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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
but never again shall i salivate the evil of the unnecessarily violent. as a last resort … this is how life sometimes must conduct itself. as a tool of habitual state … this is not.
mil williams, johan & nyström coffee shop, stockholm sweden, 9th april 2023
it’s not all plain selling. but then that’s not what life’s about.
but if i manage to stay here in the end, this — the end — it won’t be. it will be the best beginning i’ve ever managed. i spent seven years between the uk and ireland, trying to engineer a relationship between ireland and the uk. i failed.
now i say it out loud: not with joy but acceptance. acceptance that i failed in everything institutionally and personally related.
but not ideas-wise. not in respect of my increasing capacity to uncover them: like a pig and his beloved truffles. for me, ideas are truffles, waiting to be found; and they say that pigs bear many good resemblances to humans. physiologically, for sure. maybe in other respects i am still unaware of.
all i can say is if a pig is good enough for george clooney, why not associate myself with the same?
🙂
so why here — and now?
because in a very brief period of time i see a society like none i have experienced in my life. there are cruel people here: but the society as a wider whole is striving not to legislate or legitimate state cruelty. and this i am defo not accustomed to back in my homeland.
so if i have to contribute to a tech which scales up basic government and regional administrative instincts, i want it to be in a place where more manually these instincts are sound. meantime, the triumvirate of evil exists in the uk with the conservative attachment to russian wealth and trump’s idiocies all in one. and all by now as an all too well-established nouveau establishment of the horrifyingly, casually cruel.
one thing many don’t realise, and i still don’t fully understand: a military society can be a liberating one too. it all depends to what purpose you militarise — and with what genders you compose your military out of.
during my whole time in the uk i was oppressed by outliers of a military which, tbh, needed very few outliers anyway to operate and impose such oppression with the necessary precision. look at the state of the london metropolitan police right now just to appreciate how ugly the uk has allowed itself to become. and that’s the first line: just the police.
this is why here, and why now. and if it’s not possible now and here, it will be somewhere else similar, and sometime then.
but never again shall i salivate the evil of the unnecessarily violent. as a last resort … this is how life sometimes must conduct itself. as a tool of habitual state … this is not.
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:
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:
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.
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
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:
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.
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”:
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?
foucault said everything is dangerous: and more reason, for this reason, to study everything more deeply.
curie said we shouldn’t fear understanding: almost that it was our duty.
i want, now, to set up a national security facility which uses curie’s approach for its outer core, where our good people learn in supported ways to fight bad people.
and i want then, once we have fashioned the necessary tools, to develop an inner core which gets as pointed as foucault’s persistence re the dangerous.
at the #nobelprize museum today i saw two words on the floor near the entrance, amongst many others. the two i recognised and stood near were in english. i hope one day others i am able to recognise will be in swedish.
my words of preference were “persistence” and “disrespect”. of the two, the one i stood next to first was “disrespect”. not gratuitous: measured. that’s me. and that will always be me.
and that’s what i want to make of the aforementioned national security facility: something deeply infused with a profound lack of respect to the shibboleths of crime and … to what we can or can’t do to stop and dismantle them.
let’s do it.
it’s time we did. time to have confidence in our abilities. our competences. and our integrity.
i think i upset a lot of people. i remember a more than hour-long conversation with faceless executives from a big us tech corporation i really value and would love one day to work with.
i say “faceless” neutrally, mind: they had no faces, just circles with initials; and were never introduced to me. six or seven plus the person who organised the video-chat. during lockdown, it was.
i asked them the above question: there was silence for around ten seconds. in the event, no one replied at all. the fear was palpable. the fear that someone would say something which someone else would report back, and forever mark a person’s career, without recourse to explanation.
or so i thought. on reflection, maybe i had gone too far. maybe it was wrong for me to suggest their machines weren’t up to the job of beating creatively criminal terrorists. maybe it was wrong for me to suggest we could do more to creatively crimefight: to make human beings capable of being as nonconformist to the good as the putins et al of recent years have manifestly been longitudinally to the extreme ill.
here’s the thing: maybe i wasn’t wrong but maybe i wasn’t enough right.
obviously, if the exercise was delivered to its full extent, whatever your answer the assembled would inevitably agree that both machines and hollywood scriptwriters (or their analogous: the skillsets of, at least) would be the best solution. but even here problems would exist — and i would go so far as to suggest, actually, real roadblocks.
people who operate by rules and regulations — conformists we all need that make the world function with justice and fairness — don’t find it easy to value the contribution of nonconformists who, more often than not, make their own hugely competent rules. and, then again, of course, vice versa. conformists don’t always float the boats of nonconformists as much as they should.
so to allude to the fact that we need to be as good as the supremely creative criminality out there in our own forging of a singular combination of intuitive arationality with the best machines we can manufacture is NOT the solution.
no.
the solution lies in ensuring the cultures of nonconformism and conformism may come together to facilitate this outcome of creative crimefighting and national security … this … just this … has to be the solution.
if we minimally know our philosophy, a thesis — being that crimefighting and national security need ever more traditional ai to deliver a fearsome capacity to pattern-recognise nonconformist evil out of existence, alongside people who press the operational buttons on the back of such insights — will get, from me, its antithesis: that is … we need just as much, if not more, what we might term the “human good” to battle the “human bad”.
and maybe the machines, too. alongside and in fabulous cahoots.
yes. and maybe, of course, the machines.
but what if we change the process? what if a synthesis? as all good philosophy?
1. to find the nonconformist what and how — the next 9/11 before it arises — we use hollywood and analogous creativity to imagineer such events.
2. and to find the who and when of such newly uncovered neocrimes, we apply the obviously terrifyingly useful pattern-recognition capabilities of the ever more traditional ai. so that their adepts, their supporters, their proponents … and those conformists who more generally are comfortable with such approaches … well … simply be comfortable with this new paradigm i propose.
in this scenario, the suits and the flowery shirts work in consonance but never simultaneously. and so we square the circle of respect amongst the two parties, which long-term would always be difficult to sustainably engineer and forge permanently.
mil's page 