BBC Radio 4's Digital Human

"What the heck is TheSoul Publishing? I’m still honestly not sure.

Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

Asked detailed written questions about the company, a spokesman for TheSoul Publishing responded with a statement and provided background information, which is reflected throughout. The spokesman stated: “Simply because a company has roots, international offices, and/or diverse global employees outside of the U.S., one should not jump to conclusions or automatically make assumptions that there is a hidden agenda. To be clear, TheSoul Publishing creates fun, non-political oriented content that is enjoyed by an incredible amount of fans globally.”

"As mass protests against police brutality and racial injustice continue across the country, 4chan, a notorious alt-right troll hub online, is trying to meddle in protesters’ online operations.

On Sunday night, users of 4chan made several highly trafficked posts with links to dozens of Black Lives Matter channels on Telegram, a privacy-oriented, encrypted messaging app that has been used for organizing protests across the country. Users on 4chan encouraged others to post disinformation in the groups, find “incriminating” information that they can pass to law enforcement, and trawl the channels for as much personal, identifying, and organizational information as they can about people in the groups."

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Some have already posted the phone numbers of volunteers organizing food and water for protesters, and phone numbers for jail support for arrested protesters. The 4chan posts didn’t include instructions for what to do with the numbers, but based on 4channer’s normal behavior, it’s possible that the implication is to harass the person on the other end of the line. In some cases, users in the threads are also doxxing what they believe to be “Antifa safehouses” by posting addresses of these homes.

The central focus on the 4chan posts so far, though, hasn’t been to impede the current protests, but rather to compile doxxing information on the activists behind the protests. “BE STEALTHY DONT TROLL, RIGHT NOW THE MOST VALUABLE THING WE CAN GET IS INFO,” one user posted.

“A lot of these retards have identifying info on their telegram profiles, instagram, personal website, real name, phone number, etc. get that,” another wrote, urging other 4channers to store what they found on internet archive sites like Archive.is and Pastebin (links on Pastebin aren’t accessible, suggesting that the site may have taken moderation action). Others encouraged people to share their findings with “trustworthy public sources” and “right wing journalists.”

It’s unclear to what extent 4chan posters have followed through on their plans, and if the threads have led to any offline harassment. Many of the Black Lives Matter channels don’t let anyone without authorization post. And administrators of some of the channels seem to be aware of the people trying to infiltrate. One of the larger protest Telegram channels, The BLM Revolution of 2020 with roughly 8,740 subscribers, posted an open letter to “to the fascist how are watching this channel,” on Sunday night. “I’m going to be honest with you all, the path that you have picked is only going to bring more suffering, and solidify the system that you’ve set out to fight against. Your fight is going to end up with more people in your situation. Lost, lonely, and unsure where to go,” the person behind the Telegram channel wrote, encouraging right-wingers to reach out if they wanted to anonymously talk.

"I caught up with Michael Murphy late on Sunday from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, but it wasn’t easy: he hadn’t been able to answer his phone for 24 hours. “I had to turn it off,” he said. “I’m also getting spearphishing emails every 30 seconds.”

The angry callers had gotten Murphy’s name from one of the dozens of domain registries that he had set up since Friday night. That day, a friend who lived in North Carolina noticed that right-wingers in that state and across the country were setting up rallies attacking business closures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Murphy, who said he’s staunchly opposed to and frustrated by the protests because of the risks they pose in accelerating the spread of the coronavirus, and his friend realized that the organizers, which turned out to include a small group of pro-gun advocates helping coordinate the campaign, were using a simple state-based abbreviation pattern to register websites promoting the protests.

They came up with a plan. Murphy snapped up domains for every still available iteration of reopenAL.com, reopenAK.com, reopenAR.com, and so forth, that hadn’t already been purchased, along with every domain he could for variations like liberateWV.com, liberateWY.com, and liberateWI.com. The idea was to preempt any further such purchases by people genuinely seeking to organize protests.

“I realized all these fringe guys are gonna get a hold of these websites, So I went out and bought ‘em up that night,” he told me. The financial burden of thwarting fringe-right groups? “It cost me about four grand,” Murphy said. “I don’t have the money quite frankly. I was just trying to do something good. I’m in massive credit debt to do this.”

Murphy said that he recognized that his plan isn’t foolproof. While similar domains have already been obtained and still remain up for purchase, he thinks keeping fringe-right wingers from the one’s he purchased has made a difference. He said he believes such short concise domain names are important in search rankings. “Names are really powerful. That’s why people pay millions for certain domains,” he said.

After buying the URLs, things were initially quiet. But on Saturday night a Reddit post detailing information about the domain registrations went viral. While the message didn’t directly identify Murphy, it gave instructions on how to find his name alongside speculation that he must be running an anti-lockdown astroturf campaign—even though Murphy’s intentions were the exact opposite. On Twitter, people doxxed him, posting his address and home number.

“I bought these names to try to stop the insanity, basically. And it just turned to insanity,” he said. He felt forced to unplug his phone, and his inbox exploded with messages attacking him—and potentially trying to hack him..."

Dietrich Stout has a wealth of fascinating insight into early human brain development on The Paleolithic Technology Laboratory studies website. Well worth a deep dive.

This is a great lunchtime lecture to tune into if you have any interest in how the human brain came to be.

Imagine this: It’s morning and you are starting your daily routine—go to work, bring kids to school, etc. You are quite late. You lift the door handle of the car; able to recognize your fingerprints, the car unlocks. You speak, “To Helen’s school please, then Martin’s school, then to work.” The car doesn’t respond. It’s rush hour and you need to bring the kids to school on time and then rush to work.

Your car’s machine-learning algorithm predicts you are likely to get a fine or worse, despite your intentions to drive consciously when kids are on board and stay under the speed limit. Almost like the “pre-crime” police units of the Tom Cruise sci-fi hit “Minority Report,” the algorithm uses police report data on parents who speed during rush hour when late for school or work. It neglects your law-abiding attitude. Fortunately, the personal digital assistant in your watch, sensing your car has been disabled, is already contacting the schools and your workplace with your estimated times of arrival and an excuse for your tardiness.

Does this seem like a distant future? Recently, an AI-based system named COMPAS has been used to forecast which criminals are most likely to re-offend. Predictions of re-offending convicts produced risk assessments followed by U.S. judges in courtrooms. However, when the algorithm was wrong it generated higher error rates in minority ethnic groups, e.g. had a higher false-positive rate in Black than in white people. Black people re-offending was more likely a wrong prediction just as for safety-concerned parents in the fictional scenario above.

Although it is not easy (if not impossible) to even loosely predict the future, we know that in the coming decade high-tech products, such as smart drones or driverless cars (so-called near-future technologies), are going to rely heavily on machine learning. Nevertheless, machine-learning algorithms will almost certainly harbor some form of implicit bias, e.g. cognitive, social, racial, etc. For example, Caliskan’s et al.’s academic paper, “Semantics Derived Automatically from Language Corpora Contain Human-Like Biases,” published in the leading academic journal Science, described an autonomous intelligent agent associating words like “parents” and “wedding” mainly to feminine names while on the contrary career-related words like “professional and salary” when assigned to men. Several studies exploring stereotypes data used to train AI provide evidence that the word-associating agent flawed strategy may be used to train a CV-analyzer service with consequences on gender balance. Interestingly, Caliskan et al.’s experiment replicated the extensive proof of bias found in previous studies involving human participants, perhaps reflecting debatable beliefs in our society.

The question, therefore, is: How can we uncover and mitigate bias in near-future technologies before such technologies become integrated into the fabric of society? Another way to put it is: How can designers and engineers developing these near-future technologies ensure that they are no unwittingly discriminating against or excluding certain groups of people.

Check out some of the extraordinary projects coming out of the the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group. A symbiotic future looks a lot cooler than previously expected.

As far as my work goes, a lot of what I do today is inspired by creating new forms of collaboration; thinking about machines or environments as creative catalysts. It stems from an interest in thinking about authorship and technology. Because I started so young with computers, after a while I wondered, where was my creative agency in software? As I became proficient with the tools as an expert, I felt there was something missing.

I found that I missed physical gesture when working with computers—specifically the gestural instincts I’ve developed through violin and drawing. Sometimes working with software and code can feel like one is relegated to the screen. So that feeling led me to explore working with robots through the medium of performance, to re-engage with physical spaces. Robots are typically regarded as industrial tools, but I’ve always thought of them as a kind of kinetic sculpture. Being able to invent my own human/machine collaboration processes has been really empowering.

The MIT Media Lab is one of the most visible parts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — both as an imposing glass-and-metal edifice in Cambridge and as an endless source of new technologies, from Lego Mindstorms and Guitar Hero, to e-ink, touchscreens, and in-vehicle GPS. Pattie Maes, the founder and director of the lab’s influential Fluid Interfaces research group, has spent much of her career investigating artificial intelligence, cognitive augmentation, and human-computer interaction, and in recent years, she says, she’s become increasingly conscious of those technologies’ capacity for bleak unintended consequences. So, turning to a pop-culture touchstone that addresses some of those darker repercussions, this year she’s giving all her new grad students an unusual assignment: watch every episode of the dystopian science fiction show Black Mirror.

“I just think that as designers of computer technologies that will get into the hands of 2.5 billion people, that anyone who was involved in designing new services and new interfaces should really think carefully about what impact the technologies they develop will have on society and on people’s lives,” she said. “Black Mirror is of course a very negative version of how things can go wrong, but I think it’s useful for all of the students and anyone involved in the development of new digital services and systems to look at that and keep that in mind as something to avoid.”

Design fiction stories provide a novel way for designers, engineers and futurists (among others) to think about the impact of technology from a human perspective and link this to possible future needs. With a mixture of logic and imagination, design fiction can reveal aspects of how technology may be adopted and used, starting conversations about its future ramifications.

For example, the short story “Crime-sourcing” explores what might happen if AI was to use crowdsourced information and a criminal database to predict who might commit a murder. The researchers found that because the database was full of people in minority ethnic groups who, for social reasons, were statistically more likely to reoffend, the “crime-sourcing” model was more likely to wrongly suspect minorities than white people.

You don’t have to be a talented writer or make a slick film to produce design fiction. Brainstorming activities involving cards and storyboards have been used to develop design fiction and help develop the storytelling process. Making workshops that used these kinds of tools more common would enable more engineers, entrepreneurs and policymakers to use this method of assessment. And making the resulting work publicly available would help to expose potential biases in technologies before they affect society.

Encouraging designers to create and share more stories in this way would ensure the narrative that underpins new technology wouldn’t just present a positive picture, nor an extremely negative or dystopian one. Instead, people will be able to appreciate both aspects of what is happening around us.