Imagine you’re Rene Descartes, data scientist at Facebook in charge of saying true things. Problem is, your only input is what people say, and everybody lies.

Mainstream language about cyber-security, specially at the political and military level, is divorced from reality to the point of nonsense.

Silicon Valley pitches for smart cities and military descriptions of future battle environments are awfully similar. That’s not entirely coincidental.

(Spoiler alert: it’s not Detroit, and it’d be a relatively simple question if it weren’t for cancer.)

“The junk merchant,” wrote William S. Burroughs, “doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.” He might as well have been describing the commercial, AI-mediated, social-network-driven internet.

When it comes to ethics and AI, forget corporate responsibility statements. If you want to know what a tech company worries about, look at what it monitors when deploying new code.

Charlie had a chip in his head, but that’s not what made him special…

t looked to her like a Christmas miracle, but it was just the Internet of Things…

The Oxford Protocol requires all “killer robots” to be monitored by humans. But who monitors them?

About one in nine engineers in the US is a woman, which makes some men infer from this that they are “naturally” bad at it. Many data-driven algorithms would conclude the same thing; that’s still the wrong conclusion, but, dangerously, it seems blessed by the impartiality of algorithms. Here’s how bias creeps in.