Lying Autonomous Agents
BarCamp San Francisco was a GREAT event, big big thanks to Tara Hunt and crew for the excellent arrangements. We instantly found help for our long-time bugging server-issues and the overall atmosphere was of a helping-hand community. Met up with Ben Metcalfe, previously leading the BBC backstage development and now “grassroots architect & CTO” over at Citizen Agency. Ben was off to Gnomedex and continuing back to London but we’re hoping to bump into each other again soon.
We had a late night (3 or 4 am?) session with Jordan Sissel that just moved here to work for Google. Jordan is currently involved in arranging more BarCamps (the BarCamp Stanford looks interesting!). An evening microformats session held by Chris & Tantek was interesting with some discussion on, among other things, how to achieve an Apple Human Interface Guideline-esqu mentality for web2.0 sites. In effect this could entail cohesive interactions across websites much in the same way that you would expect an OS keyboard short command to function in the same way across several applications. This however, of course, has to be balanced with the creative freedom of the UI designer of each site and furthermore the greatest obstacle to overcome is probably agreeing on what good practice actually is.
Later the same week I joined Felix at the Adam Greenfield Everyware talk at Adaptive Path. Adam was a really nice guy and we had some discussions about the function of trust in an ubiComp setting and the importance of privacy and self-control of distributed data. Felix actually had the most interesting idea on the topic - instead of constantly trying to control what is being published about ourselves we should add fake-services or fake agents that propagate the web with false information. Since placing the responsibility of constantly deciding and stating “what level of privacy I as I user would like right now” the transaction costs for using the service increases dramatically. By using lying autonomous agents in parallel I could ease up on the level of control over distribution of my real personal data. Since my real data is only valuable if you know it’s true I won’t have t worry about disclosing personal information (since there will also be conflicting information available). The increase in complexity would make it hard for anybody without the right contextual understanding of me to decipher what is the “real me” and what is the fake agent. However, for somebody that knows enough about me (e.g. in what city I am today) the fake info can be filtered out prevailing the true data. Some pretty heavy algorithm work would be necessary but the more I think about it the more sense it actually makes. Of course, if a flood of information becomes available the issue of trust in the source becomes highly important. What, how and when do you trust certain sources to be credible? This will certainly be one of the toughest questions when exploring online-trust but certainly also one of the most fascinating ones.
Anyway, we’re off now to Ritual Coffee Roasters to start working on what trust is, how it functions and what the consequences for the new web will be. Stay tuned!
Would lying realy work if you have trust services that help you find the right information?
Or maybe if you out-clever the algorthms of the trust services and make them unsure of that to trust, but that seems as a waste of time.
And with that I see parallels with the whole virus industry. With the one side trying to discover flaws and the other trying to correct them. An ever lasting battle.
To be honest I´m not sure at all if it would actually work but it’s definitely an interesting idea. My point is that most people discussing privacy are only thinking about ways to prevent information from becoming available. The “lying agents” perspective turns the table around so to speak. I find it interesting since it is a radically different approach and surely one worth exploring.
The parallel with the virus industry is really interesting, hadn’t thought about that. There would surely be a constant battle between true and spam/annoying/evil-spirited agents but since the “key” to deciphering the authentic information is to actually know the person (or know certain facts about him/her) I think the evil guys would have a hard time… At least I hope so!
In fact, the problem of finding trurt it is nothing new for our age, or even in the internet. The key to complete privacy on the net simply is the most common name. Through an ever growing amount of sources with the same keywords it becomes less and less trivial to research and access “real” information, adding criteria like place of residence, field of action or interests the person researched can be sure not have it’s - for example cooking skills - discovered.
The biggest amount of internet users in fact are anonymous, since they can not be differentiated from other users with same names and same interestst, and with growing access to internet the data gets “mashed up” even more.
The only way out would be context-sensitive web, which is a dream of web2.0 - but which is counteracted spam even more.
But coming back to the whole question of trust.
New encounters normally are not trusted. Trust is something, that develops over time. Now the interesting question is whether our analogue understanding of trust in time can be adopted to the instantly acting internet with is velocity of action. If we trust instantly - we will be disappointed (ever thought about ordering viagra from one of these spam-mails?) and if we don’t we are not acting conforming to the needs of the media.
Thanks for the comments Djen, I really think your first point is exactly what I am talking about, by having a common name online today you get the same effect as having lying agents. And just like you say, to make out what info is related to what person you need additional contextual information (e.g. cooking skills).
Many users are anonymous today but that is also paralleled with a huge amount of people establishing pseudo-identeties online that stay intact across services (i.e. I have the “same” identity on flickr as on upcoming.org). By building an identity that moves across several web-sites it gains acceptance and recognition as something disconnected from a service and connected to the individual. ClaimID.com is an interesting way of trying move the identity from the service (or “the identity silo” as Dick Hardt calls them in his nice identity 2.0 presentation) to the hands of the user.
The issue of velocity is really important for trust, however, in some regards I could argue that non-mediated social interactions are much faster than ones mediated through the web. Furthermore trust is a wide and complex social phenomenon that at times can be slow to build up but in other contexts can be instantaneous. E.g. you sit at a cafe with your 2000USD laptop and have to go outside to have a cigarette - what do you do? You ask the person sitting next to you to keep an eye on your stuff. Actually you trust somebody you never met with something of large value to yourself just because he/she was sitting next to you. Why? Since the context provides an element of trust (maybe you feel connected with the ambience of the cafe) you extend that connection to the person within that context. So, trust can be instantaneous on a person-to-person level but will usually have a background in another element (a social object, place etc.).
It is the best start page out there…pageflakes.com is pretty good too, but viewing items is horrible when compared to Netvibes.
Nice picture to the article, alex
regards
very intresting article, keep up good work
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