Serendipity35

Quick followup to my previous post about very brief presentations of research. 

The average human attention span has fallen to eight seconds — below the average attention span of a goldfish. At least, so said a recent wave of debunked press coverage from outlets including The New York Times and, uh, us. The factoid, which had no clear source, felt true. New research suggests this may be because a different attention span has shrunk recently — not the individual's, but the collective's.

Collective attention span is meant to mean how long a topic stays popular (or hot or trending). It is about public conversations.   

People study the how long of news stories, movies, hashtags etc. to see when it loses its appeal. Looking at the 2013-2016 hashtags trending on Twitter (one of the things that gets blamed for reduced attention spans) they found that the top 50 hashtags fell from 17.5 hours of trending to 11.9 hours. There was similar shrinkage on Reddit, Google Books and in movie ticket sales. 

Things don't hold our attention as long. At least online and with media. Is anyone studying attention span for real world things, like reading a book, looking at a painting, watching a sporting event?

The researchers say that this is part of "a more general development termed social acceleration, the impact of these changes on the social sphere has more recently been discussed within sociology. In the literature there have been hints of acceleration in different contexts, but so far, the phenomenon lacks a strong empirical foundation."

They created a model that suggests that our collective attention span shrunk due to growing competition. There is just too much media out there competing for our attention. "Our analysis suggests increasing rates of content production and consumption as the most important driving force for the accelerating dynamics of collective attention."

This isn't all that new. Overchoice or choice overload is a cognitive process in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options. The term was first introduced by Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock.

The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less is a 2004 book by American psychologist Barry Schwartz that argues that eliminating consumer choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers.

"Decision Paralysis" is another term to put into this mix. 

I wonder that if we were simply presented with fewer choices, our attention span would increase. Though it is unlikely that we can roll the media content snowball back up the hill, perhaps we can individually limit our choices and improve our personal attention span. I don't have much hope of lengthening our collective attention span.

Eight years ago, I was posting here about Google+ (or Google Plus) which was an attempt by the search giant to compete with other social media sites (especially Facebook) for the social audience.

Now, they are deprecating Google+ (the tech term for turning off, closing, giving up on a service). Google has not succeeded at social.

My theory back in 20111 was that it might be because they weren't able to explain in a simple, clear way what their social services offered or how they were different from others like Facebook.

Do you even remember their earlier services Wave and Buzz and Orkut?

It is 2019 and the Google+ API deprecation which happens this month also affects Blogger’s Google+ integration for blogs like this one. The impact is not major but it does have effects when you kill off an integrated service.

• Support for the “+1 Button”, “Google+ Followers” and “Google+ Badge” widgets on blogs will no longer be available.
• The +1/G+ buttons and Google+ share links below blog posts and in the navigation bar will be removed. That will have some effect on the number of people who share or "Like" your posts.
• Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. That seems minor BUT it also means that the comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog. 

You can argue about the good and bad of AI, but there is no argument that artifical intelligence is here and it is affecting jobs. Elon Musk says he fears where AI will ultimately lead, but he uses AI in his Tesla vehicles. 

I keep hearing that AI will free humans of boring drudgery jobs and give us more free time. Then, we can do human work rather than machine work. I also hear that for all the jobs lost to AI there will be at least half as many new ones created.

The book Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI, examines organizations that deploy AI systems — from machine learning to computer vision to deep learning. The authors found that AI systems are augmenting human capabilities and enabling people and machines to work collaboratively, changing the very nature of work and transforming businesses.  

A symbiosis between man and machine is not here now, but it is already being called the third wave of business transformation and it concerns using adaptive processes. (The first wave was standardized processes, and the second was automated processes.)

Even when AI has advanced and humans and machines are symbiotic partners, humans will be needed. In this book, they identify three broad types of new jobs in the "missing middle" of the third wave. 

Trainers will be needed to teach AI systems how they should perform, helping natural-language processors and language translators make fewer errors and teaching AI algorithms how to mimic human behaviors.

Explainers will be needed to bridge the gap between technologists and business leaders, explaining the inner workings of complex algorithms to nontechnical professionals. 

The third category of jobs will involve sustainers who will ensure that AI systems are operating as designed. They might be in roles such as context designers, AI safety engineers and ethics compliance managers. For example, a safety engineer will try to anticipate and address the unintended consequences of an AI system, and a ethics complaince manager acts as ombudsmen for upholding generally accepted human values and morals.

And for education? These jobs will require new skills. The skills the authors describe all sound unfamiliar, as I suppose they should. Arewe ready to teach Rehumanizing Time, Responsible Normalizing, Judgment Integration, Intelligent Interrogation, Bot-Based Empowerment, Holistic Melding, Reciprocal Apprenticing, and Relentless Reimagining.

Their labels may be unfamiliar, but the skills can also be seen as extensions or advancements of more familiar ones in a new contect. 

For example, "Judgment Integration" is needed when a machine is uncertain about what to do or lacks necessary business or ethical context in its reasoning model. A human ready to be smart about sensing where, how and when to step in means that human judgment will still be needed even in a reimagined process. 

Imagine that autonomus vehicle approaching at high speed a deer and a child in the road ahead. It needs to swerve, but it will also need to hit one of them in its avoidance maneuver. Which would it choose? The decision will not be based on how we feel about a child versus a wild animal - unless a human has been involved in the process earlier.

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Read more in the book and in "What Are The New Jobs In A Human + Machine World?" by Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson on forbes.com

You don't have a social credit score today, but you might in the near future.

I have been thinking a lot about this topic since first hearing of a Social Credit System proposed by the Chinese government that is starting to take shape. It is essentially a national reputation system with the intent to assign a "social credit" rating to every citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social status.

If it sounds more like a science-fiction horror story of the future, that was what I thought at first. It reminded me of a 2016 episode of the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror shown on Netflix. In that episode ("Nosedive"), people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have, and the protagonist is someone obsessed with her ratings. When her rating drops, she panics and goes on a campaign to bring her score back up.

A Chinese app called Alipay is already assigning users a three-digit score. "Zhima Credit" rates you from 350-950 based on finances and and other factors. 

Reputation systems are not brand new ideas. They are programs that allow users to rate each other in online communities in order to build trust through reputation. You already have a reputation score if you use E-commerce websites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and Etsy or online advice communities such as Stack Exchange. Reputation systems are a trend in decision support for Internet mediated services such as shopping and advice.

A variation is collaborative filtering which aims to find similarities between users in order to recommend products to customers.

The Social Credit System proposed by the Chinese government is meant to rate every citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social status.  Does that sound like a mass surveillance tool using big data analysis technology? Well, it is.

On the surface, it is a way to rate businesses operating in the Chinese market. This can be called "surveillance capitalism," a term (introduced by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney) that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.

The idea was popularized by Shoshana Zuboff who says it emerged due to the "coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies."

It is a new new expression of power she calls "Big Other" which makes me think of a new novel plot combining Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the Internet Information Age. She feels the concept was first discovered and consolidated at Google, who are to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago.

Facebook and others have since adopted the concept for ways to extract, commodify and control behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.

The Chinese government's "Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014–2020)" focused on four areas: honesty in government affairs, commercial integrity, societal integrity and judicial credibility. The rating of individual citizens is considered to be "societal integrity."

One news story I heard said that you can gain or lose points for how well you separate and recycle your trash. It was unclear how this is monitored - trash collectors, your neighbors, credit police? Eight companies were picked by the People's Bank of China in 2016 to develop pilots to give citizens credit scores, including the giant Alibaba Ant Financial Services, which operates Sesame Credit. Ant Financial CEO Lucy Peng has said in a frightening quote I can use in that new novel that Zhima Credit “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.”

Her is hoping that you will be able to move freely and without obstruction in the future.