Digital privacy is a challenge. GDPR and its siblings make it worse. We need a reset. And then some serious effort to understand the problem. Something the GDPR creators never took the time to. Possibly the most expensive – and detrimental – ‘blind-leading-the-blind’ exercise of all time.
data
Our digital world is software, created and built by software engineers. If the software stops, the world stops. That’s software power. Can they take it down – or abuse it? Of course. It happens all the time … and it’s getting worse.
An ‘inconvenient truth‘ is when reality doesn’t match our preferences. We feel like ignoring it and just move on. Which seems to have become the rule rather than the exception lately – not the least in business. At times we even turn off the news because it’s all bad and…
Ok, so AI will not give you more time (see part I). And AI can be this huge threat to mankind etc. – according to an increasing collection of experts. Sounds serious, but it’s still kind of distant, isn’t it? So let’s bring it closer to home: Is AI a real…
Is that what you want? Actually, what you want may not matter, you’ll get it anyway. It may come as a surprise, but AI has been predicting the future for a long time – and very successfully. To the extent that we’ve been totally addicted for ages. Oh, we haven’t…
It’s almost like running out of gas, except everyone’s surprised: Oops, this thing runs on gas? Where can we get more and who pays? Of course chatbots don’t run on gas, but they do run on data and the data-pipes are about to close. How can this happen and can this possibly be…
How would you know it it’s lying? Most of us wouldn’t. Is that a problem? Only if you (blindly) believe what it’s throwing at you.
Historians and researchers are frantically trying to archive the Internet – including social media. Begging for funding to ‘preserve a rich data set of political discourse and communication trends’. Really? Save 500 million tweets and (say) 200 million Facebook posts per day? Comments, pictures, videos, likes, links, shares, the whole shebang? And that’s just two platforms and one data type. Insane.
The ‘forgetting curve’ is familiar to most of us. Occasionally a blessing, most of the time the opposite – like in the case at hand: Privacy died many years ago, but most of the world forgot. We’re pretending it’s alive if not well, and spend enormous resources trying to change that – to make it well, make it work. Maybe a short trip down memory lane can get us back on track?
Consider this scenario: A huge machine the size of several football fields producing products (or services) vital to the world. In the process, it guzzles more energy than a steel plant, ‘eats’ data by the shipload (think supertankers) – delivered via pipes the size of the cables carrying the Golden…