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PROVOKING THE FUTURE OF SECURITY: 51 micro-forecasts from the Blended Reality 2008 crowd-sourcing experiment
At our Fall 2008 Technology Horizons Conference, we crowd-sourced five questions (via Twitter, blogs, email, and SMS) about Blended Realities in 2019. Here are the massively collaborative security results!
Question #4: In 2019, who defines your identities, and who governs them?
A federation of private and public identity management systems now exist. Secure personal digital identities are now largely trusted in both the corporate and non-profit environment. Open ID and a few successors are in wide use, and have predictably captured about 20% of the market, as open source software has of the software market. These free, open solutions keep the more full-featured and complex proprietary solutions (the other 80% of the market) honest, fairly priced, and accountable. Political, corporate, non-profit, and open source entities all have some control and influence over digital identity, and the laws are finally catching up with the technology in most places. Better identity has greatly cleaned up spam, griefing, and other behavior that emerges in any anonymous space. We no longer see the web as a Wild West, but as a place that has some identity and security, with the vast majority of it being bottom up (souveillance), and a much smaller fraction being top-down (surveillance). There are more open, creative commons options for sharing, participating, and enhancing collective intelligence than ever before.
Fortunately, a very big change toward more personal management of identity is just now beginning, because the conversational interface to the world (see my article on this at: www.accelerationwatch.com/lui.html) has finally emerged in a useful, first-generation form. Interaction designers have long suspected that once you talk to a computer that can understand human language, you will want a face on that computer, a face that nods when it understands you, widenens its eyes when it doesn’t, etc. So personal graphical Avatars, so-called Digital Twins (DT’s, or Digital Secretaries/Agents if the word “Twin” makes you uncomfortable), are now taking off everywhere. They’ve finally become useful for all people who have a cellphone (which is practically all 7.2 billion of us these days), not just game players. Or perhaps its better to say that the virtual world has finally merged with the physical world, bringing SimSpace to all of us. Some futurists call this physical-virtual merger concept the ‘Metaverse” (things like virtual worlds, mirror worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging). If you are interested, more can be found out about it here:
Anyway, it is now becoming obvious that these Digital Twins, these crudely-intelligent agents, are the primary ‘filters’ we will use to interact with the web, with complex objects of any type (our workspaces, our homes, our cars, our kitchens) and each other, in coming years. Google, Yahoo, MS and other search companies continuously update the back ends of their conversational interface systems, so that our DTs are learning new skills literally every week. (Google is now widely expected to replace Wal-Mart as #1 on the Fortune 500 before 2025, though you probably saw that coming). For our part, the global community of users “garden” their intelligence, simply by talking to them. Our DT’s have access to our databases of email, blogs, and other text-based internet and cellphone activities, and some folks, particularly kids, run lifelogs that capture and autotranscribe their life experience to make the context-based aspect of their conversational interface, increasingly useful.
I’m excited about Digital Twins, as I see them as my primary “cognitive filter” for interacting with the world, and for looking after my values. In the 1980’s George Gilder said the big social change was the Microcosm (cheap chips). Then in the 1990’s he said it was the Telecosm (cheap fiber optic communication). In the early 2000’s Bruce Sterling said the next big social advance was the Datacosm (cheap ubiquitous public datasets, tied together by the Web 2.0/participatory web,). In the mid 2000’s I proposed the next change after that would be the Valuecosm, a world where conversational-interface enabled Digital Twins, which have a crude and improving model of my own public and private values, can increasingly help me manage and protect those values in my interactions with the world. There are lots of first-generation problems with Digital Twins that I don’t have time to go into here. But I’m quite optimistic about their long term potential. The more that we use them, the better they get at protecting our values, advising us on wise ways to spend our money, and helping us use our votes to get more and more the kind of society we want. I’ve written a bit on the Valuecosm here; www.accelerating.org/articles/hpe2032army.html, I’ll have much more to say about it in my forthcoming book.
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MasonLee: #2019 Your public identities will be communicated through distributed trust networks. You will manage the private keys and creating new IDs
MasonLee: #2019 But there will also be socially constructed identities for you, and you will have no control over these.
Wolven: @cascio A loosely defined but tightly knit conglomeration of fast-moving and -appropriating People Paying Attention. #2019
In #2019 an identity is licensed to me as BV4FD-39JVV-Q3WW2-PKKJC-RWWV3 and owned by Microsoft Live Identity Services
tbeckett: @cascio My kids, they grew so fast! #2019
wilw: @cascio Why, that would be our robot overlords, of course. Wait. Did I say overlords? I meant protectors. #2019 #blended
mikeliebhold: in #2019 only I will manage my own digital identies, anyone else will need my Ipermission - enforced by UN international treaties
mrjudkins: @cascio In #2019 we're at the mercy of web-based services which agregate everything we've said or done online for use by employers. #blended
dcurtisj: @cascio Identities will be wrapping paper. People will crumple them up and throw them away all day. But littering will be a felony. #2019
jonaslamis: in #2019 my intelligent agent will manage my identities. Trust modeling will be an ongoing challenge. More here: budurl.com/hpen
genebecker: In #2019 my identity is AAAH0AAAAfCjmcBJuQZaykmVS0JIFt1kkSKmNbyDkT4qXCell7XPS9wbCgFLEdsG3TLHXtpmLeTZRVjKnOq9bx... and is governed by google
Internet is not like we had it 2008. Business world found new ways to comunicate, and internet isn't such powerful and supported anymore. But people are always connected, and sometimes they cannot really disconnect themselfes from the system. Unfortunately due to many terroristic activities government have to implant to every new born child a chip to trace the activities of this growning potential criminal (governments over the world will see in every citizen potential crininal). It won't be so easy to removal this chip: very unhealty (chip is build very deep in human organism), and illegal (people without chips will be immediately arrested after they will be found with "non-chip-detectors"). But there are many people who want to live in underground, they will escape from big cities into the rest of the nature and build there their own communities (Thoreau is their ideal). Governmental forces are overloaden with crime problems in big cities, so they let people in the nature live their own lifes. Of course, they send to these Thoreau-esk communities their spies to spike their terroristic plans against big cities. 2019 is unfortunately under the sign of mistrust between people...
Identity on the internet has gone through a series of phases. After the initial glut of highly personal information that ended up on-line in the early days of web 2.0, many on the internet found themselves gravitating towards a different kind of anonymity: developing a series of personalities that each had their own separate lives on-line, profile pages and blog posts, comments, second life avatars, digitally altered you tube videos.
In an effort to know how many of these people are truly real, some googlers came up with software to determine authorship from a series of input texts.Thus some with a myriad of identities were again reduced to just one individual. What that individual really believes, however, is hidden somewhere in the twists of public poses and contradictory opinions expressed under various guises but within a recognizable writing style. Still, some people long to be able to post thoughts, etc. that truly cannot be traced back to them. These writers resort to anonymizing software that analyzes one's written text, and by adjusting vocabulary, syntax, and style, outputs a different version mimicking the style of a selected historic writer.
In 2k19 society is an economy of personal brands. Corporate structures and relationships are perfectly fluid, shifting so fast that the only points of reference are individuals. Every individual cultivates and promotes their own personal brand, recruiting funding and pursuing synergistic partnerships with others. This makes dating a high stakes game. No relationship will begin without extensive background research (Googling, social network stalking), market analysis (what others think), and discussion of a co-branding strategy. It is no longer possible to keep career and social life separate, thanks to a merging of social networks and omnipresent ambient communication. While this might sound cynical in 2k8, this actually bodes well for the life of the mind. Emotions become capital for the first time in human history, as a source of creative energy and brand awareness. People become hyper-aware of the emotional responses of others and currents of emotional interaction, much like creatives in 2k8 advertising. Risk taking is admired and rewarded more than ever, and emotional intelligence is valued highly. In 2k19, dating doesn't suck any more.
The continuing discounting of "friendship" in the social networking sense will mean I have thousands of "friends." So while a few good blogs do important work helping me organize the profusion of media out there (b/c network television doesn't have anything good on), Facebook or its successor will expose me to the opinions of many more people who I disagree with. Occasionally I'll get pissed enough by my "friend's" snark to engage her in debate. By the end, I may have learned something.
I think the hive mind will eat us. We'll effectively become cyborgs - all our data really will be in a distributed OS available to every machine. Our computers will wake us up with a list of things you need to get done through the day, and every choice you have to make will be run through a recommendations engine tied into people you trust. We'll be more powerful, if we can overcome the enormous amounts of inertia that we'll have from being able to take the "easy way out" by just listening to what the robotic assistant tells us. It will "suggest" what to wear, what to eat, what to buy, who to love. That's also right now. I'm not sure about 2019, I imagine all we'll really have is a more even distribution of what you and I have now, with a few upgrades. Photoshop isn't that different in the past 10 years, but it turns out more people use it.
Language/Technology. Since there have been increasingly fewer distinctions between handheld, tablet, and notebook portable computing devices, or between traditional computers and smart electronic appliances that handle specialized computing functions, the words "computer," "laptop," and "phone" have been phased out in favor of "machine." Portability and multifunctionality in computing is the norm; desktop terminals are called "stations," short for "stationary machines." Virtually all machines can play, record video and audio, feature voice-to-text and script recognition, and have touch panels either on screen or in lieu of trackpads. Many can project video onto a larger surface. Handheld games are very popular. The hottest item of 2016 was the WiiPhone, a communication machine that could be used as a game controller with a projector. After a lawsuit by Apple Machines, Inc. the 2nd Gen WiiPhone became the Wii2Go (sometimes the Wii-II-Go, or the WIIgo), but the original WiiPhone is generally regarded as a superior machine, especially by hackers, who love its versatility and easy programmability.
• PaulBHartzog: #2019 I am finally in charge.
rtgarden: #2019 feelings.some people never see my private studio video feed. private access.there is a public access portal. levels of access.
ourfounder: @kitode @seanness #2019 - As people lose the need for command and control management, the need to compartmentalize personal & work will blur
Security: how can we learn to trust again? In the 1970s, our parents' generation became cynical about elected government, but in the 2000s, we stopped trusting government at all. We don't trust our food, our milk, our vaccines, our communications. Jaded jokes about Big Brother watching and swooping in fade into resignation that our data is being constantly collected.
And then people start disappearing. At first, people think that the government or some nonstate entity has taken them. Over time, though, a different story emerges. More and more people are opting for services that erase their past identities and furnish them with new selves. They do this through sophisticated manipulation of the very data sets that corporations and governments have kept tabs on them. Sophisticated providers have smart hackers who make the transition seamless. But you're just as likely to get the job botched, like bad plastic surgery. A class of people with "damaged identities," somewhere between the old and the new, grows into the thousands.
Data mining will be so intergral to the informational
infrastructure that government agencies will de facto know everything
about you, and you will learn not to care so long as they don't tell
your neighbors and your other individual liberties are not affected.
Military interventions will be handled exclusively by private
contractors.
Consciousness will be in the process of a very slow migration away from the body to the persistent, virtual text(s) of what we now call the Web. The 21st century will be thus marked by a contradiction: on the one hand, an increased emphasis on the health and maintenance of the body and mind through a focus on organic food, holistic nutrition and mental exercises; and on the other, a de-emphasis on the body as the site of identity as it instead moves to the space of the virtual and the imagination. Similarly, as the 'Web' becomes the location of these texts of identity, there is a shift in the centuries-old Western focus on individualism as identities start to blur and overlap, creating another contradiction: as one sort of individualism wanes, another arises, one that is focused on face-to-face interaction, pleasure and altruism, particularly interesting since those last two are currently seen to mutually incompatible as a consequence of late-capitalism. When identities explicitly become 'texts' - collections of signs meant to render things comprehensible, that are constantly shifting meaning dependent upon context - the dynamic, changing nature of consciousness moves to the forefront. Positions, political leanings, opinions, affinities start to make sense in the imagination only as a series of three-dimensional orthogonal axes rather than a collection of points on a series of two-dimensional, linear continua.
Obviously in 2019 nanotechnology will have become commonplace. The Government will have recently allowed Google to help power public wifi, which we will by then be able to access via our brain. We can download apps to our neural sd cards so we can read the NYT articles and poke people via Facebook on the mag lev busses to work.
In 2019, simulation is applied to identity protection, to game possible ways in which a particular person may be opening him or herself to hacking, griefing, or some other bad stuff (bad as determined by the subscribers). Online communities might even contribute to the gaming by trying to break into the simulated persona. Subscribers could choose how much to be gamed in order to have an acceptable risk level.
My identities are defined by the people around me, as well as by the virtual worlds that I inhabit. They are governed primarily by others acting as moderators, who decide by consensus what is allowed and what is prohibited.
No one. Similar to today, there is no authoritative source for identity information. It is a hodgepodge of information from various sources, rife with fraud and corruption. Individuals are responsible for protecting their identities, though they have no power to do so. Identity theft and fraud has become such a problem, that it is usually safer to bury anything of value than put it in a bank. Most people find it easier (and more enjoyable) to destroy their own credit than wait for someone else to do it.
As technology continues to evolve, our identity continues to be defined by the evolutionary basics of nature & nurture. Nature = DNA sequencing & mapping technologies will continue to evolve and “reveal” insights to our tendencies and our recorded “history” as mapped in our genes. Nurture = Technologies will also record the other “history” we are a part of- our daily actions, behaviors and way of life. As we continue to become more connected to technologies, our devices, the web, & other applications continue to track and record our every transaction, search, & interaction/collaboration in order to provide us with personalized, automated and efficient services and experience. 10 years from now, our “footprints” will help form our identity in ways that are much more secure, transparent (to the user), and trusted. What will result from these technologies is a vast number of biometric and token methods of authentication. Facial recognition/retinal scanners will become mainstream in high security surveillance & alternative combinations of these new technologies will be applied to lower the rate of identity theft. Both our DNA & our “experience”/”footprints” define who we are- and the technology industry will continue to evolve the manner in which our identities are “captured”. Both government and the people will control how quickly these two categories evolved and how they are used. Personalized or “contextual” services based on our identities “captured” by our devices & the web will likely be adopted into mainstream technology & accepted as a norm at by 2019– As long they provide the transparency people need in order to understand who is seeing what. Technologies related to identifying your “DNA” identity will likely be stifled by barriers in ethics & policy by the government and human rights groups. There will be much advancement in DNA technologies by 2019 along with several attempts to sequence your genes & provide personalized health services. Yet, DNA application to security & identity will be left fairly untouched 10 years from now.
We have membership and not citizenship to societies organized around interest, race, culture etc. We have no privacy but after all that is an American fallacy. Information about everyone is sold but the difference would be that individuals will get paid for it. The bigger question I have is with virtual experiences so immersive.. Why would we ever get out of our houses..
In 2019 I control my identifies, my data supporting these identities/personas and I personally own and protect my data. Only I store and disclose such information and only when I opt to do so in exchange for benefits. In order to gain governmental or corporate benefits I mainly choose to disclose my identity but I feel in control by having the option to choose.
Public IDs are managed by each user, who controls how transparent (and
how deceptive) each ID is and who gets it. These IDs are utilized via
meshed social network nameservers. Official ID, however, is
biometric-linked and managed and tracked by an authoritarian and
insecure national ID database.
New service organizations will emerge to protect person identity in very personalized ways. For example, Brinks Identity Protection could become a big brand. This would be an “experience economy” play, where a service business evolves to transform people lives by giving them a service to protect their identity in very sophisticated (and probably expensive) ways. An extension would be to consult on your own online/offline identity—not just protect it.
In 2019, society will be divided into two groups: those who have RFID
chips embedded subcutaneously, and those who don't. Those who do will
move through faster lines just about everywhere, and they won't need
keys for most doors. Those who don't will live essentially the same
life they do now, except they'll be constantly under seige from
various corporate and government entities to sign up for the RFID
program. An RFID black market will emerge, "identity theft" will take
on new meaning and reach, and the notion of a private identity will
wither--except online, where avatars will acquire new significance.
interstar: #2019 some is defined by IRL friends... (I hope I haven't abandoned them all for being too constraining relative to internet identity play)
interstar: #2019 a few IRL friends remain ... I hope I haven't abandoned all my IRL friends (finding them too constraining)
interstar: #2019 my identity is largely defined by a bunch of web-services I signed up for between 10 and 15 years ago ...
Me
Wildcat2030: @cascio #2019, enter the age of the distributed self, all identities, separate then synchronize, reporting to base, no governance, I am many
Steve Jobs will have invented the Apple Core, a brain implant that wirelessly accesses Googlezon's computing cloud. It stores everything you think about, even recording your dreams for future reference.
President Chelsea Clinton instructs her mother, Supreme Court Chief Justice Hillary Clinton, to iron out the privacy concerns.
Everyone has a Wii car. They're called Wii-bles. They wobble but they don't fall down.
Ernest Callenbach is considered a genius.
The initials CRT, VDT and TV are unknown to the youngest generation.
consumers can choose to have all their personal/healthcare/clear card
airport security access
card/library privileges combined into one card, advertisers will
sponsor this service in order to make ultra targeted messaging so they
know they're reaching the right customers
Which identity? My electronic identity or my "real" identity? The latter becomes increasingly less important as my physical body is defined as very important by my Federal and especially Local government...violent crime will be hardly a threat. Online crime, however, will be difficult to protect myself from as server farms are regularly raided. Personal information will need to be spread thin over hundreds of computers and passwords to prevent putting "too many eggs in one basket"...a multinational security force will monitor all computing very inefficiently causing me and most of my social network to resort to daily electronic misdimeanors ourselves.
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METAWORLD OF MUTUAL SATISFACTION
After the global economic crisis at the end of the first decade of the 3rd millenium, people have increasingly tended to provide more and more information about themselves in an uncontrolled way since this has had apparently so many advantages and benefits. They can get substantial discounts from most of the companies, immediate access to brand new products and services, loans have become much easier to be achieved after those years of disturbance.
And then have the virtual worlds arrived in 2012 on a global scale. Each facet of the life has been supported by different kinds of digitally created and operated environments – from health care to life long learning, from shopping to daily working, from communication to building relationships among people. All the habits, preferences, behaviours and ways of thinking have been unintentionally „published” and then captured by operators of these virtual worlds for further analysis. This allowed for very new, complex but non-disturbing ways to influence and manipulate people’s consumption, relationships and carrier developments. By 2018, the dependence of the „free world” on technology has reached a level which has been never seen before.
Fortunately, the people liked this, after all, it has been their life by that time. People has tended to spend more and more time in virtual worlds which were much more interesting and challenging then the real one. Moreover, thanks to laws created and codes of conducts voluntarily followed by the service provider and system operator companies, nobody knew everything about individuals. Each of them had just partial information about people, and, therefore, they could not fully control people’s identity. An individual is not a simple aggregation of all its own avatars. And none of those companies had access to all of the avatars of any individual.
In the meantime, a new „world of warcraft” has started to emerge: the world of cyberwars. Some people thought that the only problem was those „bad guys”, the people thinking „differently”. Yes, they had different beliefs, habits and objectives for their real life – especially different form those living (and spending most of their time) in the virtual lifes. However, in reality, these guys just wanted to provide a better world for their own people, a real world for sustainable life. Unfortunately or not, but they have also managed to develop the best computer expertise available in the real world – at least, in the area of information manipulation. As a consequence, they have been able to penetrate any digitally created (fire or other) walls, including all the defense mechanisms of the hypercomputing centres (formerly called publicly accessible, „cloud” computing centres).
By 2020, virtually all the information about the people of the free world have been captured by some of those „freedom fighters”, as they called themselves. However, nobody was interested to publish news about this change in actual control. The new „governors” of the world made a silent agreement with the owners of the most influential service and operator companies, and, a few years later, created the so-called Government of All Possible Worlds. And the people were satisfied, since this government could seemingly tackle more effectively the increasing global problems, and they thought they could control this government by periodical elections. The governors were satisfied, too, since they could control the people through the massive scale and amount of information they continually acquired and maintained about people, which were used also for influencing the result of the election. So, a metaworld of mutual satisfaction was born.
Oh yeah, and also, time is more flexible in the year 2019 -- groups routinely slow up or speed down their clocks, b/c there is a global synchronization service that can help you re-sync anytime later. One time, the entire state of California was behind by 90 minutes for like three weeks.
cascio: In #2019 my identity gets managed through manipulation of data, intentionally misleading information, and other digital noise. Only I know.
mikeliebhold: in #2019 managing my identity, filtering personal data through wireless contact lenses and fingertip computers. #blended
linear tv watching will be considered lame. you would expect it to be replaced by on-demand watching of whatever a viewer wants, but viewers then find that having to chose is worse than watching whatever's on TV. the result of this is a bunch of algorithms that pick shows based on what a viewer likes and converts his on-demand database of shows into a specialized linear programming experience. algorithm writers and cable companies will notice how classic linear-tv is gone but re-appears as lengthy on-demand shows which become the most popular shows watched.much sooner han 2019 will the tv/cable box disappear and turn heed to a classic mini-PC, meaning the new TV experience will be accessible on the TV as well as on laptops, mobile phones and whatnot.cable and phone companies will be reduced to bandwidth-providers, on top of which everything will be provided. this is because these companies suck at services but are good at laying cables and sending technicians. they will try to buy software companies while their stock is still worth something (e.g. comcast buying plaxo) but the switch will quickly go the other way around, where microsoft and 37signals will own cable providers.