How Algorithms are changing Education, Finance, Elections, Defense, Retail…
https://convergences.substack.com/
Welcome to Convergences!
We are starting our second issue with this timely essay from Benedicts’s newsletter.
Benedict covers the end of American Exceptionalism, in the Internet space.
The end of the American internet. For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American — American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore — there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is diffusing, and attitudes are fragmenting. Link
Our Future on Social Media
With the election coming to a close there were a lot of articles around the influence of social media on the american psyche. In a key theme of ours in this Convergences newsletter, we look at the way technology became a major actor of our social battles.
Mathematicians are teaming up with political scientists to create models of how social media divides us. Technology is soon going to be as regulated as financial services, the first attempt is from the FCC, with Ajit Pai, mentioning they will look at regulating social media.
Others like Tom Rogers propose an independent arbitration system for policing extreme speech on social media platforms. In 2017, there was already a debate on Wired stating “Are social media platforms like Twitter subject to the First Amendment? Is there a right to free speech on social media owned by private corporations?”
The latest attempt is obviously the assault on Section 230 and the proposed reforms to weaken liability protections for social media companies.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued an unusual 10-page opinion arguing the courts have gotten Section 230 wrong. Thomas argues that the courts are giving tech companies like Facebook and Google more legal protection than they are entitled to under the law.
What’s interesting is that the theme of disinformation is everywhere, even teens on Tik Tok are all over Pizza Gate. Interestingly The Pew Research Center concluded that: “
“Americans Who Mainly Get Their News on Social Media Are Less Engaged, Less Knowledgeable.Those who rely on social media for news are less likely to get the facts right about the coronavirus and politics and more likely to hear some unproven claims”
The future of Warfare
One of the election consequences is the spoke in foreign interventions. Based on the recent CISA advisory on the Chinese Ministry of State Security, hackers are taking public vulnerability data and using open source tools built for supporting organizational improvements, turning them on their head to highlight holes in an organization’s at-
tack surface and exploiting the unpatched vulnerabilities before they can be remediated.
One of the technologies that has not roiled this election as we thought it would is deepfake. Researchers have been developing deepfake detention tools and journalists have been wary in using / believing videos they receive of candidates making outlandish claims. But what’s coming is using the threat of deepfake to create doubts on real events.
The subject is serious: Primer has won a multi-million dollar Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract from the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) to develop and enhance the machine learning capabilities of our airmen and special operations forces.
IF disinformation maybe the future of war, good ole weapons remain the present and are getting an upgrade too. In their Log read on the subject, the Guardian’s Frank Pasquale starts his article as follows:
The killer robots flood in through windows and vents. The students scream in terror, trapped inside, as the drones attack with deadly force.
The lesson that the film, Slaughterbots, is trying to impart is clear: tiny killer robots are either here or a small technological advance away. Terrorists could easily deploy them. And existing defences are weak or nonexistent. This is a MUST READ
Future of Retail
The world of retail has changed. And this is a definitive change. There is no coming back to pre-pandemic levels for physical retail. If you walk through the streets of any american city. You will see a sea of closed stores, empty commercial spaces.
The reinvention of retail is on the way. According to Nielsen: Following the extended stay-at-home periods, omnichannel shopping is becoming further entrenched as the future norm, with e-commerce growth eclipsing physical stores along the way. Nielsen’s Global New Shopper Normal Study found that only 9% of global consumers were regularly shopping online before the COVID-19 pandemic. But as restricted movement orders forced consumers indoors, online adoption skyrocketed, with 27% of global consumers starting to shop online for the first time. In May 2020, 44% of global consumers said they were shopping online each week, with 23% reporting shopping online multiple times each week.
One of the corollary of the pandemic has been the surge in puppy sales..According to the WSJ/; “The pet business has been among the great beneficiaries of the new coronavirus. That success has made some stocks in the sector expensive. Among the sector’s big winners this year are veterinary services firm Idexx Laboratories,up about 61% this year, and drug company Zoetis Inc., which is 25% higher. The S&P 500 is up 8.7% for 2020.”
The future of education.
The use of technology for remote learning is not without consequences. It’s widening what FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel calls the “Homework Gap”
In a wide reaching interview for the MIT Technology review.
I looked at the data and I found that seven in 10 teachers would assign homework that requires internet access. But FCC data consistently shows that one in three households don’t have broadband at home. I started calling where those numbers overlap the “homework gap” because I felt that this portion of the digital divide really needed a phrase or a term to describe it because it’s so important.
The future of Finance
Knowledge @Warton has an interesting article on one of the many applications of machine learning to stock picking. Researchers and quants have been applying algorithms to tweets, blogs, press releases to have a sense of the market direction. In this new study: , “Man vs. Machine Learning: The Term Structure of Earnings Expectations and Conditional Biases.”The authors believe their model has the potential to deliver profitable trading strategies: to buy low and sell high. When analyst expectations are too pessimistic, investors should buy the stock. When analyst expectations are excessively optimistic, investors can sell their holdings or short stocks as price declines are forecasted.
Quick bites of my musing .
Future of law enforcement
Bitcoin is now an integral part of the financial service ecosystem. Paypal is in, everybody isn,.. And so are the feds.. In its first transparency report Coinbase reveals the scope of law enforcement agencies requests to the cryptocurrency giant for customer information.
According to the report, Coinbase received 1,914 requests for information in the first six months of 2020 alone. Nearly 60% of those came from state and federal agencies in the U.S. — primarily from the FBI, Homeland Security, and the DEA.
Social Media Sentiment Analysis applied to the Elections
In the AI will rule the world category I found the application of sentiment analysis to social media as being one of the promising filed of the years to come. According to Expert.Ai, Tuesday election is much closer than pollsters think. We have all heard of the likability bias. The theory wants that people are more likely to lie to pollsters on the phone if they plan to vote for the current president. The only way around it being to ask them “ who they believe their neighbours are going to vote for?
To go around the inevitability of another poll surprise Expert.ai analysis puts Democratic candidate Joseph Biden ahead of President Donald Trump, 50.2% to 47.3%, a margin that is much narrower than the double-digit lead that Biden has over Trump in most national opinion polls.
Key Emerging Technologies
The world is changing and global domination is no more a given. The White House on Thursday rolled out a new strategy to obtain and retain global superiority in world-changing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, data science and space tech, among others. The Critical and Emerging Technologies (C&ET) list reflects the 20 technology areas that United States Government Departments and Agencies identified to the National Security Council staff as priorities for their missions. The list will be reviewed and updated annually via the interagency process coordinated by the National Security Council staff. The technology areas are arranged alphabetically.
- Advanced Computing
- Advanced Conventional Weapons Technologies
- Advanced Engineering Materials
- Advanced Manufacturing
- Advanced Sensing
- Aero-Engine Technologies
- Agricultural Technologies
- Artificial Intelligence
- Autonomous Systems
- Biotechnologies
- Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Mitigation Technologies
- Communication and Networking Technologies
- Data Science and Storage
- Distributed Ledger Technologies
- Energy Technologies
- Human-Machine Interfaces
- Medical and Public Health Technologies
- Quantum Information Science
- Semiconductors and Microelectronics
- Space Technologies
Read the report here and it would seem to me that investing in these areas would not be a completely crazy idea. Some are.
Podcast
The man that wants to invest in Social Listen here
The future of worship
Religion is going online. That’s inevitable. The pandemic has given more people a reason to seek solace in God and faith-based communities at the same time that houses of worship were forced to close their doors. Pastors have resorted to streaming on YouTube or Facebook Live in a bid to keep congregations engaged. Membership in spiritual apps has surged. The top Christian meditation apps raked in 2.3 million downloads in the U.S. from March
In a Wired article we discover that the move to Vr and other online tools is not that simple for believers. For the Catholic Church, virtual reality poses more fundamental problems. The church recognizes seven sacraments, religious ceremonies that including baptism and the eucharist, where followers consume bread and wine that have been “transubstantiated” into Jesus’ body and blood. The eucharist is central to Catholic mass. But in 2002, the Vatican officially declared that there could be no online or virtual sacraments. “Virtual reality cannot substitute for the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” the document reads. “Sacraments on the internet do not exist.”
Good News from Africa can be found in the Quartz Africa Newsletter — Quartz — you can sign up here to receive the Quartz Africa Weekly Brief in your inbox every week. You can also follow Quartz Africa on Facebook.
Payments giant Stripe has bought Nigeria’s Paystack for Africa expansion. In what could be a transformative moment for the Nigerian tech ecosystem, Lagos-based payments startup Paystack has been bought by US giant Stripe in a deal reportedly worth over $200 million. The acquisition is a hallmark of Paystack’s rapid growth since it was founded in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi. The Nigerian payments startup has over 60,000 users and expanded to South Africa and Ghana.
NowPay, a Cairo-based financial technology startup, raised $2.1 million in a seed round co-led by Foundation Ventures and Endure Capital.The round also saw participation from Beco Capital, 500 Startups (MENA), Plug and Play, 4Dx Ventures, MSA Capital, EFG-EV Fintech, and Ebikar as well as Quirky Ventures, Gehan Fathi, and Rolaco.
Airsmat, a Nigerian drone software and tech startup, received $100,000 in pre-seed funding from UK based venture capital firm, Zetagon. The drone startup is aiming to apply its technology solutions across a range of business sectors on the continent, from agriculture to oil and gas.
Subscribe here https://convergences.substack.com
Also Baobab Insights has a market map of Artificial Intelligence in Africa
Cool stuff on the Internet: Understanding TikTok& ByteDanceChina’s Attention Factory
Given the current conversation between the government and Tik Tok, I thought this would be timely.
It’s the Weekend so i know that you have been watching what is now called TV. So just to keep things in perspective. Here are some numbers:
Estimated content budgets in 2020: From Jon Erlichman on Twitter
- Netflix: $18.5 billion
- Amazon: $8.5 billion
- Apple TV+: $6 billion
- Hulu: $4.5 billion
- Disney+: $2.5 billion
- HBO Max: $2 billion
- Peacock: $1.5 billion
- CBS All Access: $1 billion
Read about it here (Subscription Needed)
Source: Bloomberg Intelligence
This level of investment comes with consequences, Quibi is dead and Pay TV is on a Death Spiral according to Axios.
Basically
The trend is deep, even i, am watching the Football games on Amazon prime,…That says a lot..
Even as U.S. arenas pushed toward more expensive box seats in recent years and TV carriage deals have escalated in price, there’s been a shift moving in the opposite direction for quite some time. An increasing number of fans either can’t afford to attend in-person or don’t have the time to do so. To counteract this, viewers have taken to democratizing sports through social video.
That’s all folks. Vote, read, Love, Eat, Make COVID Babies and Forward Convergences to your loved ones.
A pli ta
Melvine
Written by Melvin Manchau