thank you very much and we're on so uh when I think of the Cyber State I might be thinking of the usual stuff which is uh governments of the world and their intelligence agencies gathering information on us directly or in directly through relationships or compulsion with private companies but I want to think more broadly about the future of cyber State and think about accumulations of power both centralized and distributed that might require transparency and boundaries we wouldn't be used to anything ranging from Google Glass or whatever its successors might be so that we could find
ourselves live streaming out of this room at all times and have that Telemetry automatically categorized as to with whom we're having conversations and imag imine even the state then turning around and saying in the event of something like the Boston Marathon bombing or in Paris anybody near this event is going to have Telemetry that we will now request from Patriots or demand from those who are a little cherry and see just how much data can be accumulated from a peer-to-peer kind of perspective but I think it won't just be the state uh getting assisted from
it it'll be challenged too this is an app called Suki in which demonstrators can put into the app where where the police are as they're demonstrating and the app will then show you the still open exits to wherever you are that the police haven't gotten around to closing off yet and that's the kind of thing that worries uh the authorities but there's a third dimension too and that is how are these folks deciding to convene for a protest it might be through something like Facebook or Twitter or other social media in this wonderful example Facebook
was able in the 2010 us Congressional elections to get more people to vote by putting notifications in their news feeds of where the polling places were now they could do it selectively and they've got a lot of data by which to do that here's Facebook able to predict when two Facebook users are about to enter into a romantic relationship before either of the people apparently knows and you could imagine Facebook hypothetically tweaking the feeds to encourage the people to come together by showing their good sides or maybe if they don't belong together pushing them apart
and they shall never be in this highly controversial study uh there was a uh maybe not surprising um evidence that if your feed is filled with happy things you get happier and if it has unhappy things you get unhappier which if you think about it especially for those in a younger generation for whom they're getting their information from Facebook and Twitter at all their happiness level whether they feel the world is falling apart or coming together can be determined through these sort of recondite algorithms and you can see someday Facebook being challenged maybe we should
put more ice bucket challenge and less a little bit bit of stuff coming from Ferguson Missouri if there's unrest there in the name of Public Safety thinking about how that should be uh dealt with now the data that will be used to do this isn't always solid here you can see a very high correlation between suicides by hanging and the number of lawyers in North Carolina which as far as I can understand are not related at all and these kinds of mistakes can lead to funny things here like the Lego activity book paired with American
Jihad the terrorists living Among Us and other mistakes can be when algorithms Collide in this wonderful example from Amazon a regular pedestrian book was selling for $1.7 million because two sellers got into an algorithmic battle unbeknownst to each other where they had a formula of calculating their rates based on the other that didn't stop until it was $7 million for the book or in this case a shirt that actually says keep calm and rape a lot that nobody ever bought nobody ever sold it was algorithmically generated keep calm and random words all put up for
sale a million shirts on Amazon waiting to see who might buy one at which point it would be made these kinds of algorithms are going to be more and more common so when I think of something like the European right to be forgotten I see this eventually being all automated the request to be forgotten will be automatically filed on your behalf Google will think about it automatically or Bing and then they'll make a decision so the whole line from Soup To Nuts will be done without any human intervention now of course search engines themselves may
be oldfashioned it might be more like Siri who's just a concierge and will tell you before you even know to ask where you should go what you might do and thinking about where that advice will come from what ingredients are going in is it always being given in your best interest whether it's advice or the temperature of your home all very good questions to ask it really calls to mind the Harvard Yale game of 2004 in which members of the Harvard Pep Squad went up and down the aisles on the Harvard side of the field
Distributing colored placards to hold up like a North Korean rally at just the right moment to say something to the Y's on the other side it turns out though it was the Yale Pep Squad in Disguise who distributed the placards so when they held them up it spelled a rather unusual message which is a great example of a miniature polity being created with a message so big and powerful they cannot read it or understand that they're part of it but the key word there is we we is used usually what we think of with a
state it's meant to represent us but representing Us by Dent of geographical happen stance with the Sovereign imposed over it that's not what the Cyber piece is bringing us what it's bringing us instead are lots of different we mediated in lots of ways through lots of intermediaries worthy very much of study reflection and review thank you very much
