Protecting Kids on the Internet

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The UK Government thinks the problem is nude images on children's phones. Signal thinks the problem is government interference with encryption security. Symptoms.

The real problem is that children enter and inhabit a digital ecosystem built for adults without much built-in 'safeguarding'.

The stock libertarian answer: parents should control what their children can access. Perhaps libertarian parents are competent, attentive and technically capable. But the worst outcomes arise where parental supervision is at its most incompetent or perverse.

And so to negative externalities.

The costs of failure are borne by one group - young people themselves - while incentives for other parties vary. Platforms optimise for engagement; the media likes clickbait; politicians revel in righteous moralism.

The UK Government has focused on unsuitable content, politically attractive because content is visible. The nude image says, "There is the problem." But grooming, coercion, blackmail and exploitation are behavioural phenomena: that image is embedded in a relationship, a history, that's harder to pin down.

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been arguing for some time that the solution should not involve regulating communications directly. He has suggested AI-based chaperones operating on children's devices. When he first proposed the idea it sounded interesting but futuristic. Increasingly it looks like the direction in which the technology is moving anyway, with agentic assistants which inhabit your context.

For years child protection online implied state surveillance: read the messages, scan the content, break/subvert the encryption. But that may already be yesterday's architecture. Suppose every child account on an iPhone or Android device automatically entered Child Safety Mode.

The phone itself could recognise grooming, coercion, pressure to send images, suspicious adult contact with high fidelity. Not perfectly, but neither are spam filters perfect - yet spam has largely disappeared from our inboxes.

And things will get better.

The AI would contextually blur those problematic images, issue warnings, delay transmission, require parental approval for certain contacts - and flag genuinely suspicious interactions. Most processing would happen locally on the device. No government database. No finger-wagging bureaucrat reading messages. No weakening of encryption.

The technology is only now catching up with Cowen's idea. It is AI-assisted guardianship built into children's devices by default - the requirements technically standardised, the app accredited and legally mandated, and given privileged access to the operating system.

The AI technology is becoming available while policymakers are legislating the wrong things.

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Priddy Mineries; SJWs and SF; AI deep learning

Clare has had a vision these last days of a walk in the autumnal woods surrounded by the glowing colours of the falling leaves. In the last of the year's sun, we would stroll in a kaleidoscope of natural beauty.

And then there is the inevitable collision with the English climate.

In a short weather window, after a stroll in Stockhill Wood

A rain-soaked Priddy Mineries

I've been quite impressed by Ian McDonald's work so have just ordered 'Luna: New Moon' ; apparently a sequel is scheduled for publication next year and yet another volume in 2017. I particularly enjoyed his 'Brasyl', set in an alternate reality of the Latin-American country:

"A story that begins in the favelas, the slums of Rio, and quickly expands to take in drugs, corruption, and a frightening new technology that allows access to all the multiple worlds that have slipped into existence in other planes every time we make a decision."

Good review here.

I remember McDonald being a target of 'social justice warriors' for his temerity in placing his densely-imagined novels in developing countries (India is another favourite of his). This from Abigail Nussbaum's review of his earlier 'River of Gods'.

"It's a positive, vibrant, and persuasive description, but also one that gives rise to a feeling of unease when one recalls that McDonald is, after all, a white man from Belfast. What right does he have to write about India, much less to pretend to have captured its essence, much much less to imagine its future? When Nic Clarke of Eve's Alexandria reviewed River of Gods, a commenter disdainfully replied that the novel sounded to her like yet another cliché-ridden attempt by a Western writer to fetishize a nation that has become synonymous with exoticism.

"This was not long after the genre blogosphere became embroiled in what's become known as The Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom, an offshoot of a WisCon panel discussing the depiction of cultures by authors foreign to them, and specifically non-white cultures by white authors, and the combination of these two discussions got me seriously reconsidering River of Gods and my, at that point, uncomplicated affection for it.

"McDonald's India feels like a real place, but I have no idea whether he's truly captured the country's spirit and described its driving conflicts with fidelity. He may very well have fictionalized a truth more complicated and nuanced than he was interested in depicting. What's kept me feeling positively towards River of Gods in spite of this realization is the fact that, as I noted above, his India is so strong and independent, so clearly its own entity directing its own fate. River of Gods may be a novel about India told by an outsider, but within the novel India is writing its own story."

I am nonetheless a fan of Abigail's generally insightful reviews. Here is Ian McDonald's background.

"Ian McDonald was born in 1960, in Manchester, to a Scottish father and Irish mother. He moved to Belfast when he was five and has lived there ever since." (Wikipedia).

Deep-Learning has swept all before it in AI, with Facebook, Google and Microsoft competing to hire the smartest researchers. I watched a good introductory video (below) yesterday (~ 40 minutes) by Andrew Ng, who heads up things at Baidu. Delved a bit into backpropagation which is intricate but comprehensible with a little application - figuring it out has been on my 'to-do' list for years.

Despite all the successes, this hierarchical neural-net approach is still modelling perception (something which apparently occupies 60% of most animals' brains). The higher-level stuff - meaning, comprehension, conversation, intentionality still seems a mystery both in paradigm and performance. Much as I would like an AI personal assistant who 'really understands me' and 'how to fix things in the world', it really isn't going to happen anytime soon (unfortunately).

I remember nostalgically when I used to travel Europe and the world as a technical consultant for Nortel. I had scarcely a care in the world as my rather large employer could be relied upon to sort out problems with transport, hotels, illness or any of the other mischances of travel in foreign cultures. If you're rich, you can buy a concierge service which provides a similar level of wraparound care. It will take Google or similar to democratise this for the masses - once they get the AI sorted out.

Like I said, don't hold your breath.