The Waving Cat

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Just enough City

By Peter Bihr
In IoT, policy, Smart Cities
8 Min read
J

In this piece, I’m advocating for a Smart City model based on restraint, and focused first and foremost on citizen needs and rights.

A little while ago, the ever-brilliant and eloquent Rachel Coldicutt wrote a piece on the role of public service internet, and why it should be a model of restraint. It’s titled Just enough Internet, and it resonated deeply with me. It was her article that inspired not just this piece’s title but also its theme: Thank you, Rachel!

Rachel argues that public service internet (broadcasters, government services) shouldn’t compete with commercial competitors by commercial metrics, but rather use approaches better suited to their mandate: Not engagement and more data, but providing the important basics while collecting as little as possible. (This summary doesn’t do Rachel’s text justice, she makes more, and more nuanced points there, so please read her piece, it’s time well spent.)

I’ll argue that Smart Cities, too, should use an approach better suited to their mandate—an approach based on (data) restraint, and on citizens’ needs & rights.

This restraint and reframing is important because it prevents mission creep; it also alleviates the carbon footprint of all those services.

Enter the Smart City

Wherever we look on the globe, we see so-called Smart City projects popping up. Some are incremental, and add just some sensors. Others are blank slate, building whole connected cities or neighborhoods from scratch. What they have in commons is that they mostly are built around a logic of data-driven management and optimization. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, management consultant Peter Drucker famously said, and so Smart Cities tend to measure… everything. Or so they try.

Of course, sensors only measure so many things, like physical movement (of people, or goods, or vehicles) through space, or the consumption and creation of energy. But thriving urban life is made up of many more things, and many of those cannot be measured as easily: Try measuring opportunity or intention or quality of life, and most Smart City management dashboards will throw an error: File not found.

The narrative of the Smart City is based fundamentally that of optimizing a machine to run as efficiently as possible. It’s neoliberal market thinking in its purest form. (Greenfield and Townsend and Morozov and many other Smart City critics have made those points much more eloquently before.) But that doesn’t reflect urban life. The human side of it is missing, a glaring hole right in the center of that particular vision.

Instead of putting citizens in that spot in the center, the “traditional” Smart City model aims to build better (meaning: more efficient, lower cost) services to citizens by collecting, collating, analyzing data. It’s the logic of global supply chains and predictive maintenance and telecommunications networks and data analytics applied to the public space. (It’s no coincidence of the large tech vendors in that space come from either one of those backgrounds.)

The city, however, is no machine to be run at maximum efficiency. It’s a messy agora, with competing and often conflicting interests, and it needs slack in the system: Slack and friction all increase resilience in the face of larger challenges, as do empowered citizens and municipal administrations. The last thing any city needs is to be fully algorithmically managed at maximum efficiency just to come to a grinding halt when — not if! — the first technical glitch happens, or some company ceases their business.

Most importantly, I’m convinced that depending on context, collecting data in public space can be a fundamental risk to a free society—and that it’s made even worse if the data collection regime is outside of the public’s control.

The option of anonymity plays a crucial role for the freedom of assembly, of organizing, of expressing thoughts and political speech. If sensitive data is collected in public space (even if it’s not necessarily personably identifiable information!) then the trust in the collecting entity needs to be absolute. But as we know from political science, the good king is just another straw man, and that given the circumstance even the best government can turn bad quickly. History has taught us the crucial importance of checks & balances, and of data avoidance.

We need a Smart City model of restraint

Discussing publicly owned media, Rachel argues:

It’s time to renegotiate the tacit agreement between the people, the market and the state to take account of the ways that data and technology have nudged behaviours and norms and changed the underlying infrastructure of everyday life.

This holds true for the (Smart) City, too: The tacit agreement between the people, the market and the state is that, roughly stated, the government provides essential services to its citizens, often with the help of the market, and with the citizens’ interest at the core. However, when we see technology companies lobby governments to green-light data-collecting pilot projects with little accountability in public space, that tacit agreement is violated. Not the citizens’ interests but those multinationals’ business models move into the center of these considerations.

There is no opt-out in public space. So when collecting meaningful consent to the collection of data about citizens is hard or impossible, that data must not be collected, period. Surveillance in public space is more often detrimental to free societies than not. You know this! We all know this!

Less data collected, and more options of anonymity in public space, make for a more resilient public sphere. And what data is collected should be made available to the public at little or no cost, and to commercial interests only within a framework of ethical use (and probably for a fee).

What are better metrics for living in a (Smart) City?

In order to get to better Smart Cities, we need to think about better, more complete metrics than efficiency & cost savings, and we need to determine those (and all other big decisions about public space) through a strong commitment to participation: From external experts to citizens panels to digital participation platforms, there are many tools at our disposal to make better, more democratically legitimized decisions.

In that sense I cannot offer a final set of metrics to use. However, I can offer some potential starting points for a debate. I believe that every Smart City projects should be evaluated against the following aspects:

  • Would this substantially improve sustainability as laid out in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) framework?
  • Is meaningful participation built into the process at every step from framing to early feedback to planning to governance? Are the implications clear, and laid out in an accessible, non-jargony way?
  • Are there safeguards in place to prevent things from getting worse than before if something doesn’t work as planed?
  • Will it solve a real issue and improve the life of citizens? If in doubt, cut it out.
  • Will participation, accountability, resilience, trust and security (P.A.R.T.S.) all improve through this project?

Obviously those can only be starting points.

The point I’m making is this: In the Smart City, less is more.

City administrations should optimize for thriving urban live and democracy; for citizens and digital rights — which also happen to be human rights; for resilience and opportunity rather than efficiency. That way we can create a canvas to be painted by citizens, administration and — yes! — the market, too.

We can only manage what we can measure? Not necessarily. Neither the population or the urban organism need to be managed; just given a robust framework to thrive within. We don’t always need real time data for every decision — we can also make good decision based on values and trust in democratic processes, and by giving a voice to all impacted communities. We have a vast body of knowledge from decades of research around urban planning and sociology, and many other areas: Often enough we know the best decisions and it’s only politics that keeps us from enacting them.

We can change that, and build the best public space we know to build. Our cities will be better off for it.

About the author

Just for completeness’ sake so you can see where I’m coming from, I’m basing this on years of working at least occasionally on Smart City projects. My thinking is informed by work around emerging tech and its impact on society, and a strong focus on responsible technology that puts people first. Among other things I’ve co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit community that promotes responsible tech, and led the development of the Trustable Technology Mark. I was a Mozilla Fellow in 2018-19 and am an Edgeryders Fellow in 2019-20. You can find my bio here.

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What happens when one product in a family of connected products fails?

By Peter Bihr
In connected world, digital rights
5 Min read
W

About a year ago, we changed our home audio setup to “smart” speakers: We wanted to be able to stream directly from Spotify, as well we from our phones. We also wanted to avoid introducing yet another microphone into our living room. (The kitchen is, hands down, the only place where a voice assistant makes real sense to me personally. Your mileage may vary.) Preferably, there should be a line-in as well; I’m old school that way.

During my research I learned that the overlap of circles in this Venn diagram of speakers that are (a) connected (“smart”) for streaming, (b) have good sound and (c) don’t have a microphone is… very thin indeed.

The Venn diagram of speakers that are connected (“smart”), good and have no microphone

The Sonos range looked best to me; except for those pesky microphones. Our household is largely voice assistant free, minus the phones, where we just deactivated the assistants to whatever degree we could.

In the end, we settled for a set of Bang & Olufsen Beoplay speakers for living room and kitchen: Solid brand, good reputation. High end. Should do just fine — and it better, given the price tag!

This is just for context. I don’t want to turn this into a product review. But let’s just say that we ran into some issues with one of the speakers. These issues appeared to be software related. And while from the outside they looked like they should be easy to fix, it turned out the mechanisms to deliver the fixes were somewhat broken themselves.

Long story short: I’m now trying to return the speakers. Which made me realize that completely different rules apply than I’m used to. In Germany, where we are based, consumer protection laws are reasonably strong, so if something doesn’t work you can usually return it without too much hassle.

But with a set of connected speakers, we have an edge case. Or more accurately, a whole stack of edge cases.

  • The product still fulfills the basic function, just in a way that is so diminished and awkward to get to work because of a software issue that it’s too much to do on a daily basis, meaning the speakers simply stay off. It kinda works, kinda doesn’t. Certainly doesn’t work as advertised.
  • If one of these gets returned and I wanted to switch to a different brand, then I’d be stuck with the other speakers in the set, which are now expensive paperweights: Connected products work in families, or so-called platform ecosystems. One without the other just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the chain that breaks as soon as the weakest link breaks. So can I return all of them because there is a software issue with one of them?

This is going to be an interesting process, I’m afraid. Can we return the whole family and switch on over to a different make of speakers? Or are we stuck with an expensive set of speakers that while not quite broken, is very much unusable in our context?

If so, then at least I know never to buy connected speakers again. Rather, then I guess I’d recycle these and instead go back to a high end analog speaker set with some external streaming connector – knowing full well that that connector will be useless in a few years time but that the speakers and amp would be around and working flawlessly for 15-20 years, like my old ones did.

And that is the key insight here for our peers in the industry: If your product in this nascent field fails because of lacking quality management, then you leave scorched earth. Consumers aren’t going to trust your products any more, sure. But they are unlikely to trust anyone else’s, either.

The falling tide lowers all boats.

So let’s get not just the products right: In consumer IoT, all too often we think in families/ecosystems. So we have to consider long-term software updates (and mechanisms to deliver them, and fall-backs to those mechanisms…) as well as return policies in case something goes wrong with one of the products. And while we’re at it, we need to equally upgrade consumer protection regulation to deal with these issues of ecosystems and software updates.

This is the only way to ensure consumer trust. So we can reap the benefits of innovation without suffering all the externalized costs as well as unintended consequences of a job sloppily done.

(See also the ThingsCon Trustable Technology Mark, Better IoT, Tech Transformed.)

Update (Oct 2019): Turns out other companies also start recognizing that there’s a demand for mic-free speakers: Sonos just launched a speaker that they market specifically for it being mic-free, and it’s otherwise identical to one of their staples. (It’s called the One SL; I imagine the “SL” stands for “streamlined” or “stop listening” but I might be projecting.)

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Developing better urban metrics for Smart Cities

By Peter Bihr
In connected world, digital rights, Digital Transformation, Smart Cities
6 Min read
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Photo by Noralí Emilio on Unsplash

When we embed connected technologies — sensors, networks, etc. — into the public space*, we create connected public space. In industry parlance, this is called a Smart City. (I prefer “connected city”, but let’s put the terminology discussion on the back burner for now.) And data networks change the way we live.

* Note: Increasingly, the term “public space” has itself come under attack. In many cities, formerly public (as in publicly owned & governed) has been privatized, even if it’s still accessibly by the public, more or less. Think of a shopping mall, or the plazas that are sometimes attached to a shopping mall: You can walk in, but a mall cop might enforce some house rules that were written not by citizens but the corporation that owns the land. I find this not just highly problematic, I also recommend flat out rejecting that logic as a good way forward. Urban space — anything outside closed buildings, really — should, for the most part, be owned by the public, and even where for historical reasons it can’t be owned, it should at least be governed by the public. This means the rules should be the same in a park, a shopping mall-adjacent plaza, and the street; they should be enforced by (publicly employed) police rather than (privately employed) mall cops. Otherwise there’s no meaningful recourse for mistreatment, there’s no ownership, citizens are relegated from stakeholders to props/consumers.

Networks and data tend not to ease but to reinforce power dynamics, so we need to think hard about what type of Smart City we want to live in:

  • Do we want to allow people to get faster service for a fee (“Skip the line for $5”), or prefer everyone to enjoy the same level of service, independent of their income?
  • Do we want to increase the efficiency for 90% of the population through highly centralized services even if it means making the life of the other 10% much harder, or do we plan for a more resilient service delivery for all, even if it means the overall service delivery is a tad slower?
  • Do we want to cut short-term spending through privatization even if it means giving up control over infrastructure, or do we prioritize key infrastructure in our budgeting process so that the government can ensure quality control and service delivery in the long term, even if it costs more in the short term?

These are blunt examples, but I reckon you can tell where I’m going with this: I think democratic life requires public space and urban infrastructure to be available to all citizens and stakeholders, and to work well for all citizens. Pay for play should only apply for added non-essential services.

“Don’t confuse the data you can capture with the things you need to know!”

In order to shape policies in this space meaningfully, we need to think about what the things are that we prioritize. Here, a brief warning is in place: the old management adage “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” is problematic to say the least. All too often we see organizations act on the things they can measure, even if these things are not necessarily meaningful but just easy to measure. Don’t confuse the data you can capture with the things you need to know!

What do we want to prioritize, and maybe even measure?

That said, what are the things we want to prioritize? And might it even be possible to measure them?

Here I don’t have final answers, just some pointers that I hope might lead us into the right direction. These are angles to be explored whenever we consider a new smart city project, at any scale — even, and maybe especially, for pilot projects! Let’s consider them promising starting points:

Participation
Has there been meaningful participation in the early feedback, framing, planning, governance processes? If feedback has been very limited and slow, what might the reasons be? Is it really lack of interest, or maybe the barrier to engagement was just too high? Were the documents to long, too full of jargon, to hard to access? (See Bianca Wylie’s thread on Sidewalk Labs’ 1.500+ page development plan.) Were the implications, the pros and cons, not laid out in an accessible way? For example, in Switzerland there’s a system in place that makes sure that in a referendum both sides have to agree on the language that explains pros and cons, so as to make sure both sides’ ideas are represented fairly and accessibly.

Sustainability
Would these changes significantly improve sustainability? The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) framework might offer a robust starting point, even though we should probably aim higher given the political (and real!) climate.

Will it solve a real issue, improve the life for citizens?
Is this initiative going to solve a real issue and improve lives meaningfully? This is often going to be tricky to answer, but if there’s no really good reason to believe it’s going to make a meaningful positive impact then it’s probably not a good idea to pursue. The old editors’ mantra might come in handy: If in doubt, cut it out. There are obvious edge cases here: Sometimes, a pilot project is necessary to explore something truly new; in those cases, there must be a plausible, credible, convincing hypothesis in place that can be tested.

Are there safeguards in place to prevent things from getting worse than before if something doesn’t work as planned?
Unintended consequences are unavoidable in complex systems. But there are ways to mitigate risks, and to make sure that the fallback for a failed systems are not worse then the original status. If any project would be better while working perfectly but worse while failing, then that deserves some extra thought. If it works better for some groups but not for others, that’s usually a red flag, too.

When these basic goals are met, and only then, should we move on to more traditional measurements, the type that dominates the discourse today, like:

  • Will this save taxpayers’ money, and lead to more cost-effective service delivery?
  • Will this lead to more efficient service delivery?
  • Will this make urban management easier or more efficient for the administration?
  • Will this pave the way for future innovation?

These success factors / analytical lenses are not grand, impressive ideas: They are the bare minimum we should secure before engaging in anything more ambitious. Think of them as the plumbing infrastructure of the city: Largely unnoticed while everything works, but if it ever has hiccups, it’s really bad.

We should stick to basic procedural and impact driven questions first. We should incorporate the huge body of research findings from urban planners, sociologists, and political scientists rather than reinvent the wheel. And we should never, ever be just blinded by a shiny new technological solution to a complex social or societal issue.

Let’s learn to walk before we try to run.

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How to plan & govern a smart city?

By Peter Bihr
In digital rights, Digital Transformation, Smart Cities
6 Min read
H

Taking the publication of Sidewalk Labs’ Master Innovation and Development Plan plan for the smart city development at Toronto’s waterfront (“Toronto Tomorrow”) as an occasion to think out loud about smart cities in general, and smart city governance in particular, I took to Twitter the other day.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing there, here’s the gist: I did a close reading of a tiny (!) section of this giant data dump that is the 4 volume, 1.500+ page Sidewalk Labs plan. The section I picked was the one that John Lorinc highlighted in this excellent article — a couple of tables on page 222 of the last of these 4 volumes, in the section “Supplemental Tables”. This is the section that gets no love from the developers; it’s also the section that deals very explicitly with governance of this proposed development. So it’s pretty interesting. This, by the way, is also roughly my area of research of my Edgeryders fellowship.

On a personal note: It’s fascinating to me how prescient our speakers at Cognitive Cities Conference were back in 2011 – eight years is a long time in this space, and it feels like we invited exactly the right folks back then!

Smart cities & governance: A thorny relationship

In this close reading I focused on exactly that: What does governance mean in a so-called smart city context. What is it that’s being governed and how, and maybe most importantly, by whom?

Rather than re-hash the thread here, just a quick example to illustrate the kind of issues. Where this plan speaks of publicly accessible spaces and decision-making taking into account community input, I argue that we need public spaces and full citizens rights. Defaults matter, and in cities we need the default to be public space and citizens to wield the final decision-making power over their environment. Not even the most benign or innovative company or other non-public entity is an adequate replacement for a democratically elected administration/government, and any but the worst governments — cumbersome as a government might be in some cases — is better than the alternatives.

My arguments didn’t go unnoticed, either. Canadian newspaper The Star picked up my thread on the thorny issue of governance and put it in context of other experts critical of privatizing the urban space; the few others I know from the thread make me think I’m in good company there.

What’s a smart city, anyway?

As a quick, but worthwhile diversion I highly recommend the paper Smart cities as corporate storytelling (Ola Söderström, Till Paasche, Francisco Klauser, published in City vol. 18 (2014) issue 3). In it, the authors trace not just the origin of the term smart cities but also the deliberate framing of the term that serves mostly the vendors of technologies and services in this space, in efficient and highly predictable ways. They base their analysis on IBM’s Smarter City campaign (highlights mine):

”this story is to a large extent propelled by attempts to create an ‘obligatory passage point’ (…) in the transformation of cities into ‘smart’ ones. In other words it is conceived to channel urban development strategies through the technological solutions of IT companies.”

These stories are important and powerful:

“Stories are important because they provide actors involved in planning with an understanding of what the problem they have to solve is (…). More specifically, they play a central role in planning because they “can be powerful agents or aids in the service of change, as shapers of a new imagination of alternatives.” (….) stories are the very stuff of planning, which, fundamentally, is persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future.” (…)

The underlying logic is that of a purely data-driven, almost mechanical model of urban management that is overly simplistic and neither political, nor does it require expert matters. This logic is inherently faulty. Essentially, it disposes with the messiness that humans and all their pesky complex socio-cultural issues.

“In this approach, cities are no longer made of different – and to a large extent incommensurable – socio-technical worlds (education, business, safety and the like) but as data within systemic processes. (…) As a result, the analysis of these ‘urban themes’ no longer seem to require thematic experts familiar with the specifics of a ‘field’ but only data- mining, data interconnectedness and software-based analysis.

So: Governance poor, underlying logic poor. What could possibly go wrong.

A better way to approach smart city planning

In order to think better, more productively about how to approach smart cities, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

If you follow my tweets or my newsletter, you’ll have encountered the Vision for a Shared Digital Europe before. It’s a proposed alternative for anything digital in the EU that would, if adopted, replace the EU’s Digital Single Market (DSM). Where the EU thinks about the internet, it’s through this lens of the DSM — the lens of markets first and foremost. the Vision for a Shared Digital Europe (SDE) however proposes to replace this logic of market first through 4 alternative pillars:

  • Cultivate the Commons
  • Decentralize infrastructure
  • Enable self-determination
  • Empower public institutions

Image: Vision for a Shared Digital Europe (shared-digital.eu)

I think these 4 pillars should hold up pretty well in the smart city planning context. Please note just how different this vision is from what Sidewalk Labs (and the many other smart city vendors) propose:

  • Instead of publicly available spaces we would see true commons, including but not limited to space.
  • Instead of centralized data collection, we might see decentralization, meaning a broader, deeper ecosystem of offerings and more resilience (as opposed to just more efficiency).
  • Instead of being solicited for “community input”, citizens would actively shape and decide over their future.
  • And finally, instead of working around (or with, to a degree) public administrations, a smart city after this school of thought would double down on public institutions and give them a strong mandate, sufficient funding, an in-house capacity to match the industry’s.

It would make for a better, more democratic and more resilient city.

So I just want to put this out there. And if you’d like to explore this further together, please don’t hesitate to ping me.

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Monthnotes for March 2019

By Peter Bihr
In Smart Cities, work
6 Min read
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This installment of monthnotes features the wrap-up of a fellowship, updates on a PhD program I’ll be supervising for, a ThingsCon event, and an anniversary. Enjoy.

If you’d like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have limited availability but am always happy to have a chat. I’m currently doing the planning for Q3 and Q4 2019.

The Waving Cat turns 5

The Waving Cat just turned 5 officially. Which is still mind blowing to me. It’s been quite the ride, and 5 incredibly productive years.

In this time I’ve written 3 book-ish things and many reports, co-published multiple magazine-ish things and a proper academic paper. Co-chaired some amazing conferences like ThingsCon, Interaction16, UIKonf and more. Worked on strategy, policy and research across a pretty wide range of industries and clients from global tech to non-profit to governments. Was on a number of juries, and mentored a bunch of teams. Was a Mozilla Fellow. Launched a consumer trustmark. Helped kickstart a number of exciting projects including ThingsCon, Zephyr Berlin, Dearsouvenir and the Trustable Technology Mark. Spoke at about 40 events. Wrote, contributed or was quoted in about 60 articles.

So yeah, it’s been a good 5 years run. On to the next round of adventures.

(By the way, that anniversary is the company’s; the website & blog go way, way further back. All the way to like 2005.)

Wrapping up my Mozilla Fellowship

With the end of February, my Mozilla Fellowship officially wrapped up. (That is, the active part of the fellowship; Mozilla makes a point of the affiliation being for life.)

Technically this fellowship was about launching ThingsCon’s Trustable Technology Mark (which got so much great media coverage!) but it was so much more.

I’m glad and grateful for the opportunity to be warmly welcomed into this fantastic community and to meet and work with so many ambitious, smart, caring and overall awesome people.

Nothing could symbolize this better than the lovely ceremony the team put together for Julia Kloiber’s and my farewell. Unicorn gavels and flower crowns and laminated “for life” cards and bubbly were all involved. Thank you! ?

OpenDott is nearly ready

The collaboration with Mozilla isn’t ending anytime soon. OpenDott.org is a paid PhD program in responsible tech that is hosted by University of Dundee in collaboration with Mozilla and a host of smaller orgs including ThingsCon, and that I’ll supervising a PhD for.

I’m not logistically involved in this stage but my understanding is that the final paperwork is being worked out with the 5 future PhDs right now: The last YES’s collected, the last forms being signed, etc. Can’t wait for this to kick off for real, even though I’ll be only marginally involved. I mean, come on – a PhD in responsible tech? How awesome is that.

ThingsCon

The new ThingsCon website, thingscon.org, is by now more or less up and running and complete. Just in time for a (for ThingsCon somewhat unusual) event in May: A small and intimate unconference in Berlin about responsible paths in tech, economy, and beyond. Details and how to apply here.

Zephyrs: going fast

We’ve been making our ultimate travel pants under the Zephyr Berlin brand for about 2 years now. I’m not sure what happened but we must have landed on a relevant recommendations list or two as we’ve been getting a pretty sharp spike in orders these last few weeks. This is fantastic and a lot of fun. But the women’s cut is almost out now. We don’t know if/when we’ll produce the next batch, so if you’re looking to score one of those, don’t wait too long.

The Newsletter Experiment, continued

As I’ve mentioned in the last monthnotes, over in my personal(ish) newsletter Connection Problem I started an experiment with memberships. The gist of it is, I publish about 100K words a year, most of which are critical-but-constructive takes about tech industry and how we can maximize responsible tech rather than exploitation. You can support this independent writing by joining the membership.

It’s all happening under the principle of “unlocked commons”, meaning members support writing that will be available in the commons, for free, continuously. You can learn more in the newsletter archive or on this page. It’s an exciting experiment for me, and hopefully the output is something that’s useful and enjoyable for you, too.

AI, ethics, smart cities

I was invited to Aspen Institute’s annual conference on artificial intelligence, Humanity Defined: Politics and Ethics in the AI Age. It’s a good event, bringing (mostly US based) AI experts to Germany and putting them onstage with (mostly German) policy experts to spark some debate. I’ve been to this since it started last year and enjoyed it. This time, my highlight was some background on the European High Level Group on AI Ethics Guidelines shared there by one of the group’s ethicists, Thomas Metzinger. He made a convincing case that this might be the best AI ethics doc currently, globally (it’s going to be published next week); and that it has glaring, painful shortcomings, especially as far as red lines are concerned – areas or types of AI applications that Europe would not engage in. These red lines are notably absent in the final document. Which seems… a shame? More on that soon.

I’m just mentioning this here because there are a few exciting projects coming up that will give me an opportunity to explore the intersection of smart cities, policy, AI/machine decision learning and how insights from creating the Trustable Technology Mark can lead to better, more responsible smart cities, tech governance, and applied AI ethics. More on that soon.

What’s next?

This week I’ll be at the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) in Valencia, Spain. Then later in the month I’ll be teaching for a day about trustable tech at Hochschule Darmstadt at the kind invitation of Prof. Andrea Krajewski. Otherwise it’s drafting outlines, writing some project proposals, and lots of meetings and writing.

If you’d like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have limited availability but am always happy to have a chat. I’m currently doing the planning for Q3 and Q4 2019.

Have a great April!

Yours truly,
P.

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The 3 I’s: Incentives, Interests, Implications

By Peter Bihr
In policy
5 Min read
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When discussing how to make sure that tech works to enrich society — rather than extract value from many for the benefit of a few — we often see a focus on incentives. I argue that that’s not enough: We need to consider and align incentives, interests, and implications.

Incentives

Incentives are, of course, mostly thought of as an economic motivator for companies: Maximize profit by lowering costs or offsetting or externalizing it, or charging more (more per unit, more per customer, or simply charging more customers). Sometimes incentives can be non-economic, too, like in the case of positive PR. For individuals, it’s conventionally thought of in the context of consumers trying to get their products as cheaply as possible.

All this of course is based on what in economics is called rational choice theory, a framework for understanding social and economic behavior: “The rational agent is assumed to take account of available information, probabilities of events, and potential costs and benefits in determining preferences, and to act consistently in choosing the self-determined best choice of action.” (Wikipedia) Rational choice theory isn’t complete, though, and might simply be wrong; we know, for example, that all kinds of cognitive biases are also at play in decision-making. The latter is for individuals, of course. But organizations inherently have their own blind spots and biases, too.

So this focus on incentives, while near-ubiquitous, is myopic: While incentives certainly play a role in decision making, they are not the only factor at play. Neither do companies only work towards maximizing profits (I know my own doesn’t, and I daresay many take other interests into account, too). Nor do consumers only optimize their behavior towards saving money (at the expense, say, of secure connected products). So we shouldn’t over-index on getting the incentives right and instead take other aspects into account, too.

Interests

When designing frameworks that aim at a better interplay of technology, society and individual, we should look beyond incentives. Interests, however vaguely we might define those, can clearly impact decision making. For example, if a company (large or small, doesn’t matter) wants to innovate in a certain area, they might willingly forgo large profits and instead invest in R&D or multi-stakeholder dialog. This could help them in their long term prospects through either new, better products (linking back to economic incentives) or by building more resilient relationships with their stakeholders (and hence reducing potential friction with external stakeholders).

Other organizations might simply be mission driven and focus on impact rather than profit, or at least balance both differently. Becoming a B-Corp for example has positive economic side effects (higher chance of retaining talent, positive PR) but more than that it allows the org to align its own interests with those of key stakeholder groups, namely not just investors but also customers and staff.

Consumers, equally, are not unlikely by any means to prioritize price over other characteristics: Organic and Fairtrade food or connected products with quality seals (like our own Trustable Technology Mark) might cost more but offer benefits that others don’t. Interests, rational or not, influence behavior.

And, just as an aside, there are plenty of cases where “irrationally” responsible behavior by an organization (like investing more than legally required in data protection, or protecting privacy better than industry best practice) can offer a real advantage in the market if the regulatory framework changes. I know at least one Machine Learning startup that had a party when GDPR came into effect since all of a sudden, their extraordinary focus on privacy meant they where ahead of the pack while the rest of the industry was in catch-up mode.

Implications

Finally, we should consider the implications of the products coming onto the market as well as the regulatory framework they live under. What might this thing/product/policy/program do to all the stakeholders — not just the customers who pay for the product? How might it impact a vulnerable group? How will it pay dividends in the future, and for whom?

It is especially this last part that I’m interested in: The dividends something will pay in the future. Zooming in even more, the dividends that infrastructure thinking will pay in the future.

Take Ramez Naam’s take on decarbonization — he makes a strong point that early solar energy subsidies (first in Germany, then China and the US) helped drive development of this new technology, which in turn drove the price down and so started a virtuous circle of lower price > more uptake > more innovation > lower price > etc. etc.

We all know what happened next (still from Ramez):

“Electricity from solar power, meanwhile, drops in cost by 25-30% for every doubling in scale. Battery costs drop around 20-30% per doubling of scale. Wind power costs drop by 15-20% for every doubling. Scale leads to learning, and learning leads to lower costs. … By scaling the clean energy industries, Germany lowered the price of solar and wind for everyone, worldwide, forever.”

Now, solar energy is not just competitive. In some parts of the world it is the cheapest, period.

This type of investment in what is essentially infrastructure — or at least infrastructure-like! — pays dividends not just to the directly subsidized but to the whole larger ecosystem. This means significantly, disproportionately bigger impact. It creates and adds value rather than extracting it.

We need more infrastructure thinking, even for areas that are, like solar energy and the tech we need to harvest it, not technically infrastructure. It needs a bit of creative thinking, but it’s not rocket science.

We just need to consider and align the 3 I’s: incentives, interests, and implications.

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The Waving Cat