Is the Future of Trust in Danger? DataDownload

8 min readApr 10, 2021

Is the Future of Trust in Danger? DataDownload A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

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Today — the Media Lab is gearing up to ask an important question — what is the current state of Trust in America, and is it likely to get better or worse?

We’ve gathered together a remarkable group of thinkers to discuss the topic. Amy Mitchell, Director of Journalism Research, Pew Research Center. Vasant Dhar, Co-director of graduate studies, ph.D Program Center for data Science. Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman. And Janet Coates Managing Director Consortium on Trust in Media & Tech, University of Florida. We’re going to explore The future of Trust. Wednesday the 14th at 2PM EDT. You can register for free here.

It’s an interactive conversation you won’t want to miss. And — as you’ll see, this week’s newsletter hovers around that question. Do we trust our information to be factual? Do we trust our WiFi? Do we trust Holograms? Do we trust our data privacy? What really caused Facebook’s 500M-user data leak? Can AI really make art? Should we trust humans to edit our children’s genes? And, has a tiny particle exploded our trust about what we know about physics?

So, grab a cup of coffee, read about trust, and then come to our gathering on Wednesday — ready to ask hard questions. We’ll see you Wednesday at the Media Lab exploratorium.

Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Steve@NYCMedialab.org
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read That Spotty Wi-Fi? There’s $100 Billion to Fix It.

President Biden’s $2T infrastructure plan includes $100B for getting fast internet access to all homes. If you’re from the city it’s hard to imagine that there is spotty or nonexistent WiFi in 2021, but the problem is crippling for low-income families or those living in rural areas. Students without decent connectivity have already fallen behind a full year. In all, something like 20M rural Americans live without reliable connectivity.

The plan still relies on private companies to install the cables and cell towers — one concern is that “companies won’t consider the effort worth their time, even with all the money earmarked for those projects.”

“The administration’s $100 billion plan aims to connect even the most isolated residents: the 35 percent of rural homes without access. In those areas, the White House said, it would focus on ‘future-proof’ technology, which analysts take to mean fiber and other high-bandwidth technology. The administration highlighted its support for networks run and owned by municipalities, nonprofits and rural electrical cooperatives.”

NY Times / 8 min read Read More Want to Solve the Misinformation Crisis? We Already Have a Proven Solution at Our Fingertips

What are we to do when over 25% of the most-viewed English-language COVID videos on YouTube contain misinformation, and when fakes news travels six times faster than true posts on Twitter? If tech giants have conflicting interests when it comes to regulation, and the government isn’t stepping up, who will? Like I pointed out last April, “it’s like we want this magical entity that isn’t the government, that isn’t Facebook or YouTube or Twitter” and Fast Company generously says: “Media Lab’s Steve Rosenbaum is absolutely correct.”

But there might be a solution already staring us in the face — the fifth largest site outside of China, Wikipedia. Where once college professors scoffed at citing the free encyclopedia (despite a 2005 blind test that determined Wikipedia had no more serious errors than Encyclopedia Britannica), the site is now cited in federal court documents and underpins your smart assistant’s answers. And over the past twenty years, Wikipedia has learned how to come to a consensus on what is true and what is false:

“While anyone can submit an edit, Wikipedia has a formal hierarchy of administration. Editors strive to reach consensus, but the platform also provides a range of conflict-resolution mechanisms. Wikipedia then enforces sensitive results through 11 protection methods. Human oversight works in concert with AI-powered vandalism-reversing bots, which can make thousands of edits per minute. Crucially, all this occurs in a transparently logged environment.”

Fast Company / 6 min read

Read more Tech+Media What Really Caused Facebook’s 500M-User Data Leak? Last Saturday a hacker posted leaked records of 533M Facebook users, including their full names, locations, birthdays, and in some cases emails. For reference, Cambridge Analytica scraped some 80M users in 2016.

Alon Gal, CTO at Hudson Rock, the firm that discovered the leak, says that “from a security standpoint there wasn’t much Facebook could do to help users affected by the breach since their data is already out in the open, but he added that Facebook could notify users so they could remain vigilant about.”

WIRED / 10 min read Read More Diddy Beams Into Son’s 23rd Birthday Party via Hologram: See Video Diddy teleported to his son’s birthday bash using PORTL, an interactive hologram machine previously used by Kane Brown during the 2020 iHearRadio festival. Check out Diddy’s appearance here.

Also check out LedPulse. The company built a volumetric display composed of up to 144k LED lights suspended by hanging threads. The effect of turning a subset of these LEDs on and off for a fraction of a second is pretty much a 3D hologram.

Billboard / 1 min read Read More Five Years of VR: A Look at the Greatest Moments From Oculus Rift to Quest 2

From a bug-ridden prototype headset and a scrappy team in 2015, Facebook’s XR efforts have come a long way: Facebook Reality Labs now houses an estimated 20% of the company’s entire workforce, and the Oculus Quest 2 sold more units than all other Oculus headsets combined. Zuckerberg’s mission to get XR devices into most homes seems reachable at this point.

Sentiment, however, has gone in the opposite direction. Not just because of events like Cambridge Analytica, but distasteful plays like making Facebook accounts mandatory in order to use the Oculus. That said, the company has pumped billions to move the needle for XR, and that it has. For Oculus’s five-year anniversary, the company wrote a look-back feature on their blog, featuring their greatest moments. For something more nuanced, check out Wired’s piece on the company’s hardware, people, and the waning trust in Facebook.

Oculus / 15 min read

Artificial intelligence is helping humans make new kinds of art. It is more likely to emerge as a collaborator than a competitor for those working in creative industries.

The Economist (YouTube) / 8 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Should We Edit Our Children’s Genes? Would It Be Cruel Not To?

Is it wrong to edit your kid’s genes? Is it cruel not to? What happens when CRISPR and capitalism collide? Will we witness the rise of a superhuman genetic elite? And what kind of political and economic systems do we need to start building?

Spotify / 56 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: NYC Media Lab — The Future of Trust
Date: April 14, 2PM-3PM EDT
What’s the difference between news and information — and can the growing impact of AI create a new, more trustworthy environment to re-establish trust? We’ll bring on some of the world’s leading experts to virtually explore the Future of Trust. Register Here.

Free Event: Know Before You Vote — Who Does What
Date: April 14, 12PM EDT
Join LMHQ, the League of Women Voters, the Alliance for Downtown New York, and the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association for an overview of the roles and responsibilities of NYC’s elected officials. Register Here.

Free Event: Nvidia GPU Technology Conference
Date: April 12, 11AM EDT
Join Nvidia for breakthroughs in AI, data center, accelerated computing, healthcare, intelligent networking, game development, and more. Register Here.

A Deeper Look A Tiny Particle’s Wobble Could Upend the Known Laws of Physics

“This is our Mars rover landing moment.” — Chris Polly, a physicist at Fermilab

The Standard Model of particle physics does a pretty good job of describing the fundamental forces of the universe — except when it doesn’t, like in the case of gravity. But sometimes, there are glitches, or loose threads, as PBS Space Time’s Matt O’Dowd calls them, that hint at deeper layers of physics that might eventually lead researchers to a theory of everything.

A recent experiment at Fermilab explored such a glitch with the muon, a fundamental particle similar to an electron but much heavier (207x). Two hundred physicists working on the project found that the muon didn’t work as predicted — showing “strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory.” That something might lead to new physics.