Facebook Rebrands Itself After a Fictional Dystopia

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Regrettably, people’s opinions on the metaverse currently depend on whether they view owning and operating a “digital self” through the lens of dystopia (“The Matrix”) or harmless fun (“Fortnite”). It is additionally unfortunate that an innovative space as dynamic and potentially revolutionary as the metaverse has become, in the public’s imagination, the intellectual property of one company.

But the fact that future users so readily associate the metaverse with Facebook is a temporary result of and a wave of , and will be replaced by firsthand experiences gained through our exposure to the metaverse itself, and not a single firm’s vision for it.

Meta Power

So, what does this all mean? How will the metaverse shape the way we do , the way we live our lives, the way we ourselves? Who owns the metaverse? Why do we need it? Who will be in charge?

Taking a lead from this stellar , if we simply replace the word “metaverse” with the word “internet” wherever we see it, all of a sudden, its application and significance become easier to grasp. It also becomes clear that Facebook’s rebranding as Meta is not as much a reference to the creation of the metaverse but more in line with the company’s desire to become this new territory’s most enthusiastic homesteaders. Facebook is not so much creating the metaverse as it is hoping — like every other firm and government should hope — that it won’t be left behind in this new world.

As far as the metaverse’s impact, its political implications might end up being its least transformative. In the United States, for instance, the digitization of political campaigning has carved a meandering path to the present that is too simplistically summed up thus: Howard Dean so that Barack Obama could so that Donald Trump could so that Joe Biden could drop us all off at .

Where this train goes next, both in the United States and globally, will be a function of individual candidates’ goals, and the all-seeing eye of algorithm-driven voter outreach. But the bottom line is that there will be campaign advertisements in the metaverse because, well, there are campaign advertisements everywhere, all the time.

More interesting to consider is how leaders will engage the metaverse once in power. Encouragingly, from the governmental side, capabilities and opportunities abound to redefine the manner in which citizens reach their representatives and participate in their own governance. Early public sector adopters of metaversal development have but scratched the surface of these possibilities.

For starters, the tiny island nation of Barbados has staked out the first . This openness to embracing technology and a renewed focus on citizen interaction evidenced in this move are laudable and demonstrate the metaverse’s democratic value as a means for increased transparency in government and truly borderless global engagement. Though novel, Barbados’ digital embassy is no gimmick. You can be sure that additional diplomatic missions will soon follow suit in establishing their presence in the metaverse and will perhaps wish they had thought to do so earlier.

Another happy marriage of innovation and democracy is underway in South Korea. Its capital city has taken the mission of digitizing democracy a step further by setting the ambitious goal of creating a by 2023 for the express purpose of transforming its citizenry’s access to municipal government. Things like virtual public hearings, a virtually accessible mayor’s office, virtual tourism, virtual conventions, markets and events will all be on the table as one of the world’s most economically and culturally rich metropolises opens its digital doors to all who wish to step inside.

Digital Twinning

Any time technology is employed in the service of empowering people and holding governments more accountable, such advancements should be celebrated. The metaverse can and must become a vehicle for freedom. It need not provide a tired, easy analog to Don DeLillo’s ominous underworld.

But then there’s . While some of its cities and state-run firms are making plans to embrace what functionality is afforded via metaversal innovation, there can be no question that the government in Beijing will have a tremendous say in what development, access and behavior is and isn’t permitted in any Chinese iterations of the metaverse. It is hard to imagine, for instance, certain , products or symbols making their way past the same level of censorship beneath which China already blankets its corner of cyberspace.

Yet China’s most intriguing metaverse-related trend involves the in digital property ownership occurring while its real-world real estate market continues to . Such a considerable of resources away from physical assets into digital ones mirrors the increasing popularity of as a safe haven from the risk of inflation. Call it a technological inevitability or a societal symptom of COVID-fueled pessimism, but the digital world now appears (to some) to present fewer risks and more forward-looking stability than the physical.   

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China may be an extreme example, but the need to balance transparency, openness and prosperity with safety and control will exist for all governments in the metaverse just as it does in non-virtual reality. Real-world governmental issues will not find easy answers in the metaverse, but they might find useful twins. And as is the case in the industry, the of democracy will give its willing practitioners the chance to experiment, to struggle, to build and rebuild, and to fail fast and often enough to eventually get some things right.

Championing commendable applications of this new technology in government and business will position the metaverse as a useful thing within the real world, something that enriches real lives, that serves real people — not the other way around.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Welcome to the Metaverse: The Peril and Potential of Governance appeared first on 51�Թ�.

China’s pursuit of quantum technologies, quantum supremacy and a leadership stake in the much-heralded quantum awaiting us is as well as the United States’ similar quest. Additionally, opinions concerning quantum computing’s significance to global security, business and geopolitics range from comprehensive analyses of the industry’s to the musings of its pluckiest . Just as bountiful are the resources — both structured and — available to anyone interested in the technical , universal physical properties, revolutionary new bits or pioneering logic gates powering such complex, world-changing machinery.

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So, rather than using this space for another overloaded elucidation of quantum computing’s principles, our focus must pivot to the need for, and the already encouraging progress toward, educating the next generation of computer scientists, developers and engineers in what any of these words and concepts mean, what quantum computing is and, just as importantly, what it can be.

Computing of the Future

What quantum computing can be is the most significant technological, economic and governmental functionality in human history. It will empower its masters to blow away the capabilities available via traditional computers to solve problems in seconds that would take today’s machines years to complete. What it will also be for some time is , and a bit . But this is all the more evidence of our need to understand its most fruitful applications as well as its limitations, whatever those might be.

What quantum will be is what the next generation of students — the most technologically-skilled cohort ever assembled — refers to not as “quantum,” but simply as “computing.”

While the hype over quantum computing’s transformational capabilities across sectors, industries and regions has been for decades, too many American public policy proposals in the quantum realm have begun and ended with public investment in hardware, sparing little attention or resources for the education of the next generation of engineers who — for any national quantum program or policy to succeed — must be equipped to use it. Some encouraging developments, however, indicate that the importance of quantum education and a quantum-skilled workforce may finally be taking root. There are several entities leading the charge to identify quantum education as a critical need, as collections of the right in the right rooms (virtual or otherwise) are currently conducting the first wave of conversations necessary to educate the workforce the quantum age will require.

The first such institution is the US Army. Placing a renewed emphasis on the development of its people, and the attraction of top industry talent to roles of public service, the US Army has led the way from a federal standpoint in committing to the of its workforce for the quantum age. Though encouraging, it is important to note that such an undertaking must be generational in its scope and investment to be successful, as the biggest organizations, like the biggest ships, change direction most slowly.

The national security implications of quantum computers are a likely driving force behind the Army’s design of its Quantum Leap initiative. With that said, it is encouraging that given those concerns, the Army has responded with a people-first focus on developing, attracting and retaining the kind of talent necessary to steward the weaponry of the future capably and responsibly.

A layer beneath the modernization of federal agencies sits the collaborative approach of the US National Science Foundation, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a smattering of the country’s largest technology firms referred to as the National Q-12 Education Partnership. The appeal of such a public-private endeavor is clear and mutual, as both America’s public and private entities have a stake in seeing the next generation of quantum leaders developed in the US.

Diversity

Such partnerships should set ambitious goals for themselves and inclusively embrace the full breadth of talent waiting for them within a generation that is as unprecedentedly tech-savvy as it is diverse. Quantum must be more than yet another driver of inequality. Its transformational potential is too great to hoard in Palo Alto or Cambridge. As such, partnerships like these must emphasize the inclusion of institutions like America’s historically black colleges and universities — which have done work to close achievement gaps in STEM fields — to tap their talents as indispensable leaders of this historic educational effort.

Finally, local initiatives to educate the next generation of quantum engineers mark perhaps the most American solution to this challenge of all. University leaders should take a lesson from their at UC Santa Barbara who are partnering with local school districts to tailor quantum educational programming to students of all ages and ability levels. While federal support for such programming is surely welcome, universities and K-12 institutions need not wait for Washington to start training and identifying the future leaders of a quantum age approaching as fast as the photons flying over Shanghai.  

Quantum computers, like traditional computers, televisions, toasters, phones and radios, will be neither good nor bad. But they will be here, available for common personal and business use, soon. Education in their design, functionality and best uses will allow for the formulation of informed, forward-looking, strategic, quantum computing governance policies rooted outside of the binary choice between ignorant cynicism and naive optimism. Rooted, that is, in the messy nuances of reality and the goal of every stubborn innovator to not just build the thing right, but to build the right thing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Beginning in 2020, Shenzhen, in partnership with Chinese tech behemoth Tencent and NBBJ Architects, embarked on the design of a coastal, sustainable, state-of-the-art neighborhood called to serve as the exclamation point capping Shenzhen’s status as China’s Silicon Valley. And yet, upon its completion in 2027, Net City, like Shenzhen itself, will represent far more than just technology company’s corporate . In fact, Net City might just set the for urban development in the 21^st century. That is if it can navigate the perilous waters that have sunk so many similarly intentioned projects in the past.

Policies, Principles, People

Green, tech-infused infrastructure is no longer groundbreaking in and of itself, but neither is the desire of major global firms to directly fund urban investment as a business strategy. Examples of this often quixotic foray range from Google’s disappointing but understandable of investments in a Toronto smart city project to , Ford Motor Company’s failed Amazonian utopia chronicled brilliantly in Greg Grandin’s 2009 award-winning book. For both the Googles of today and those of generations past, it appears that products remain significantly easier to manufacture than physical places.

Any local economic development professional, or for that matter anyone who has tried to renovate a kitchen, will tell you that construction projects, no matter their scale, are marked by an eternal struggle between the perfect and the possible. What, then, can set Tencent’s Net City apart from these previous failures? To borrow the time-honored language of geopolitical analysis, the potential answers come in three “buckets”: policies, principles and people.

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On the policy front, the analysis must begin with the fact that there exists no better example of the , however gradually and cautiously, as an accelerant for innovation, growth and prosperity than Shenzhen. It is stunning how much economic dynamism has been unleashed in this former fishing village over the past few decades, and the same innovation-spurring economic policy framework that enabled the city’s rise will similarly nurture the growth and ongoing vitality of the Net City project as it matures.

That said, Shenzhen is not the only part of China that has grown. And, in immediate relevance to Net City, it would not be the only place where China has invested untold billions only to end up with what are commonly referred to now as . A Net City skeptic might point to both the ambiguous nature of the true costs of this ambitious urban development and those still unoccupied, debt-funded townscapes littering China’s interior still awaiting their first residents as the fodder for their wariness.

Product and Place

Skeptics are also right to cite the lingering uncertainty of COVID-19 and fissures with nearby Hong Kong as risks to the sizable Shenzhen has enjoyed throughout its rise. While the Chinese government and Tencent have every incentive to ensure the successful development of Net City, even these giants are not immune to the conditions of the world economy and thus should double down on the (relatively) open policy frameworks and diversified, reliable financing strategies that have thus far enabled Shenzhen’s rise.

Next, as it relates to the upon which Net City has unapologetically been founded, its focused, intentional blending of work and leisure with the natural world place sustainability at its core in a manner and at a scale no previous corporate community can claim. Limitations on cars in favor of pedestrian-friendly walkable spaces coupled with reliance on renewable energy sources will provide a rising China with beautiful, tangible evidence that it, too, is taking steps to combat climate change and to shape the next century of life on this planet in ways the rest of the world might cheer.

These commitments to sustainability, while encouraging, cannot only be for show. Net City provides China with an opportunity to demonstrate not only its desire to lead the world as a center of innovation, but as an upholder of the shared values and responsibilities that come with the terra firma for any global power.

Lastly, as it relates to the people who will someday call this new neighborhood home, it is possible that no single neighborhood in the world has ever rooted itself so enthusiastically in the philosophy of user-centered design as Net City. The blurring of lines between to come upon its completion will pale in comparison to the implications of Net City’s more meta-level, but no less intentional, blurring of product and place. But just as fatefully as the designers of Fordlandia discovered that places are not products, so too must Net City’s master planners remember that people are not products either.

Net City’s development has begun at a moment when the familiar dueling concepts of work and life have also merged into one amorphous, quarantine soup of time and space. While billions around the world cannot wait to return to certain elements of pre-COVID work-life balance, a more realistic forecaster will admit that work and life have become intertwined in ways that have transformed experiences on both fronts and will not soon be undone.

This march may appear inevitable, but it remains an open question how much further people will willingly participate in the elimination of boundaries between home and work, of private and public spaces and of restrictions instead of rights. Whether discussing a new piece of technology or a new smart city, the tired bargain between new features and old freedoms is a false one. Smart cities need not — and should not — dangle the possibility of positive environmental outcomes behind the acceptance of stricter, tech-fueled surveillance states.

The ongoing development of this initiative will fascinate global analysts for the majority of the next decade that stands to reveal the level of commitment its designers have to the lofty promises they have made at its outset. But beneath all that potential and possibility Net City might also reveal the answer to a deeper question: Is the internet a place we want to live?

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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“Defund the Police”: A Simple Slogan for a Complex Problem

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Policing in America is, by definition, a state and local responsibility. But this has not stopped the federal government from weighing in on police matters or them in significant ways. New national-level reforms to law enforcement will present obvious challenges, but where they would make the greatest impact is in the field of regulating technologies and tools police have available to them. Police have never been more on this front, and particularly worrisome is the availability of invasive — and often malfunctioning — facial recognition software. Intelligent regulation of tools like these must navigate some problematic global developments regarding these technologies and, where appropriate, take cues from the industry responsible for their production.

Global Trends

Globally, there appear to be two trends developing regarding government regulation and use of facial recognition software. While both are underwhelming, they each underscore truths about the nature of these tools with which any better alternatives must also contend.   

First is the more immediately worrisome approach to facial recognition that comes in form of a familiar Faustian bargain: the exchange of privacy for safety. This approach involves a full embrace of facial recognition’s capabilities in the name of national security, now including essential and expansive COVID-19 contact tracing. While straightforward, this rationale for facial recognition is far too easy to exploit. For example, it is widely that facial recognition software is indispensable to China’s ongoing efforts to target Uighur Muslims. Similarly, the use of facial recognition in is fertile ground for privacy and civil liberties concerns that show no signs of abetting.

The second approach appears to be, for lack of a better term, punting. This approach was best epitomized by the European Union Commission’s of any meaningful reference to facial recognition in its latest white paper on artificial intelligence. This will certainly be remembered as a moment the EU missed. While it might still articulate a comprehensive regional approach to the use of such tools, it is clear that attempting to do so in the age of coronavirus was too much to ask.

While the EU may have punted such a decision into the future, US federal government has seemingly punted it to local authorities. What has arisen instead of a coherent national strategy is a patchwork approach of and banning certain uses of certain tools, as well as a swarm of that use them all with gusto, ban them completely or have no facial recognition software policy at all.   

Fortunately, global demonstrations against the overuse of police power have, for the time being, held further expansion of these tools at bay and on this front, the most meaningful reform has come from technology companies themselves. IBM suspended its development of facial recognition software citing its in the hands of law enforcement. Similarly, Amazon suspended the sale of its facial recognition platform called to law enforcement agencies for one year, reasoning that lawmakers would need that time to regulate facial recognition programs in a fair, transparent way. and have also come forward to announce their resistance to providing facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies for the time being.

Line of Business

When IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Google all decide that a line of business is not worth the risk or the money, lawmakers need to pay attention. That said, concerned citizens must note that most of these encouraging company policies are designed to be temporary, and even those not billed as such can change as quickly as one can schedule a board meeting. Just as critically, these firms mainly cite the hypothetical, improper uses of their software in the hands of others as the primary reason behind their current unfitness. One must squint harder to discern whether these firms believe facial recognition tools are problematic in and of themselves.

To miss this distinction is to miss the entire need for government action and the limits of corporate self-regulation as a national strategy. Though unmentioned in these tech titans’ official statements, the full technical context for why such tools are concerning in any user’s hands are neatly summarized in reports like from MIT Media Lab and Microsoft Research in 2018 that lays out specific ways in which facial recognition programs routinely misidentify non-white faces, particularly those of non-white women. These findings demonstrate that such technologies, even when used competently, will not make policing any smarter, less discriminatory or less capable of encroaching on people’s freedoms. The replacement of systemic, interpersonal racism with hard-coded, digital racism is no reform at all.

People need to know what tools are currently in use to police their communities. And they are, indeed, in use. In the fall of 2016, Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology published a claiming that 50% of American adults already had images of their faces captured in at least one police database. Additionally, as recently as 2019, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to use facial recognition software to 97% of air travelers. A lack of transparency and further delays to meaningful regulation only allow the programs these tools support to render themselves more essential to the day-to-day operations of law enforcement.

The effects of national incoherence on this critical issue are not neutral. Self-imposed bans, incongruous local decisions lacking clear federal guidance, and the steady march of more authoritarian uses of such technologies around the world are insufficient responses to the questions this moment of global reckoning has thrust upon the world’s police and security agencies.

*[The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and not of his employer, Grant Thornton International Ltd. 51�Թ� is a  partner of .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Facial Recognition Technology and the Future of Policing appeared first on 51�Թ�.

From a technology policy perspective, there is a lot to like about the CARES Act. Investments in new medical technologies, including increased , are a terrific use of taxpayer dollars at a moment to which countless health-care professionals have admirably risen. From a cybersecurity perspective, the act dedicates $400 million to progress in the realm of ahead of what stands to be the most unconventional, and perhaps vulnerable, election cycle in US history.

These are good ideas, and we need more of them. The next stimulus (or perhaps the one after that) ought to go further in empowering technology companies of all sizes to lay the foundation for the post-pandemic American economy.

First, the next stimulus must address a in the CARES Act. Inexplicably, companies owned at least 50% by venture capital firms are ineligible for the nearly $350 million in funds set aside for small businesses thanks to ambiguous legislative wording. It is no secret that small businesses have been, and stand to be, hit hardest by the economic downturn resulting from COVID-19. Denying access to needed federal support for venture-backed startups, the preponderance of which are in technology, not only hurts those companies right now but risks endangering the otherwise thriving of America’s most promising sector.

Second, the fiscal stimulus packages to come have the potential to both resuscitate and reinvent America’s education sector in much the same way the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act supercharged . America’s education system has been ripe for disruption for years. Debt-ridden and under-resourced abound. Now, with colleges and universities forced to send students home early, and local K-12 school districts anticipating the diminished revenues that , education leaders across the country have already decried the CARES Act as this essential pillar of childhood development and national competitiveness. Therefore, the federal government should provide tax credits to investors in and developers of educational technologies while matching private capital put toward this critical area of innovation. Additionally, state and local funds should incentivize curricula to incorporate lessons in using new technologies in targeted, positive ways.

Even before being forced to learn remotely, the next generation of students stood to become the most tech-savvy that has ever walked the earth. So why not lean into providing them the kind of foundational technical understanding the evolving economy demands? After months of quarantine, we should formally retire the phrase “I’m not really a technology person” from the American lexicon.

Lastly, and perhaps most controversially, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) — the gatekeeper of the world’s most valuable intellectual property — should transition from its fee-based funding system to a more traditional reliance on appropriated taxpayer dollars. The USPTO accomplishes the rarest feat in government: achieving its mission while costing taxpayers nothing. However admirable, this model transfers the burden of its operating budget onto innovators themselves through a . These application and processing fees may minimally impact the decisions of larger, established firms, but they can eat through large portions of precious funding available to start-ups without accounting for the additional costs of legal guidance required to navigate compliance matrices.

Reducing, or potentially eliminating, the costs to an inventor filing a patent or trademark would fundamentally reshape the USPTO’s operating model, but a nation committed to innovation and investing in its future should not shy away from purposing taxpayer dollars to make those indispensable pursuits more accessible to a broader number of people and firms.

Financial stimulus alone cannot replace what has and will be lost to COVID-19. Yet somewhere amidst the pandemic’s pain, confusion and uncertainty, there is an American tinkering with a new product or application that might just save an entire industry, a struggling company or someone’s life. What kind of blessing might her success afford the rest of us? What a pity, and what else might we lose, should we stand in her way?  

*[Benjamin Verdi is a global innovation manager with Grant Thornton International Ltd. The views expressed in this column are his own and are not those of his employer. Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is a of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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