continue an ongoing project my wife and I started a number of years ago: volunteer work with a sea turtle research and conservation organization based in Chania which is on a mission to protect endangered sea turtles and their natural habitats. They offer a very unique learning experience to the volunteers who join their efforts, and promote public awareness. To achieve their goals, they operate a science-based research and conservation project on the island, in collaboration with local and national authorities. My wife and I volunteer as well as provide funding for their research efforts, and we sponsor two oceanography students who will spend part of their summer here.
For this summer’s readings I have tried (tried) to eschew anything to do with AI and computer systems and technology and have turned to climate eschatology, that a warming Earth will radically change life as we know it, that we can’t change it, so let’s just face the adjustments we’ll need to make because we are doomed. Yes, a pessimistic view but I am also re-reading the work of Rachel Carson (there is a monster of a new compendium out with all her writings) and while everybody knows Silent Spring, it’s her books and articles about the sea … exploring the whole of ocean life from the shores to the depths … that deserve more attention. She was incredibly prescient about what was happening to the seas due to exploitation, and even more so about what she perceived was the growing “government assault on science and nature”. I will write more about that next week before my wife and I take a 4 week breather and we “disappear” and get off the grid.
But I did break my “climate only” reading rule and I finally cracked open Kevin Werbach’s new book (well, published in 2018) and I agree with many of the reader comments on Amazon: he does a terrific job explaining blockchain — the history, the hype, the promise and the concerns.
I have been somewhat ambivalent about blockchain. About 1-1/2 years ago my media group started filming a documentary about it. We did a fair amount of research. We realized cryptocurrencies and blockchain are often thought of as a singular technology. The singular “blockchain” idea is actually a collection of composable technologies that when combined provide novel and emergent value propositions and applications. The purpose of the documentary was to be a “primer” for lawyers, to demystify blockchain technology and digital assets, from the most relevant high-level concepts to value propositions and applications. Some of the topics we have discussed so far are blockchains, smart contracts, consensus, incentives, digital assets, mining, valuation, and private blockchains. We expect to resume the filming later this year.
And we have seen lots of attention spent on this. Prominent on the scene (since 2016) has been the IBM-backed open-source project Hyperledger. But that’s not a real blockchain. As I wrote last year:
A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed database, an immutable ledger of events or transactions where truth is determined by a consensus mechanism — such as participants voting to agree on what gets written — so that no central authority arbitrates what is true. IBM’s definition of blockchain captures the distributed and immutable elements of blockchain but conveniently leaves out decentralized consensus — that’s because IBM Hyperledger Fabric doesn’t require a true consensus mechanism at all. In effect, IBM’s ‘blockchain’ is nothing more than a glorified time-stamped list of entries.
And, of course, we have Facebook’s Libra, a digital cryptocurrency slash payments slash finance platform. It is (sort of) built on decentralized open-source blockchain but it is merely a globe-straddling method to ferry remittances and transactions all over the globe with minimal fees or fuss. Paypal on steroids. And given Facebook’s self-image as an agora of global human connection — well, it’s a bit at odds with its mixed public reputation so good luck with Libra.
Most of the great challenges we face can be expressed as failures of trust. We don’t believe our leaders and scientists and journalists; we watch corporations exploit those they claim to serve; and we see our fates increasingly in the hands of inscrutable machines. Weaponization of information through bots, fake news, and recommendation algorithms (plus good old-fashioned propaganda) undermines any consensus about the very nature of truth. Trust is the glue that binds communities and societies toward a common purpose; without it, we are adrift.
What to do? Perhaps, as researchers suggested last week, mice can help ferret out deepfakes, but we shouldn’t hold our breaths for magic technical solutions. The alternative of governments directing content filtering by social media platforms, the norm in China and perhaps soon to be ordered by the U.S. White House, will only worsen the trust crisis. We need to step back. What is trust? And how can we build technological systems that are trust-generating rather than trust-destroying?
As Kevin tries to explain in his book, trust is confident vulnerability. It’s more than just willingness to act. Facebook’s user numbers and profits haven’t dropped despite its many scandals, because people value convenience and lack alternatives; that doesn’t mean they trust it. Revelations this week that Facebook paid contractors to listen in and transcribe users’ audio messages didn’t help. As a result, Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency was met with a hail of criticism, even though Libra’s design is, on its face, trust-enhancing. Trust and distrust aren’t entirely rational. That’s something the autonomous vehicle community is learning as well. Statistically lower accident rates in trials won’t convince users and local officials to take the leap and open up public roads.
There are calls to “regroup” … such as the internet CEOs and activists that issued a manifesto this past Tuesday on accountability for digital platforms, to build tech we trust … but it means changing our technologies at a more fundamental level, building in human and regulatory structures. Techniques such as differential privacy and federated learning allow modern AI to function without passing control over data to potentially untrustworthy actors. Such techniques are seeing rapid adoption in contexts such as medical imaging, which I wrote about earlier this year. Many countries are developing AI ethics frameworks.
But as Kevin points out, the U.S. is late to the party, and there really is no political will. And even the regulatory conversation needs to move beyond defining rules such as GDPR (which he finds totally inadequate) to means of real compliance.
NOTE: if you really want to get a taste of this, join me in Barcelona this coming January for the ACM FAT Conference, home base of the exploding algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency community.
But to be fair, as Kevin points out in his book, the problem isn’t just the lack of trust; it’s also misplaced trust in the untrustworthy. The disgraced Chinese scientist behind the “CRISPR babies” built a circle of trust of influential experts to support his experiments, but it crumbled quickly when the truth got out. And researchers recently showed that geographic clusters of extremely old people, a phenomenon of great scientific interest, are largely artifacts of poor record-keeping for birth certificates. Garbage in, garbage out, as the global financial crisis and the LIBOR scandal reminded us as well.
Which brings us to blockchain. Yes, says Kevin, it’s an overhyped playground for speculators, cranks, and criminals. A report just out from Ciphertrace says thieves and scammers have already stolen $4.3 billion of cryptocurrency this year. But Kevin thinks it is also our greatest hope to re-architect trust in the veracity of information. Blockchain can replace trust in those who record or verify with trust in a decentralized network secured through cryptography. Two examples Kevin notes:
• IBM’s Food Trust was one of the first production enterprise blockchain systems (with Walmart)
• The French grocery chain Carrefour recently announced that fruits and vegetables whose provenance is tracked through the system sell better.
Although critics appropriately note the paucity of high-volume production systems or consumer applications with significant usage, there are too many experiments and pilots underway to count, in every conceivable industry. Developing technologies of trust will be a powerful theme in the coming years.
Something has to stick. Give Kevin’s book a read. It looks at blockchain technology through the lens of many fundamentals: business, trust, governance, technology, and law. And it is an easy to read – without much jargon so you can easily digest the broad aspects of the challenges ahead in this space.