The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question:

     Us: “Why are we here?”
     Earth: “Plastic … asshole.”

— George Carlin

I just finished Ray Kurzweil’s How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. The book is technical enough for the nerdy, but plainspoken enough for everyone else. It got me thinking or, as Kurzweil would have it, pattern matching.

Kurzweil expands on his decades-long thesis that the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR as he’s coined it) drives the exponential increase in price/performance of computing. By 2029, this growth in hardware/software will create an intelligence that rivals our brain’s wetware. The LOAR is based on five key concepts that underly all computing:

1. Arbitrarily accurate communication, based on Claude Shannon’s noisy channel coding theorem;
2. Universal computation, based on the Turing Machine;
3. Von Neumann’s architecture of the modern computer;
4. Artificial, brain-like intelligence that passes the Turing Test; and
5. Moore’s Law which says that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.

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For those that missed my talk at Strata+Hadoop 2012 in October, Big Data is a Hotbed of Thoughtcrime. So What?, the kind folks at O’Reilly have made it available on their YouTube Channel. Here’s the video link. 

I also did an interview for the preview issue of Big Data Journal on the thoughtcrime topic. And for those that want to follow along with the video, here’s the presentation:

During our Strata 2012 panel discussion on privacy and big data, Daniel Tunkelang asked whether inferring private facts from public data is an attempt to define a new category of thoughtcrime — an insightful question. This got me thinking about the intersection of thought, speech, and acts with privacy and big data.

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This year, Data Privacy Day stretched into Data Privacy Week. I celebrated by participating in a Churchill Club panel on The Collection of Online Consumer Data: The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. The discussion centered on consumer interest in protecting personal data and the importance of striking the right balance between regulation and innovation. January has been such a busy month for data privacy issues that we had several recent events to noodle…

First, there was the SOPA kerfuffle which resulted in the withdrawl of the legislation. My take here.

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On the road last week, I gave my Accidental Chief Privacy Officer talk at LinkedIn (video, slides). The 20 minute Q&A starts around 53:00 and, as expected, was filled with very insightful questions.

I revamped the section on regulation, attempting to deconstruct the privacy frame into spaces, players, and consequences. The space defines whether we’re engaged in a public, private, or shared experience with players of varying power disparity where consequences can be assessed. By the way, I’ll be speaking with Solon Boracas and Alex Howard at the March Strata Conference on how we might better think about data-use, its benefits and consequences. Here’s the video of my LinkedIn Tech Talk:

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I

always enjoy talking to future leaders, and today I’m excited to be speaking to those young people that will soon be entrusted with our digital archives.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Research and Development of Digital Libraries (CRADLE) is a test bed for the development, deployment, and management of digital libraries. Of course, privacy and big data are just some of the key issues they’re tackling. It should be a spirited, informed discussion. (Update: it was!)