my REAL concerns around democracy’s use of digital: an overview of the last week’s work

introduction to my rationales for a new #neurodiverse-#it in order to solve #complexproblems:

my real concerns around being #secrecypositive, or not at all, have lately had nothing to do with governments and what they do with our right to #secrecy. after all, many citizens buy #secrecypositive reading- and sharing-machines of highly controversial content quite legally in all #european countries: we call them books, and they are made of paper. nothing more #secrecypositive than this millennium-old way of sharing and spreading, both in good and bad faith, information of all kinds.

so if it’s legal on paper, with pencil or ink, and has been for centuries, why not repeat in digital — and sooner than later?

you see, the problem isn’t discovering a digital burglary has taken place. because the removal of a digital privacy or object or piece of content like this is possible to achieve by copying exactly. the removal is consequently effected without removing. but its potentially prejudicial removal is a fact all the same. just as if in a life more conventionally real:

www.secrecy.plus/spt-it

my problem is never a government access to my bedroom, and always instead a criminal usage of similar accesses:

no.

i don’t mind — really don’t mind — knowing good governments can see what i do. i wouldn’t mind, for example, the #swedish government watching me in this way, because they are a state which strives to legitimate itself always.

meantime, i have minded the british doing the same to me since they incarcerated me improperly back in 2003, using #mentalhealth legislation to achieve #nationalsecurity objectives: there really is no way the homeland of boris johnson, even now as it currently stands twenty long years later, can be called a legitimate world player of any standing whatsoever.

and certainly not for the rest of #europe. because in order to erect and democratically sustain a hierarchy of surveillance, you have to robustly aspire in an ongoing way to manifesting that same democracy of legitimation.

to challenges, then, which i’d like to answer with the project “complexify.me”:

but even governments and governances as immensely competent as the #swedish ones manifestly show themselves to be can’t respond wholly cogently to the following set of quandaries i and many others find ourselves both intellectually and emotionally suffering from right now:

  • yes, the governments of good nation-states like #sweden must act deeply to preserve the delicate balance of their societies which evidence this goodness: and more intelligently as a result of their delicacy.
  • for they, more than say the british (and not just now but, in hindsight, for much longer than we pretended was ever the case), are entirely vulnerable — out of choice … and rightly so! — to such ecosystems of goodwill being upturned by outsiders and insiders who prefer to take advantage of these profoundly democratic freedoms for their own criminal gain. for in the freedoms of such constituted trusts lie the essences of their wisdoms.
  • the quid pro quo, or the caveat if you like, is this: we must as essentially democratic peoples accept that sometimes in order to protect our treasured states there will exist a need to do less democratic acts. but for a limited period of time clear to all, and even then to proportionate measure.
  • because being this kind of democracy doesn’t mean you cannot maintain yourself with insight and firmness. you don’t have to limit yourself to rolling over and thinking of the northern lights because you are good and mustn’t defend yourself with decision on occasions. and so to deliver on this, you do need to have the ongoing capacity to gather any information and datasets that preserve these laudable states of fragile coexistence, without at the same time puncturing them.

summarising my thoughts on these matters a little:

understand me: i’m not saying don’t watch your citizens. i’m saying as citizens we have to watch each other, all of us to all of us: but as KEEPERS of each other’s human souls, so that necessary violent actions of the state are always, always, kept to a bare minimum.

finally, digital burglary — as described above — inconveniently can happen without us ever being aware of it: and in this “us”, i mean the state, its best professionals and its most intelligent citizens … all of us.

my issue, therefore, with deep surveillance is that if my government does it, even where immensely cleverly, in it will exist people with two dangerously connected roles:

a) rights of legal and proper access to state surveillance tools, datasets and infrastructures; and

b) illegitimate obligations, for whatever reasons, as humans possessed of covert and completely illegal relationships with an ever more embedded, organised, and creative criminality.

conclusions to the above:

if my state says it needs to surveill me to the extent that it can even see and hear me whilst i have sex, in order that it may protect me in more relevant matters, it will already exist as a capability of the aforementioned criminality years before. and so, as mil’s theorem suggests:

“in an almost infinitely malleable digital environment and world, if i — with my limited intellect and financial resources — can imagine a new crime, someone else with far more money and brains will already be doing it. i don’t need to prove this #neocrime exists to know it does.”

mil williams, stockholm sweden, 17th april 2023
crimehunch.com/neocrime
  • the consequences being …? we can’t fight this kind of crime only with good #neurotypical people who are naturally comfortable with such #neurotypical-#it platforms and tools.
  • we must include equally good people with #neurodiverse abilities and brand new kinds of #neurodiverse-#it, so they can then start to construct and tell the stories that describe the #darkfigure increasingly being committed out there in some of the ways i now describe.
  • stories which the existent #neurotypical professionals — properly and usefully so, too — can then begin to chase down and stop in whatever sanctioned ways the states of good faith in our #europeanunion judge to be necessary, at each historical moment in our collective future-presents.

complexify.me | www.sverige2.earth/complexify

“coffee-shop cctv hacked to gain intel with military value”: EXACTLY why our security needs different tech philosophies

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/russian-hackers-target-security-cameras-inside-ukraine-coffee-shops

and these freedoms for us all. not just the inhibiting hierarchies enjoyed by those who own — in more ways than one — this thing we know as tech. and therefore our democracies.

mil williams, stockholm sweden, 12th april 2023

there is so much #darkfigure being delivered by people in tech, and our law-enforcement and security agencies have given up on developing systems which could counter such #neocrime:

crimehunch.com/neocrime

the agencies rely heavily on machines plus humans — in that order — because their tech partners are interested in the monetisation virtues of this order of priorities:

sverige2.earth/complexify


meantime, the bad hackers use humans plus machines — in this order — to creatively imagine, imagineer, and only then engineer new and covert ways of committing crimes that remain as invisible as possible for as long as possible.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/11/russian-hackers-target-security-cameras-inside-ukraine-coffee-shops


and it’s not even that our agencies are criminal in the main (though some take advantage of #darkfigure extensively to bend, or sometimes go so far as to break, the law), but their ongoing inability to recognise the importance of humans over machines is negligence of a sort:


and even more so, the illegitimate criminal power of the human+machine workflows and deals over the agency machine+human combos is utterly ignored, in the absence of truthful criteria re innovation and procurement. and yet it would be so easy to begin a process of repurposing, with integrity, of existing technologies to ensure people are made bigger by machines and not diminished.

i’m sorry. but it has to be observed, painful though the recognition, if a given, will be.

because this next one has to be taken on the chin, if we are to improve our capacity to fight creative criminality in a collective future-present:

9/11 came about because horribly creative humans used machines as tools to kill other humans, who failed to prevent it from happening because their tech partners had consistently recommended using machine+human workflows.

not because they really believed this was true; that is, that human intuition was a lesser value than the incremental thinking engendered by machines.

no.

rather, because machines+humans make more money, more easily, than workflows that consist of humans+machines … that is, humans expanded and enhanced by machines.

mil williams, stockholm sweden, 12th april 2023

crimehunch.com/terror

and so the only way we can prevent such horrors in the future — particularly the invisible ones such as the recent us defense leaks due to bad hackers and web actors, some of which date back to october 2022 and are only just now discovered, as well as the cctv hacking reported in the guardian newspaper article above — is to begin to reverse the order and purpose of tech.

this — what follows now — is what i suggest and advocate most firmly: humans always first, enhanced and expanded by tools whose primary rationale no longer remains monetising a tech partner into obscene levels of technological wealth whatever the wider human cost but, instead, delivering without exception on making a safer and more secure, more legitimate, more socially responsible, and more honest world all round.

and these freedoms for us all. not just the inhibiting hierarchies enjoyed by those who own — in more ways than one — this thing we know as tech. and therefore our democracies:

sverige2.earth/complexify


how to combine three brains to fight the fire of creative criminality with the fire of a newly creative crimefighting

introduction:

this post contains thoughts from a fortnight’s thinking processes more or less; plus the content of a synthesising presentation which is the sum of years of thought-experimenting on my part. i’ll start with the presentation, which is now where i want us to go:

fighting creatively criminal fire with a newly creative crimefighting

i created the slide below for a presentation i was asked to submit to a european digital agency pitching process, by the uk organisation public. the submission didn’t prosper. the slide, however, is very very good:


the easy answer is that obviously it benefits an industry. the challenging question is why this has been allowed to perpetuate itself as a reality. because real people and democratic citizens have surely perished as a result: maybe unnecessarily.

here is the presentation which public failed to accept for submission to the european digital process last october 2022, and from which the above slide is taken:

presentation submitted to public in october 2022 (pdf download)


where and how i now want us to come together and proceed to deliver on creative crimefighting and global security

the second presentation which follows below indicates my thinking today: no caveats; no red lines; no markers in the sand any more. if you can agree to engage with the process indicated here, no conditions on my side any more.

well. maybe just one. only western allies interested in saving democracy will participate, and benefit both societally and financially from what i’m now proposing:

www.secrecy.plus/fire | full pdf download


following on from the above then, thoughts i wrote down today — in edited format to just be now relevant only to the above — on my iphone notes app. this constitutes a regular go-to tool for my thought-experimenting:

on creating a bespoke procurement process for healthy intuition-validation development

step 1

pilot a bespoke procurement process we use for the next year.

we keep in mind the recent phd i’ve had partial access to on the lessons of how such process is gamed everywhere.

we set up structures to get it right from the start.

no off-the-peg sold as bespoke and at a premium, even when still only repurposed tech for the moment.

step 2

we share this procurement process speedily with other members of the inner intuition-validation core.

they use it: no choice.

but no choice then gives a quid quo pro: this means total freedom to then develop and contribute freely to the inner core ip in ways that most fit others’ cultures.

and also, looking ahead, to onward commercialise in the future in their zones of influence where they know what’s what, and exactly what will work.

and so then, a clear common interest and target: one we all know and agree on.

mil williams, 8th april 2023

historical thought and positions from late march 2023

finally, an earlier brainstorming from the same process as described in part two above, conducted back in late march of this year. this is now a historical document and position, and is included to provide a rigorous audit trail of why free thinking is so important to foment, trust and believe in, and actively encourage.

we have to create an outcome which means we know we think unthinkable things far worse than any criminal ever will be able to, to prevent them. we need a clear set of ground rules, but these rules shouldn’t prevent the agents from thinking comfortably (as far as this is the right word) things they never dared to approach.

the problem isn’t putin or team jorge. it is, but not what we see. it’s what they and others do that we don’t even sense. it’s the people who do worse and events that hurt even more … these things which we have no idea about.

if you like, yes, the persian proverb: the unknown unknowns. i want to make them visible. all of them. the what and how. that’s my focus.

trad tech discovers the who and when. but my tech discovers the what and how before even a glint in criminals’ eyes.

so we combine both types of tech in one process that doesn’t require each culture to work with the other. side-by-side, yes. but in the same way, no. so we guarantee for each the purest state each needs of each.

my work and my life/love if you prefer will not only be located in sweden but driven from here too. that’s my commitment. and not reluctantly in any way whatsoever.

[…]

i have always needed to gather enough data. now i have, the decision surely is simple.

mil williams, 21st march 2023

“upskilling” human beings in the ways of the machine … again? i don’t THINK so

introduction

i just got a message from microsoft (linkedin) which asked me to consider and/or explain how what i was about to post (what you see below in the screenshots) related to my work or professional role.

why nudge in this way

is this a stealthy attempt to remove the ambiguities of #arts-based thinking patterns from contaminating the baser #chatgpt-x instincts and what they scrape?

more than personally, quite intellectually i think it’s wrong — in a world which needs lateral and nonconformist thinking — to define, a priori, what a thinker who wishes to shape a better business should use as a primary discourse.

because this discourse may include how much we follow or no the traditional way of framing information: where we state what we will say, say it, and then summarise it, we fit the needs of machines and people trained to think like them.

art should be used to communicate in any forum

‘truth is, when we choose a precise ambiguity (one forged out of the arts — not the confusions — of deep communication), where such ambiguity and the uncertainty it generates may in itself be a necessary part of the communication process’s context — and even content — what value ever is added by telling the speaker and/or writer they are ineffective?

in any case, the public will always have the final vote on this: and if you prefer to communicate in such ways and be not read, why not let it happen?

why choose this kind of nudge to upskill writers in the ways of the machine?

using automated machines to do so, too …!

so what do YOU think? what DO you?

me, what follows is what i want. what no one in tech wants to allow. because i’m not first to the starting-line: i’m last. they decided it didn’t suit their business models decades ago. i decided i didn’t agree. and i still don’t. and neither should you.

on making a systemically distributed intelligence and genius of all human beings … not just an elite

a different, more process-focussed way of humanising #ai

introduction

i had an idea way-back-when. i posted it and then talked about it in various forums. i think the first time formally was a berkeley skydeck submission.

then i did an online whitepaper called crime hunch:

crimehunch.com

it contained a number of different ways of doing crime, ways which lent themselves particularly to the almost infinitely malleable — and therefore unimaginably criminal — world we now live in.

crimehunch.com/neocrime

crimehunch.com/loopholes

it also included what in hindsight has become a nascent way of fighting crime:

crimehunch.com/terror

developing the nascent idea more fairly

without asking the question as clearly as i could have at the start, the image that follows is really what was at the back of my mind … what i was gnawing away at without being so clear as i could have been at the time:

after the crime hunch page on terror and before the above slide, which in truth was created for a euro-event sponsored by the british organisation PUBLIC, i also had a lengthy video conversation with seven or eight american tech corporation executives. i never saw their faces or knew their names. but the conversation, even so, was valuable. before and after this conversation, i have found it easy to rate positively and highly the corporation in question.

anyway. i asked the assembled the conundrum which the crime hunch terror page poses. however, none of them was prepared to say anything; not even address it to say that it shouldn’t have been posed in the first place.

this was when i began to realise i might have gone too far.

so recently i decided i, myself, would address what could have been hurting people out there: people who otherwise might have seen themselves through to considering it useful to work with me.

i realised, too, i needed to finesse not only my words but also how i might address the challenges being raised: the tool or tools — or conceptual positions — needed.

squaring the circles of human intuition-enhancing #ai (and therefore of creative crimefighting) with traditional #datascience views

less than a month ago i produced a presentation about three kinds of human brains and how we might make it easy for them to work together. i was interested in exploring the weaknesses in my hollywood writers idea, and maybe bring onboard as well the strengths of a more traditional and exclusively automating #ai.

because one of the replies those people who do answer the terror conundrum have previously given is that using both teams of resources is the best solution.

the problem with this however is that it’s not necessarily a solution. we have cultural challenges of simple workplace interactions which inevitably kick in, where differing professional mindsets — necessarily conformist crimefighters (someone has to want to apply the rules) versus nonconformist creatives, for example — may struggle to understand, or even minimally validate, the other’s work and approaches.

what #datascience finds easy — and then, what it really struggles with

i then deepened this perception specifically in relation to the #datascience brain and how it values other, more intuitive ways of thinking.

and this formed the basis of the three brains presentation i mentioned: “fighting fire with fire”:

www.secrecy.plus/fire

and what follows from the presentation itself on what i honestly now believe are cultural NOT technological challenges facing us:

i’d like us to focus for the moment on the first slide above:

without intending to or seeing at first what i had done, i was delivering finally on a solution to the conundrum i had — maybe a year or so before — ended up using in good faith but, at the same time, unintentionally hurting the sensibilities and feelings of more than a few.

in this slide we see a process emerging at last where two cultures can work profoundly well together, without having to negotiate anything ever of their own ways of seeing, or of their professional praxis and therefore often unspoken assumptions.

so. to the nitty-gritty.

how would it work?

we take the sorts of minds and creatives i’ve already typed and labelled as “hollywood screenwriters”. but not just hollywood, of course. more widely, the intuitive thinkers; the ones who go with hunches and inventing new future-presents on the basis not of experience exclusively but, rather, in tandem, and deeply so, with what we could call the leaps of faith of what often necessarily leads to genius — whether good guys or criminals.

and then with these brains, in the first stage of our newly creative part but never whole of crimefighting, law enforcement and national & global security, we also type the increasingly unknown unknowns of #darkfigure, and related, which the what and how of terrifyingly unexpected creative criminal activity surely involve.

and with this approach and separation of responsibilities — traditional #datascience and automating #ai on the one hand, creative #intuition-focussed humans to the max on the other — we may now propose using traditional automating #ai as it has functioned to date: that is, where the patterning and recognition of past and present events serves to predict the who and when of future ones. and so, leaving the frighteningly, newly radical and unexpected unknown unknowns of what and how to the creatives.

the value-add of this new process-focussed approach to humanising #ai

never the twain shall meet, maybe? because in a sense, with this separation of responsibilities, established and necessarily conforming security and law-enforcement organisations can advantage themselves of the foresight of creative #intuition and #hunches without losing the purity — if you like — of tried and tested security processes.

and the creative second and third brains below can create and forward-engineer the real evil out there before it becomes a bloody fact — yet without inhibitions or compunctions.

and then, what’s more, both parties — rightly conformist security professionals and effectively nonconformist creative crimefighting professionals — can do to the max, without confusion or shame, what best — and even most emotionally — floats their boats.

initial steps to delivering this process

this is the first steps of process i see and suggest:

final words

so what do you think?

is this a fairer, more inclusive, and frankly practical approach — as well as a way forwards to a real and potential implementation — of the original crime hunch terror conundrum i outlined at the top?

and if so, what would those first steps actually look like? #ai technologies and approaches like this, maybe — coupled closely with an existing #ai where no one would have to change their spots?

www.secrecy.plus/hmagi

thephilosopher.space

____________________

further reading:

platformgenesis.com | • crimehunch.com

what happens when society is secular but redemption remains a desire and real human need?

introduction:

i’ve been thinking a lot about redemption, ever since a messenger and intermediary said to me in 2016 that my problem was guilt.

she was, on due reflection, wrong. guilt is good, if its reasons for provoking can be assuaged in competent and compassionate manner.

what i still suffer from is an absence of process, in the secular society i cherish, for redemption.

my supposition:

let’s presuppose the following: let’s say that religion served a real positive purpose which in its relative absence now in many of our societies has not been supplanted with other processes as compassionately. i say compassionately with circumspection, of course. religion itself has effected many horrible historical — and even current — events in humanity’s journey.

an example, then, of the redemption i mention?

well. here we are!

discretion is a very humane aspect of criminal justice systems, when used in the spirit of the law and its kindly interpretation.

i studied international criminal justice in 2017 at master’s level and on one occasion stumbled across the following anecdote in the academia i was reading: italy, well known for the misuse of family power and structure, may also invoke the good of family leading to a better criminal justice praxis there.

most crime in all criminal justice systems is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 26. after that age, almost automagically, its incidence tails off. some suggest there may even exist physiological reasons for this: that young male brains get hard-wired to begin settling at around the upper age band quoted.

either way, we have a criminal justice reality: young men who commit crime are also victims of crime, in the sense that they are the most vulnerable group to enter criminality, and get very little proactive support to stay out of the criminal justice system. more often, in fact, they get targeted — maybe targeted into it — via prejudice and presumption of very many, damning and defining, societal forces.

in italy, then, this was the example: a law-enforcement officer heard of a young man around 17 who had just about committed his first crime; certainly infraction. the officer knew of the family, and instead of “inducting” the youth directly into a path which later would be heading irreversibly towards criminality, he went behind the back of the youngster and straight to his parents.

he explained the situation gently and non-threateningly, explaining that the family could help. here, we could argue, was good discretion operating to the max: even, that it shouldn’t have been necessary to use discretion to keep the young man out of being typed so young as criminality’s cannon fodder. maybe it could be conceivable that the officer’s own kpi-structure and law-enforcement praxis would consist primarily of keeping people out of the system — enabling and allowing them to redeem any initial acts so that criminality became something they themselves wanted to veer from — instead of counting up the number of criminals captured and banged away.

proposal:

on the of the above, and in relation to things i’ve already published on a new concept of criminal justice which i’ve termed natural justice, i’d like to propose that we take the renewed need for a societal infrastructure of redemption to be revisited.

in the absence of father confessors, that is in the absence of many people finding them unsatisfactory to their needs (where they work, no change needed of course!), we should create serious halfway houses between the criminality and zero good of #darkfigure and #neocrime as i understand them at one extreme (the 20 to 40 percent that is the crime and related loopholes invisible to criminal justice) and religiously delivered confession and relief at the other. which for secular societies no longer functions easily.

yes: a natural justice, after all.

final observations:

thinking more philosophically, it’s possible that the behaviours acted out as described in this post, which may then duly and rightfully lead to criminal prosecution, are encouraged because we need to be redeemed — to feel it, i mean. and unless in secular society you enter the criminal justice system, a societal-level redemption is not within reach. if we provided other ways which had nothing to do with criminal justice stigma, perhaps — too! — fewer would wish to be criminals.

i’ve often felt, as a by-the-by and in analogous way, that open-source and social-networked online communities have become so popular and active because in such spaces — the really competent and well-run ones i mean — we find the reality (or even just simulacrum, but at least this) of a democratic discourse that real democracy increasingly is lacking.

what’s clear is there are exist basic human instincts and impulses, and they must always act in pairs.

doing democracy is one; where nowadays the reward for its practice where this doesn’t invoke the relationship of abused partner?

and so doing ill is another; where nowadays the redemption which doesn’t involve punishment and disgrace?