Sunday, October 27, 2019
Wall Mount or on a Stand? What You Need to Know Before Setting Up Your New TV
Streaming TV War Kicks Into Gear With Apple, Disney Launches
China Passes Cryptography Law as It Gears Up for Digital Currency
ETtech Top 5: Apple India's falling revenue, Rise of desi content creators abroad & more
Incode, which is developing a biometric identity platform for enterprises, raises a $10M seed round (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
Incode, which is developing a biometric identity platform for enterprises, raises a $10M seed round — Incode, a San Francisco startup developing what it describes as an omnichannel biometric identity platform, today announced that it's raised $10 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors.
Flipkart unit's losses rise 40% to Rs 1,624 crore
E-cigarette traders write to state govts seeking help against ban
In search of a low-hanging fruit
Streaming TV war kicks into high gear with Apple, Disney launches
UPI hits 1 billion transactions in October
Apple India slips as iPhone sales slow
Redmi 8 Set to Go on Sale Today via Flipkart, Mi.com, Mi Home Stores
Sources: after SEC injunction, Telegram Open Network ICO investors extended the deadline for the TON token launch from the end of October to April 30 (CoinDesk)
Sources: after SEC injunction, Telegram Open Network ICO investors extended the deadline for the TON token launch from the end of October to April 30 — Investors in Telegram's blockchain project have opted to stick with the firm despite the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) …
Stochastic disaster
As I write this, massive fires are erupting all over California, and massive protests are erupting all over the world. Is the former a facet of the climate crisis? Is the latter a symptom of hyperpolarization caused by hyperconnectivity? Yes, I mean no, I mean it’s impossible to say. That’s what it means to live in a stochastic age.
During the past few weeks there has been an extraordinary outburst of popular protests in all corners of the world.
Here's a map of the locations, and primary causes, of recent unrest around the world. @gzeromedia pic.twitter.com/V7Lelxw9kj
— Xavi Ruiz
(@xruiztru) October 23, 2019
This is an era of stochastic terrorism: “The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.” It is also an era of climate crisis as a stochastic disaster, causing a whole spectrum of ‘random’ natural disasters to become ever more probable and terrible.
Is ours also an era of stochastic political strife? Does the world’s increased connectivity, aided by social media’s inherent amplification of outrage, have second-, third-, or fourth-order effects which heat rhetoric and protest, triggering secession movements and massive rejection of the status quo? Is our hyperconnectivity the political equivalent of global warming?
If so, it would explain a lot. The baffling and horrifying rise of neo-Nazis and white supremacy around the world. The increasing political polarization of seemingly every polity. The growing dearth of anything like a political middle ground. The huge protests scattered across the globe, against almost every form of government.
But let’s not be too quick to diagnose this. This might be somehow periodic: terrorism and protests were both more common (per capita) in the late 60s and early 70s than they are today. It might just be a symptom of, and backlash against, a global trend of neoliberalism-morphing-towards-antidemocratic-oligarchy, which, sadly, is the recent economic / political history of much of the world.
The hypothesis is that this stochastic strife has something to do with technology and hyperconnectivity, that across the world we’re experiencing the political equivalent of global warming. Intriguing, but far from proven. How might we test or measure it?
The obvious test is to introduce a control group, A/B across a representative slice of the planet — but that seems pretty unlikely, and I’m not aware of any reliable quantitative measures of political strife, and either way it suffers from the inevitable problem that it’s impossible to tease out just one of the myriad factors which accumulate (or not) into political fury and protest.
— At least it’s impossible at any given moment. But we do know that connectivity is likely to just keep increasing, especially across the developing world, and that averaged across nations it is likely to change faster than almost any other factor at play.
So if this hypothesis is correct, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Political outrage, massive protests, and secession movements will continue to grow worldwide, eventually at a pace which makes California wildfires seem leisurely.
Let’s hope that either the hypothesis is proved wrong, or that we find a new way, transcending traditional nation-states, to distribute political power … before all those eruptions turn into conflagrations.
A profile of Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the chess-obsessed intelligence chief who oversees UAE's $1.5T sovereign wealth and wants to make UAE an AI superpower (Bradley Hope/Wired)
Bradley Hope / Wired : A profile of Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the chess-obsessed intelligence chief who oversees UAE's $1.5T sover...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
