The "reading" of minds (Disturbing? Wonderful? AI is certainly significant...)

On Twitter, the explanation from Siqi Chen@blader:

·
Mar 3

"okay so AI can literally read our minds now. a team from osaka was able to reconstruct visual images from mri scan data using stable diffusion. first row is the image presented to the test subject, second row is the reconstructed image from mri data. wild. "

New German government calls for European ban on biometric mass surveillance

"The newly-agreed German government coalition has called for a Europe-wide ban on public facial recognition and other biometric surveillance.  This echoes the core demands of the Reclaim Your Face campaign which EDRi has co-led since 2020, through which over 65 civil society groups ask the EU and their national governments to outlaw biometric data mass surveillance. Today, 24 November 2021, the new German government announced their highly-anticipated coalition deal, including the strongest commitments seen so far in Europe to “rule … out” “biometric recognition in public”.  They further called to “reject comprehensive video surveillance and the use of biometric recording for surveillance purposes”. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the environmentalist Greens and the business-focused Free Democrats (FDP) jointly emphasised the vital importance of anonymity in public as well as online.  Their statement echoes the demands of over 65 groups in the Reclaim Your Face campaign, co-led by EDRi."

"iSpy with my little eye: Apple’s u-turn on privacy sets a precedent and threatens everyone’s security"

Image credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 3.0 US)

"Apple has just announced significant changes to their privacy settings for messaging and cloud services: first, it will scan all images sent by child accounts; second, it will scan all photos as they are being uploaded to iCloud. 

With these changes, Apple is threatening everyone’s privacy, security and confidentiality...

EDRi [[European Digital Rights] and other civil society groups have been warning of the risks of these proposed technological ‘solutions’. 

Despite the laudable goal to protect children, these changes in fact introduce measures that make everyone less safe by creating a ‘backdoor’ into our private lives. 

With Apple blessing these privacy-invasive technologies and the adoption of the recent interim CSAM legislation, we are deeply concerned that these practices will be normalised and promoted further by other companies and by policy-makers. We call on Apple to abandon these proposed changes and to step up against corporate and government surveillance."

Read more here.

Joan Subirats: Cities are spaces where things can change for better (int...

"A radical change is taking place. Cities around Europe – through platforms, movements and international networks – are creating paths for citizens to participate in and influence politics directly. Joan Subirats, one of the founders of Barcelona’s municipalist platform Barcelona en Comú, discusses how cities can deal with uncertainty and provide a new type of protection, reverse the trend of tech giants owning all our data, and even defy their nation-states on issues such as refugees."

"Captured" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

[A surveillance camera in Barcelona. MANEL LLADÓ.]

 “I’m the only foreigner in the Catalan government,” Italian, Francesca Bria used to sometimes say when introducing herself to a public audience. 

In the two years leading up to the pandemic, her team’s work on “digital sovereignty” for people living in the Catalan capital might prove to be as important as others' efforts on political sovereignty.

A Financial Times article gave her the cringe-inducing title “Barcelona’s Robin Hood of Data” but Bria’s official job name was CTO (Chief Technology Officer) for the city. 

Along with Amsterdam, under Bria's’ charge, Barcelona was one of the two big cities that ran a pilot program titled DECODE that aimed to “provide tools that put individuals in control of whether they keep their personal data private or share it for the public good.” It was funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme.

Invited to take up this position by Mayor Ada Colau, the legal framework her team produced might just have helped prevent the mistakes of other European cities and countries where the rights of citizens are fast being snatched by corporations operating hand in hand with governments and their agencies.

Recent government attempts to authorise drone surveillance by police in France were only barely defeated by public pressure. 

Their use for the so-called public good in the fight against terrorism and to ensure national security came out of the usual conservative arguments that don’t admit that new technology can violate basic human rights. 

With conservatives, the ends always justify the means, except when it hurts the most financially well off in society.

Echoing the history of especially the last 4 years in Catalonia, independent consultant and curator Marta Arniani Marta Arniani (who has worked in the same EU circles as Francesca Bria) said to me, "There have been cases of police beatings and if it’s a case of an individual citizen’s voice against the police, we know where power lies. That’s why it’s very important to [be able] to film the police. This is valid for France, for Catalonia, for Europe. It’s a matter of making these systems accountable. People who work in civil rights, lawyers for example, should be able to access which algorithms and surveillance tools are utilised, for instance through public registries. As emerged in my research for Digital Future Society on the gender dimension of digital welfare , the digitalisation of public services is mostly subcontracted to private companies: there is little know-how and social impact evaluation inside the public bodies, and no oversight from independent observers. Digitalisation should be an occasion to review the bias encoded in our public systems through centuries, so that they can be more inclusive; instead, the dominant solutionist approach is leading to automating inequalities. That's the title of a very good book, by the way!"

I very much share experts like Marta's concerns. Police and private drones are already flying with minimal legal restrictions in Barcelona but late last year the Spanish government approved the use of flying air taxis in Barcelona (and Santiago de Compostela; curiously both places being major foreign tourist destinations.)

My first question with this and every proposed legal or technological change is, ”Does it benefit the average person in any way? If not, then who does it benefit and who does it disadvantage?” Expensive helicopter rides only benefit those who can afford them and cause noise and visual pollution for everyone else.

The same basic question needs to be asked about new technology, including “biometric” facial recognition cameras. In my opinion, the answer is similar: the richest 1% (or 5%) of the population are those who gain from it. As usual.

[A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2021.]

"Oxford vaccine is safe, according to second stage study data"

[ Rumyana Vakarelska]

"The vaccine builds immunity, but still does not protect against infection."

"We have some really good news; the so-called "British 'A' vaccine being developed by scientists at Oxford University is entering its third phase of testing," Rumyana Vakarelska, a journalist in London, told Horizon's "Before All" program. She works for an American financial information and analysis corporation and covers Covid-19 and the impact on business.

Her comment is that the latest phase of clinical trials of the experimental coronavirus vaccine, developed by the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the major biotechnology companies, begins today in the United States. 

This is the first vaccine tested in the United States. The University of Oxford and one of the major pharmaceutical companies are also testing vaccines against Covid 19. This was announced last week from the rostrum of the British Parliament.

"The most important thing from the second stage of the study is that this vaccine is safe. It is likely to be implemented in early 2021 and the team's optimal plan is that most people can be vaccinated by April-May next year. "

In the third phase of testing the vaccine, there are also questions, the journalist believes.

"What is known so far is that the vaccine builds immunity, but still does not protect against infection. That is, if you get sick, you will get sick more easily and deaths will be reduced in the future. The vaccine will attack the virus and create antibodies and will create immunity. '

Rumyana Vakarelska explained that a gradual vaccination is expected , and the vaccine has so far been tested on the age group between 18 and 55. Testing has also begun on people between the ages of 59 and 65 and a second group for people over the age of 70.

The United Kingdom has ordered 100 million vaccines from the company, and the United States has ordered 400 million vaccines, although they are also developing a vaccine, Vakarelska explained.

When asked if there will be access to the vaccine at a good price, the journalism specified:

"The UK will do everything possible if the vaccine is completed successfully and in the third stage the transmission of the infection from person to person is prevented, the UK will help the vaccine reach everyone. The program for the UK provides for its distribution through GPs and will most likely be free. It is not yet known whether pharmacies will be available and available there. "

Vakarelska stressed that anti-epidemic measures, however, must not stop being observed, although we will be able to catch our breath if there is a vaccine.

"14 percent of people in the UK have said they will not get the vaccine, for the United States this percentage is 45 percent," said Vakarelska in connection with the anti-vaccine movements."

Original source from Bulgarian media BNR here.

"Blurred lives" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Quim Puig]

Without barely noticing it, we are routinely doing two things (or even more) at the same time. 

I don’t mean having the TV on in our houses, as Juan Goytisolo called it, “Spanishing on” in the background like in a typical bar here.

What I continually notice is that our daily lives are an action movie of driving while texting, texting while watching TV, watching while screen-scrolling, scrolling while not listening to our companions.

Without questioning, our species silently changes what we do. Only 25 years ago, the phone had a fixed place in the hallway. Now it’s wherever we go. Some use it to shop at midnight or gamble and simultaneously watch sport. 

We experience a collective near-addiction to the stimulation that technology provides and this means that we are caught in our own man-made bubble of fixation, at work, at home and in between.

Piled on top of this, personal identities are more and more undefined. The more fashionable among us are flexitarian, pan-sexual. What was private is now openly public. We are selfie-supermodels: silicon titty down-shots and dick-picks for the under 30s. 

Even what was someone else’s body can now be yours. There are women you can find wearing hair extensions from an unknown Chinese stranger.

Some do the opposite and cling to identity. I’m my race, let’s leave Europe, get out of MY country, “walls are good things, barbed wire can be beautiful” says Trump, “eat my shorts” says Homer Simpson.

And who still has a 20th century-style job? The blurring of life-lines has of course crossed over into the world of employment. Oh, you’re a consultant? He’s freelance, she’s a temp/intern/trainee and that kid makes big money from playing computer games. The rest of them all have zero-hours contracts.

In fact at this moment in time, my own income comes from seven different sources. I’m a teacher/journalist/translator/author and occasional recipient of parental financial help...at age 50. 

I currently go to how many different work locations? 

Apart from my own home, which is also a workplace, the answer is: 10. That is over five days. Imagine, too, how many more it would be for a truck-driver, a Deliveroo bike-rider, a home-shopping deliverer or an Amazon door-to-door courier.

Added to creeping uncertainty and the old ways being so far gone, across this fragmented society there are “a million mutinies now,” as the author VS Naipual once wrote. 

To unconsciously fight against the disappearance of any real certainty in our lives, internal reactions are made into actions. Gay bashing, wife-bashing, woman-hating, immigrant-hating, Muslim-hating, Jew-bating, tail-gating, restaurant-rating, bomb-making, piss-taking, muck-raking, reality-faking. 

All with the momentum of a mudslide that doesn’t want to stop.

And what are we now scared of? Not the bullies. Plenty of people are frightened of the failed-economy’s victims. People with next-to-nothing: refugees, the homeless, beggars. 

We are not afraid of the unknown (giant multinational companies, faceless billionaires. They are all too abstract). We are fearful of The Other.

One of the ironies here is that as a result of this ‘loss of separation’ and things being so indistinct (possibly because of it) we are probably further away from each other emotionally and physically, even when we eat.

The French are continuing to be an exception to this trend but research has shown that more than one in five [British] families “only sit down to eat a meal together once or twice a week. 40% of them only sit down together to have a meal three times a week.” The average American eats one in every five meals in a car!

All this has made me tired now. I suspect you are too.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2019.]

Twittering, I am...

Well, I finally joined the twittersphere this month and am happily tweeting at BrettHethering (or is it also 'twittering?) so if you are also using it please send me a tweet and follow me.

Happy social media life!

"Slavery 2.0" -- Exploitation in the tech industry to be uncovered in Barcelona this week

 "The Mobile Social Congress (not to be confused with the anti-Mobile World Congress or the socialist side of congress) is coming to Barcelona next week hell bent on promoting citizen awareness. 

This is to be the fourth ever Mobile Social Congress and is to focus on the working conditions and environmental impact of the electronics industry.

“We want to denounce labour exploitation and the exploitation of natural resources stemming from this predatory model of production and technological consumption,” said Laia Fargas, member of the NGO Setem Catalonia which is organizing the event. 

The title of the event Esclavatge 2.0. De la mina a l’abocador (Slavery 2.0: from the mine to the dump) sends a clear message about the objectives of the event, which include: adopting a global perspective on the production and consumption chain through round table talks, workshops and the projection of a documentary at the Pati Manning in Barcelona on March 26 and 27 in the afternoons.

These events will explore how working conditions reminiscent of slave labour appear in factories in European countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic as well as in China. There will also be presentations on repairing and recycling electronic products and data protection."

Source: News at Catalonia Today

"Work, money, machines" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

My twin brother is a poet. Usually when I tell my adult English students this they ask me how he is able to survive economically.

They are always surprised when I say that Australia has an unemployment benefit paid monthly by the government and that this benefit does not stop after six months, as it does in Spain.

Of course my brother, just like all the other recipients of 'the dole,' as it's called there, have to jump through bureaucratic hoops and many have recently been victims of all sorts of horrific stuff ups by a system that is being privatised.

Yes. Soon the payments the poorest live on will be controlled by businesses that put making a profit from their 'clients' as their biggest interest. In Australia these unemployment benefits are only just enough to live on if they are combined with other government payments such as rent assistance.

I have a friend living in Barcelona who is a very talented graphic artist and is also a photographer with a unique eye. Like me, he teaches to pay the bills because his creative work does not get him and his family consistent income. Also like me, he enjoys his classes but would ideally like to be spending more time on using his talents to make new 'products' as our consumer society would insist on calling them.

But there is a wider question for every society here. Is a form of guaranteed basic income a good idea?

Some people argue that the public purse should not pay people to do what non-creatives believe to be just hobbies but this is missing a vital point. Practically every industry is now using greater numbers of robots  and other types of automation and mechanisation.

When I was leaving university in the early 1990's a guaranteed job for life was working in a bank. We now know this rapidly became not the case and branch closures across the world have meant the loss of most banking jobs.

Mainly this has been because machines now do the jobs that people used to do and the finance sector is only one place where this type of change is marching on. At Amazon for example, every job that can be done by a mechanical device is being done by one.

The people who work there have to keep up with the productivity of machines (even if it costs them their nervous systems) or they are simply fired and replaced with another very low paid worker who works long, long shifts almost exactly as a robot does.

Not long ago, I myself once worked in a full-time job for one of the world's largest smartphone companies (sitting at a computer) until one day my right arm completely froze-up after months of tendinitis problems caused by using a mouse at a high speed.

I was sacked the same day I came back to the office after being on medical leave for this problem. My body just would not work as a machine does.

The question that has to be asked and answered is what do our societies do to deal with increasingly significant numbers of people who don’t have enough paid work or even any paid work.

Economic survival can be close to impossible. In much of Mediterranean Europe the family unit has typically helped out, as have charities but this has created an uneven coverage of the basics of life for many people.

The obvious solution is a universal basic income for every individual in society. Europe’s newest progressive political party DiEM25 believes that the funding for this “should come from a dividend, financed from the returns on all capital; a 'public' percentage of companies’ profits, especially for companies that commercialise technology developed from public funding.”

In other words, “Technological progress should not simply serve capitalism.”

The great benefit from this is that it would allow creativity to flourish and people who prefer paid work at a higher income can do that too.

[Image: Nacho Diaz]

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2018.]

Barcelona's extraordinary Supercomputing Centre

A place I was lucky enough to once do some language work in...

"One of Europe's largest supercomputers is housed inside of a disused chapel.

What was once a...place of worship known as the Torre Girona is now the home of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, filling the expansive main hall with banks of futuristic computer equipment under glass. 

Since 2005 the former church has been home to MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe that was instrumental in developing modern microchip technology. 

The giant machine is used to perform the massively complex calculations involved in such fields of research as human genome mapping, astrophysics, and weather prediction. Physically the computer consists of a number of black computing stacks that are all encased in a giant glass box, which itself sits in the romantically-styled main hall of Torre Girona.

Rebuilt after the Spanish Civil War, the Torre Girona is a 19th century church that sits on the campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. 

The space was used as a Catholic church until at least 1960, when it was deconsecrated. Since then, it has been used for more functional purposes, finally being inhabited in full by the supercomputer and its attendant offices. 

MareNostrum may not be the most powerful computer in the world any longer, but it will likely remain the most visually appealing for years to come."

Source from Atlas Obscura here.

"Conversus interruptus" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Selective semi-listening. Fading in and out of the conversation. Attention-divided syndrome. Texting while talking. Missing the point. Ignorance-bliss. Even not paying attention to your own words when you are the one speaking them.

"Is that my mobile ringing?"

“Were you just saying saying something about something?”

I propose a new verb: keywording. = to only notice a few key words in someone’s spoken sentence. Eg.”Are you keywording me?” [ie. Are you only half-hearing me?]

Politicians and PR people have been doing a similar thing (but intentionally) in the media for years: answering the question that they want to answer rather than the one that has actually been asked.

It is becoming just as common in daily life to go about keywording eachother. The best laid ideas can just float away unheeded.

When we stop paying genuine attention to each we stop paying attention to the words used by those who govern us. So when we hear the word "austerity" we accept it instead of realising what it really means: our elected representatives selling parts of public hospitals to private comapnies so they can profit from our illness. We hear the words "budgetary responsibility" and we don't stop to think that it means continuing to allow tax evasion for the richest and their businesses while public servants salaries are slashed.

As George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) the Irish playwright and essayist once wrote, ""The problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred."

Re-reading the great Primo Levi’s “The Reawakening” a while ago I was reminded like a glass of ice water in the face that we have this human need to be understood. And when I say ‘understood’ I don’t just mean comprehended through language. I mean in an empathetic sense of the word: to be heard, to be understood well, and to be recognized as speaking important truths – important because they are human experiences that must be felt and genuinely identified with, by fellow humans.

My own struggles with communicating in a second language are tiny compared to Levi’s fear that his accounts of his year in Auschwitz’s Nazi concentration camp would be ignored or not believed.

But I want to live my life (and hope others will too) with Terentius’ maxim of: Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. In…

English: I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.

Catalan: Sóc un ésser humà; això fa que rés humà em sigui aliè.

Castilian Spanish: Hombre soy, nada humano me es ajeno.

In other words, a great variety of human experience always has at least something that we can relate to. Live as a good listener and a verbaliser because that is the ideal for full and best communication, I try to regularly tell myself. I know this has been one of the strongest mutual reasons for my relationship with my partner (wife) enduring and thriving for more than twenty years.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2015.]

 

"The best of times?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

Has there ever been a better time to be alive in the history of our tortured, super-intelligent species? 

At the press of a few buttons we have virtually all the accumulated knowledge of the last several hundred (or is it thousand?) years available. And it is available fast.

We have the answers to a billion conceivable questions and we can communicate almost instantly with the majority of people on the planet, language barriers excepted. 

For many of us, our taste buds can be stimulated by the food from dozens of cultures who, just a few short years ago were out of reach, either geographically or economically. 

In this increasingly mixed European society, young people have started to grow up sitting next to others from Asia, Africa and assorted parts of the wider continent and for them this is as natural as mother's milk.

On top of all this, there is a gentleness that in so many senses did not exist just a generation ago. 

A man can be intimately involved in the care of his baby or child without automatically being a figure of gossip or ridicule. He can be the main cook for his family and not be thought of us somehow suspect. 

Finally too, homosexuals are more accepted or at least tolerated in the majority of circles, rather than being chemically castrated as some were less than seventy years ago (in the UK for example.)

Today too, there are increasing numbers of people who are not only acknowledging their own depression or mental illness but are speaking openly about it in public forums and in the media. 

Such a development was virtually unthinkable merely a decade ago. 

Equally though, the average women in the developed world has a wider horizon than ever before. Her place in the workplace is now barely questioned at all, though she may still be paid less than a man or have trouble getting a full-time position or promoted according to her ability.

Yet despite this progress, despite the modern mind being freer from superstition and religious dogma than probably any time in history, what do we also have?

Underneath the shiny towers of vanity there is a great, putrid sewer stench of injustice. 

There is the distinct sensation of a nausea without relief and that comes from having both your eyeballs open and your ears unblocked. Anyone who chooses to not be ignorant knows, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "the deal is rotten." 

And all those signs of enlightenment that came to view in the the first half of the 20th century now have a faded quality and there is a hollow ring to the chants, songs and poems of social movements.

Throw into this mix the fact that the warming of the earth continues at pace. 

It is only those who genuinely don't understand or politicians who have been bought out by the polluting industries that do not accept the truth of the overheating globe that we walk on. 

Or think of the wealth that flows through financial systems. Shockingly, the 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion. 

And what else?

There's the vacant look of history's books

Slave labour and murder thy neighbour

Greed as a virtue and carers that hurt you

This is the present we have

We see the limp hand of the state and rape-a-date

The power of one at the point of a gun

And the good times are back with daily Prozac

This is the future that right now we have

See that liar's smile when the truth's on trial?

This is the justice we have.

Living and laughing in ignorance bliss

We have fashioned a world exactly like this.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, December 2014.]

"To screen or not to screen?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

As I write this, my son is hating me.

Last night I took a computer game off him that his mother and I agreed was violent and told him he would not be getting it back. He is twelve years old and naturally, he disagreed.

But I am not badly disturbed by his feelings toward me. I know they are temporary and I trust in the knowledge that sometimes parents will be hugely unpopular with our own children...if we are being moral, ethical parents - involved parents.

In this part of the world people get a lot right about how children are treated. One of the most notable things is how older children are largely both tolerant and even downright nice to their younger brothers and sisters, as well as to other littler kids they are not related to at all.

In Mediterranean Europe, the family unit is close and socialising with the extended family of grandparents, cousins and other blood relatives is a common part of almost every one's weekly life.

This is in stark contrast to standard Anglo families.

But I would argue that across this stretch of the planet (but probably in other parts, such as North America as well) parents are much too concerned with their children's happiness.

This may sound like a harsh, uncaring statement so it needs a bit of explanation. To me (and to plenty of full-time philosophers) happiness is a temporary state. It comes and goes under it's own invisible steam and can arrive and disappear before we hardly realise it.

The more we desperately look for it or try to manufacture it the more it seems to slip through our fingers.

I'm not advocating that we don't do our best to create situations where our kids are likely to find enjoyment or fun - quite the contrary.

But if we put happiness, which is by its nature a short-term sensation, ahead of trying to develop a son or daughter with a sense of what is right and what is wrong, then we are making a terrible mistake.

If we act and speak by instinctively putting our children's immediate gratification as the priority instead of doing what we can so that they are playing and learning in ways that are beneficial to them (at least in the medium or longer term) what is the logical result?

Years later you end up with adults who value getting as many petty possessions as they can (because materialism is supposed to create contentment) and to them this a thousand times more important than having something as bothersome as a conscience, which just gets in the way of fueling a bigger bank account.

In other words, you have corruption and you have it on a grand scale. The Mediterranean disease.

I accept that the inclination towards having happy children is a healthy one. I just don't accept that this injection of happiness should always be the most important thing.

Faced with the choice of being strongly disliked by my son for a period of time or, on the other hand, turning a blind eye to him exercising disturbing impulses for potentially hours on end, I'd choose unpopularity every time.

Knowing what we now know about how violent, first-person computer games will desensitise even adult users (and that is why modern military training uses simulated war-games) it would be almost a crime to be the indulgent parent.

[A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2014.]