I am on a new podcast called Technically Divided. Hope you enjoy:
It seems like Artificial Intelligence is all the buzz these days. It’s all around us. Working almost invisibly. From the applications we use for work to the devices we carry with us to how we use social media, AI is working hard to make all of our lives better. Or is it? Join us as we discuss the realities of AI, how it helps, how it hurts, and how it can, in some cases, destroy.
Special Guests:
Davi Ottenheimer
Keiland Cooper
Plaid (technically a word that means blanket to stay warm) used to imply something good, something safe.
Now technology appropriation of the term is allegedly giving the exact opposite meaning instead:
A Settlement has been proposed in class action litigation against Plaid Inc. (“Plaid”). Approximately 5,000 mobile and web-based applications (“apps”) use Plaid to enable users to connect the app to the users’ bank account(s). This class action alleges Plaid took certain improper actions in connection with this process. The allegations include that Plaid: (1) obtained more financial data than was needed by a user’s app, and (2) obtained log-in credentials (username and password) through its user interface, known as “Plaid Link,” which had the look and feel of the user’s own bank account login screen, when users were actually providing their login credentials directly to Plaid. Plaid denies these allegations and any wrongdoing and maintains that it adequately disclosed and maintained transparency about its practices to consumers.
Ouch. Why would product managers have approved “the look and feel of the user’s own bank account login screen, when users were actually providing their login credentials directly to Plaid”?
Deceptive practices being core to this company’s product, in a way that destroys trust in web transactions, beg the question: is this really how financial “innovation” is supposed to happen?
“If Plaid is actually downloading and saving financial data without permission,and in breach of consumers’ rights, then it would need to reengineer the product and go on an apology tour … and regulators may be punitive.”
My guess is there was a serious lack of safety or ethics in the founding Plaid engineering culture, which allowed generations of its developers to release harmful products into society with abandon. In fact, Plaid denying allegations hints at a continuing lack of security ethos even though it’s been acquired by heavyweight Visa.
On a related note, soon after a poorly engineered “Plaid” car was released it burst into flames and almost killed the owner.
Unlike Tesla, which never seems to be held accountable for its serial lying and egregiously false representations, Uber is yet again facing penalties.
The second offense related to estimated taxi fares provided by the app to Sydney customers between June 2018 and August 2020, when the taxi ride option was abandoned.
The algorithm used to calculate the fare ranges inflated the taxi estimates. The actual taxi fare was almost always cheaper than Uber’s lowest estimate. Uber had not ensured the algorithm was accurate, the commission said.
Did not ensure the algorithm was accurate? Tesla’s inaccurate algorithm is killing people. At least Uber just stole some money. The first offense also was Uber lying to its customers.
Again, however, Tesla doesn’t seem to be in any trouble for all its lies that lead directly to deaths so it begs the question why regulators keep going after Uber.
In 2018 both Uber and Tesla had “self-driving” products that killed pedestrians. Guess which company shut down their program and faced extensive public and regulatory outrage, versus the other company that simply charged customers more for even less?
Regulating industry-laggard engineering practices of Tesla (documented as worse than even 1990s KIA in quality failures), let alone their inaccurate algorithms and deceptive business practices is an obvious requirement for market safety. That is probably why O’Dowd has started a campaign to do exactly that.
Putnam’s first ad for O’Dowd is dubbed “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an homage to the 1965 best-selling book by longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. It opens with a brief disclaimer and an image of O’Dowd, who is identified by his company title. The ad then shifts to a nearly minutelong compilation of Tesla cars crashing and nearly veering into things, and includes audio of passengers and drivers dismayed by the seeming malfunctions.
O’Dowd is being reported as an outsider to politics, when he seems to be the only one running with the inside view of actual engineering and market safety. This would be like calling a doctor an outsider to politics when running on a healthcare reform ticket.
The 1933 Wall Street Putsch is looking like foreshadowing.
Business leaders like JP Morgan and Irénée du Pont were accused by a retired major general of plotting to install a fascist dictator
I’m not hearing the warning yet from a retired major general, and Elon Musk is perhaps no automobile union-busting Irénée “Black Legion” du Pont (or maybe he is), but there surely are parallels to history worth studying.
Galloway makes the case very eloquently without using any real history at all.
Elon will be a poster child for how power corrupts potential…. The kind that reduces effectiveness. Last week at TED, Mr. Musk continued to disparage what’s left of our nation’s umpires, calling the SEC “bastards” for its enforcement action against him after he tweeted he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. Elon insisted the Commission had bullied him into saying he’d lied and had no funding. The day after Elon’s TED interview, a court filing confirmed that, yes, he had lied, and funding had not been secured. Mr. Musk’s wealth results, in large part, from the protocols of the SEC, not despite them. Likely the biggest one-day hit to his wealth would occur if he were to leave this ecosystem of bastards and re-list TSLA elsewhere. Without subsidies and credits from the entity he has such contempt for (Uncle Sam), would TSLA even exist?
Putting a town square under the ownership of one man has already proven catastrophic.
In fact, Galloway gets history of America completely wrong and thinks the obvious mistake is something new or novel when it’s instead a rehash of long past failures. Facebook was clearly going to turn out very badly, as I warned here in 2011 by explaining why I deleted my profile in 2009.
A better exposure of the “emerging” caste system (Galloway hints at only briefly) is to look more honestly at the origin story of America, which was unquestionably a slaveocracy intended to block abolition movements and create a new country of tyranny.
Consider for a minute whether Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are successful in America because it rewards their apartheid/caste mindset of wealth generation, which they learned well when their parents benefited so much from one in South Africa.
Others are demonstrating through data analysis that (in classic dictator fashion) the big pronouncements to remove “bots” on Twitter is a tell, which is to say that buying Twitter is meant to do the opposite. Armies of “not so secret” bots can be expanded dramatically by dictators to generate fraudulent wealth (and power) without accountability.
Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%. (They looked at the average stock return for the week previous to the bot’s creation and for the week following.) While Tesla’s market value has increased over the years, the price has seen dramatic ups and downs. The periods around bot creation showed sharp increases, but outside those windows, trading was far more volatile, Chowdhury said. “This isn’t a causal relationship, but it does raise questions,” Kirsch said, about why there’s a correlation that does not appear to be random. “We’re trying to understand the mechanism. It can’t be just a bunch of tweets that push the stock. People have to notice them, interpret them and act on them.”
As Doctor Strangelove put it in 1964 when predicting realities of today’s big data security “The Whole Point of the Doomsday Machine is Lost if You Keep it a Secret!”