La inteligencia artificial nos obliga a revisar nuestra idea de justicia. (@dweinberger)

“Ya no se trata de lograr una IA justa, sino que la propia IA está haciendo mucho por nosotros porque nos obliga a revisar las diferentes ideas de justicia que tenemos las personas”

“La inteligencia artificial nos obliga a revisar nuestra idea de justicia” – David Weinberger, Doctor en Filosofía | EL PAÍS Retina

Ya en 1999 fue coautor del Manifiesto Cluetrain, definido como un manual sobre marketing online y en el que se abordaban las nuevas formas de comunicar y de compartir conocimientos e impresiones en internet. Casi 20 años después, al analizar cómo han evolucionado esas conversaciones, se muestra optimista: “Mucho de lo que estamos consiguiendo es positivo, a pesar de que resulta duro escuchar algunas conversaciones globales de las que no podemos estar orgullosos y que son fruto de la estupidez y de los privilegios de algunos. Además, existen conversaciones manipuladas, discontinuas u ofensivas que sería necesario erradicar, pero aun así no quiero subestimar la capacidad de internet como herramienta de comunicación”. 

…centrado en su labor como investigador del Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society de la Facultad de Derecho de Harvard, la actividad de Weinberger intenta dar respuestas a cómo está cambiando la tecnología las relaciones humanas, la comunicación, el conocimiento y la sociedad.
Weinberger señala que hay dos aspectos “apasionantes” a la hora de investigar los avances del aprendizaje automático (el consabido machine learning) de las máquinas: los nuevos conjuntos de reglas creados por la propia IA y la redefinición del concepto de imparcialidad. 

…el tecnólogo se pregunta qué significaría para nosotros si esos modelos con los que el aprendizaje automático entiende el mundo resultaran ser más precisos o veraces que nuestra propia manera de analizar cómo funciona el mundo.

Según Weinberger, es necesario seguir trabajando en este concepto, lo cual ya está generando un debate que le resulta muy enriquecedor: “Admito que la IA puede amplificar las injusticias en la sociedad y que es posible que eso sea algo muy difícil de evitar, por lo que supone un problema urgente. Pero personalmente quizás esté más interesado en lo que los humanos estamos aprendiendo sobre nuestro propio concepto de imparcialidad gracias a nuestro trabajo con la IA”.

Is getting rid of rules and leaders making any movement more open and fair? (by @wired)

excerpts from A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley's High-Minded Tyranny | WIRED

while this rhetoric of personal empowerment has been great for Silicon Valley, for the rest of the world it has produced a deeply painful reality: greater disparity in wealth and power, fewer tools for reversing these conditions, and a false sense that we are personally to blame for our own difficult circumstances.

The women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s was rebuilding the world in a consciously different way: no designated leaders and no rules on what you could say and when you could say it. Yet Freeman wondered if getting rid of rules and leaders was actually making feminism more open and fair.

After a hard think, she concluded that, if anything, the lack of structure made the situation worse: Elite women who went to the right schools and knew the right people held power and outsiders had no viable way of challenging them. She decided to write an essay summing up her thoughts. “As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules,” she wrote in the piece, published in Ms. magazine in 1973. “Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.”
…
More than 40 years later, Freeman’s essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” continues to reverberate, especially in Silicon Valley, where it is deployed by a wide range of critics to disprove widely held beliefs about the internet as a force of personal empowerment, whether in work, leisure, or politics. 
…
The reality, of course, is a bit different. Bitcoin is dominated by a small cadre of investors, and “mining” new coins is so expensive and electricity-draining that only large institutions can participate; Facebook’s advertising system is exploited by foreign governments and other malevolent political actors who have had free rein to spread disinformation and discord; and Google’s informal structure allows leaders to believe they can act in secret to dispense with credible accusations of harassment.

In Freeman’s unstinting language, this rhetoric of openness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”

Because “Tyranny” explains how things work, as opposed to how people say things work, it has become a touchstone for social critics of all stripes. During the Occupy movement, Freeman’s essay was on the organizers’ minds when they sought to eliminate hierarchy without introducing a hidden hierarchy. … digital culture is where Freeman’s work has the most currency these days.

Benjamin Mako Hill, a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he is studying how free software projects operate, said Freeman’s essay was “really an inspirational thing.” In many of the communities he researches, Hill said (refering to Jo Freeman's essay), participants reject any hint of formal structures or authority only to discover that “10 years later, there really are a lot of leaders and structures.” Because the leaders and structures arrived informally, he said, they are much harder to uproot.

“Tyranny” was a healthy reminder that Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of openness and meritocracy doesn’t match the reality. “I’ve felt that paranoid delusion myself,” Taylor wrote in her book about the internet, The People’s Platform. 
“How do you explain inequalities in a system where explicit discrimination doesn’t exist? 
How do you make sense of homogeneity when there’s no sign on the door excluding different types of people?”

Freeman takes the long view about her argument, seeing it as part of a permanent push-pull between structure and structurelessness. There may be particular reasons why Silicon Valley leaders have an aversion to outside authority and rules, but mainly she thinks they embody the excessive enthusiasm of any group who gains a foothold in a new field—whether in oil exploration or railroads or the internet—and decides they are uniquely fit to hold that powerful position. In the early days of the internet, she says, “it was highly inventive, it was highly spontaneous, but we’re past that. As long as you reject the idea that any organization is bad you are never going to have the discussion about the best organization for whatever it is you are trying to do.”

And while this rhetoric of personal empowerment has been great for Silicon Valley, for the rest of the world it has produced a deeply painful reality: greater disparity in wealth and power, fewer tools for reversing these conditions, and a false sense that we are personally to blame for our own difficult circumstances. …



Excerpts from The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman

Formal and informal structures

Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals, with different talents, predispositions, and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate structurelessness -- and that is not the nature of a human group.


The nature of elitism

"Elitist" is probably the most abused word in the women's liberation movement. It is used as frequently, and for the same reasons, as "pinko" was used in the fifties. It is rarely used correctly. Within the movement it commonly refers to individuals, though the personal characteristics and activities of those to whom it is directed may differ widely: An individual, as an individual can never be an elitist, because the only proper application of the term "elite" is to groups. Any individual, regardless of how well-known that person may be, can never be an elite.


Political impotence

Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. It is when people get tired of "just talking" and want to do something more that the groups flounder, unless they change the nature of their operation. Occasionally, the developed informal structure of the group coincides with an available need that the group can fill in such a way as to give the appearance that an Unstructured group "works." That is, the group has fortuitously developed precisely the kind of structure best suited for engaging in a particular project.

There are almost inevitably four conditions found in such a group;
1) It is task oriented. Its function is very narrow and very specific, like putting on a conference or putting out a newspaper.
2) It is relatively small and homogeneous. Homogeneity is necessary to insure that participants have a "common language" for interaction.
3) There is a high degree of communication. Information must be passed on to everyone, opinions checked, work divided up, and participation assured in the relevant decisions. This is only possible if the group is small and people practically live together for the most crucial phases of the task.

4) There is a low degree of skill specialization. Not everyone has to be able to do everything, but everything must be able to be done by more than one person. Thus no one is indispensable.


Principles of democratic structuring

1) Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures.
2) Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them.
3) Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.
4) Rotation of tasks among individuals.
5) Allocation of tasks along rational criteria.
6) Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible. Information is power. Access to information enhances one's power.
7) Equal access to resources needed by the group. A member who maintains a monopoly over a needed resource (like a printing press owned by a husband, or a darkroom) can unduly influence the use of that resource. Skills and information are also resources.

19 Strategies To Drive Innovation in your Corporation (@CBInsights)

 Hilarious
A Guide To Corporate Innovation - CB Insights Research

Here they are, 19 strategies to make your corporation look more innovative:

1. Do the Silicon Valley petting zoo thing 

2. Launch an accelerator 

3. Have a brainstorming meeting that uses lots of Post-It Notes 

4. Take someone who has plateaued in their career and give them “innovation” 

5. Start a corporate VC 

6. Talk about bringing learnings from the outside in 

7. Don’t give metrics to innovation / growth-focused teams 

8. Have multiple groups with similar but different enough mandates 

9. Invest in VCs as an LP to “access innovation” 

10. Expect returns within 12 months

11. Invent new senior titles 

12. Move to an open floor plan 

13. Start talking like how you think startups talk 

14. Hire a huge management consulting firm 

15. Hire some Xooglers 

16. Have rooms that are painted with whiteboard paint 

17. Hire a chef and offer free meals 

18. Spend lots of time defining your stage-gate process

19. Adopt a casual dress code

What is AI, exactly?

Is this AI? We drew you a flowchart to work it out - MIT Technology Review

The definition of artificial intelligence is constantly evolving, and the term often gets mangled, so we are here to help.

3 artículos de Harari que me interesaron

2018, October https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-yuval-noah-harari-tristan-harris/

2018, August https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/aug/05/yuval-noah-harari-extract-fake-news-sapiens-homo-deus

2017, May https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/08/virtual-reality-religion-robots-sapiens-book

Romer y el crecimiento endógeno (@Sintetia)

 Paul Romer y William Nordhaus, premios Nobel de Economía 2018 (Cándido Pañeda, Catedrátioco de Economía Aplicada)

El Premio Nobel de Economía del 2018 ha sido concedido a dos economistas que, siendo muy distintos en muchos otros aspectos, tienen algo en común, ambos se enfrentan al tema del crecimiento económico, aunque lo hagan desde dos perspectivas diferentes: por una parte, a Paul M. Romer, quien convierte en traslúcida la caja negra de la tecnología y, por otra, a William D. Nordhaus, quien, partiendo del hilo de las restricciones que la escasez de recursos naturales puede plantear al crecimiento, llega al ovillo del cambio climático. A continuación, se resumen ambas aportaciones.

Paul Romer

Un bien es “rival” cuando, por decirlo de algún modo, no podemos usarlo dos personas al mismo tiempo. Por ejemplo, una camisa es un bien rival porque una persona no puede llevar la camisa que utiliza en ese momento otra persona. 

La “exclusión” se refiere, como la palabra indica, a si hay algún sistema que permita excluir a los potenciales usuarios. En las camisas hay exclusión, ya que en las tiendas no se las facilitan a quienes no las pagan. Pues bien, resulta que la tecnología es un bien no rival en el que hay exclusión, aunque sólo sea parcial o temporal. Así, el programa con el que se escriben estas líneas es un bien no rival porque pueden estar utilizándolo muchos otros usuarios en paralelo, sin que pase nada y, además, es un bien en el que hay exclusión, pues se usa previo pago del mismo. 

Vinculada con la no rivalidad, la tecnología tiene otra característica fundamental: el coste de producirla es elevado y el coste de, por así decirlo, “reproducirla” es bajo. 

Crear el programa con el que se escriben estas líneas costó mucho dinero, pero, una vez que se creó, realizar copias del mismo cuesta muy poco. Esto nos lleva al mundo de los rendimientos crecientes y los costes decrecientes (si el coste de crear el programa es 1.000 y el de la copia es 2, el coste medio de la primera copia es 1002. Si realizamos dos copias y hacemos de nuevo la cuenta desde cero, el coste medio baja a 502) y, al final, a la competencia imperfecta.

Do we know why customers would want us to transform? (by @TrendWatching)

 Digital Transformation & Consumer Trends report: https://info.trendwatching.com/hubfs/Digital-Transformation-1.pdf

…

Before you embark on an expensive and ambitious digital transformation project, don’t just ask, ‘do we know why we’re transforming?’
Instead ask the more important question, ‘do we know why customers would want us to transform?’ 

…we’d like to offer four reasons why too often the focus on ‘digital transformation’ misses the point, and show how injecting a consumer trend perspective can help increase your chances of success above that 50% mentioned above.
1. Focus on outcomes, not tools and technologies
     Why do your customers care that you even exist?
2. Embrace the journey, rather than a destination
     Every organization will need to be in a state of constant digital transformation.
3. Escape legacy thinking
     Why protect legacy ‘assets’ that have become liabilities?
4. Pursue opportunity, rather than fear
     You can never overshoot on customer experience