Month: June 2016

Brexit: The Revenge of the Working Class

In the last few days we’ve been hearing all kinds of allegations about the Brexit voters. They’ve been accused of racism, of narrow mindedness, and stupidity in general. We’ve been assured that the Brexit voters are the radical right-wing nationalists. But now come the results of the surveys and demonstrate that the reasons behind Brexit are more complex. It turns out that the main force that turned the tables came from the working-class voters.

In other words, the decision was made by the people who are most frustrated about the new economy and their perceived and very real inability to influence it.

A few months ago I wrote in this blog that the UK is turning into a plutonomy: a nation in which the wealthy and the prosperous are driving the economy, while everybody else tags along. The term plutonomy first appeared in a memo sent by the global bank Citigroup to its wealthiest clients. As the writers of the memo report –

“There is no such thing as “The U.S. Consumer” or “UK Consumer”, but rich and poor consumers in these countries… The rich are getting richer; they dominate spending. Their trend of getting richer looks unlikely to end anytime soon.”

The data reveals that this analysis has much merit. As The Equality Trust reports, the top 10% of earners in the UK have an income over 27 times larger than that of the poorest 10%.

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Income distribution in the UK. Source: The Equality Trust

It also turns out that in terms of income distribution, the UK is one of the most unequal developed countries in the world.

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Income inequality in different countries in the developed world. Source: The Equality Trust

Of course the rich and the wealthy – residing mainly in London and in the South East – are largely satisfied with current affairs. In the 2014 State of the Nation poll inquiring about the level of trust citizens place in the UK political parties in general, those two regions were the most trusting of all. In the meantime, citizens from all other parts of the country gave devastatingly low grades (an average of 3.54 out of 10) to indicate their lack of trust in UK political parties.

Unsurprisingly, the wealthiest regions had the lowest percentage of Brexit voters.

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Percentage of Brexit voters by region. Source: BBC

 

The evidence, when taken together, means that the working class is dissatisfied and frustrated. The average worker in the UK knows he or she has no real power, and is feeling increasingly alienated from the political, economic and cultural elites in London. As Peter Mandler recently wrote –

“…the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded, not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but more crucially from power.”

So what happens when those citizens of a plutonomy, who realize they have no real power, are suddenly given the option to influence events? They eagerly grab at the rope they’ve been given, and yank on it – and damn the consequences. This is the real story behind Brexit: that of people who’ve been deprived of power for the last decade or two, suddenly being given the chance to make themselves heard. And they certainly did.

This analysis has implications for the future of other countries as well. The United Kingdom is not the most unequal nation in terms of income distribution. There are five other countries in the developed world with worse inequality: Mexico, Israel, Spain, Greece and the United States of America. These are all countries in which large parts of the electorate feel neglected and removed from power in the day-to-day happenings. But once every four years in America, the public gets the chance to choose who’ll sit in the White House – and Donald Trump campaign’s success shows just how much the public wants change and distrusts the current state of affairs.

 

Conclusions

Brexit is a demonstration of how the inherent tensions in plutonomies can explode, since the rich and wealthy may control the economy, but the current political system still gives some power to the public. This means that the rich still can’t allow themselves to ignore the general public, or the public will come back to bite them when they least expect it.

Right now, the general consensus among the wealthy and the celebrities of the UK is that the public is dumb. It’s not. It’s just frustrated and wants to make a point. If the people on top want to avoid such disastrous decision making in the future, they should stop blaming the public, and instead find ways to change the political environment so that the public will gain more power in the daily affairs of nations. Any other course of action would lead to tensions building up again and being released explosively at the next Spainexit, Greecexit, or – who knows – maybe even Trumpexit.

 

 

The Real Reason We’re Losing our Privacy

“You don’t understand,” said the soldier who sat next me, who was speaking into his phone. His hand was shaking. “They’re dangerous. Really dangerous. You need to find somewhere safe! Go to your mother, and call me as soon as you get there.”

He hung up, and held the phone with both hands on his lap. I could see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

“Is everything OK? Is there something I can help with?” I asked politely.

He shot a frightened look toward me. “Did you hear what’s happening on LinkedIn?” he asked.

“A bit,” I said. “What, exactly? What did they do now?”

“It’s not what they did, it’s what was done to them,” he muttered, and buried his head between his hands. “Didn’t you hear that LinkedIn was hacked? One hundred and seventeen million encrypted user passwords are now being sold to anyone who can pay all of two thousand dollars for them, and I’ve heard that hackers who’ve scanned these encrypted passwords were able to decipher ninety percent of them. That means that over one hundred million user accounts are now hacked. What’s more, I’ve just returned from Afghanistan. Do you know what this means?”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“I fought the Taliban there, and now, they know who I am,” he muttered. “I had always worn a nametag on my uniform, and any Afghan wanting to take revenge on me will have already found my password. He’ll know where I live, based on the personal details in my account. They know who my wife is. They know how to get to our house!”

“Oh.” I said. “This is the world without privacy that we’re all afraid of. But it’s OK. They won’t find your wife.”

He looked up with a miserable glance. “Why not?”

“Because LinkedIn was already hacked once, four years ago, in 2012.” I explained. “They just didn’t understand how serious the problem was back then. They thought that only six and a half million passwords were stolen. Now, it turns out for all of that time, Russian hackers had all of those passwords, and although they really may have used them during that time – they might have already sold them to the Chinese, to ISIS, or to other centers of power – you can still set your mind at ease, provided that you changed your password.”

“Actually, I did,” he said. “In 2013, I think.”

“So you see? Everything’s OK,” I reassured him. “Or, in more exact terms, sufficiently OK, since this whole episode should teach us all an important lesson. Real privacy doesn’t exist any more. One of the more secured companies in the world was hacked, and this event wasn’t exposed for four years. Now, think about it, and tell me, yourself – what are the chances that some of the world’s databases hadn’t been hacked yet by the intelligence services of countries like Russia, China, or even the United States, working under the radar?”

He thought for a moment. “None?” he suggested.

“That’s what I think, too.” I said. “Hey, Snowden managed to steal enormous amounts of information from the National Security Agency of the United States, and no one was even aware that the information disappeared until he let the cat out of the bag himself. He was just one more citizen concerned about what this agency was doing. What are the chances that the Chinese haven’t managed to bribe other people at the agency to send them the information? Or that the United States hadn’t located its own agents in Russian or Chinese communities, or anywhere else in the world? Chances are that all of this information about us – not just passwords, but identifying particulars, residential addresses, and so on – are already in the hands of large governments around the world. And yes, ISIS may also have gotten its hands on it, though that’s a bit less likely, since they aren’t as technologically advanced. But one day, a Russian or Chinese Snowden will funnel all of this information to Wikileaks, and we’ll all know about everyone else.”

“But only within the period that information was gathered in,” he said.

“Right,” I answered. “That’s why I’m claiming that we’ve all lost our historical privacy. In other words, even if one day we enact new legislation to protect private information, a large portion of the information will already be circulating around the world, but it’s only valid during the period it was gathered in. It’s nearly certain that by today, various intelligence services can piece together impressive profiles of much of the world’s population, though they can only rely on the information gathered during that time. So even if ISIS managed to get its hands on those passwords, and even if they managed to hack your profile during the period between 2012 and 2013 and extract data about you without you knowing about it, the big question is if you were even married at the time.”

“Yup,” he said. “But I was married to my ex-wife, in a house I used to live in. Does this mean that ISIS could get to her?

“If all of these assumptions are true, then yes.” I said. “Maybe you should call her and warn her?”

He hesitated for a moment, and shrugged.

“It’s OK,” he said. “She’ll manage.”

 

 

This article was originally written by me in Hebrew, and translated and published at vpnMentor.

 

Can Bots Replace Human Teachers?

“You want to order another pizza?” I suggested.

Eric just shook his head. Something was obviously bothering him, and not even Flatbread Company’s pizza (quite possibly the best pizza in the known universe, or in Rhose Island) could provide him with some peace of mind.

“It’s the bot.” He finally erupted at me. “That damned bot. It’s going to take over my job.”

“You’re a teaching assistant.” I reminded him. “It’s not a real job. You barely have enough money to eat.”

“Well, it’s some kind of a job, at least.” He said bitterly. “And soon it’ll be gone too. I just heard that in Georgia’s Technological Institute they actually managed to have a bot – an artificial intelligence – perform as a teaching assistant, and no one noticed anything strange!”

“Yeah, I remember.” I remembered. “It happened in the last semester. What was the bot’s name again?”

“It’s Jill.” He said. “Jill Watson. It’s based on the same Watson AI engine that IBM developed a few years ago. That Watson can already have debates about current issues, conduct scientific literature reviews, and even provide legal consultation. And now it can even assist students just like a human teaching assistant, and they don’t even note the difference!”

“How can that be?” I tried to understand.

“It all happened in a course about AI, that Prof. Ashok Goel gave in Georgia Tech.” He explained. “Goel realized that the teaching assistants in the course were swamped with questions from students, so he decided to train an artificial intelligence that would help the teaching assistants. The AI went over forty thousand questions, answers and comments written by students and teaching assistants in the course’s forum, and was trained to similarly answer new questions.”

“So how well did it go?” I asked.

“Wonderful. Just wonderful.” He sighed. “The AI, masquerading as Jill Watson, answered students’ questions throughout the semester, and nobody realized that there’s not a human being behind the username. Some students even wanted to nominate ‘her’ as an outstanding teaching assistant.”

“Well, where’s the harm in that?” I asked. “After all, she did lower the work volume for all the human teaching assistants, and the students obviously feel fine about that. So who cares?”

He sent a dirty look my way. “I care – the one who needs a job, even a horrible one like this, to live.” He said. “Just think about it: in a few years, when every course is managed by a bunch of AIs, there won’t be as many jobs open for human teaching assistants. Or maybe not even for teachers!”

“You need to think about this differently.” I advised him. “The positive side is that there’s still place for human teaching assistants, as long as they know how to work with the automated ones. After all, even the best AI in the world, at the moment, doesn’t know how to answer all the questions. There’s still a place for human common sense. So there’s definitely going to be a place for the human teaching assistant, but he’ll just have to be the best as what he does: he’ll need to operate several automated assistants at the same time that will handle the routine questions, and will pass to him only the most bizarre and complex questions; He’ll need to know how to work with computers and AI, but also to have good social skills to solve difficult situations for students; And he’ll need to be reliable enough to do all of the above proficiently over time. So yes, lots of people are going to compete for this one job, but I’m sure you can succeed at it!”

Eric didn’t look convinced. Quite honestly, I wasn’t either.

“Well,” I tried, “you can always switch occupations. For example, you can become a psychologist…”

“There are already companies that provide psychological services on the internet, using text messages.” He said. “Turns out it’s really going well for the patients. You want to bet bots can do this too in a few years? So get ready to wave bye-bye at many of the human psychologists out there.”

“Or maybe you could become an author and write novels…” I tried to continue.

“An AI managed to write a novel this year, and it passed the first round in a Japanese literary competition.” He stated.

“Or write political speeches…”

“Computers do that too.”

“Ok, fine!” I said. “So just sell flowers or something!”

“Facebook is now opening a new bot service, so that people can open an online conversation with them, and order food, flowers and other products.” He said with frustration. “So you see? Nothing left for humans like us.”

“Well,” I thought hard. “There must be some things left for us to do. Like, you see that girl over there at the end of the bar? Cute, isn’t she? Did you notice she was looking at your for the last hour?”

He followed my eyes. “Yes.” He said, and I could hear the gears start turning in his head.

“Think about it.” I continued. “She’s probably interested in you, but doesn’t know how to approach.”

He thought about it. “I bet she doesn’t know what to say to me.”

I nodded.

“She doesn’t know how best to attract my attention.” He went on.

“That’s right!” I said.

“She needs help!” He decided. “And I’m just the guy who can help her. Help everyone!”

He stood up resolutely and went for the exit.

“Where are you going?” I called after him. “She’s right here!”

He turned back to me, and I winced at the sight of his glowing eyes – the sure sign of an engineer at work.

“This problem can definitely be solved using a bot.” He said, and went outside. I could barely hear his muffled voice carrying on behind the door. “And I’m about to do just that!”

I went back to my seat, and raised my glass in what I hoped was a comforting salute to the girl on the other side of the bar. She may not realize it quite yet, but soon bots will be able to replace human beings in yet another role.